Kids on Brooms

Magic schools! Ones designed and developed by you and your group. Not set in the billion-dollar franchise world led by an author whose bigotry is having real and lasting consequences on 2SLGBTQ+ rights around the world.

This is Kids on Brooms by Renegade Game Studios. It’s a magical school hack of the Kids on Bikes game, which is itself an homage to 80s movies and adventure mysteries through the eyes of kids. In Kids on Brooms you make a magic school with its history, classes, and locations, then you define your characters and their relationships. It’s a collaborative world building game before you get into the RPG itself. And you know how I love collaborative world building.

Playing the game is pretty simple, your trope and age determine most of your stats and bonuses. The six core stats are Brains, Brawn, Fight, Flight, Charm, and Grit. Those are ranked from d4 (which is terrible) to d20 (which is superb). When you want to accomplish something, you roll your die and compare it to a difficulty. The difference is your degree of success or failure. If you're casting magic, you also get to roll an additional d4 magic die that is added to your result. Every stat die you roll (but not your magic die) explodes if it rolls the highest amount—which means that if you roll a 10 on a d10, you roll an additional d10 and add that second value as well. Dice can continue to explode if you keep rolling the maximum over and over!

Magic rolls use a really straightforward way to determine difficulty. The player describes what they want their character to do, and the GM sets the difficulty of the action by referencing four tables:

• Magnitude

• Area

• Duration

• Experience

For example, using a gust of wind to blow a stack of papers off a desk would be a +1 in Magnitude because it could naturally happen, the Area of effect is tiny, so probably another +1, the Duration is instantaneous so that'd be a 0, and most likely the character has cast this before for a +1, giving the total difficulty a value of 3.

If you wanted to knock the entire desk over, you might change the Magnitude to unnatural +3 and the Area to big +5, and now the difficulty is 9. If you want to conjure a permanent mystical gateway to the moon, that would probably be reality-breaking at +7, big at +5, permanent at +6, and inexperienced at +5—a total difficulty of 23.

The rules are flexible, straightforward, and fit into less than 100 pages of a 6x9, A5 book.

This is the first "Kids on Whatever" game I've played, and I really enjoyed it. Much like our very first episode where we used Fate Accelerated to model going to a magical school, this ruleset laves things open ended for imagination, which I feel is the most important box to check when playing in this genre. I don't know how the game would hold up to a long campaign, but it feels like you could get some good stories out of it.