The great Buddha of gaming, Jeff Rients, once posed a form of gaming called “retro-stupid” which is comprised of using older systems (or systems that feel older) and incorporating them in ways that don’t take themselves seriously.  Mutant Future is such a game.  If you take HackMaster as your core and dip it in a coating of Mutant Future, hopefully you come away with something akin to a Reese’s Cup of retro-stupid.

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I played a game of Aces & Eights at Origins this year.  I thought it had some neat elements to it, but I decided that the initiative system was a little fiddly and I would need a little time to fit it into my standard groove of gaming.  I particularly liked the crunch of the character creation system.  There was a chart for nearly everything, but it was augmented with points so that you could pay for a re-roll, or pay even more to straight up select something off of the charts.  The kind gentleman running the game (who’s name escapes me, although he was part of the Kenzer demo crew,) talked very shortly about the new HackMaster using a very similar system.  The wild west has served as an occasional tryst for me but never been my fictional home.  Swords and sorcery, however, is a core of my tabletop subsistence.

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