Moonhop is a hack of Into The Odd that's aimed at making the already weird horror-steampunk setting implicit in Into the Odd into a planet-traveling odyssey of wackiness. Making a flavorful character is quick and fun. In just six pages you can be swallowing wizard teeth and getting horribly mutated!
As author u/TypeOneNinja describes his approach to OSR, "The goal is to streamline character creation and encourage player (not character) ingenuity by giving them lots of items and not so many combat-focused class abilities." Moonhop does this with aplomb and brings a lot of character to the table.
What is it?
Wacky, streamlined, OSR-adjacent, pickup-and-play d20 sci-fi system
Why play it?
Built to learn at the table and on the fly. Quick to build humorous characters and start playing a space travel mutant hexcrawl. Become a deranged skeleton wizard.
Novel features
Mech combat, space travel ("moonhopping"), fun characters, mutations
Resolution mechanic
saving throws only. d20 roll-under. Polyhedral dice for weapons.
Rules crunch
Very light / Light (22 pages) / Mid / Crunchy
Ease of learning rules
Easy / Okay / Difficult
Deadly?
Safe / Dangerous / Deadly
Character classes?
Kind of? Race and occupation tables, but anybody can be a wizard.
Adventure included?
No
Setting agnostic?
Yes
System compatibility?
Into the Odd, GLOG magic
Overview
Into the Odd is already a very slim system that's flourished in the OSR space; Electric Bastionland is its evolved form. With Odd we're talking three attributes, 1d6 hitpoints, only players roll dice, d20 roll-under-the-target-number style. What I like about Into the Odd is that players only ever make saving throws. There's no other kind of roll. It encourages active and straightforward roleplaying and puts the power in the players' hands to do stuff, in a setting that is scary and hostile.
Moonhop retains the guts of Odd, of course. Roll 3d6 + drop lowest for your STR, DEX, and WIL. After your d6 HP is gone, you take damage directly to your stats. When you take damage to STR, you roll on a table with results that range from "lose an eye" to "explode" and "shit slugs." The rules are packed with humor! It's structured to be read at the table and play, and honestly I think would find myself reading selections aloud to the table so they can share in the laughs.
Characters
The characters in Moonhop are some of the best I've ever seen. You roll to determine your character's age, then roll on a fun alignment chart, and then figure out your race and profession. Will you be a booze dwarf or an amnesiac space elf? Or will you be a pile of rats in a trench coat? Every race has a perk (beehive in ribcage, firesneeze 30') and a drawback (Identity crisis, CHA save or you steal things).
My personal favorite is the Half Orc. It attacks again when it draws first blood! The drawback? Wheelchair (no legs). All due apologies to the disabled community!
The career tables are split across eras (Digital, ancient, medieval) which makes this a real sword-and-planet type of game. There's no setting or adventure baked in, but rather the book is a canvas waiting for you to hack and build off of the great stuff in here.
Magic
The magic system is influenced heavily by Goblin Punch's GLOG system. By consuming wizard teeth, you gain charges [dice] to cast spells. Casting spells can cost you sanity, mutate you, and lead you to a doom that you can avoid by undertaking a quest. It's all very cool and there are just enough tables and 10 spells to get you started, and lots of opportunity for homebrew or adoption of other OSR or GLOG magic stuff.
The vibe of the magic system is encapsulated here: "Anyone can taste an object to see whether it is magical." Brilliant and kind of absurd.
Moonhopping
The rules for eponymous "moonhopping" are like a brick wall. The equation provided takes into account the time differences between moons and allows you to calculate the fuel and time costs, which are then used to figure random encounters. The math isn't hard, but seeing deltas and pipes and equations is a huge turn off for me and I won't be using this.
Mechs!
The Mech rules are crunchier than hand-to-hand combat and provide more tactics for those who want it. The rules are basically "just scale it up" and "add mega in front of everything: MegaHP, Megadamage," but it also places the combat on a hex grid with some extra rules for flanking, knockback, and preparing attacks. This combat system is still smooth and it's just different enough to feel novel. Big cinematic mech fights in space! What more could you want?
Extras
Moonshot includes a page and a half of rules for followers and hired hands. There's enough here to work with, and because the system lacks rules for advancement or leveling up, I think it's here to provide content if you continue gameplay past a one-shot. I would have preferred to see advancement instead, but on the other hand, keeping PCs low power and giving them material upgrades feels right for this game.
A novel idea I want to call out is a single short paragraph about haggling. You buy trade goods at a cost of 1000c per syllable, and sell for 500c per syllable. There's an example of arguing about the name of the item in order to get a lower price, which is a very clever idea. Buying a "silver sword" and trying to sell it as a "scintillating scimitar" sounds like a lot of fun to roleplay! That kind of clever puzzle built into the system is incredibly appealing, doubly so because of my undying love of words.
Presentation
The character creation content is front-loaded to facilitate fast gameplay, which is an accessibility move mirrored by Moonhop's 2019 pandemic-era contemporaries Troika! and Mausritter. The rules do what they need to do and make the appropriate assumptions about the reader (it assumes you know what OSR is, what a d6 and d8 are, etc) without beating you over the head with specific language.
Conclusion
Moonhop is short and sweet, and I think it's emblematic of the increasing specificity of OSR offerings that are burgeoning. There are a lot of OSR rule systems out now, but frankly Moonhop hits notes that the others are missing. I can't remember the last time I did a double-take or laughed out loud while reading an RPG, and Moonhop gets my recommendation for that alone. It has the perfect amount of rules to pick up and play, but it has so much character that I think it will make a fine "core" to whatever OSR rules you're after.
I think it's a shame that the titular Moonhopping system strikes me as such a disappointment. I guess I will need to hand the book to an engineer at the table in order to utilize it, but I don't understand how it fits into what is clearly a beer-and-pretzels style game. I'm here to cast "Storm of The Dave" and watch Dave knock stuff over. I'm not here to do math.
Worth Borrowing
The zany classes were a nice inspiration for my untitled D6 RPG project; it was validating to see the idea I was toying with employed so effectively and effortlessly here. The particulars of the magic system are so cool and dynamic that they're worth stealing, but let's face it: it's just another riff on the GLOG, which never fails to make great systems.
Moonhop is very funny. I have been vacillating on the idea of putting jokes into my rules, and this is an example of great execution that really makes the product stand out. It also makes a lot of assumptions and cuts out a lot of fat in a way that works very well. Combat rules take up scarcely two pages. There are no instructions for how to roll on the d8 and then d6 tables, it is just there and it expects you to figure it out. I need to keep this in mind for my own writing.
The "value based on syllables" is an intriguing notion that could also be adapted to magic systems, but its use here is genius and I will keep it in a back pocket to employ in other games the next time I need to fun RP challenge.