Godzilla’s been having a bit of a moment lately, hasn’t he? Between the hugely successful Monsterverse movies in the US, and Japanese filmmakers knocking out smash hit reinterpretations Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One, the stink of Godzilla 1998 seems to have been entirely dispelled.
What better time, then, for the big fella to finally get his own tabletop RPG?
As revealed by our friends over at GamesRadar, IDW Games will be launching a Kickstarter for the game in March. One promising detail is the talent on the design side—it’s being written by Gav Thorpe, Jervis Johnson, and Mark A Latham.
Those are three legendary names in tabletop gaming, particularly on the wargaming side of things. They’ve all done serious time in senior positions at Games Workshop on Warhammer Fantasy, Warhammer 40,000, and more. Thorpe also worked on videogames including For Honor and Space Hulk: Deathwing, and Latham designed Modiphius’ Skyrim wargame and The Walking Dead: All Out War. While their collective experience in designing RPGs is perhaps more limited, these are certainly guys who know how to make chucking dice fun.
Or rather, drawing cards in this case—as, unusually, the Godzilla RPG will use a standard playing card deck to resolve actions rather than dice. It looks like it’ll be set in the universe of IDW’s newest range of Godzilla comics, one in which super-powered agents of G-Force battle the big man himself and other familiar giant monsters.
(Image credit: IDW Games)
I’m not caught up on this new ‘Kai-Sei’ era, but I’ve read a large chunk of IDW’s previous Godzilla comics and it’s put out a lot of really good stuff. I’m particularly a huge fan of Godzilla: The Half-Century War, but also really enjoyed its Kingdom of Monsters series and sequels.
Importantly, it’s done a consistently good job of finding meaningful things for human characters to do while the giant monsters are crashing into each other, which seems like it’ll be the key thing to get right for this RPG. Even once you crack the mechanics of how the party can fight something 70 times bigger than themselves, you can’t just run a titan fight every session—there needs to be other interesting stuff going on along the way.
It looks like that experience in the comics has also secured the game a really strong visual style. The Kai-Sei era of comics has a brilliantly colourful, eye-catching look, and judging by the WIP cover of the RPG, that’s going to carry over directly.
This’ll be the first IDW Games project since 2021, and seems to be a relaunch for the brand. That could be promising in itself—if you’d be keen to see tabletop RPGs and board games based on its comic properties including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Rocketeer, Locke & Key, and 30 Days of Night, it’ll be worth signing up to their new newsletter for updates.
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