Crushed

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Crushed: The Doomed Kitty Adventures!
Published by: Rising Force Productions
Distributed by: Team Frog Studios
Reviewer: Eric Edwards

So what do you get when you cross the Hackmaster Game with naked female furries?  You get Crushed: The Doomed Kitty Adventures! Based on the comic strip of the same name, Crushed is a d20 system setting for a specific kind of world, and a specific kind of gameplay. Fortunately, you can pull the gameplay from the world, and the world from the gameplay, or leave them all together, whichever you might choose.

The book itself is a 32 page paperback, 6 ¾" by 10 ¼", with stapled binding. The cover is a heavy, full color front-and-back cardstock.  The interior pages are a decent weight paper, with black and white art abounding.  At times abounding almost too much.

On both the front and the back covers, the book provides a warning regarding the graphic nature of some of the art, recommending the book for players 13 years old and up.  This is a good thing, because the book is abundant with images of anthropomorphic female anatomy.  My first thought in skimming through this book was that it would be well suited to be a pop-up book.

Six pages of Crushed are devoted to the comic strip of the same name (see www.supermegatopia.com). You have a full page map in the center, with another 1 page map of the keep for the six page sample adventure included. The remainder of the 32 pages are dedicated to providing some new spells, magic items, monsters, the main cast of the comic, and the obligatory Open Game License.

The art in the book, as mentioned previously, is not suited for young children.  Not because of graphic violence, though that does exist in the game.  No, it is because the art shows naked breasts of the main Crushed characters.  Mind you, these are cartoon drawings, and that isn't the only thing in the art. Many pictures do not have naked animals in them. Overall, the art is actually quite good, and humorous at times too (as was intended).

My only complaint on the art is due to layout more than anything else, and that is only on a few pages. In two of the character write-ups, and in the Ninja Frog write-up, the corresponding images have been grayed out and laid as the background for the page. Unfortunately, this ends up obscuring the text more than it should.  Other than these few instances, the art is uniformly good and appropriate to the game.

How useful is the book in a typical D&D Third Edition campaign, you ask? Exactly what is a typical D&D Third Edition campaign is my response. If you play in some ultra-serious Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk campaign, will you be able to use much of this book?  Probably not, but there is one thing you can definitely take from this book. If you want to run either a 'furry' campaign of anthropomorphic characters, a humorous campaign, a hack-and-slash campaign without real worry, or some mixture of the three, you can use most of this book.

The central point of this game is to have fun. The author gets this out in the open on page 7, when he writes, "Here is the one hard and fast rule in this book:  Whatever is funny or silly or stupid, that is the way to go in any situation." With that being said, I'm going to cover a few key elements of Crushed.

The game focuses on what is called the "Hero Class". This isn't a new character class, but is more of a caste in the world.  One in one thousand individuals in the world are members of the Hero Class, and many are able to live for a long time without knowing this fact. The one sure way to find out is to die. If you reappear at the Temple of Infinite Lives, you are one of the Hero Class.  If you don't, then you aren't.  Yes, the Temple of Infinite Lives.  The player characters are all members of the Hero Class.

When a PC dies, they reappear at the nearest Temple of Infinite Lives. They reappear at full health, missing all of their clothes and their equipment. So the fear of death has lost a bit of its bite, but everything isn't all roses.  The PC may or may not retain experience gained since their last level advancement.  And their body remains where they fell, with all of their equipment on it.  So, in theory, the character could make it back and get their equipment back. But if they died from chronic dental penetration
of the draconis family (eaten by a dragon), they are going to have to dig through some dragon dung to find the body and equipment. Or the remains, anyway.  Now, exactly what the rest of the party is up to while the unfortunate character tries to catch up to them is part of the fun.

So what can you take from this book? Like I said earlier, it depends on what kind of game you are running. The spells and magic items are not things you would find in many D&D campaigns, though others might use them. I would strongly suggest you consider what effect they might have if you do choose to use them in your campaign, because some could really be considered campaign wreckers.  There is one nugget in this book that every campaign will benefit from.  I mentioned it earlier. The point is to have fun.

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