Trashsexy

 Trashsexy

Company: Fox and Boar Games; Type: RPG; Players: 3+; Time: 30 minutes; Genre: Fast RPG; Rating: 💥💥💥💥💥 I love it!

This is a game I demoed by playing it twice in a row at Total Con. Imagine a world of intelligent raccoons trying to make their way finding trash and shinies in a world of somethings-, often- hostile humans. And that's Trashsexy in a nutshell.

Trashsexy belongs to a genre of super-short RPGs that can be played in a single session, in the same amount of time and space as you would use in playing a few hands of Coup. I got involved while standing around watching a demo with the game designer (John Harford) and two players. And boy, was it a blast!

In Trashsexy, you play an anthropomorphic raccoon (or as the rules term it, a raccoonicature) whose main goal is to travel between scenes accumulating trash and shinies. You then interact with the environment and its creatures. Each raccoon has both trash and sexy moves. Trash moves tend to be more physical than not. Sexy moves are the opposite, more about attitude than not. One set of moves is your specialty rated at D6, the other is your off-brand set of moves rated at D4. Your target number for success when trying anything is 4, which also includes any pluses or minuses due to environment, obstacles and also even your god-given ability. You also have Kilter (essentially HP), Pudge (your ability to ignore damage X number of times), and Skeeve (your ability to ignore environmental effects X number of times).

Advancement in the scenario is simple. The Trashmaster sets the scene for you. You need to move through X number of scenes, moving from scene to scene after you have accumulated X number of items of trash or shinies collectively as a group. It's a highly imaginative - and improvisational- style of play. (Which just happens to be my sweet spot!)

Trashsexy has an expansion booklet called -- wait for it! -- Tootrashsexy. It is largely about adding more flavor and options to the game. The game designer said that most people he knows who play it tend to do short one-shots. There is, owever, the option to urn it as a more involved campaign. It think it would take a lot of extra effort to accomplish this -- but it may well be worth it. Personally, I've given thought to doing something similar to the anime Pom Poko for an adventure path, with or without the tanuki. Just another thing to add to my to-do list.

(Confession: In my mind, I call this game Sexy Trash Panda. Which is actually a really good name for describing the vibe of it.)