Review of ‘Low Life: Rise of the Lowly’ for ‘Savage Worlds’ and its first supplement ‘The Whole Hole’.
Low Life is a tabletop RPG that I really enjoy, and I even got to interview its creator, Andy Hopp,back in April.
I also toyed with the idea of finding the right kind of miniatures to play it. Well, it turns out that there now is a Kickstarter campaign for official Low Life miniatures!!!
Check it out right HERE. :)
I spent last Wednesday and Thursday with some friends, just having fun and playing RPGs!
I ran a short game using the Cinematic Unisystem from the ‘Angel Roleplaying Game’. The game wasn’t set in the Buffyverse, but it was a ‘monster hunting’ type of story similar to shows like Buffy, Angel, Supernatural and others along those lines. We had so much fun that I’ll do more ‘episodes’ for them. Now that I tried it, I LOVE the Cinematic Unisystem, it’s perfect to tell a story, the rules are simple and intuitive… I can see myself using it for completely different sorts of games as long as they’re cinematic in style.
After that, I ran them a short game of ‘Low Life: Rise of the Lowly’, a comedic setting for ‘Savage Worlds’. Let me tell you, we laughed and smiled so much that at the end our facial muscles were hurting from all the smiling. I’m not even exaggerating!
Finally, one of my friends ran us a ‘Call of Cthulhu’ scripted adventure from Chaosium. I made a criminal/treasure hunter and I’m glad to say he survived the first game session! Let’s see if he can manage more adventures without dying or going insane…
LOW LIFE: Rise of the Lowly
This is a role-playing book I got recently and let me tell you, I can’t wait to play it… I mean, look at those character designs! Look at them!
The setting is very comical and tongue-in-cheek, but despite that, it’s one of the most immersive role-playing books I’ve read in a while! The world it portrays is so insane and over-the-top that I couldn’t stop myself from coming up with idea after idea, both as a game-master and as a player! When I started reading it on my way back home in the subway, I chuckled on more than one occasion. (I’m sure it didn’t look weird at all for the people around me in the subway train to see me hunched over a book, chuckling…)
There’s a lot of toilet humor in this for sure, so it’s not for everyone, but the characters you can create within this setting are some of the most original you’ll ever come across.
I think it’s a shame that no supplements/sourcebooks were made, but since it uses the Savage Worlds system, I guess it could be said that some of the Savage Worlds supplements can be used for ‘Low Life’ too…
(IMPORTANT EDIT: Turns out at the moment I write this, there is a Kickstarter project to get a new ‘Low Life’ book done!!! Go check it out here!: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1359565526/low-life-the-whole-hole-a-gadabouts-guide-to-mutha?ref=live )
For those who want to check it out, the official web site is this: http://www.muthaoithcreations.com/lowlife.html
