This is a vague sequel to the Maid RPG post published here recently. Spooktacular is a retroclone of the 80s Ghostbusters role-playing game written by Ewen Cluney, who not only translated Maid RPG but also wrote an original game, Kagegami High, that mixes Maid RPG‘s mechanics with the ones found in Ghostbusters.

I decided to write an original adventure for when I would eventually run Spooktacular for my players. This was a problem for me, because I live by the Mythbusters credo; if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.

A Brief History of the Ghostbusters RPG

Ghostbusters was designed by Chaosium designers Sandy Petersen, creator of Call of Cthulhu; Greg Stafford, creator of Glorantha and designer of Pendragon; and Lynn Willis, who previously had helped Greg Stafford create the generic version of Chaosium’s Basic Role-Playing system. Ghostbusters was created during a brief period when Chaosium decided to experiment with designing games for other publishers; in this instance, West End Games. [Designers and Dragons: 1980s pg 249]

The first edition of Ghostbusters, released in 1986, was an early comedy RPG, and also one of the most rules-lite games of its era. Character creation used a simple point-buy system that could be completed within less than five minutes. Encumbrance was measured by using item cards that were included in the boxed set instead of something more complicated. Let’s see what the game has to say about initiative, which it calls “Sequence of Play”; remember this was 1986:

During the most action-packed parts of an adventure, when there’s lots of conflict and panic and smashing things and running around, the Ghostmaster organizes events in a certain order to keep things from getting confused and to make sure everybody gets a chance to do something . . . [brief instructions about listening to each player say what they’re going to do, and the Ghostmaster placing these actions in logical order based on any relevant advantages / disadvantages] . . . During most of the game, it isn’t necessary to use the sequence of play – just be tolerably polite, don’t interrupt others without good reason, and let the Ghostmaster organize the talking so everybody gets a chance to say something, ask questions, or do what needs to be done.

A second edition was released to coincide with the release of Ghostbusters II, and it added more crunch to the game. West End Games claimed that people demanded more rules; there’s no proof of this, but RPG.net user Baulderstone has a solid theory that some 80s gamers looked at the rules of the original edition and felt they were literally incomplete, because they couldn’t wrap their heads around intuition-based design. This sounds likely to me.

The second edition, Ghostbusters International, was written by Aaron Allston and Douglas Kaufman; Allston later wrote The Rules Cyclopedia. This edition essentially took the kernel of the D6 system used in the original game and updated it to use something more like the Star Wars D6 system. Most people feel that the second edition overcomplicated a game that was beautiful in its simplicity, but it does have its fans; some 4chan bozo said “True believers appreciate the more complex rules, and appreciate that anything beside a one-shot would need more than the first game provided”. This is very much a minority opinion, but it’s not like the other games that used the D6 system were disliked; I think it’s fair to say that the second edition suffers mostly because of comparisons to the superior first edition.

The WEG Ghostbusters RPG was described by Ewen Cluney as being “a forgotten gem of 1980s RPG design”. It’s a game that was very acclaimed in its time; Risus creator S. John Ross rated it a full 5-out-of-5 stars. Noted RPG critic Rick Swan gave both editions three-out-of-four stars in his book The Complete Guide to Role-Playing Games. It was rated one of The Millennium’s Most Underrated Games in Pyramid magazine. In all my years of lurking on RPG forums I’ve never seen someone who actually played the game say anything negative about it, and it frequently is mentioned in forums and on reddit whenever people bring up rules-lite or comedy games. In the words of Lowell Francis of Age of Ravens, “Ghostbusters was fun and clever, with the horror taking a back-seat as it needed to. It remains among the best ‘funny’ games out there, striking the right balance between goofiness and playability”.

DNA from Ghostbusters can be seen in many other games such as Shadowrun and Over the Edge. Ghostbusters also informed the Storyteller and PDQ systems. S. John Ross called Ghostbusters “the game that ‘fathered’ Risus” [Risus Companion pg 45]. More obviously its influence can be felt in later WEG releases, which expanded upon the D6 system found in the original Ghostbusters game. This includes the classic Star Wars game as well as Indiana Jones, Hercules & Xena, and, appropriately enough, Men in Black, a clear descendent of Ghostbusters on a conceptual level, even if the conspiracy theories predate Ghostbusters itself.

But I’ve also seen the game panned a handful of times, always by people who’ve never actually played it. Chad Rocco¹ and System Mastery both fixated on the amount of rulings the GM is expected to make in the game, with the assumption that the GM is going to be an asshole, something that can happen in any game with a GM. Zigmenthotep fixated on the writing style used in the core rulebook of the second edition [granted, many fans of the first edition dislike the second edition].

Ultimately I think this is a great object lesson in the pitfalls that come with someone writing a review of a game they’ve never played. I can understand why Ghostbusters might seem like an underwhelming game that doesn’t really jump off the page, but the people who’ve actually played it have very positive things to say about it. But that’s not what this piece is actually about, this is about writing adventures for Spooktacular.

Ghostbusters and Spooktacular Mechanics

Spooktacular is a retroclone of West End Games’s seminal 1986 Ghostbusters RPG. There are a bunch of games that seek to emulate the Ghostbusters concept, such as InSpectres and M-Force, but Spooktacular is, to my knowledge, the only direct clone of the original licensed game.

Ghostbusters doesn’t have a lot of mechanics that specifically focus on the act of ghostbusting. The system used for Ghostbusters was, in fact, repurposed and turned into a generic system by mostly adding things rather than subtracting them. This might be considered poor design today, and indeed, a problem with a lot of rules-lite games is that the mechanics can sometimes not enforce or encourage specific kinds of behaviors.

It helps that, in a game of Ghostbusters, players are emulating very specific procedures; wait to get called for an assignment, walk around with a PKE meter, shoot ghosts with a proton stream, use a trap to capture ghosts, etc. The mechanics don’t really need to be more crunchy because roleplaying as a Ghostbuster is very uncomplicated.

I’m not trying to imply that Ghostbusters is a good game in spite of its design. It was revolutionary in its time – it was the first game to use a dice pool, and unlike a lot of games of its vintage, Ghostbusters asked players to give their characters motivations and other bits of information to enhance roleplaying, rather than the players optionally bringing things to the table if they felt like it like in D&D. In practice the original WEG Ghostbusters system has a slightly narrative-y feel, even if it uses very simple and traditional action-resolution mechanics.

Before I get into the adventure writing process, I’d like to quickly review Spooktacular. For the most part it’s exactly what it needs to be; a readily available and affordable PoD book that revives the original WEG Ghostbusters, which will probably never see an official re-release.

Spooktacular is a retroclone, but like the best retroclones it iterates slightly on the design of the original game. 90% of Spooktacular is taken from the more highly regarded first edition of Ghostbusters, but a handful of improvements from the second edition, like damage subtracting temporarily from stats, and degrees of success, are also implemented. Cluney dubbed this new system “Sixtacular”.

The Sixtacular SRD that Cluney released alongside Spooktacular is a great basis for a rules-lite comedy game, and I’d love to see it re-released under an ORC or CC-BY license instead of the OGL license it currently uses. The raw mechanical base of Sixtacular / Spooktacular I’d argue improves on the first edition of Ghostbusters, but there are a lot of small complaints I have otherwise.

The writing style used in Spooktacular occasionally leaves something to be desired; I sometimes felt like I was reading someone’s forum post while reading the book instead of a real product. I’m not saying there are misspellings or bad punctuation, but rather that the jokey, conversational tone sometimes doesn’t land. Cluney also has an obsession with bad clip-art, which sometimes hurts the design of the book. That being said, the original art in the book by James Workman looks incredible.

The original game, and its second edition, had “routines”. These routines outlined how simple tasks might go down by rolling a few dice, and the most important one detailed the kinds of things that might happen while driving a car. This meant the game didn’t need to include 5 pages detailing how car chases are supposed to work. Some of the things in the routines presented in the original game were a bit too silly in concept, but the complete absence of routines in Spooktacular is a bit of a bummer. They weren’t essential, but obviously one might find it desirable for driving a car to sometimes have complications that aren’t arbitrarily inserted by the GM. Considering Cluney’s love of random tables it’s especially surprising they weren’t carried over.

Spooktacular does have some useful stuff for GMs, such as facts about a handful of “haunted” real-world cities, ideas relating to NPCs, adventure hooks, and a random haunting generation table. But it doesn’t have any actual adventures; the original game had a few small adventures and 21 Adventure Ideas, as well as its own Random Adventure Generator, and lots of great advice. It also had NPC ideas; the original had almost everything Spooktacular has and more.

Spooktacular, minor quibbles about clipart and writing style aside, only really suffers in comparison to the original Ghostbusters package. On its own merits it’s a great game; the core system is a slight improvement on the one used in Ghostbusters 1E, and it’s definitely a lot cheaper than buying the WEG original. It just would’ve been nice to have something a little more competitive with the original game on a holistic level. Cluney said that he was planning on releasing a few books of supplemental material, but I would personally prefer a revised edition of the core book with the additional material included; a nice, meaty, 8.5″ x 11″ tome, like Maid RPG.

Cluney said the following back in 2018:

I’m planning for my next Sixtacular game after Spooktacular to be Zaptacular: Mad Science Adventures. Rick & Morty is an important influence, but it basically mashes up elements of all my favorite comedy sci-fi stuff–Red Dwarf, Futurama, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, and many, many more–with a cynical modern-day Earth as the default setting (but options for time-hopping like Doctor Who, being lost in deep space like in Red Dwarf, and so on). There’s kind of a ridiculous amount of media that I really love that fits squarely into Zaptacular’s wheelhouse, as well as a bunch of my own random creations that work well with it, so I expect to have a lot of stuff to stick into the game’s multiversal setting.

I am very excited to see Zaptacular if it ever comes to fruition [I don’t think he’s mentioned it since 2018]. It seems like a great way to use the Sixtacular system, and it has a strong concept. I hope there’s some Road to the Multiverse influence in there as well, even if acknowledging that Family Guy exists is an easy way to damage one’s credibility.

Anyways, if you still think I have enough credibility to talk about TTRPG stuff, I’m going to start talking about adventure design resources and philosophies in the next part, and also go over the various kinds of problems Ghostbusters had to solve in the various movies, cartoons, and WEG modules.

This series will update on a biweekly schedule; Part 2 will be released on April 19th, and things will conclude on May 3rd.

1. Chad Rocco’s Ghostbusters RPG video might be the best produced video I’ve ever seen about an RPG, speaking purely on a filmmaking level. ↩︎