Get Ready for Disposable Bags of Meat: a TTRPG of luck, grit, and survival

Humans. An incredible breadth of diversity – of physical prowess, intellectual agility, and personal charm. And yet, when the blood starts to pump, or flow, or gush from a severed artery, it’s not skill or wit or even brute strength that keeps an individual human alive.

It’s luck.

It’s grit.

It’s the refusal to acknowledge that all is lost, and the pure animal instinct to live.

That’s how it works in horror movies anyway, and that’s the kind of world Disposable Bags of Meat operates in. A world where humans face off against monsters that are, by definition, bigger, stronger, and more lethal than they are. Where – sometimes – they survive.

Where every human is equally poorly equipped to the point of being interchangeable.

The idea that skills and gifts won’t save you is grim, on the surface. Dig a little deeper, get the dirt of the idea under your fingernails, and it’s great. It’s a leveller. It means anyone could make it. All humans, every human, has a chance they could spit in death’s eye socket.

Characters in Disposable Bags of Meat (Meatbags for the game, from here on in, and meatbags for the characters) are average humans with no special skills – space truckers, college students, a suburban family on vacation. That’s not strictly fair. They probably have tons of skills, they’re just not relevant in a life or death situation. You know, horror movie characters. They rely on Luck and Grit, two qualities it turns out human beings in desperate situations have by the bucketload.

Meatbags uses a percentile dice system to take on challenges. The GM never rolls. The characters' biggest problem is their own unexceptional nature. Oh, and the monsters. Actually, it's definitely the monsters.