Eat God (early access)

The Kickstarter campaign for Eat God is over; however, late pledges will remain active until further notice. 

Eat God is a game about being on the outside. You'll explore it from the knee-high perspective of the Folk: beings who stand for every small, funny-looking creature in every game that insists small, funny-looking creatures are morally okay to kill – every goblin and kobold and imp – reimagined here as a single impossibly varied, self-created people.

Of course, you're not just any small, funny-looking creature. You have an ace up your sleeve: the Rebellious Arts. Part existential philosophy, part martial art, these disciplines confer upon those who master them the title of God-eater.

What does it mean to eat God?

Is “God” the systems of oppression we build to keep others down, and eating God means throwing off those chains?

Is “God” the culmination of an error in our understanding of reality, and eating God means finding another way to be?

Or is “God” just a great big tyrant in the sky, and eating God means exactly what you think it means?

Your journey to find out will lead to many places, each offering potential answers, usually in the form of someone being ground under someone else's boot. Owing to your outsider's perspective, your interventions may not always help in the ways you intend, but you can ensure that those who benefit from the status quo are having a bad time.

In plainer terms, Eat God is a parody of games about reality-warping martial artists with full sentences for names on a quest to dethrone God, casting players as gender-ambiguous muppety things sticking it to the Man through the power of gratuitous cartoon violence. Is this an effective way to bring about structural change? There's only one way to find out.

This game is a work in progress. It's being offered for comments and playtesting. The current revision contains everything you need to play, with examples of play and additional material coming in future versions. Feedback can be provided either via the comments here, or using the Penguin King Games Discord server.

Credits

Written and edited by David J Prokopetz.

Additional writing by C.T. Kelly.

Cover art by M.C. Marcellin.

Character sheet by Wendy Ribston Pippin.

Beta reading by Jan Caltrop.

Playtesting and feedback by acorn-squash-writes, balaur-of-four-toes, baronetcoins, bobafloutist, fractalkitty, gement, hobbular, kingerslyy, lightning-and-lavender-fire, littlepinkbeast, paradoxius, pepperdoken, poisonhemloc, rcbirdy, robezpierre, scribe-awoken, whorelandoflorida, wickedsick and wings-liker.

Additional contributions by fralexion, goatsgomoo, llsilvertail, onemerlin and robjectionable-content.

License

The text of Eat God is licensed under CC BY 4.0