A Quick Look at a Big Book: Eco Mofos!!

I have once again been reading a Mark of the Odd game, that is, a game descended from Chris McDowall’s Into the Odd. This time, it’s Eco Mofos!! from Copy/Paste co-op, written by David Blandy with art by Daniel Locke and editing by Iko. It has the curious feature of acknowledging inspiration from Mythic Bastionland, despite being released a year earlier, thanks to Chris McDowall’s open development practices and early pdf releases, I assume.

Eco Mofos!! is a post-apocalyptic “Oddlike”, but presents itself as “weirdhope” rather than grimdark. The world is dead, long live the world, I guess? Players take the role of “Punks” searching for a “Grove”, a safe place to call home. The stats are pretty much the usual Oddlike fare (three roll under stats + HP), except for the inclusion of a fourth luck stat, which depletes and replenishes when succeeding and failing luck saves, enforcing an evening-out of luck rolls, rather than leaving them fully to chance, like the die of fate suggested in Cairn.

Another addition to character creation is Adaptations, which sit somewhere between the Knights of Mythic Bastionland and the starting item packages of Into the Odd. They offer both items and special abilities, like the Knights, but which are available to roll are determined by your HP stat, as in Into the Odd. This works well, assigning caster Adaptations to low-HP characters, and more close combat oriented ones to high-HP characters. With its Adaptations, Eco Mofos also gives explicit examples of semi-diegetic advancement: each is tied to a “Key Item”, where finding one of these and absorbing it (whether that means installing a cyber augmentation or drinking a weird tea) will give you the ability associated with that Adaptation. While I don’t think the book explains this system super well, I think it’s a cool way to give examples of what advancement could look like. Many of these could also be backported into e.g. Cairn as advancements (some with some reskinning from tech to magic). They also offer exactly the kind of unique character special abilities that I felt was missing from Cairn 2e (and I tried to make some exaples of).

Another point where the game is very clearly inspired by Mythic Bastionland, is the Hermits, serving a similar role to the Seers. A key part of their role lies in helping guide the punks to a Glade. It is also very clear from the text, that the game is intended to be played as a big crawl campaign (though it leans Cairn in this instance, as it suggests a pointcrawl rather than a hexcrawl). It comes with a handful of pages of generation procedures, and a bunch of cool tables to roll on for features and encounters in different terrain types, as well as a plethora of cool items to find, and descriptions of different types of factions in the world.

Despite all of this being very cool, I think this is also where the games greatest weakness reveals itself. The game describes itself as “weirdhope” rather than the regular old depressing post-apocalypse, they are at the very least neighbours in genre, and without the same cultural footprint, it would be difficult for me to roll up a campaign capturing the essence that is Weirdhope, without falling into the trap of a bog-standard melange of Mad Max and Fallout. I am sure reading the published adventures would go some way towards helpting this, but unlike the grove-seeking big campaign implications of the book, most of the published adventures seem to be little standalon adventures (at least from the descriptions - I should really pick them up and read it). I’m sure I would still have fun playing a “normal” post apocalyptic game with Eco Mofos, and the tables are great and evocative, but the thing I would really wish to see is an example campaign setting, complete with faction and location legwork. What does a big Weirdhope campaign setting look like? Mythic Bastionland, despite its on-the-surface even more barebones generation procedures, gets around it with a combination of very clearly presented Myths and Seers to fill your realm with (and many of them), and the fact that Arthurian Mythic Fantasy is much more well-established as a genre than Weirdhope. Cloud Empress (as I reviewed here) has a similarly uncommon setting, but compensates partly by just pointing really hard at Nausicaä, and partly by releasing the big Land of Cicadas setting hexcrawl with the game.

I recently played in a short two-session adventure of Eco Mofos (playtesting an adventure for the upcoming Islands of Weirdhope adventure collection), and I had a blast. Character creation and flow of play were super smooth, super fun. It’s a great game world and system, and I’d really like to see more of it. As a GM considering running it, I just wish I had a fully realised example of a campaign world that I could either run, or be inspired by in creating my own. Fortunately, this is a very fixable problem: someone just needs to write and release the Big Weirdhope Pointcrawl.

In the meantime, I’ll go pick up the adventures and think about what the commonalities are, and how they paint a picture of what “Weirdhope” really is.