Prep Report: Slugblaster 2026, Popularia Run

Pre-requisites

As a result of downtime actions, Best Bud Life (BBL) now have -1 status with DARA, and their Rescue Agents, inter-dimensional Officer Krupskys, and a +1 with Panopticon, evil social media monopoly.

Officer Ed Crannik. The everycop. The only person who in every corner of the multiverse is exactly the same, so multiple instances work for DARA. A 6ft man with the thickness, colour and greasiness of a cheap pork pie, bald on top, though still with peppery back and sides, moustache like whale baleen, body coated in the butter-yellow plastic haz-suit of DARA Rescue. Hates teens. Rules are his god.

BBL now have a portal to Popularia, the coolest place in the multiverse. My players were interested in the prize for the next run being an Amp, ‘a dope spot where tricks earn +1 Style’. So something in Popularia is going to offer the crew a style boost.

The Amp

The Amp cannot be a static place. There is nothing fun about a run that ends with “you get access to this cool place! ok, you do some tricks and leave.” Dullsville. It’s basically the same as additional style, only trapped behind some extra rolls.

The Amp must instead be a summonable alteration to the world that makes it cooler. Declare Amp when doing a trick. Amped Tricks earn +1 style. It has a cooldown: once-used, the Crew has to a clear the track AMPED to use it again. If the trick fails, the Amp has a negative effect that will play into the Slam.

Amp offers:

1. A floor fan big enough to propel the whole crew into the sky
2. A booster chevron, giving everyone who crosses it extra speed
3. When the trick lands, something behind you explodes
4. Mid-air gravity grindrail
5. An excellent track comes on the radio
6. The trick incorporates a Sailor Moon-style costume change. Costume lasts till next turn.

Meaning

I wrote in the previous prep blog that meaning is created by offering choice between two or more visions of the good, or bad. This is still true, but there’s a dimension there I missed, that helps to concretise what ‘vision of the good’ means.

I am constantly thinking about Thomas Manuel’s presentation of Duskwall (in Blades in the Dark) as a world where everything is owned by a faction, meaning, every attempt to steal will bring someone to your door with one hand held palm up, and another holding a knife.¹ It’s an elementally fun proposition. And one rich with meaning. Duskwall is a world built on taking. Meaning comes from the choice of who the players take from.

Slugblaster is a game about teens not thieves. It is therefore a game about social anxiety. The metacurrency is ‘coolness’. The social question is “what can the PCs do to make people think they’re cool?” The meaning is derived from who the players are trying to impress.²

So, who are they trying to impress?

DARA should be on the table even if my players will immediately reject them. It’s not really offering choice to put them forwards as a definition of the good, but it makes them equivalently real as the other factions.

The Popularians are the main folks to impress. I’ll represent them using the Crowds. Specifically the Thrashers, who see Slugblasting as art, the Heads, who see it as a sport, and the Freaks, who see it as a lifestyle, man. As a Cool Utopia they wouldn’t have Mavens or Normies.

Thrashers value authenticity, aesthetics, style, and attitude.

Heads value skill, chops, innovation, and professionalism.

Freaks in the book value originality, expression, and freedom, but to my mind that overlaps too much with the Heads and Thrashers (what is innovation if not originality? what is expression if not style?). So let’s broaden out what it would mean to make portal-hopping on your skateboard and shooting a raygun a “lifestyle”, into…

Freaks value combination, independence, and diplomacy.

Ok so these are the values at play. But how are they in conflict? What are these groups fighting over? Well to work through that we now need to turn to the Image.

Image

Full transparency: I tried to come up with a conflict for a good hour at least before turning to think about the image I wanted the situation to revolve around instead. Thinking with the image, I figured out the conflict in about five minutes.

I think this is because, to put values systems into conflict, there has to be something in the world creating that conflict. That conflict creator is the core of the game; so it is also the core image. But it turns out I can reach the conflict far more easily when reaching through the image, than when starting with an abstract need for the conflict. That might work for you too reader!

Anyway, the image I immediately came up with was the metaterrestrial slug. Huge flopping shapes, the rainbow colour of an oil spill, with horrible circular fleshy mouths filled with mucus. and grasping pink-wet ridges.

But! This was not actually the first image. Scrolling up, I can see the actual first image I had was Ed Crannik. And what makes him very useful as a first source of conflict is that he can be immediate. The moment the crew enters Popularia I can bring Ed Crannik in to try to ‘rescue’ them. His being an infinite cop, I will use my GM-moves to add more Eds to his track. Which just starts ED, and will grow to ED&ED&ED…

I remember too that the first job of a GM is to give players something to do.³ So I can start the situation by introducing the Amps, offering them to the crew as a way to do cool tricks, and making clear that the Popularians will grant the ability to summon them if they think you’re cool enough, and then putting Ed Crannik in their way.

But Ed is not just here to spoil their fun. There is actually something to be rescued from! A metaterrestrial slug migration, track: MIGRATE. I’ll tick it after each action the PCs take. A portal opens and a parade of giant slugs burst into town. Which of course will complicate everything.

So the setup of the situation is that the PCs are trying to fill the “cool” tracks for either the Thrashers, Heads or Freaks. If they fill one, they get an Amp. They are being obstructed by Ed Crannik and the slugs.

Crowd tracks are:

• THRASHER
• SLUGHEAD
• BIGFREAK

Codify

As before, to ensure this prep is interactable, the final step is to codify it into laws.

1. The citypark of ??? in Popularia has six Amped-Up Districts: What’s Up, Boosterton, Cool Guys Only, Multi-Grav, Tunesville, and the Catramp. It’s well known that if a slugblaster crew impresses two of the three local Crowds, they gain the power to summon one of the Amps wherever they are, to gain +1 style on a trick.

2. Popularia is an all-slugblaster utopian society, run on the principles of the Coolinist Dudeifesto. The three Crowds in Popularia are Thrashers (THRASHER), who see slugblasting as an art, Heads (SLUGHEAD), who see slugblasting as a sport, and Freaks (BIGFREAK), who see slugblasting as a lifestyle. To impress a Crowd, fill their Track.

3. DARA recently announced a ban on travelling to Popularia, and has tasked Officer Ed Crannik, the everycop, with keeping citizens of Null out of the plane. He is to rescue anyone in the plane. Track: ED&…

4. SECRET Citypark ??? is the first stop on the metaterrestrial slug migration route, and DARA’s tracking says the latest spawning will set off any moment. Track: MIGRATE. There are so many slugs they cannot be beaten.

Reflections (post-game)

The best thing about this session was the Amps. Every district having its own trick effect kept the session feeling fresh and varied. I think the key to this was making the District-Amp effects a result of the tricks that the players would perform anyway. Changing location changed play passively, e.g. without imposing another memory burden on the players, maximising fun, minimising annoyance. Having locations add passive effects onto player actions is definitely a trick I'll repeat.

While the Amps were the part of the game that I think worked the best, the best fun of the game for me was playing the French artiste my players said was the NPC representing the Thrashers. The silly accent was a big part of that, but I think the thing that made it really fun was getting to mime dragging on a cigarette every time I voiced her. Giving your NPCs gestures is advice for portraying NPCs I have read before, but never seriously implemented. I think I will prioritise that next time.

Oh and, it's vital that next time I make sure all the factions have an NPC ready to represent them. Factions on their own are too abstract. They need faces to properly exist in play.

Looking at this adventure, I see three key components to it: prize, thresholds, and stakes/friction. The prize(s) is/are the thing(s) the characters/players want. In this adventure, that was the Amps. Thresholds are the conditions the players (may) need to clear to get the prize. In this adventure, that was the opinion of 2/3 Crowds. Stakes make attempts to clear a threshold exciting, by creating consequence(s) for failure to do so; frictions make actions harder e.g. by making a PC's tool unusable, or by using up their resources.

Thinking about adventures in this way, I think the way social meaning emerges is that the prize, threshold, or stakes of an adventure, is a faction's opinion of the players, as embodied in an NPC.

Also, this new component-focused adventure design gives me a different way of prepping. Instead of separating 'meaning' and 'image' into two different phases, what I think I should try to do is come up with three or more separate images - of NPCs, items, etc. - and then 'cast' those images as prize, threshold or stake/threshold. For example, in this run, the Amps were the prize, the thresholds were the Crowds, and the stake/friction was Ed Crannik and the metaterrestrial slugs. What's fun about this approach is that I could produce a completely different adventure, simply by moving images into new roles: for example, Ed Crannik going from stake/friction to prize would be fascinating!