Mad as Hell: Quickstart

Get Mad as Hell!

Mad as Hell is an anti-capitalist demon-hunting exploration of activism and community. This quickstart gives you a taste of the game, including six pre-generated characters and a grimy, waterlogged starter adventure - Something in the Water. 

Time to Stand Up!

Play as Radicals, members of various Communities, banding together to fight the literal demons of capitalism. 

The only way to kill demons is to understand what quiet violence created them in the first place, work out how to solve that problem, and turn it into a weapon. You might kill a demon of mouldy water with a purifier, a demon of poison-laced diet drugs with its own reflection, or a demon of bigotry with a pride flag. Unless you address the root cause of the problem, the wound in the world will continue to fester, and the demon will be reborn, free to wreak havoc. To defeat the demon truly, you need to make meaningful social change in your communities and help those around you. 

The game is intended to create a safe, lightly fictionalised environment for aspiring and current activists to become familiar with the methods used in community organisation and direct action. It helps provide a structure that mimics the real-world approaches to tackling injustice through a radical lens, and takes action against capitalism.

Drip, Drip, Drip...

Something in the Water is the best way to wrap your head around the game. It pits your radicals against the kind of quiet violence many people face day in, day out. 

So many of us are forced into crumbling and decrepit housing, not fit for habitation, that slowly leech our health and energy. 

There are thousands of demons of this quiet violence, all bubbling up from the wound that is depriving people of safety and refuge and gouging them for it with high rents. The landlord’s choir, slimy faced and brutal, stalks apartment blocks and tenement houses across every nation. But within this vast legion there are a hundred variations, different flavours of horror, and one is known to Radicals as the Pipe-Leech.

Many houses and apartment buildings are ancient, crumbling and not properly maintained. There are even those still with lead pipes in their bowels, even though in theory many countries have outlawed such things. But replacing pipes costs money, or is difficult, and so landlords are slow to act. They’d claim they don’t know of the problem, if confronted, but of course they do — how could you not know that there are pipes in your property slowly killing those inside?