I know this is the sub-forum for
online Animorphs roleplaying, but I thought I'd bring this up here since you guys are already obviously into RP. Has anyone ever thought of doing a tabletop RPG for Animorphs?
There's this fantastic indie RPG by Jason Morningstar called
Grey Ranks, which I believe could be hacked pretty easily to be about Animorphs. It's about teenage guerrilla soldiers fighting the Nazis in WWII-era Poland, but the game mechanics aren't really focused so much on the fighting. Each character has a motivation for fighting - family, faith, patriotism, etc. - which is represented by a little token. These tokens are placed on a sort of emotional grid. You have mission scenes, and personal scenes, and how well you do on either/both of these determines where your token moves on the grid at the end of each scene.
You can download the grid
here; it's the fourth thing down on the page. But if you don't want to do that, I'll just tell you: each side represents a different emotion (Love, Enthusiasm, Exhaustion, and Hate) and in each corner is a different way to die. These possible deaths are: Martyrdom (at the intersection of Love and Enthusiasm), Nervous Breakdown (at the intersection of Love and Exhaustion), Derangement (at the intersection of Enthusiasm and Hate), and Suicidal Depression (at the intersection of Exhaustion and Hate). You want to avoid landing on those corner squares, because the second time you land on the same one, you die. This is made more challenging by the fact that players start on squares fairly close to the corners. I imagine Rachel would start out on the square closest to Martyrdom, Marco Derangement, Tobias Suicidal Depression, and Cassie Nervous Breakdown. Don't know about Jake.
Anyway, this basic setup could translate very well to Animorphs. Unlike Grey Ranks, this game would probably need a GM to come up with Yeerk plots for mission scenes. We could add a mechanic about morphing - maybe as soon as someone morphs, the GM starts a timer for two minutes (or more, if that's too difficult) and after the two minutes are up, you have to either have already started demorphing or you become a nothlit. Maybe there could also be a place on the character sheet for exhaustion, and you tick off an exhaustion box everytime you morph or demorph, and that has mechanical effect on how well you do in the mission scene.
Anybody interested in this? Sadly, I don't think I could get any of my real-life friends to play an Animorphs RPG, but I thought I'd throw this out there.
