Five Fires (Ashcan Edition)

Five Fires is a hiphop ttrpg about artistic expression. You play as members of a crew that does music, grafitti, dance, etc, and you try to make a name for yourself, give back to your art, and solve problems in your own life.

It's also extremely warmhearted and earnest.

The PDF is 37 pages and cleanly organized. It's unornamented, but easy to read and the writing is extremely good at communicating concepts in a way that makes them come alive.

Mechanically, this is as much a worldbuilding game as it is a character-focused rpg. You construct a city before you play and everyone weighs in, using a dice-placement minigame to build it neighborhood by neighborhood.

Character creation also has a collaborative feel, but is a bit more traditional. You mostly make choices about your character's background and priorities. These determine circumstances that give you bonus dice. However you *also* choose a big secret, something that's been hanging over your head for a while, and I want to take a moment to talk about that.

This secret is a fun dash of seasoning, but it's part of a unique approach that Five Fires takes. Most game systems that include character secrets encourage you to hide them and penalize you if they come up. Five Fires has you show your secret to another player, gives you bonuses when you and that player stand up for each other, and lets you auto succeed a roll when you reveal your secret. This is fantastic, and it creates instant cohesion between the PCs.

Gameplay-wise, Five Fires is about managing dice pools, and rolls use a competitive dice-placement minigame vs the GM to determine success, stress, and consequences. This minigame is easy to follow, but it's deeper than I'm making it sound. Each of your attributes interacts with it differently, and they can get used up when you call on them.

There's also a weird and extraordinary depth to the way the game handles damage. When things go wrong, you take stress. When you take too much stress, you get stressed out. Being stressed out makes all your other problems worse, but you can deal with stress and resolve problems in a way that's specific to your class.

And I mean, like, extremely specific.

The MC has a whole flowchart for writing songs. The graffiti writer has a risk/reward minigame. There's even audience participation, with spots carved out for the rest of the group in each class's stress-relief.

I think my only real critique of the system is that outside of specific places where the game deliberately includes other players, PCs can spend a lot of time alone in their own scenes. You can probably adjust this at the table by having out-of-scene players speak for NPCs when they come up.

Actually exploring the story of the game has an odd flow to it, but it feels natural for the system. Each player receives a set of Beats, and they can spend Beats to frame scenes which either remove stress or make progress towards dealing with their character's problems.

Five Fires includes a character sheet and other utilities to help make tracking gameplay easier, but its rules are also very clearly explained and this is frankly the best GM tool of all. It's a relatively complex game, but I was able to follow it easily, and every piece clicks into place as you read. There isn't a sample adventure, but there is an example of gameplay, and including a stock adventure might even be antithetical to the way Five Fires works.

Overall, this is a fantastic rpg. It does stuff I haven't seen anywhere else, and the parts that are familiar are very carefully and cleverly assembled. If you have a passion for hiphop (or you want to use the system for some other new artform like skating or rpg writing), I'd *strongly* recommend checking out Five Fires. I'm saying this very earnestly, this is a great game.

Minor Issues:

-Page 2. "Those6 sessions" missing space. Also it might be worth clarifying it's 6 total in the first line of the paragraph, which just says 'several'.

-Page 3. the last use of Hip Hop is capitalized while the others aren't.

-Page 4, fifth para. "shady politics.corruption" Missing a space and a capital.

-Page 4, fifth para. "pbulic institution"

-Page 4, fifth para. Two periods at the end.

-Page 4, sixth para. "has a many mansions or is world renowned financial center" move the a to after the is

-Page 5, First Trip. There's a period before the first sentence

-Page 8, Culture. Lines 5 and 6 are merged together.

-Page 8, Naming. "it's time toname" missing space

-Page 8, Naming. "be the 6th session" by the

-Page 10, third para. "everyone can grabs" grab

-Page 11, I'm Known For. The second bullet point seems to be two bullet points combined.

-Page 13. "Convince a love interest to go on a date" is listed under both big and small problems. This might be intentional, but I wasn't sure.

-Page 13, second to last para. There's a period before the sentence.

-Page 14, Problems. "when you et stressed out" get

-Page 16, third para. "every ork of artyou" every work of art you

-Page 19, Fire, second dot. "Each listener can jot down the title of a fake or real album title" second title isn't needed

-Page 30, first para. "You get thYou have" first half looks like it might be a fragment from an earlier draft

-Page 30, second para. "but gets and extra" an extra

-Page 31, Building An Action Pool. "Extraplayers in the scene" needs a space

-Page 36. "willaskqualifyingcharacters" missing several spaces