My Hellboy ttrpg conundrum
There is a platonic ideal of a Hellboy rpg which I will never play because it hides within the human factors that are intertwined with any ttrpg ruleset. For me, it's a lot more related to how much the players know the source material than to the rules, because just narrowing down Hellboy to "paranormal investigation" just feels so dull. Even though it paints itself as action-horror, I don't think you could just take an action-horror rpg and wing it, I believe there is this aura that surrounds Mignola's comics that can only be perceived by, well, reading them. The simplicity of the art, the gruesome violence reduced effectively to motion within darkness, the absurdly human nature of all these paranormal agents, the sudden digression into syncretic myths and legends to contextualize to the reader... It's a vibe.
While you can get the vibe from reading a couple of hardbacks, I'd say it's a lot harder to absorb then, say, the vibe you get from uhhhhh Star Wars? Star Wars is a lot more "open" in the vibe it's trying to give: you see a single Star Wars poster and you get it, not only because it's immensely popular and you probably already have some vague idea of what it's about, but also because Star Wars is mostly about the fight against evil using laser swords in space. If you get that down, you can do Outer Rim, Clone Wars, Republic, Old Republic, New Republic, you name it. You could fool yourself into thinking Hellboy would be just a "hunting monsters" vibe, but if you go to Hellboy thinking Supernatural or Van Helsing, it won't work for me.
Maybe I'm just being an elitist prick! Happened once, could happen again, despite my best efforts. I know there are a lot of of awesome ttrpgs out there that do a Hellboy adjacent thing - and I would know, because every time I see the words "Hellboy" or "BPRD" in any thread, I lock-in like the dog from Up. I love the Profiles from Agents of the O.D.D., a lot of cool BPRD scenarios could come out of adapting F.I.S.T., Hexingtide1 does wonderful things with the idea of playing around your monstrosity, and Strange Squad almost nails down exactly what I'd want from a Hellboy-like experience.
The thing is, I'm gonna contradict myself, since I know I can run a Hellboy table with basically any rules you give me. That was like, literally the first thing that made me play an rpg, I improvised some rules to make my friends go on BPRD-ish adventures. To be completely honest, hand me a black marker and a couple of Blades in the Dark playbooks and I'll run you a Hellboy game right now - but that's never gonna work because I know I'm not a good enough narrator2 to convey what I'm trying to convey if you haven't read the god damned comic.
So is my conclusion just like, what I started with? I want players who like Hellboy as much as I do? Is that silly? It feels really silly. It feels like pushing the problem elsewhere, but maybe there are some problems that I just can't solve by myself. I could probably spend time drafting a Hellboyful hack of World of Dungeons or 24XX if I get bored one afternoon, but I think it would likely be worse than some of the stuff I mentioned earlier, and also less familiar for possible players. Still, I could see how spending the time to indulge my desire to try to nail down "my Hellboy game" might yield some kind of positive result.
anb
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Although I only read an old version. I saw a big revamp came out some time ago, but I didn't have the time to check it out yet.↩
I word it as "narrator" here and not "GM" because I know my strengths and weaknesses well enough at this point. I can learn rules, get games started and make up stuff with whatever players throw at me, but you'll never get a description of a monster out of me that could conjure anything like the Ogdru Hem. Like, never in a million years I could get the werewolf from the Wolves of Saint August in the minds of my players.↩