The date: 1943. The location: Nazi occupied Paris. Your assignment: to climb into a pressurized steel coffin. Survive a drop from a few thousand feet. Make your way to the Eiffel tower, where the Fuhrer’s airship is docked and drink all of the party leader’s blood.

Relevant note: you are a vampire.

Sometimes you need a self respecting monster (or six) to take care of the scummier ones.

A backer preview of Eat the Reich released in October 2023 (fittingly on Friday the 13th). It is an RPG written by Grant Howitt (the creator of the Honey Heist), illustrated by Will Kirkvy and published by Rowan, Rook and Decard (the publishers of DIE RPG), and it is a completely, totally and 100% unapologetically anti-fascist joyride.

In terms of setup, the game is simple. The game comes with six pregenerated characters, each a vampire with some reason for wanting to fight. For some it’s personal vendetta, for others patriotism, and for others it’s a way to not be staked for their crimes. Each character has a preprinted list of stats, abilities, injury tracks and equipment (with a track of how many times equipment can be used before it runs out). Abilities and equipment come with “+” symbols and a brief description. Mechanics (referred to as the “Havoc System” by the creators) are simple: At each location, players are to carry out an objective (listed as a track that needs to be filled), and the area has groups of enemies with Threat ratings (also with a track, and a threat level). Players decide which stat fits what they want to do best, and describe how they are using the character’s abilities and equipment. As long as a character describes it, and it makes even tangential success, they add the number of plus signs from the equipment and abilities, add it to their stat and roll that quantity of 6 sided dice. Dice rolls between 1-3 are ignored, 4-5’s are normal successes and 6’s are critical successes. Players can spend those successes to fill up objectives, reduce the Threat of opposition, defend against counterattack, or drink their victim’s Blood (which acts as a currency to power abilities and/or heal). 

The way that the game handles locations bears mentioning in a bit greater detail. The game generally keeps to the persistent rules light and narrative driven pattern of the rest of the mechanics. A map is given to the players to review, filled with zones ringed around the final objective of the Fuhrer’s Airship that is docked at the Eiffel Tower, moving from Zone 1 out from Zone 3. Players pick their choice of a Zone 3 location to coffin drop into (usually with a gloriously detailed description of a solid steel coffin slamming into quaint scenery, and reforming in a bloody mass), which starts the gameplay cycle mentioned above. Each location comes with a description of the environment along with an Objective to solve and the Threats that populate it. In some ways, the description of the area is as important, or more important to the players than the Objective and Threat. Yes, the Objective and Threat is the mechanical engine that must turn for the plot to continue. However, because the player’s choice of actions rely heavily on bonuses from Abilities and Equipment which are activated from the player’s description of what they are trying to do. The narrative of the setting, to continue the analogy, is the fuel that players use to make that engine turn. It provides high ledges, charming cafes, dark alleys, oil soaked garages,a hit list of quick hooks for players to interact with in their romp through the streets of Paris. 

 When the Objective is clear, the PCs are considered to have cleared out the area, and are able to loot a piece of equipment from the site.The players pick their next stop on the game map and the players begin the next round of adventures using the description block provides. In an interesting note, there is no rule I can find in the book that has a hard and fast rule for how to progress from location to location outside of players being supposed to begin at Zone 3. Instead notes are given about pacing. The authors provide a suggested framework of trying to run the game between 2-3 sessions, but not a number of locations. The GM could frame it as doing as many locations as player would like for their available time, or could try to cannonball run it in a blitz, but ultimately control is handed over to the players. The game mechanics really do leave it open. There is a mechanical economy in play: each site has threats that require players to expend their resources (Equipment uses and Blood) but also provides ways for player to replenish them at each pass: players can use their successes to drain blood from humans in the area and what they can loot replaces the gear that they dropped with. One detail I had neglected earlier is that the final use of a piece of equipment adds another die to roll, with a not so subtle note that players are meant to consume what they have and scrounge. As long as the dice rolls keep hitting, players can play indefinitely. However, there are tools the GM has in their pocket to keep things moving along. 

As players move on from Zone 3 to Zone 2 there is an alteration to the feedback loop.. I can see a gameplay model inspired by First Person Shooter video games where region to region will spawn generic enemies that are slightly scaled up, but include unique opponents that function similarly to boss battles. These are the “Ubermenchen”, and you can tell that the creators really care about these setups in that what players face go from basic tank crew to an opponent who “had her true name removed by a team of surgical occultists,  uses golden technology harvested from Atlantean satellite ruins to manipulate the forces of chance and decay” (direct quote). These opponents have abilities like the players, but their blood is brimming with power that allows players to unlock more Advanced Abilities on their character sheet. (Along with a description of just what that blood tastes like). These definitely spice up the encounter, and I can see them being useful for a GM to prod along sessions if it seems as if they are running long or need spicing up.

The game continues this gameplay cycle until the group pushes to the city center, and ends as the players corner the quivering coward who set off this mess and then drink all his blood. He doesn’t get a speech. In fact, I am not even going to type his name because he doesn’t deserve the attention. Players describe how they want to continue their unlife and how they move on.

So, it’s a bloody (literally and figuratively) and violent game.That isn’t to say that the creators built the game that way carelessly. If anything, the authors were more cognizant than most that they are explicitly making a game with violence inherently baked into the core premise. The book opens with content warning, notes on the tone the creators are trying to set,discusses safe play, how to set standards of what your players consider appropriate and even state that the villains aren’t certain levels of evil (committing sexual violence among others) and thus there isn’t a need for the nominal heroes the PCs play to approach the topics. With that said, I am going to get this out of the way: the game is meant to be ultraviolet and over the top, and the game text explicitly states that it expects players to take action to cartoonish levels of gore. If that is going to bother you as a player or as a GM, then take a deep breath and walk away. To be clear, the game is conscious of what they are endorsing and to quote the creators:

“We also consider anti-fascist violence meaningfully different from, say, violence against random orcs in a fantasy game.Nazis have indicated that they’re evil, harmful, and oppressive to you by their choices, whereas killing an orc just because they were born an orc is definitely racist (and probably the sort of thing a nazi would do).”

So yes, there is violence in the game, and players are expected to revel in it. But the point is to direct it into a cathartic source against fictional characters whose status as a target is a result of their own choices rather than anything they were born into. The game creators have set up plenty of tools make sure that players are informed, and boundaries set.

Overall, the game looks to be a fun and quick romp, gloriously reveling in players being narrative and having fun rather than being sticklers about mechanics. Driven by more narrative mechanics and with pre-generated characters offered the game is meant to be quick hitting over the course of a few sessions. Can games go longer? Can players make their own creature of the night? Well, yes. There are rules for making fresh characters, and the advice mostly boils down to reskinning and repurposing the current pregens, but the game both implicitly (with the game length) and explicitly aren’t designed for a bespoke side quest that will flesh out a character’s backstory. The book offers a few prompts for other ideas for quick campaigns (such as “Making the Pain Run on Time”, “HiroEATO” and “Franco my Dear, I Don’t Give a Damn” for glorious punnery) but unlike the main campaign there isn’t any location support or unique area bosses. As such, the game doesn’t have much in the way of longevity and has limited replay value, but this appears by deliberate choice than an oversight, electing to keep the action tight and focused.

We’ll be keeping an eye out for the full release going forward, but if you and your friends are looking for a quick game to play for spooky season, I fully endorse taking a look and getting hands on a copy as soon as possible – pre-orders are currently live on BackerKit!