Cocaine Owlbear is a Honey Heist hack about being a woodland animal high on cocaine performing a heist to obtain more cocaine.
The physical Snowblind Edition is 20 pages, with a genuinely fantastic cover art piece, a fun scenario map, and a lot of public domain interior illustrations. The layout is clean and easily readable, and the font choices do a lot to help sell the game's tone.
Gameplay-wise, Cocaine Owlbear cleaves really close to Honey Heist. It even centers around a heist with a crew, something that doesn't feel essential for the cocaine-animal-attack vibe it's trying to channel. The game also doesn't really have a strong justification for why you're working as a crew (you can easily assume everyone snorted the same enchanted cocaine together, but this doesn't feel as strong as Honey Heist's 'you know each other and have planned to work together' setup.)
Your two stats are Cocaine and Woodland Creature, and there *is* a genuinely cool interplay between them where you can have flashbacks to your Woodland Creature innocence to lower your Cocaine level. This little bit of grounding in tranquility makes the rest of the game feel even wilder.
For GMs, there are random tables to generate scenarios, and they again cleave extremely close to the ones that are in Honey Heist. The trappings are now more D&D, but what everything does structurally is pretty unchanged.
Overall, if you want an even more gonzo version of Honey Heist with a distinctly dungeon fantasy flavor, Cocaine Owlbear does hit that mark. It's hard to overstate how good the cover art piece is, and it makes Cocaine Owlbear a great gift. However, you might want to gift it alongside Honey Heist since there's a few spots where Honey Heist explains a mechanic and Cocaine Owlbear doesn't.
Minor Issues:
-I read through a couple of times, and I don't think the game actually tells you to use d6s.
-Special abilities and spells and whatnot don't currently affect dice rolls, just provide narrative flavor---I don't know if this is intentional.
One thing I'm missing is a mention if the abilities is only "you can do something extra" or if it grants the honey-heist-like "2d6 take lowest" on some actions. Will probably use both. Already pitched the game to friends and looking forward to what madness will inevitably happen.
So, the game finally took place. The sparrow flock hivemind named Darryl bought another hat. The ferret was a dwarf beard. There was a goose-raccoon-ferret stack that got into town by goose smacking someone in the balls with a flail. There was a goose launching an air attack with a flail. There was a sparrow flock distracting a stone golem so that the goose could smack it in its anatomically accurate balls while the raccoon stole as much cocaine as it could. Everybody enjoyed.
It did require a few changes in regards to how the attributes are moved (in general move towards cocaine on success, towards animal on fail), but it really was a sight to behold. Thank you for making this.
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Cocaine Owlbear is a Honey Heist hack about being a woodland animal high on cocaine performing a heist to obtain more cocaine.
The physical Snowblind Edition is 20 pages, with a genuinely fantastic cover art piece, a fun scenario map, and a lot of public domain interior illustrations. The layout is clean and easily readable, and the font choices do a lot to help sell the game's tone.
Gameplay-wise, Cocaine Owlbear cleaves really close to Honey Heist. It even centers around a heist with a crew, something that doesn't feel essential for the cocaine-animal-attack vibe it's trying to channel. The game also doesn't really have a strong justification for why you're working as a crew (you can easily assume everyone snorted the same enchanted cocaine together, but this doesn't feel as strong as Honey Heist's 'you know each other and have planned to work together' setup.)
Your two stats are Cocaine and Woodland Creature, and there *is* a genuinely cool interplay between them where you can have flashbacks to your Woodland Creature innocence to lower your Cocaine level. This little bit of grounding in tranquility makes the rest of the game feel even wilder.
For GMs, there are random tables to generate scenarios, and they again cleave extremely close to the ones that are in Honey Heist. The trappings are now more D&D, but what everything does structurally is pretty unchanged.
Overall, if you want an even more gonzo version of Honey Heist with a distinctly dungeon fantasy flavor, Cocaine Owlbear does hit that mark. It's hard to overstate how good the cover art piece is, and it makes Cocaine Owlbear a great gift. However, you might want to gift it alongside Honey Heist since there's a few spots where Honey Heist explains a mechanic and Cocaine Owlbear doesn't.
Minor Issues:
-I read through a couple of times, and I don't think the game actually tells you to use d6s.
-Special abilities and spells and whatnot don't currently affect dice rolls, just provide narrative flavor---I don't know if this is intentional.
One thing I'm missing is a mention if the abilities is only "you can do something extra" or if it grants the honey-heist-like "2d6 take lowest" on some actions. Will probably use both.
Already pitched the game to friends and looking forward to what madness will inevitably happen.
it was intended to be the HH rule of: "2d6 take lowest"
So, the game finally took place. The sparrow flock hivemind named Darryl bought another hat. The ferret was a dwarf beard. There was a goose-raccoon-ferret stack that got into town by goose smacking someone in the balls with a flail. There was a goose launching an air attack with a flail. There was a sparrow flock distracting a stone golem so that the goose could smack it in its anatomically accurate balls while the raccoon stole as much cocaine as it could. Everybody enjoyed.
It did require a few changes in regards to how the attributes are moved (in general move towards cocaine on success, towards animal on fail), but it really was a sight to behold. Thank you for making this.
awesome!
I cannot wait to GM the shenanigans that are about to ensue!
let me know how it goes!