The “Boomstick!” Jumpstart promises a genre bending frenzy of fun, but its theming issues and confusing progression make it fall short of its potential.
Hello Heroes!
My name is Pierce and today Ill be reviewing the “Boomstick!” Jumpstart from “Just insert Imagination”. “Just insert imagination” is just coming off of their banger setting, “Wiseguys”. I love me some “Wiseguys”. Being a metal-head and fan of “Evil dead”, I was very excited for this project.
The Setup
When you first jump in to “Boomstick!”, you’re greeted with its inspirations. It claims to draw heavily from “Evil Dead” and “This is Spinal Tap”.((Right from the beginning I saw a bit of an issue there, because those movies aren’t really even in the same ballpark.)) It continues that you and your friends are apart of a heavy metal band that’s on the rise. By the time you’re at the highest level, the band would be a worldwide phenomenon.
The lore centers around a group called the Enkidu warriors and how they’re battling the forces of evil through the sounds of heavy metal. This is where our heroes come in.
There’s a short blurb about the tone of the story and how its “Slapstick horror”. It talks about the tone being scary as well as funny, but also engaging. I’m just gonna go ahead pump the brakes real quick. Lets have a chat.
I have absolutely no clue what theme they were going for here. At the beginning I was confident that this was going to be setting centered around the cheesy horror of “Evil Dead”. Then as I read it, it seemed like it was going to be a romp through hell using the power of music. I would be excited for either one of those. But I have no idea how you translate “Slapstick horror” to a ttrpg setting.
Its such a niche genre that most people have no clue what exactly its going for and it would be even harder to GM. Try to explain a slapstick joke to someone, go ahead and try, and see if its funny. You cant. Explaining to your players that the instrument came to life and poked you in the eye like the three stooges isn’t funny. You’d be better off mimicking cartoon sound effects when an enemy makes a hit.
Theming is extremely important when you’re making any setting or really anything to do with a ttrpg. It has to be clear and compelling. In Wiseguys they had perfect examples and so much material you could pull from to get into the spirit of the setting. As well, they had examples and different ways that players or a GM could feel apart of the story.
Whether its Sci-fi; fantasy, or horror, the theme has to be accessible and easy to improvise. In Boomstick! Im left wondering what exactly the theme was, and I wish there were more examples of their direction or how they intended it.
If I’m throwing a party, and I say the theme is Sesame Street/Death Star, you’re going to be very confused as to what kind of party I’m throwing.
The Execution
It starts off with having your players name their band and style of music. “Just insert Imagination” has always been fantastic at making you feel like your apart of the fun and this is no exception. It presents as if you’re being followed by a documentarian and they’re getting a low-down on bands in the scene.
My testing players named their band “Brawndo” and they were “Catholic Werewolf Power metal”. Its real, look it up.
My players are playing their show and then are accosted by a “Dead thing”. It was a pretty straightforward encounter with the looming threat that if that “Dead Thing” infects one of them they could eventually become dead things themselves.
The instruments come to life and start to choke and maim the players, causing even more havoc in the fight.
The blend of Metal and mayhem works okay here, its not the best, but its not awful. Not every archetype character provided had a weapon, one of them just had punches and kicks. So there’s definitely a sense of dread here and it makes for a good encounter.
I was really hoping that my players were gonna be using their instruments as weapons. As in, the guitarist plays a riff and the riff causes the dead things guts to blow out by its shear awesome. But again, I don’t understand the theme.
The band is then sucked into hell by a portal that opens up in the venue they are playing in and we are transported to another world full of demons and 80’s metal tropes. (Ronnie James Dio is better than Ozzy, fight me.)
We are met with a woman who is essentially the players guide through the hellscape called Greta Von Knox. I enjoyed her character, I think she was fun and cheesy in cool way. She pulls up in a Pontiac Trans am and tells my players that she knows how to defeat Ilqu (The BBEG, I assume) and how our players can make that happen.
Her backstory lends to our backstory and yet again they give us another great chance to feel apart of this world by letting my players tell a story about a show they performed.
After meeting with Greta, we have a few optional scenes that “Boomstick!” gives us if our players have the time to do it. Ive always loved that about “Just insert Imagination”. They always have the players fun in the forefront of their minds, and that’s what its all about. The optional scenes; the exciting ways to feel like your apart of the action, its always great.
In one scene your having a guitar duel, and my players definitely enjoyed that. The other, not so much.
The other optional scene has you roll a spirit roll and the lowest failure gets infected. Now, we all know that Savage worlds has a litany of safety nets and ways to get out of a sticky situation, but this felt weird.
My lead guitarist player failed the spirit roll and now they had to amputate their hand or die. This is made even harder considering the fact that amputation is performed with a -2 if someone else does it and -4 if you do it.
Going from a guitar duel to amputating a hand is an odd combination. I enjoyed the brutality of it but the tone shift was so fast I nearly broke my neck trying to understand it. I could definitely see it working on paper but in practice it felt very odd. My players are no strangers to horror. Ive killed them all in many different and bloody ways. But the tone of those stories were consistent the entire way through, the threat of death was apparent and needed to be avoided. In “Boomstick!”, you could play “Guns and roses” on a cassete tape and then be required to cut off your own boomstick to survive.
We finally make it to “Tower records” where the key to defeating Ilqu is. The players have to find a certain record and begin to look around the store.
Then, Cliff.
Cliff, a random demon, comes out of literally nowhere and begins to destroy the record store for some reason that Ill never get the answer to. Cliff has no backstory. Cliff has no connection to the record store, he just shows up.
I’m not gonna sit here on my high horse and pretend like I haven’t thrown an enemy in the mix at random, we’ve all been there. However, this is the last encounter before the jumpstart ends and he adds nothing to anything. It could have easily been the manager or maybe he was protecting the record. It would have made much more sense if they were about to find it and he grabs it instead and says “I found it first!” or anything, something.
He just shows up and destroys stuff.
The fight itself is a dramatic task centered around finding the record, which I thought was a nice touch and the party can end the jumpstart with all of them back at the bar on a Sunday morning.
Final Thoughts
Boomstick! Is a fun jumpstart through a world where metal reigns supreme and you fight hordes of horrifying demons. The theme of the setting is convoluted and difficult to get into without tweaking it, but I would still give the full setting a shot. There’s some great ideas here and some awesome ways that it could be implemented.
Thanks so much for reading this! Give “Boomstick!” a shot for yourself and let us know how you liked it. Leave a comment. Tell me I’m wrong or tell me Im not a “real” Bruce Campbell fan.
Until next time.
Pierce is a friend of the site who reached out about an RPG he was excited to discuss. Let us know what you think!
- Krusk
The TTRPG Factory 