Raccoon Sky Pirates

I am excited to be trying the fabled mega game at a convention in January but I'm not sure how much time I should allow for it. Three hours? Four? Send help!

Today we played Raccoon Sky Pirates.

Once upon a time, two racoons, two possums, and a pigeon built a janky airship in a junk yard out of a 72 VW Beetle, a Food Processor, and the Octopus ride from a carnival. It was rickety, well armored, and well-armed. It also smelled like corn chips, had sticky floors, was held together with duct tape, and was constantly playing broadway show-tunes.

They named their contraption: "the Dreaded Dumpster Fire Trash Can of Revenge"!

Its crew consisted of:

• Antoinette Cornflake the pigeon
• Princess Todd the mama possum (and her troop of joeys, all named Todditha)
• Raccoona Matata the muscle
• Rac-kit the baby-face raccoon
• and Zort the sleepy opossum

They set sail across the neighborhood, were spotted flying over an electrical substation, and finally arrived at a McMansion house in the suburbs.

They broke in through the sliding glass doors and spread out through the kitchen, dining room, foyer closet, and powder room, stealing trophies, remote controls, hats from the closet, apples, eggs, and flower, an extension cord, and other various items, before waking the dog, then the owners of the house.

With that they made their hasty exit. On their way back to the junkyard, their engine began to overheat but was cooled by Antoinette's wings. They were intercepted by another airship from a rival junkyard over the electrical substation! Racoona Matata used the octopus to throw the VW beetle at them and they escaped!

They made it back to the junkyard as heroes! Legends whose deeds will live on - until the next time we play! See less

I have two open questions:

1. The structure in the house is unclear to me. Are the raccoons supposed to bring new found trash back to the ship before carrying on and stealing more? Is moving back to the ship an action on its own. Like moving? But the rules state that you often don’t have to make a roll for moving to the ship. Can players have a turn without rolling dice? Do raccoons move from room to room? Is every move here a turn? This would result in a lot of moving turns and therefore roles.
   My handling of the house was: Every turn a player has to make a role. A raccoon can either explore an unexplored room or steal trash in an already explored room. Stealing trash includes bringing it back to the ship.
2. When the residents wake up every raccoon has to make a final test to flee to the ship. What happens on unhelpful roles? Do we start checking problems for the ship here already? Can we still play complication cards? My idea was: For every unhelpful role the raccoon has to leave one item of trash behind. 

I love the concept of the game, the art, and spirit; it's wonderful. 

I haven't actually played in part because I worry that I'm getting a rule wrong. Getting to a house (4 space of movement = 4 roles), boarding the house (2 roles) and getting home (4 roles) requires 10 successful Action roles (even if you don't do anything extra/fun on the way). Since Actions have a 50/50 chance of working, that means marking 10 Problems - which is 4 more than you need to explode. 

Complication cards can help, obviously, but mostly (unless you're very lucky) I think will just postpone the Problem. 

So it seems like most voyages should end in disaster - players would have to be very lucky to make it home with sweet, delicious trash.

Am I missing something? (Maybe clever Complication use can help - I haven't run the odds on that.) Or some other mechanic? 

bought this a while ago for a friend, finally got it to table last night. we laughed our fool heads off, so great job there.

however we had a couple of rules questions (yes we have the 2e PDF) that I hoped you could give clarity on:

1. the ship Strengths...do nothing mechanically? We took "tightly fastened together" and our very first Problem in Scene One was that the ship was shaking itself apart, "rivets loosening". that was jarring and we were sure we missed something.
2. "Deal with unforeseen consequences" is in the main rules as an option for every Scene, but nothing describes what it does. Does it actually uncheck a Problem or clear a Complication from the table? 

Again, these are minor quibbles and we had a good time (even if the dice failed our 50/50 odds approximately 9 out of our first 11 rolls...), just wanted to see if we missed something to make next time run smoothly.

Hi Chris, this is Christian,

Played RSP last year (2022). Instead of using the houses in the box, we used the huge wilderness lodge where we were staying. We literally pointed to where our raccoons would be scurrying and pointed out what we stole. It was a blast!

Planning on running it with some other friends this year.  My players wanted to create their own characters, so I just allowed them to pick the closest archetype to what they had in mind and just changed the name on the PDF. Any future plans for additional varmints? One of my players wants to play a squirrel pretending to be a raccoon. Since squirrels are preppie snobs who are loved by humans and look down on trash, she's ostracized by squirrel-kind and viewed with suspicion by raccoons. So she smeared grease on her eyes and tail as a disguise.

Hey HE!

Thank you for this game. Already ordered a physical set, but in the meantime is it possible to get a pdf of the Complication deck? Something i can print?

Thank you!

FYI: I just bought 2e (having already owned 1e) bc I love this game; I haven't played it yet, but just reading the book made me cry with laughter.  Two prehensile thumbs up!

Unfortunately ... the PDF has some serious issues in the MacOS Preview app. Haven't tried on my iPad but I'm assuming it'll have the same problems (since it's the same Apple PDF code.)

• The house maps are mangled. The floor-plans are squished vertically and split into pieces, making them unusable. This would be a deal-breaker if I didn't have 1e to fall back on :-(
• Most of the TOC links don't work; that is, when I display the TOC sidebar and click an outline item, nothing happens. It's fairly random which items work and don't work, but consistent.
• The character sheets and house sheets aren't in the TOC at all.

No idea why this would happen, since it looks like the PDF was generated by Adobe InDesign. Did you run it through any other program afterwards that might have altered it? (It's also possible these are bugs in Apple's PDF library, but I'd be surprised since it's a long time since I've run into any.)

(I know I can download Acrobat, but I hate having Adobe bloatware on my computer, grumble grumble...)

--Jens

I just played my first game of Raccoon Sky Pirates today, and holy trash pandas is it FUN!

It is a very well designed game, playful, silly, co-op, and really everything I could personally want in a TTRPG. 

10/10 experience.

Hi, Chris! I bought your game after hearing your interview on the Plot Points podcast, and ran it with my group. We all loved it! I especially loved that it was GM-less, letting me get in on the fun.

I had a question, though. We played over Roll20 and Discord, so I made some complication cards to share virtually. To put it kindly, they were really ugly. I remember you mentioning during the podcast that you were working on some physical cards. Would you also be able to make some virtual cards available for purchase so nobody else would be subjected to my ugly ones?