Something Is Wrong With The Chickens

Something Is Wrong With The Chickens is a fast-paced oneshot system in the broad vein of 1980s environmentally conscious monster movies. You play as a gang of weird fowl sabotaging a poultry producer.

The physical book is a trifold pamphlet with easy to read text, good visual organization, and several charming and thematic illustrations.

Mechanically, Chickens is fully random, but not especially punishing. When you attempt an action, you roll 3d6 and hope you don't get all highs or all lows. All lows makes you more chicken-like, all highs makes you more of a monster, and if you become too chickeny or too monstrous you lose the game.

Of note, because the game tracks these things purely off of your Eldritch score, and because your Eldritch score starts at 1, you can lose your character on the first roll of the game if you get all lows.

Tone-wise, there's a lot of comedy in the text (including the option to play as a chicken nugget,) and the game leans on the GM and the group willing to play fast and loose and embrace chaos. It's a solid oneshot system, and might be especially suited to games around Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Overall, Something Is Wrong With The Chickens is a nice system to add to your library of oneshots. It's good for zany, all-ages play, and the illustrations and writing breathe a lot of life into it.

Ran this game with friends tonight! One of our players embodied Foghorn Leghorn if he had been exposed to the works of Karl Marx, one of our players had been cross-bred with a sheep, and the last one suffered an untimely death and had to be replaced by a horde of little chicks. The game was altogether kooky, exactly what it advertises on the tin!