Hellcats and Hockeysticks actual play

Role-playing games Librarians and Leviathans
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Good evening, travellers. On a warm and sunny day like this, what better than to stay indoors avoiding all the flies because I neglected to bring any fly repellent on my business trip, and there are apparently no cafes in the vicinity? A perfect occasion to dredge up something from the depths and cast a pod or two. Stay a while, and listen.

Many years ago now, I acquired a game called Hellcats and Hockeysticks, which is intended to model the genre of “fairly bad schoolgirls get up to shenanigans”. I ran my players through the sample adventure. On the whole I thought there were some issues with the game, both in my GMing and the game itself, but it might tickle your fancy.

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I ran a one-shot session of H&H not long before I left San Diego, with five of the players from my circle, giving them their choice of around a dozen pre-gen characters with modest room for customization, and preceded by watching the original St. Trinians movie. It was a lot of fun. I thought the rules served quite well for the specific genre, even though they were too low-res for the realist aesthetic I usually go for.

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You all certainly seemed to be fighting the system quite a lot. I haven’t seen the game mechanics, but perhaps it might work better to treat the subjects as stats rather than skills, so that everyone has the same set, with a rating in each of them. And then have a FATE-Aspect-style resolution, so that when you do something you make a case for a particular subject being relevant to it.

As for the social dynamic, yeah, St Trinians (which after all had most of its genesis as a relief from the horrors of a Japanese POW camp) isn’t the same thing as Angela Brazil and they aren’t the same thing as A Clockwork Orange. One could probably write a very effective piece on the way closed societies reinforce their worst memes, but it wouldn’t be much fun to play.