Angry Flowers RPG: Review

As the guard turned and opened the door, Seraph shot its creeping vines out of the darkness and coiled them tightly about the guard. He struggled for his gun, and, unable to reach it, grabbed his baton instead. He swung as best he could, but it was too late; his limp body dropped to the ground. The 6' tall purple lilac slipped quietly into the building.

This is how the first encounter went in the Angry Flowers game I ran Friday night, as part of our vacation gaming.

In Angry Flowers, players take the roles of, well, angry flowers that seek to extinguish humankind's presence on the planet. It's a fun theme that lends itself to dark and twisted humor. Or it did for us. And that might say more about us than the rules (My favorite scene: the evil snapdragon plucked the petals from the flower, i.e. the head, of the NPC the PC had been sent to find, while cackling "he loves me, he loves me not.")

The cover. How could you not want to buy this?

As the product page notes, "Angry Flowers is a rules lite rpg of furious foliage in the future. It's meant for a quick, easy evening of role playing for 2 or more players and a game master." Coming in at 7 pages, and if I'm not mistaken, that includes the cover, these are indeed lite. GMs may need to make a lot of rulings in-game to run this. 

I happen to like it because it means I don't have to look up specific rules for everything. I prefer a framework to work from, rather than an exhaustive list of what can and can't be done. Still, more explanation of the telepathic powers in terms of game mechanics would have been helpful. As it stands, for Angry Flowers, the only rules I need to know to GM are Saving Rolls  and how combat works. That pretty much covers everything.

The d4, that much maligned die utilized primarily to roll hit points for magic-users and thieves, has its day here. Nearly all but one roll (for number of foot-like roots and that might be a typo) use a d4 or multiple rolls of the d4, e.g. 2d4, 3d4, etc. Character attributes are all d4 generated as well.

And did I mention, characters are angry flowers?  (I can't help it, I think this is a great idea)

According to the official fluff, humans have been driven back to a primitive state. What primitive means is left to interpretation. For my purposes, I thought it would be fun if it was a post-apocalyptic type setting, where humans do have access to technology here and there.

At $0.99 it does seem a bit pricey for just 7 pages, but on the plus side, you get two pdfs - 1 full size and 1 pocket mod.  True, it's not anything you couldn't do yourself with any existing system (but you didn't, did you?), and it won't replace your regular RPG set, however, $0.99 for a playable, easy to run, fun game, for a break from "serious" sessions is a pretty good deal. I got mine for $.75 during the recent Christmas in July sale on the DriveThru sites, and it's definitely worth at least that. 

For less than a dollar and maybe 20 minutes spent creating a scenario, we got an hour or so of laughing, dice rolling and story telling. What more do you want?