Homicidal Transients

 The premise behind Homicidal Transients is a boiled-down parody/satire distilation of just about every (pseudo-) fantasy RPG ever made. You play a homicidal homeless person, bent on killing things and stealing their stuff. This game reduces that to it's most fundamental level. I read the rules for Homicidal Transients in about five minutes flat. That includes the "Guide to Deadly Violence" expansion. This game is about as rules-light as you can hope to find. It requires that everyone have the same dice, but it doesn't really matter whether it's a d6 or a d20 or any die in between. It uses all of five skills and includes two basic styles for characters, the homicidal and the transient.

I don't really see anyone running long campaigns with this game engine. It's just too tongue-in-cheek for that. One of the weapons is "TOASt" or Terrier on a stick. Yeah. A dog. Duct-taped to a stick and shoved at an opponent as a single-use weapon, "but you can keep the stick and reuse it." So I can't imagine campaigning in this game. But I can imagine playing it at a convention or as a single-session game. And I suspect, with a little creative story telling, it would be a very memorable, very fun game. Reading the sample adventure in the Guide, I think this is the sort of game that, if I saw another group playing it at a nearby table, the laughter and enjoyment would make me jealous and distract me from whatever game I was trying to play. 

The layout is intentionally rough, with sections on ruled paper and yellow post-it notes, some text in a handwriting font and some in newsprint cutout. The rules span 13 pages, plus a character sheet. A future edition plans to add in more "how to make a character" steps, but I doubt any seasoned gamer would struggle for long with the concepts.

This game is definitely worth the $5 for the entire bundle.