Gauntlet League Wrestling: Road to the PPV

CUT A PROMO

The gaming I’m most excited about is Gauntlet League Wrestling. I’ve mentioned World Wide Wrestling on the blog before. I picked it as my favorite game of the year in 2016. And that’s from someone who never cared for wrestling growing up. But it’s a tremendously fun rpg. It took one session at Origins to hook me.

Because I dug it so much, I wanted to set up a full season campaign online. I decided to do that as part of the Gauntlet Hangouts. I’m doing eight sessions, culminating in a PPV event. I wasn’t sure if the Sunday morning slot would work, but we’ve got all the sessions filled. We have a dozen different players over eight six-person games. That means we’ll get an awesome mix of wrestlers and stories. I only hope I can do it justice.

I need to thank Joe Zantek for giving me some advice when I first started thinking about this.

GAME OPTIONS

We’re using all the WWW gimmick playbooks available right now. That’s twenty-five options. To make it easier, I assembled a one-page listing with their blurb descriptions. I marked those from * to *** for their challenge at the table. (You can check that out here). I also put together a quick cheat-sheet, based on things I picked up after a couple of plays. It’s incomplete. For example, I didn’t have space to get into the Announcer rules. I’d appreciate any feedback from WWW vets.

Besides the new wrestlers, we’ll be using a couple of options from WWW: International Incident. They’re pretty simple. The first is The Hunt Protocol.

“Ignore the Advance option “gain +1 to a stat.” Instead, if a player wishes to raise one of their wrestler’s stats, they need to use “take a Move from another Gimmick” to find an appropriate Move. Each Stat has multiple Moves that raise it by +1 distributed amongst the Gimmicks; this way there’s some specific flavor built into the decision that can impact the wrestler’s concept.”

That’s a cool idea and I like how it has you look over other playbooks. As the Creative, I’ll also be using the new options for match types and audiences (Deathmatch, Indie, etc). They’re nice arrows to have in my quiver of Creative moves. I’m not using the Mythic Moments option, but only because I’m already complicating things.

But the big idea I’m using from International Incident is that promotion have Tags & Troubles. These show the promotion’s character and give inspiration for moves during play. The book has some great suggestions. Storyline events can change these elements during play. I dig that the “Over” wrestler gets a chance to change up those tags at the start of a session.

OUR PROMOTION

Gauntlet League Wrestling has gone through several transitions and has multiple smaller local branches (GLW: St. Pete, GLW: Houston).  The promotion’s just coming off a big shake-up, with injuries and incidents shifting the roster. To know more about the current state of things, you can check out The Hooded Luchadore’s recent fan video talking about the last PPV. He names names and doles out rumors.

TAGS: Cable Deal, Large War Chest

TROUBLES: Chaotic Writers’ Room, Shadowy Masters

BELTS: Tag Team, Demolition Master (The DM Championship), and the big one: The Gauntlet which is given to the MC: Master of Conquest.

ON THE ROAD

I’m super stoked about this. Despite being a wrestling newb, I’ve loved every WWW game I’ve been part of. I’m looking forward to running for vets and new players. I plan to record sessions and maybe do highlight video summaries. Or I could just post the Hooded Luchadore’s updates. 

WRESTLE ALL THE THINGS!

CONQUER ALL THE ARENAS!

SEIZE THE GAUNTLET!