The Moon Fucking Hates You (Review)
The moon, eh? Always there at night. Looking over you. Watching you. Leering at you. It's plotting something. Something bad. Something big. Waiting for it's opportunity to fuck you up bad.
This then, is the premise of The Moon Fucking Hates You, a RPG by H.L. Black, from Holly Crown Games.
And, if I'm honest, it's an odd little thing of a game. It's obviously a joke, but it's a developed joke. You'd expect it to be a one page RPG but it manages nine, all crammed with content.
It uses d12s, which somehow feels both fitting and inevitable. It's a generic system and a reasonably solid one at that. Task resolution feels PbtA inspired but not identical; you use 2d12 and it gives you a range of failures and successes, including complications.
Perhaps the standout parts are Phase and Hate, both also character stats. Lunar Phase is interesting because it encourages but doesn't dictate a certain type of personality when it comes to your character. So if your Phase is Gibbous you gain an extra Lunar Die for being all reflective and thoughtful and shit. But if it's Crescent you're loyal to the point of stupidity and will follow your friends through hell and high water.
I like personality mechanics and this is a very solid one; clear without being overwhelming. It reminds me of Alchemic Humours. Probably unintentionally, but that's still very much my bag.
Hate is simple how much the Moon Fucking Hates You. The more you fail rolls, the more Hate you get. The more Hate you get the more you can spend it on bonuses to your roll. In a gamey sense, this is a very well done balancing mechanic. I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense. But I suspect that trying to apply logic to this game is a category error.
Some light but decent rules for combat, health and character advancement and that's essentially your lot. Definitely one of the better short generic rulesets I've seen out there. It all works and slots together nicely.
However, if I have criticisms, its of that generic nature. The lunar theming is strong enough that it isn't entirely settingless, but any setting there is heavily implied. There is a suggested setting at the end of the book, but it pretty much boils down to "Looks like Hellboy, fight Nazis". Much as I approve of punching Nazis, I'm not sure this is quite enough to go on. There's some planned setting books mentioned at the end of the RPG and on the shop page, but unfortunately they don't seem to have happened.
This puts it in a bit of an odd place. If I hadn't been playtesting it for the review (and to be clear we had great fun), I'm not sure my group would have got it to the table. That's less of a flaw in the game itself and more market realities. Quirky one shotters are a very competitive field and the problem here is that it neither has the setting to hit the ground running with no GM prep, nor is it so themeless you can use it to run any idea.
Which I think is a bit of a mistake, because mechanically it's good and the game is well written and fun.
It's only five dollars over on Itch.io though, so it's well worth checking out for yourself if the concept appeals.
And it does do us the public service of warning us about a true and present danger. All I'm saying is I've not heard anything from those Tiktok Witches who tried to curse the moon recently...