Product Review: Death Race Fury Road

From Kort'thalis Publishing
Cost: Free
http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/196994/Death-Race-Fury-Road

Death Race Fury Road is a simple race simulator for a race in a chaos filled world where getting there is half the fun.  This is pretty good because the chance of winning the race is slim to none.


The layout of Fury Road leaves a little to be desired as it starts referencing parts of the book that you haven't read yet.  That being said it is really short, so it doesn't take much time to scan and figure out.

The important thing to remember about Fury Road is it isn't about winning.  IF your racer doesn't die, then you have a 15% chance of placing and "winning the race".  You can only get worse odds from there.  While there are lots of ways for racers to die, and even to do each other in, this isn't much incentive if you stick strictly to the rules presented in it.  The booklet must assume that there are dozens of racers, as your ending roll gives you a fixed finishing place (i.e. rolling a 5 on a d20 means you finish 5th place), so no matter how many racers die, there are always 20 left, because you can come in 20th place (sucks to be you!).  A simple tweak that fixes this is to have the rolls for placing be relative with the racer closest to 1 placing first and the racer closest to 20 placing last.

What the book does well is give the feel of a no rules, high octane, murder race with ADHD In which  there is so much chaos involved, it might be more of an incentive for a racer to just say forget the race and come in last because they would rather hook up with that willing stranger they met on the side of the road.

I see some value in Fury Road, not for PCs but as a backdrop event that PCs can bet on.  They can roll for their racers and see the outcome of chaos.  It might present some interesting story hooks if players want to run down the racer who threw the race because of (fill in blank, but probably has to do with sex).

All told a decent piece of inspirational work, and you can't beat the price of free.