In Mad as Hell you fight demons in your neighborhood and in the boardroom
When social ills turn into living, breathing monsters hell-bent on destruction you have to treat the symptoms and the disease
Everything is fucked. Here in the UK? Fucked. Everywhere anyone I speak to on a regular basis lives? Fucked. Why is everything fucked? Capitalism. True, there are plenty of more detailed and nuanced answers you can give, but you can also just say “capitalism,” and while you may not be 100% right, you’re absolutely not going to be wrong. Now, this isn’t just a case of me injecting politics into this otherwise escapist tabletop gaming publication again, because Mad As Hell, by Evie Moriarty, published by SoulMuppet, is about everything being fucked because of capitalism. It takes that simple premise and asks “What if the evils of capitalism spawned literal demons?”
Players are cast as Radicals, regular folks who have realised this truth and decided to fight back against both the supernatural evils and the all-too-real ones that birthed them. This may not sound a million miles away from other modern horror games, but Mad As Hell isn’t just about beating up demons for funsies, it’s intended to be both inspirational and aspirational, a safe space to develop radical thinking that can be applied to real life.
That’s one hell of a pitch.
