Friday 28 March 2014

Doctor Magnethands!

My own work. Source images: This lab coat from
Gentleman's Emporium, used with permission, and
this magnet, used under licence.
Yesterday evening we played Doctor Magnethands which is a... thing. I mean, I guess it's technically a story game, but it's much too silly to deserve that title.

"In this game, you'll play superheroes who must defeat Doctor Magnethands as he prepares to destroy the earth by firing his radioactive rocket castle on the moon into the White House on Christmas Eve! Yeah! Because shut up, that's why!"

This is a silly game that is designed to be played by drunk people. The rules says "get drunk before you even think about playing this stupid game, and don't stop drinking until after you've finished" but we played whilst completely sober and had a great, side-splitting time. I guess we're just too daft as a group to need alcohol to be extremely ridiculous.

It takes about an hour to play, and is mostly about coming up with bizarre and hilarious ways of combining randomly generated elements into conflict resolutions.

We played as team Narcissistic Explosions, comprised of:

  • A real crowbar of a guy, a speech-maker with a secret volcano base and a...
  • Robot butler, secretly a werecat - utterly loyal and utterly incompetent. 
  • A random collection of objects including a Klingon rhyming dictionary. To be clear, this wasn't exactly a character. The player in control just managed to achieve things by random happenstance involving these items.
  • A swarm of cowboy bees with unbelievably perfect cooking skills.
  • A cloud of purple rain with the ability to turn biscuits into dinosaurs and teleport when sneezing
  • Me. No, I don't mean the author of the post. This player's character was just defined as "me" and anyone who tried to define them too closely ended up going insane at the recursive meta-definition.
We defeated such notables as the depressed black hole, the moral quandary of the green thumb, the custard train, the welsh space vampire, Segata Sanchiro, the power of control over magnolia, and far far more. Definitely the most surreal thing I have ever been involved in creating.

Shout out to Parz who introduced us to the game and GM'd. He did a fantastic job of playing Doctor Magnethands, with a hilarious accent and constant ranting, raving, and odd philosophical tangents every time we defeated one of his challenges.

I look forward to playing this again soon. Fabergé dragon - away!

3 comments:

  1. Cross posted to http://www.story-games.com/forums/discussion/19316/doctor-magnethands

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  2. For anyone who wants a sense of how the conversation flows - this twitter RPG session (of Dungeon Crawl) features Doctor Magnethands, the game's creator and the appropriate levels of sheer insanity: http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2013/10/yesterdays-twitter-dungeoncrawl-superheroes/

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  3. I've just written a new post about Doctor Magnethands here: http://weaving-stories.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/neverending-backpack-hack-of-doctor.html

    ReplyDelete