Play Review - Slipgate Chokepoint
Play Reviews are thoughts and summaries on systems and settings I’ve played at the table whether in groups or as a solo experience. This is usually done from my viewpoint of the “Game Master” role rather than a “Player Character” perspective, but need not always be the case.
Presentation
The system of Slipgate Chokepoint is a hack of Stay Frosty, a thriller/horror shoot-em-up skirmishing game that itself is a remix of the Black Hack. Whereas Stay Frosty draws from 80s and 90s action movies, Slipgate Chokepoint draws its repertoire from 90s FPS computer games, most notably DOOM but also Quake, Hexen, Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem and Unreal Tournament. You will encounter medpacks, power-ups, high powered weaponry, rocket-jumping and other familiar trappings of the genre. Characters are uniclassed for the purpose of singeminded action driven by a go-go-go momentum that leaves little room to pause. You won’t be coming up with backstories for level 1 characters as surviving each mission adds to the tapestry of your ranger. Assembling a team of newbies or veterans, you carry out excursions into the hellish dimensions for any number of operations.
Writing
The tone is set from the get go with a snippet of fiction depicting a totally fucked ranger. It hits the basics of what players will be doing in game: running and gunning through winding passages to survive the onslaught of Heck. From there, no time is wasted in introducing the basics of play and its additions/revisions from Stay Frosty.
The text does meet you with the expectation that you are at least aware of its source material, Stay Frosty, explicitly telling you to have a copy on hand. For example, it features no instructions for character creation, pointing you to instead use the Stay Frosty rules directly. There are several mechanics and rules referred to as such, so it is truly essential to have a copy of Stay Frosty at the ready for reference.
Where it departs from Stay Frosty it does so sharply, plummeting you into a pit of terrors while unloading every last bullet. Where Stay Frosty is tactical survival and carefully sizing up foes, Slipgate Chokepoint is running up to danger and kicking it in the nards. The slathered prose feeds you a fucked world with evocative esoteric-techno babble. It does well to paint situations and environments in a way that makes it easy for a GM to convey back to their players. The repertoire it draws from is easily accessible, it is not difficult to set expectations and rally everyone at the table behind a shared vision.
Artwork
One of the book’s strongest suits is the vivid, gorey and horror fueled illustrations. While running our game, I constantly flipped the book to my players to give them a peak at the monster artwork. It’s art you are excited to share! The color painting front cover is incredibly indicative of the type of experience to be had in the game. Ambika Kirkland and Andrew Walter have art styles that are complementary to each other, focused black line work with expert use of smudged tones give a foreboding and smoky visual direction. The map pieces for The Flayed Domain were made using Aseprite, adding to the 90s FPS repertoire the system is drawing from to full effect.
Layout is clean, with clear readable text that is never crammed or too busy with artwork and tables. The sequencing of the book makes sense, leaving little confusion in where to flip for referencing. Layout isn’t overly fanciful, imparting a zine-like quality that exemplifies utility over flair. The blocky typeset gives a computer text feeling like you’re pouring over the computer console of some doomed scientist. There are no gimmicks to the book’s layout, giving you a straightforward no nonsense procedure on how to run things.
Material
There is a host of new playthings including weapons, power ups, runes, and tables for building excursions. The monsters provide a well-rounded retinue of foes each with their own battlefield roles, but also features guidelines for creating your own beasts of hell. These range from a monster’s general appearance, its armor, special abilities and even the way it attacks.
It also includes guidelines for crafting your own missions with tables for objectives, locations, themes, hazards and notable features. In this way you are provided more than enough juice to string together a campaign for long term play. Really helpful stuff!
Supply management is somewhat key to missions, but you won’t be tracking ammo or other use-items as most of them feature a supply die. Whatever your feeling on supply dies, I think it works quite well for the spray and pray approach SGCP is going for. Simply rolling to see if your ammo level depletes after each firefight is a good ritual for an after battle cleanser, and with each weapon having a capped supply die, it makes gathering ammo feel all the more akin to source inspiration material of old school computer shooters.
SGCP and Stay Frosty by extension are incredibly easy games to pick up. Succeeding on an action immediately grants you another action with compounding disadvantage. It’s a rather elegant way of letting players go until they run out of steam or luck. The method of HP as a meat shield to protect from spilling over excess damage onto stats lends a sense of exhaustion to fucked-up characters. The tension mechanic from Stay Frosty is present with its own iteration, providing a set of bonuses as you get deeper in the shit. Perhaps the two biggest additions are Gibbing and the Stunt Die.
Beginning with the Stunt Die, it is most reminiscent of the Mighty Deed in DCC, allowing for a breadth of player creativity and ingenuity for on spot action. Simply think of the cool and risky thing you want to try (like sliding through a demon’s legs and axing him in the groin) then roll 1d3, succeeding on a result of 3. This chance raises as your ranger levels in experience, meaning you can do more cool shit more often.
The main show of Slipgate Chokepoint is Gibbing. Essentially, enemies possess a Gibbing value where, when slain, if the total damage goes over their Gibbing value, the enemy dies in a bloody mess, immediately granting the player another attack for free and without disadvantage. In this way, you can chain together kill combos, painting the walls with your foes’ guts. The high damage output of weapons offer high chances to Gib, with some enemies only being slain by Gibbing, offering a tactical wrinkle to firefights.
The Flayed Domain is the mission provided with the rulebook. It is short and simple, exemplifying the main points and functions of the game with steady beats to progression. There were some gaps left to fill, but as a GM I come into most games expecting this. The mission is a point crawl from room to room with skirmish scenarios and interactive set pieces featuring secrets for curious players. There are a lot of high risk high reward situations with backtracking through rooms to solve late encounter puzzles and obstacles. Moving from room to room always incurs a roll on the danger table (which is featured only in Stay Frosty) which can result in build up of Tension and a roll on the encounter table (which SGCP does feature on its own). It was somewhat troublesome to flip between the two texts as reference but this never seemed to interrupt the flow or tone while playing. Some details are a bit muddled, such as the functionality of the teleporting chamber. My players were keen to fix it and once they did, I ruled that it could be used to one-way teleport to any room into the facility. They carefully planned their tactics around this boon, but this wasn’t an explicit function in the room’s text.
At The Table
Years ago I was a player in SGCP that first colored my impression of this game. My most recent time playing had me in the role of GM which I believe provided a fuller scope to the system and its tools. As a player, I loved it. As a GM, my players loved it and I had a blast running it. Running the included mission, The Flayed Domain, proved to be a bloody good time for all involved.
I had to unwire my typical dungeon crawler brain approach, focusing less on movement, light, reactions, etc. Basically the party moved from point to point, and when arriving at a location I explained the set up, offering a chance at surprise attacks but otherwise starting skirmishes off the bat. Using popsicle sticks was a super simple way of measuring fire distances, there was never any confusion as to who the party could target. Players were smart to use cover any chance they got, and seized moments with weakened enemies to rush in and close the gap with melee. There was much fun to be had Gibbing enemies left and right. The only player death came at his own hands, having blown himself apart in a failed stunt die attempt to “rocket jump” towards the final boss. With the dangers fully laid out on the table, players made decisions with the consequences within full view. They saw the dangers of hell and were more than willing to face them.
Final Thoughts
It was a swell time running, players knew the tone and direction of the game right off the bat. With a few experienced table top players and one complete TTRPG newbie they were able to pick up and go with the rules and mechanics with little confusion. My biggest wish was for the absent parts from Stay Frosty to have been included in the rulebook. By adding a few extra pages with the materials needed in Stay Frosty, everything could be included in a handy single volume for easy reference. By no means does the book feel incomplete, but sometimes it does not feel whole.
While I usually rail against table top games trying to emulate video games, Slipgate Chokepoint does so with full intention and without coyness. Recreating a work you love in your own vision is a valid expression many artists have done crossing over all mediums, and you can really tell that Slipgate Chokepoint was made with buckets of adoration for its inspiration material.