Review: You’ve Got A Friend In Me

You’ve Got A Friend In Me is a zine soon to be released by the good folks over at Greedy Gorgon. They’re running a kickstarter for it now, wrapping up in a few days if you want a copy. We’ve reviewed some of their stuff in the past, and I’ve been meaning to get to some of the rest because they were great. The TLDR of the reviews is that these folks know Fun. The most important part of an TTRPG in my eyes. Some folks prioritize perfect mechanics, believeable worlds, and Gorgon has those things, but doing Fun stuff is at the foremost. So when they reached out and asked me to write something up for this new one, I jumped at the chance.

My PDF is 72 pages, but I suspect there might be some expanded pages in the back or wherever they stick kickstarter reward stuff, or some yet to finalize changes. Either way, its a hefty Zine packed with content. But if you need more, you can snag the “Greedy” edition kickstarter exclusive (I’m not reviewing that one today) which has a boat load of additional content.

Like always, they have a killer cover artist. Gorgon never skimps here, and its always one I’d love to see in a store that will for sure get me to pick their book up. And remember, art sells RPGs, so good on them. Interior art is stock art, and plentiful. Its spaced throughout to keep things interesting, and its a pretty well selected. I really like the page with the entry for Monsterologists. Its hard to pair stock art with specific scenarios, but this does it.

This is a system agnostic backstory generator designed to go beyond just rolling on a table and declaring yourself a fisherman. Instead, the focus here is on relationships, with other players and with NPCs. Thats the point of a story anyway right? How do the characters interatct with things. Man vs Man, Man vs Society, and all that. Without relationships, you just don’t have a story, and so I’m really down with this approach. This one has your classic roll on tables too, but a little better.

In YGAFIM, the players all gather together, and roll d100 as a group to answer some basic questions. In fact, some of these are literally questions I ask my parties, and its not uncommon to get blank stares to “How do you guys know each other”, when they have a 10 page backstory detailing every aspect of their PCs life up until that part. The irony being, I’d rather the inverse. No personal backstory and lot of how the gang got together. You roll your d100, and it spits out a result like Hucksters. Theres not much mechanics to it, but the prose explains exactly the sort you’ll be.

You can roll for the entire group, or maybe your group are Hucksters, but you and Billy want your PCs to have a bond for how they met to be Hucksters. You roll again and get Childhood Sweethearts.

The prompts are designed to ask more questions, and let the players fill them out. What sort of Hucksters are we? What was our con, which jobs worked out, remember that one that didn’t? Do we have a shady contact or two we can pull on? We were sweethearts, did you pursue me? Were we the classic jock/cheerleader prom king/queen pair? On the drama club together? Did our parents forbid us like Romeo and Juliette? Did we keep in touch? The prompts are designed to fish info out of you, and by extension hlp you develop your characters perosnality and goals. We aren’t rolling a die and getting “Brash” in a chart. We realized we were brash because thats how our huckster con worked.

And thats the first prompt. There are a bunch more.

• We last saw each other (Time since last meeting)
• When last we met, you were (The state of one of the people)
• The last thing you said to me was
• Somewhere only we know (Secret and cool places you know about)

• Look after it (Personal shared items of note)
• We used to call ourselves (fun club names)

Overall, I really like it. Like, theres a good chance I’ll go out and buy a physical copy for use at my IRL tables. You can tell the authors had fun writing it, coming up with cool stuff, and making it silly, badass, deep, emotional, and friendly. Highly recommend this book, especially if you find yourself doing a lot of session 0s, or launching new campaigns like I do.