License to Kill, a new irregular column about RPG adaptations

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s going to be an official Godzilla roleplaying game. It’s the first title from IDW Games, a relaunched tabletop vertical from comics company IDW Publishing. It's an original system from some veteran Warhammer designers that, according to Bleeding Cool, will have you "playing as a group of survivors in the middle of a full-on kaiju attack featuring the iconic monster and others from his roster of enemies and allies." That's not a lot of information but when Christian Hoffer reported on it for EnWorld, he didn't even know if you played humans or the monsters themselves.

It seems like every month, there’s a new announcement of a tabletop RPG based on a licensed IP. Rascal has previously covered the Neopets game (which more than one year later is now in alpha playtesting), Welcome to Night Vale campaign (which has shipped but without the dice tray in the mockups; some backers are upset, and the publisher has been apparently deleting complaints on the basis they violate the TOS), and the Tomb Raider RPG (which was cancelled after creative differences between Evil Hat and the license holder). 

But we didn’t cover so many more — we didn’t write about the Invincible game (which will be fine because it's Free League) or the Diablo RPG (which has almost 10,000 signed up for the campaign launch but the button hasn’t been pushed for months) or the Legacy of Kain RPG (a MÖRK BORG hack, I think) in the Lost in Cult book about the video game. And more recently, there’s been announcements of a Ghost in the Shell: Arise adaptation from Mana Project Studio and an Attack on Titan RPG from Need Games, who are both really interesting studios from Italy. 

On one hand, I want to talk about all these games, but I also want to talk about them in a complicated way. Because it is complicated.