For a year, my home campaign has played an almost-weekly game, using u/skullfungus amazing two-page RPG The Mutants of Ixx, which is a hack of Into the Odd by Chris McDowall. Mutants of Ixx I believe is mostly thought of as a one-shot style game because of its low page count (2 pages) and minimalist style, but I’ve found that it has enough meat on the bones to easily fuel long-term campaigns.
Here is what I have learned
The post-apocalyptic world is harsh.
Food, water and ammunition are hard to get and even harder to hold onto. Having food and water tied to healing makes them a valuable resource. My players always know exactly how much food and water they have and are on the lookout for more. When my players think of looting the body, they are pulling out their skinning knives and thinking of that sweet, sweet, meat the body holds.
I have encouraged this hunger by making most bodies riddled with toxins and parasites and the streams are polluted or consisting of salt water.
Ammunition is also currency; this makes every combat a question of how much money do I want to shoot at the enemy. You can see the players making the calculations and this makes for some interesting choices.
Being outnumbered is scary.
While player character death does happen, I have found it to be not as frequent as I first expected. That said, the scariest fights for the players have always been the ones where they are outnumbered.
The included map is more than enough.
When I started playing Mutants of Ixx I scrambled for other maps made by Skullfungus to use when the players tire of the starting area. All that scrambling proved useless. The included map is so evocative and full of inspiration that my players have yet to explore the entire map and a huge amount of content can be found (or easily created) in just two or three hexes.
The character sheet is awesome!
It immediately sets the tone and more than once players have taken the time to color their character sheets creating a vibrant piece of art.
Advantage is huge.
My players quickly learned that rolling advantage on their damage is a game changer and have become very adept at pulling of cool stunts and maneuvers to gain advantage. This has led to some exciting battles.
Most Battles last two or three turns.
Combat is quick, decisive and occasionally deadly. I love this.
The initiative system allows for a lot of teamwork.
Allowing the players to all act together on their turn is simple but powerful. PCs can easily work together to do things they couldn’t do on their own.
The level up system encourages ambition.
Having followers and commanding armies baked into and required by the levelling up system has encouraged my players to reach out and try a different playstyle than they normally do. Often the interactions between a PC and their follower have led to some of the best RP moments.
Sometimes a little bit of OP is not a bad thing.
I have watched Mind Blast decimate my big baddies and the result has been my players cheering and talking about that combat for several play sessions later. There are enough things to counter it (groups of enemies, robots who cannot be affected by mind blast, rolling poorly) that I am not worried about it becoming an “I win button” and the amount of fun they have when it works is worth it.
What I would do different next time
Armor is king.
There is really no reason for a character to not wear the maximum armor they can get a hold of. Max armor is fairly cheap and its ability to reduce all incoming damage by 3 is huge. If I did it over again, I would make the max armor very hard to get a hold of. Not something you could just buy, but instead the reward for finishing an epic campaign.
Mutations never run out.
In a year of play the only characters to have exhausted their mutations have been starting characters with only a d4 usage die for mutations. This is not a huge issue, because robbing my psycho mutant players of their precious mutation powers would be frustrating if it happened often, but as it is now, rolling the Mutation Die feels like useless record keeping since there is no real fear of it being exhausted. It is too easy to refresh the Mutation Die after a short rest. Going forward I will house rule that the Mutation Die requires resting overnight to reset.
What is there to buy?
The players do not have much to spend their money on or to save up for. This relies on the GM to create valuable items to purchase or excavate from old ruins. Which is okay, there is only so much room on two pages after all. I am partly handling this by creating cybernetic items my PCs can purchase and install at a high cost. If a GM knows they are going to be running a long-term game of Mutants of Ixx I would suggest spending a little time creating a high-end item list that will give the PCs something to drool over and save up for.
Players want more defensive abilities.
While my players absolutely love the system (even some of the crunchier holdouts that normally champion GURPS), the one thing I hear from several players is they wish there were some more defensive actions they can take on their turn since the system is auto-hit. I have handled this by adding some special mutations such as a healing ability (spend 1 STR to heal d4 HP) and defensive ones like protective thorns (d4 dam to opponents who hit you in melee).
An unwanted mutation can bum a player out.
Most of the time players are super excited after rolling their mutation after leveling up. The exception to this is that every once in a while, a player rolls a mutation that they just don’t like. It’s not even that they feel the mutation is weak, but it just doesn’t fit with their image of their character. My fix for this has been to have ancient tech in ruins that can allow a mutant to reroll one of their mutations before the machine breaks or having irradiated mushrooms that do the same thing, being sold by vendors for crazy high prices.
Some people rather go it alone.
Some of my players found controlling multiple characters to be distracting and slowed things down, but felt they wouldn't be weak in comparison if they did not take an apprentice. Next time I might limit players to one character.
I have no idea what a Panzerhound is.
Despite all this we did find after a year we were hungering for a game with more crunch, but two pages equaling a year of game time is pretty darn good!
TLDR: The Mutants of Ixx is light enough to fit on two pages, but crunchy enough for long-term play.
My players and I love this game and we are going to keep running it for the foreseeable future. Who knew so much goodness could be contained in two pages?!
It’s only 2$ which is a steal at double that price. Go show some love and pick it up at
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/274526/The-Mutants-of-Ixx?affiliate_id=568571
His Patreon is also filled with useful stuff that can often work great alongside Mutants of Ixx
https://www.patreon.com/skullfungus/posts
Some amazing Ixx paper minis are found here
https://gnarledmonster.itch.io/ixx-paper-minis
While not technically Ixx these paper minis fit the vibe
https://skullfungus.itch.io/warparmy
A second edition of Ixx now with more pages and a slightly tweaked system (note I have no experience with this version)
https://www.playrole.com/store/games/isle-of-ixx
Lastly, a handy pocketmod character sheet for the new version
https://uristmacitchio.itch.io/pocketfold-of-ixx
No comments:
Post a Comment