B Is for Boogie Knights
In Boogie Knights of the Round Table (BKotRT), the heroes live in world yoinked from a hodge podge of cliches ripped from musical movies, especially those of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. (You know? Back when maybe music wasn’t good, but it was better than today’s music. Now get off my lawn!) People live under the thumb of the Man, but no matter how hard that thumb presses down, the Man can’t crush the spirit of dance and song.
BKotRT is based on my non-award-winning, free RPG, The Accordian Files (TAF). If you’ve not experienced this game, you owe it to yourself and to posterity to download it and give it a spin. Seriously. You’re great-grandchildren will be thankful. Eventually.
BKotRT takes the “you can play almost anything” wonderfulness of TAF and hammers it into a vaguely specific genre. This hammering first beats the ability scores into three new shapes. Instead of Body, Mind, and Spirit, all heroes have Kung-Fu, Brains, and Cool. Kung-Fu represents a hero’s physical prowess, including strength, agility, manual dexterity, health, and martial arts skill. Brains stands for a hero’s smarts, whether those are book-smarts or street-smarts, as well as mental toughness, perceptiveness, and problem-solving ability. The last ability score, Cool, tells us about a hero’s force of personality, sangfroid, fashion sense, and courage.
Each ability score defaults to a d6. The player gets 2 points to increase ability scores. It costs 1 point to raise a score’s rating to the next highest die type. The player can lower one ability score to a d4 rating in order to get a bonus point to spend on ability scores or qualities. The dice used in BKotRT are, in order from lowest to highest, d4, d6, d8, d10, and d12.
For example, Gary is making up a BKotRT hero, whose starting ability scores are Kung-Fu d6, Brains d6, and Cool d6. Gary opts to not decrease an ability score. He spends 1 point each on Brains and Cool. His hero’s ability scores become Kung-Fu d6, Brains d8, and Cool d8.
The player also gets 5 points to purchase qualities for his hero (or 6 points if he opted to reduce an ability score to d4 and then chooses to spend the bonus point on qualities). A quality is a short, descriptive statement about a hero. Each quality is like a suitcase full of knowledge and skills. A player should aim for two or three qualities to help define his hero, but at least quality should have something to do with music or dancing. The best qualities focus on some combination of a hero’s culture, personality, job, philosophy or beliefs, looks, goals, life story, and problems. It costs 1 point to get a quality rated as a d4. Each additional point spent on a quality raises its rating to the next die.
Back to Gary. His hero is a Ex-Con Banjo Player. He worked for a time as a Rodeo Clown. Finally, he is Full of Homespun Wisdom. It costs 3 points to get each of these rated at a d4. Gary spends 1 point each on the first and third qualities. When all is said and done, here’s Gary’s starting BKotRT hero:
Beau Mandy
Kung-Fu d6, Brains d8, Cool d8
Ex-Con Banjo Player d6, Rodeo Clown d4, Full of Homespun Wisdom d6
