The Devil Made Us Do It

Description

The Devil Made Us Do It contains three complete games: Stealing Stories for the Devil, Who the Devil Are You, and The Devil’s Dandy Dogs.

Stealing Stories for the Devil is a fast-paced tabletop roleplaying game by legendary designer Monte Cook, in which you save existence as we know it by bending reality to carry out the perfect heist. When you play Stealing Stories, you pull off the perfect heist. Unique mechanics and structure ensure players and PCs are competent and cool at every stage of the adventure, and always have a trick up their sleeves. A collaborative scenario-building process means zero GM prep as the group formulates its elaborate plan while creating the adventure scenario at the same time. Unique mechanical elements such as Mission Cards hand the initiative to the players, turning crisis into opportunity just when it looks like there’s no hope of success. And, as reality-shaping liars, PCs can reshape their situation in literally any way they can conceive of. And lies always succeed. (While success is not the question, the price may be steep.) Throughout gameplay, unprecedented player agency ensures the PCs create and pull off amazing feats, completing their heists against incredible odds and looking great while they do it.

Who the Devil Are You? is a game of wide-open possibilities. Using most of the same basic rules as Stealing Stories (minus the lying effects), this new game is perfect for a no-prep one-shot session with your friends.

The GM describes a scene and names the genre and general tone of the night’s game. Then, the players come up with who they are, and why they are in that scene. So, if the GM describes that the PCs are on the bridge of a starship and can see a space station orbiting a planet, the players might decide that their characters are the crew of a cargo vessel coming to deliver something dangerous to the station. Or they could be criminals on the run from the authorities and want to get down to that planet. Maybe they’re a military force coming to attack the planet, but know that they have to disable the station first. In this way, the players create not only their characters but also their goal. The GM doesn’t know what the players will come up with, but already has some notes for stats on the station and the people on it that can be easily tailored to whatever the players say. The game includes:

A short rulebook building on the rules in Stealing Stories as well as lots of ideas and suggestions for this kind of collaborative, improvisational gaming,
A set of cards that work very much like the Mission Cards in Stealing Stories for the Devil (but are more open ended for any scenario or genre), and
Half a dozen pre-made scenario starters with a cool scene-setting image and general stats and guidelines, as well as some surprises to introduce during the scenario.
Who the Devil Are You? is a fantastic and fun exercise of shared creativity. The resulting sessions are very character-focused, and end up feeling very much like a movie, with an opening “establishing shot” that then tells an entire story that the players are highly invested in.

The Devil’s Dandy Dogs. You are one of the Devil’s Dandy Dogs, part of a pack of supernatural hounds tasked with collecting souls for the Devil. You live by the Devil’s code and do the Devil’s bidding. If you are a good dog, someday you will earn your reward—freedom, a soul of your own, the promise of protection for a loved one, or something much bigger. Perhaps you even dream, secretly and surreptitiously, of becoming the Devil yourself.

But the Devil is cunning and crafty and will get the better of you if they can. But they too have a code, and you—a creature torn from the Devil’s very shadow—are under that code’s protection. Pursue your ambitions carefully, and you can earn your reward without tempting the Devil’s wrath. Of course, you are a creature born of temptation. Your personal Temptation gives you strength and power, but rely on it too much, and you will fall. Desire, greed, fear, hunger, and even love can cause you to stray from your path.

Devil’s Dandy Dogs, by Shanna Germain, is a no-prep, rules-light storygame filled with magic, mystery, and a pack of supernatural dogs trying their best to be oh-so-good. The focus is on narrative storytelling, complex dilemmas of mind and heart, unique supernatural abilities, and the interplay between the Devil and their dogs. Characters rely on four traits to complete their tasks: Devil (how good you are at supernatural stuff), Dandy (how you interact with the world and others), Dog (how good you are at dog stuff), and their own personal Temptation (an enhancement to other abilities, but dangerous to rely on). A deck of tarot-sized cards (along with d6s) are used to design the characters, create the narrative, and drive the story. Devil’s Dandy Dogs is a complete game with everything you need to play included in the box.