Old Fashioned Fascist Fighting!

Grant Howitt and Will Kirkby's 
Eat the Reich

The gonzo neon cover of Eat the Reich.

A Note on Nazis:

Let's get what should be very obvious out of the way first: Nazis are vile monsters given human form. This is as true today as it was in 1932. They simply wear suits and ties now instead of the uniforms of the SA, SS, or the Wehrmacht. Anyone ascribing to their views or sympathizing with them is not welcome here - full stop. Now that that is taken care of let's move on to the review. 

Introduction

Eat the Reich (by Rowan, Rook, and Decard's Grant Howitt of Spire: The City Must Fall and Heart: The City Beneath fame and illustrated by Will Kirkby) is a masterclass in how focused and narrow in scope a TTRPG can be. Howitt and Kirkby set out with a very clear, and very tight goal in mind: how best can we make a game about vampires killing Hitler? They do this spectacularly well in both form and function. 

In Eat the Reich players take on the role of crack vampire commandos from the allies' secretive F.A.N.G organization with a singular mission: "Drink all of Hitler's Blood." Eat the Reich's rules are simple and easy to understand, providing substantial narrative flexibility for GMs and players alike. However, these rules demand significant creativity and engagement from players, so shy or less creatively inclined players may have a harder time than those used to more narrative games. Kirkby's art and graphic design is in a world all its own and in conjunction with the text clearly conveys Eat the Reich's gonzo anti-Nazi tone and intent. The core 'Let's Kill Hitler' scenario is fantastic in its structured flexibility and potential for player driven chaos and mayhem. Finally, the ancillary products provide good value for money. 

Art, Layout, and Tone

The tone of Eat the Reich slams into you the moment you pick up the book and does not let up for all of its short 72 pages. The totality of this style can only be described as anti-Nazi neon gonzo grindhouse. This anti-Nazi tone is core to the intent and experience of the book, "This game is anti-Nazi propaganda. It's a place for imaginary Nazis to get their teeth kicked in." This is something of an understatement as the entire game revolves around massacring Nazis, making them weak and ineffectual in the face of the righteous onslaught of the undead. The game makes a point of making the characters most likely to be voiced by the GM, the Übermensch 'bosses', to be each divorced from the Third Reich in some unique manner in order to further deny Nazis' a voice. 

Kirkby's art for the book is frequent and universally good, with some sort of large full color spread every couple of pages. It makes liberal use of a wide variety of neon colors and and generally displays a scene from the vampires' adventures through Paris, building on a potential characterization of them in some way. Most of the Übermensch and the the Vampirjagers also get pretty good large art pieces that are expressive in their own right. The art goes beyond simply being technically good. Rather, it was clearly done with an eye towards reinforcing the text. For example, the full page art of each of the vampires in their resting places communicates very quickly through visual cues the stock character of each one. You immediately know when looking at the portrait of Nicole that she is supposed to be a stock French Resistance fighter, as she is depicted wearing a variety of stereotypically French symbols including a beret, a badge bearing the iconic Cross of Lorraine, and a proliferation of cheap cigarettes. I am sure there are other symbolically French things in the image that I am not picking up on. All of the other character portraits are similar in how they convey the nature of each. I particularly enjoy how the bat-person-monster, Flint, is implied to be the most veteran of them all with its ten mission tallies proudly tattooed on its chest. 

The layout is also excellent, easy to read and supports emersion of the reader into the fictional F.A.N.G organization. I was surprised by the attention to detail in the documents that are used to frame the text in the layout. Having once worked in an archive I have some knowledge of what old declassified documents from the 1940s look like and these match them to a 'T' in style and tone. Just to be clear, the real ones did not mention vampires. 

A Narratively Driven Ruleset

The characters are all pre-generated for the core adventure / mission, but they are all interesting with short little blurbs serving to provide seeds for how the character might be played. There is some advice for how to make custom characters in the back of the book but it is clearly not the focus. These seeds are both descriptive and at times even silly, as is the case with the man-bat Flint. As stated above the art reinforces these descriptions rather well. 

The rules for Eat the Reich are dead simple with a pronounced focus on narrative play rather than mechanical complexity. Howitt uses the HAVOC engine originally pioneered in his aptly named HAVOC Brigade game. Each character is defined by seven statistics that form the basis of the dice pools generated by the HAVOC engine. Each also has a bevy of limited use equipment, a variety of pretty wild abilities, and the capacity to consume blood from their foes to fuel special abilities or conduct healing. 

At its heart the HAVOC engine is simply a d6 dice pool building system. Each player describes whatever wild or crazy thing they want to do in the context of the game and then they build their dice pool based on what elements of their character sheet they have incorporated into their description. For example, if Nicole the vampiric French resistance fighter wanted to gun down a bunch of Nazis hiding in cover, then that would be based around the shoot statistic (in her case 4 dice). However, if Nicole's player incorporates the following elements into their action description: using a smoke grenade to distract the Nazis and cover her advance (+2 dice) to set up flanking with an M3 submachine gun (+2 dice) and potentially spends 1 blood to summon a rat swarm (+2 dice) to distract the Nazis their dice pool would be: 10. They would then roll the dice and any resulting 4, 5, 6 would be successes. With any 6s being criticals that might be spent on fueling special abilities or simply counting as 2 successes. The GM would then roll a number of dice equivalent to a given enemies attack rating counting any 4, 5, 6 as one success and therefore 1 potential damage from the adversaries present. In contrast each player success rolled allows the players to: deal damage to an enemy reducing its threat rating by 1 one, regain 1 blood, or apply 1 dice towards achieving the objective of a given scene, or act as a defense thereby eliminating 1 success from the GM's pool.  

This system requires players to be wildly creative with their descriptions - its core focus is player agency.  It is incumbent on GMs to explain this clearly in their set up that players need to go wild with their descriptions in order to do well during the game. 

The "Let's Kill Hitler" Adventure

Scope and Scale

Much like the rules, the 'core' or included adventure is relatively simple in scope and scale. The scale is a fictional Paris in the grip of a massive Nazi occupation far surpassing that of the actual occupation in World War Two. The scope is dead simple, "Drink All of Adolf Hitler's Blood." This simple premise is broken down into eighteen distinct zones on the fictional map of Paris across three sectors. The player being their journey in the third sector and must massacre their way across the map to sector one where Hitler's Zeppelin is docked at the Eifel Tower. 

This adventure is not quite a point crawl in the same semi-rigid manner as, say for example, Luke Rejec's Old School Essentials (OSE) adventure Holy Mountain Shaker (which is an excellent module for a radically different system). Whereas Holy Mountain Shaker is a series of points of interest with distinct interconnections, Eat the Reich is a non-linear series of points across three broad sectors of Paris for the party to traverse with no specific lanes of connection between them. Other then the whims of the players and the GM, of course.

Play Experience  

When I ran the adventure I did so with no specific outline of where I wanted the players to go. Rather I simply laid the map in front of them with a series of suggestions and adjusted the world and enemy placements on the fly to accommodate their chaos. We rolled randomly to determine where they would land in the third (starting) sector, and from there I simply let player agency take hold. I only provided guidance when narratively appropriate, and a little bit more when we were running low on time. 

Eat the Reich encourages this sort of open-endedness within its frame work, going so far as to have a section titled "Provide Opportunities for Chaos." The GM must also be evocative in their descriptions of things when establishing the shared fiction in order to facilitate the chaos of the players. This is further encouraged by the narrative focused nature of the HAVOC engine and the simple nature of the eighteen  location descriptions. The engine and simple, but open-ended, structure enable rapid improvisation and experimentation in a manner I am unused to seeing in mainstream TTRPGs. 

At one point I had created an entirely new location and scene for the players on the fly to explain how the vampires marched a massive quadrupedal walker between two locations in the second sector. The structure of the locations - an objective and threats - made it simple to create on the fly. For some added flare, I had some Ju-87 "Stuka" dive bombers attack the vampire's walking tank as it strode down the fictional Champs-Élysées, scattering commuting Parisians before them.

Moreover, I transformed one of the Übermensch and moved another to keep things fresh. The Stahlsoldat became a mecha monster blasting propaganda. The vampires smashed apart the mecha with a Panzerfuast (I forgot they had) and a combination of sewer rats infiltrating gaps in the mecha armor to devour the pilot - and lucky rolls. I also had the Rust Witch chase down the vampires from her location in the fair grounds by riding a run away Ferris wheel to their location - where she was blown up by grenades. All of this was done easily on the fly enabled by the engine and the structure of the adventure.  

I should note that Eat the Reich warns against trying to run it as a single session game, this is good advice - heed it. This warning pans out rather well when it makes contact with lived experience. The scenario, while technically able to be blitzed through in a single long session in the style of a convention game does not do the best when run that way. I found that running it as a one shot / convention game required me to speed through scenes far quicker than I would have liked, resulting in less time for the players to massacre villains and cause chaos. It was also very hard to keep the descriptions and action level fresh and high tempo across the 3.5+ hours we ran through the scenario in. In the future when I run this game, which I intend to, I will take more time and play it across 2-3 sessions. That being said, even the truncated version I ran was wildly fun and engaging.

I did no real prep work for the game other than carefully reading the book over a couple of times and writing some notes. This worked well enough, but I would recommend some slight expansion of the locations that a given GM wants to focus on. I plan on doing so for the next time I run it, as I think it would help maintain some narrative focus a little bit more.  

Supplemental Materials

Rowan, Rook, and Decard produce excellent ancillary products like large glossy map folios and GM screens. However, in my experience they often sell out and can be kind of hard to find. However, I was lucky enough to find a copy of the Eat the Reich: Character Sheet and Map Pack at my Friendly Local Game Store the other day. This product is essentially just larger two page spreads of the vampire characters from the book and two page spreads of the map of Paris (locations and blank). Normally this would not be worth much comment from me, but what I found especially interesting was that rather than just a single set of sheets and maps, the packet had two of each. This is excellent nod towards practicality and value for both the players and GM.

A value pack of vampiric mayhem!

Conclusion and Recommendation 

In summation, do I recommend the vampiric rage fueled Nazi killing game? Yes, yes I do. In fact I give this game my highest recommendation - I will play it again and look forward to doing so. 

It is a masterful combination of focused yet extraordinarily flexible game design, enabling a GM to easily understand its core rules and implement them with very little prep work. Moreover, it is a masterful joining of art and text in such a way that is greater than the sum of its parts. I would, however, strongly recommend running it across 2-3 evenings instead of a single long session. Finally I might recommend GMs apply a little bit of prep work work above and beyond the book in order to truly make it a unique experience for players. 

Eat the Reich can be found online at Rowan Rook and Decard's website and at fine friendly local gaming stores world wide.