How would you run an Animorphs game?

How would you run an Animorphs game?

Call of Cthulhu, with some extra mechanics.

Serious childhood trauma, war is hell, etc

The fact that HP doesn't matter because they recover any damage when transforming means you might as well do rules light or just straight RP.

make sure none of the interesting things about the setting involve the party

Make everyone fish out a piece of paper. One of the papers says they're the traitor, a yeerk. But also make it so that none of them could be a traitor.

Run the campaign as normal. If there's a traitor, they get a secret victory condition. Whether theres a traitor or not, the players will have fun guessing and testing other players. Paranoia is fun.

It needs low HP levels, to offset transforming recovering HP.
It needs to be a skill-heavy system, as conceivably all other "advancement" happens by getting better animal morphs.
Avoid allowing players to set a new base form and regain their morphing, it seems potentially awkward.
I don't recall if this was a thing in the novels, but set a limit on how many morphs each player gets probably from 6 to 10, to both avoid having a morph for every occasion, but also encouraging players to be better or worse suited for particular tasks. One person isn't going to want to be the guy with all of the useless, situationally crucial morphs.
Have fun splatting your favorite monsters and characters in to be transformed into, or be forms of morph-capable bad guys.


This could work particularly well, if handled right.
>Everyone draws Yeerk, nobody knows anyone else is a Yeerk, every Yeerk has a plan to screw over the other Yeerks
Delicious.

I really thought that was Todd Howard turning into a wallet from the thumbnail

First mission would require the players to take the form of a subterranean animal of some kind.

I could never play one. I never saw or read the series, so I don't know the tone, but I do know I would class completely with the tone of a YA series as I try to be some ass kicker with my animal power

They can still die if they sustain too much HP at one time relative to their morph's body mass.

IIRC, there was that one time one of them got smashed as a fly and the rest of the group just barely managed to get him conscious enough to morph back into his human form.

There was also the one book where the gang was saved by the robot dog guy and the POV shifted from him going unconscious to being shocked awake by the robot guy.

>I don't recall if this was a thing in the novels, but set a limit on how many morphs each player gets probably from 6 to 10, to both avoid having a morph for every occasion, but also encouraging players to be better or worse suited for particular tasks. One person isn't going to want to be the guy with all of the useless, situationally crucial morphs.
There wasn't a limit from what I could tell and a lot of the time they shared morphs unless they needed one person to be point man because the morphs the rest of the group needed had senses that were too poor to navigate efficiently.

Like the one book where Marco and Ax had to be wolf spiders while the rest of the group used their webs to navigate their way through an AC vent.

Or when they had to morph into mites and ride on the back of one of the kids morphed as a dragonfly.

Much like Vietnam. Complete with a version of Operation Wandering Soul.

Shoot all my players in the fucking face and save them the pain.

or blueball them at the final boss fight and end the campaign.

Mind control followed by genocide.

>One person isn't going to want to be the guy with all of the useless, situationally crucial morphs.

au contraire, my friend.

>engaged in chemical and biological warfare
>deliberately destroyed infrastructure with the intent of causing mass starvation
>supported a traitorous cannibal cult that split off from their enemies
>eric
>conscripted disabled children
>sent those children to die in a distraction because it would buy another minute or so
>massacred thousands, if not tens of thousands, of helpless prisoners as a distraction
>frankly admit that the only reason they aren't the ones in front of a UN war crimes tribunal is because they won the war

I don't think kicking some ass is going to clash with the tone. things get pretty fucked by the end.

You have to think of it as a kind of urban terror campaign. The PCs aren't a million miles away from a terrorist cell, even if they're on the side of the good guys.

Also, PC stats don't matter as much as animal stats.

maybe incorporating the time limit of morphing into a kind of HP system?

Several attempted assassinations too. Some cold motherfuckin kids

attempted and actual.

I would CHANGE THE FUCKING ENDING BECAUSE FUCK YOU KA APPLEGATE YOU GHOST WRITTEN WHORE THAT WAS MY CHILDHOOD

Remember to include lots of body horror, loss of sanity, becoming evil, have at least 1 person become trapped in morph, and make sure they trust no one not even themselves

How fucked up was the David arc tho?

PC Mental stats are important.
PC Physical stats could easily be handled broadly by a simple, "pick an area to receive +1 to".

>Remember to include lots of body horror
Reminder that severed limbs are commonplace.

Your catspaw deserved what he got, space satan.

PTSD, all the PTSD. Very important.

Willpower checks to avoid being overcome by certain morphs.
Remember that time whats-his-face almost got stuck in Taxxon, because the wormy motherfucker ran a train on his brain?

or the termites.

My favorite bits of this series was always the bits showing what a lovable retard Ax was.
He's the autismo that wanders around saying cinnamon buns and eating cigarette butts all day, and I love it.