Review: Gangs Of Titan City
If the drudge and misery of modern urban life is getting you down, Gangs of Titan City is here to remind you that it can still get a whole lot worse.
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Imagine a vast, endless city, one that ‘sags under the weight of rust and smog’. Yup, we’ve all been to Birmingham, but even that concrete purgatory doesn’t have to squeeze 10 billion citizens into its unyielding guts. Gangs of Titan City unrepentantly dumps players into a dirty hole where they’ll live out the absolute grimmest lives possible.
Out of the gate, I’ll admit to loving this game. I think it’s got some of the tightest writing SoulMuppet have ever released, pairing it with their trademark simple-yet-oozing-with-theme mechanics. Plus it looks great! Ben Brown’s art evokes exactly the right degree of lo-fi desolation, whilst Dai Shugars’ layout is razor sharp; everything complements each other in a way that keeps half your head rooted in the style and feel, yet the other half free to quickly comprehend the rules and action.
There are really two main thematic components established here. Firstly; your gang is everything. It’s not about loyalty or identity, so much as naked, wide-eyed survival. Your gang is life; or, if not life, then whatever that miserable thing that you eke out for a few regrettable years is called. Secondly; all of this is going to end. Pretty dreadfully, probably. Being born into the Guts of Plutogia is not a survivable experience; and various looming consequences are inevitably going to punch you repeatedly in the head until you stop breathing; or at least until you pick up enough Traumas that you’re forced to ‘retire’.
Session zero in GOTC thus involves building a gang together, then creating your PCs - which in this game are unceremoniously referred to as Gutters - before deciding on the Dangers your group will be beaten down by. I say unceremoniously, but there’s actually a joyous revelling in the awfulness here. This setting is almost poetically atrocious. Yes, it’s Necromunda to the nth degree stuff, and at first glance you might want to compare it to CY_BORG: but whilst that game is a wonderful, vibrant, chaotic freewheel through an unimaginably stark futurism, Gangs of Titan City is systematically grounded in an unsmiling urban misery.
This game is also not trying to be OSR, even if it technically does use six stats. Much like SoulMuppet’s other games Best Left Buried and Orbital Blues, it takes the best of simplified dice mechanics and pairs it with the theme and storytelling of something Powered by the Apocalypse; doing it in a way that I think leaves both types of players pretty satisfied. Most checks are a 2d6 roll, with 10+ scoring a success, 7-9 partial success and 6 or lower a fail. Dice are added by equipment and specialisms, such as trying to jump a car between buildings being aided by High Speed Driving, or ninja-kicking a Psi-Squad captain through a wall being easier when you’ve just injected an Adreno-Rage Pharmo-serum directly into your eyeball.
Character stats, by the way, are called Approaches since they represent the line-of-attack that gutters take to a problem; they are Overwhelm & Exploit, Resolve & Calculate and Dominate & Appeal. Paired into physical, mental and social spheres, they nonetheless naturally lend themselves to colourful narrative decisions; whilst also being straightforward and precise for the less touchy-feely players. Honestly, I’m a little awed by how well they blend fun with functional.
There’s so much more I’ve not covered here; a flavourful advancement system; loads of great actual-play-in-prose examples to showcase mechanics and table feel; a crisp map and sector generation system that brings a crumbling chunk of Plutogia’s hellishness to a single sheet of paper; the ability to gain XP from performing a significant hand-shake; I’ve run out of words, so I’ll stop, but hopefully somewhere in my torrent of gush, I’ve managed to make three things clear: you should buy Gangs of Titan City; you should play Gangs of Titan City; and then you should play it again.
Created by: Nick Spence, Ben Brown and Zachary Cox
Published by SoulMuppet Publishing
This feature originally appeared in Wyrd Science Vol.1, Issue 6 (August '24)
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