DANGER DAYS

If anyone wants character sheets for their group, I made this for our game: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JUxP_daNTL8qoKsLzjy7Cp4rKR-3f8c0BLkG2fg1UqQ/...

I added a backgrounds question (Battery City or the Zones?) and a place to make your own mask, and changed a little bit of text to get things to fit (sorry), but it's here in case anyone else wants it.

This is a deeply pulpy, flavorful, lightweight system about a group of messy rebels in the kind of suburban apocalypse that 2000s era post-hardcore imagined. It's a giant homage to My Chemical Romance, and it completely works.

That said, it does seem to want a very dreamlike tone---dive too deep into the specifics of worldbuilding and it starts to crumble, but run it on the same narrative logic as a music video and it's perfect and effortless---so it may take a little work by the GM to not explain and rationalize everything in the setting. Feeling is way more important here than applying a rationalist filter to everything, and you'll get way more mileage out of asking the characters to express themselves than asking them to explain themselves.

Fortunately, Danger Days' mechanics are strong, self-consistent, and kind of perfect, and you use a playing card deck in a way that's both simple, crunchy, and fun to interact with. Your stats tell you how much to draw, and then red cards are your successes, with face cards triggering powerful secondary effects. Black cards periodically reset into the deck, red cards don't---at least until you take a moment and deliver a heroic speech about emotion and freedom and the red cards reset.

On top of this, there's funeral rules *and* a mechanic for stealing the GM's place, which both works perfectly and is completely wild. Plus, when a character dies, their player always chooses how they go out. This feels extremely satisfying.

If Danger Days is missing anything, I think it's an instruction to the GM that every group should start with an objective. It doesn't have to be an objective that can fix the world or save the setting (this isn't really a game for that,) but it should be something the PCs can try to achieve before the forces of the world eventually grind them down and they die or go straight. Maybe it's a road trip, or a rescue, or killing a specific corp drone, or something for the PCs to focus on and hope that maybe they can get reality back onto the right track if they can just accomplish that one thing.

It won't work out for them, but that mix of acceptance and defiance matches the music.

Overall, if you like pulp, you like good mechanics, and you can suspend the parts of your brain that learned to grow up and give in, this is an excellent game to add to your table.

On the other hand, if you strongly dislike the music that shapes the game's setting and tone, or if you need a game that ends with a victory, this may be less your thing.

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You could probably also easily adapt the system to run a lightweight version of a certain popular cyberpunk setting, so if you're not completely sold on what you've read so far but you do like that certain other cyberpunk setting, this probably still worth a purchase.