Each playbook can also choose a Role, or personality type, which provides a further unique move and which you can change to another Role when your Stress gets too high. However, playbooks for mechanics/drivers/pilots (Cowboys), administrative staff/soldiers (Grunts), and the camp chaplain (Padre) are available to cover the different kinds of personnel that were part of a Korean War MASH.Īs in most PbtA games, each playbook has its own unique rules in addition to the game’s basic rules.
Players are encouraged to play medical staff: the nurses (Angels), surgeons (Cutters), general practitioners (Docs), and enlisted medics (Corpsmen). There are seven different character types, or playbooks. These scenes then spur what happens outside of surgery, giving you an incentive to find ways to relax and remove those Stress points from your character. During surgery, you make hard choices such as who gets operated on first, or whether you can risk spending time on one patient at the risk of another one’s life (scenes that are almost guaranteed to bring Stress points upon the players). Again evoking thoughts of M*A*S*H, gameplay alternates between operating tent scenes and ‘camp life’ scenes. Of course, there are some new thematic concepts introduced, such as a Stress tracker that can affect your personality (aka Role) if it gets too high, and unique surgical rules that puts your players around a patient playsheet (complete with human body and various countdown and harm clocks) and has them work together as a team. If you’re familiar at all with the PbtAengine, you’ll have a good idea of how the rules work. The core rules are based on Vincent and Meguey Baker’s Apocalypse World (Meguey is also credited as a developmental editor on this book), and inspired by other Powered by the Apocalypsegames such as Jason Morningstar’s Night Witches.
Fortunately, since they are the same sources as those used by the M*A*S*H producers, the ‘feel’ of the game can be very much like that of the show itself, mixing light comedy, gallows humor, and mature situations. Instead, MASHEDcontent comes from dozens of historical works and military manuals.
The game acknowledges M*A*S*H as a good source of inspiration for your table, but is not based directly on it, thus avoiding any messy trademark or copyright issues. ‘MASH’ is a historical acronym that stands for ‘Mobile Army Surgical Hospital,’ though it was popularized by the M*A*S*H film and television series, which may very well be where you first learned of it. So said former Korean War helicopter pilot Ed Ziegler, in a quote that starts off MASHED’s early Gameplay section and gives a hint of what the following pages hold in store. “Keep in mind that you can’t take that many well-educated, highly intelligent people and restrict them to live in an area the size of a football field and not expect some very odd and unusual things to happen.”
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