To The Slaughter
A downloadable Digest
CONTENT WARNING : Nonfictional, intense animal cruelty in a fictional gonzo cold war spy thriller.
Built for FIST : JAM OPS 3 "...To The Slaughter" is a printable digest containing a universally applicable NPC Personality tracker, rules for generating a new tracker for new characters, and a 3+ scenario mini-campaign about fighting regulatory capture, terrorist funding networks, and people who throw live baby chicks into grinders.
That sounds a little Try-Hard-Angsty, but the instances of animal cruelty at CAFOs [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations] and their associated butchering facilities are taken from Standard Operating Procedures and recorded historical instances at their real life US counterparts. While the paranormal elements are fictional, the cruelty depicted is not.
Liberties were taken, including merging different types of faculties together (butchering, feeding, breeding) and the creation of a fictional branch of Luxembourg royalty.
Recommended accompanying reading material :
Wikipedia pages for Big 5 Personality Traits , Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Moral Foundations Theory, and the Enneagram.
"Meat Market : Animals, Ethics, & Money" by Erik Marcus is a decent primer on the horrors of CAFOs. It's a quick read when you ignore all the advocacy management recommendations and 'how to vegan' bits and just focus on the depiction of the state of the industry as it is - about forty pages.
"The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt provides an excellent layman's understanding for Moral Foundations Theory.
Andrew Heaton's podcast interviewing Open Philanthropy's representative of Animal Farm Welfare.
Caroline Nelson's podcast, about being a farmer in Montana.
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For the full 'zine experience, consider setting your printer to Economy mode. Or, if you're somewhere with reasonable shipping rates relative to the Continental US, send me ["Burrito"] a message on the FIST DISCORD SERVER and I can see about mailing you a signed copy.
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Last word / Author's Diatribe : Meat is awesome. This isn't a spiel for adopting vegetarianism - if that's your thing, more power to you, but we've got predator binocular eye positioning, sweat glands built for endurance running prey animals til they die of heat stroke, and a digestive system designed for consuming flesh. Omnivorism is where it's at.
Secrecy + regulatory capture + perverse market incentives + targeted breeding programs = organized systemic cruelty. There is a way to get livestock products with a minimum of animal suffering though : Find farms you can get your meat/eggs/milk from that lets you see their animals in their day-to-day life. The flavor difference between a steak from a miserable assembly-line cow and one from a happy cow is night and day. Single-sourced cow milk compared to the million-cow-mix milk you get in the store is like barrel select scotch vs bottom shelf blended whiskey. It's well worth paying the price difference or only having half as much.
“You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I was overjoyed to find this, and reading it only sharpened that pleasure. I've been a butcher and a cook my entire life. I've personally worked in multiple slaughterhouses. Never did I ever think this would interact with my enjoyment of indie RPGs, but here we are. Thank you for this, and for shining light on banal evils that we all partake of and mostly choose to ignore. The bit of tech with RNPM looks brilliant as well, and I'm keen to start using it - I love what it draws from and its (accidentally?) esoteric aesthetics.
Finding this brightened my day. Thank you.
Your comment made the time I spent working on this worth it. Thank you.
The Ennegramm is symbolized using a funky almost-pentagram model that does aid in visually parsing it, but makes anything derived from it carry that quasioccult look. Add in Maslow's Hierarchy being a pyramid and the longstanding obsession neocults have with those and I was pretty much obliged to the "esoteric aesthetics". Not that it doesn't work...
The scenario was very loosely inspired/prompted by an OSR mini campaign that reimagined Lamentations of the Flame Princess as an "escape the dungeon" scenario for anthropomorphic swine. It used to be linked in the "3rd Party" section of the LotFP website but isn't anymore, so I can't point you towards it, but... if you're interested in seeing the theme incorporated into your TTRPG experience there's at least one more example floating out there somewhere on DriveThruRPG.
To The Slaughter is a great zine with engaging content and a strong point of view.
An old comrade's farm is the target of corporate espionage threatening his retirement. The players are tasked with shutting down Cyclops and their Industial assets. The campaign included consists of three different facilities featuring various livestock.
The missions include dangerous Cyclops operatives and their minions, but I found that the real standout NPCs were the livestock. They (mostly) don't have stats blocks but the writing makes clear that this story is about them and their life trajectory.
The content warning is not used frivolously, these are not happy farms. The peek behind the curtain of the realities of industrial animal farming set a dark and grounded tone. There may be cosmic dark forces at play in the F.I.S.T universe but you don't have to look beyond out own creations to find true evil.
Included at the beginning of the Zine is the RNPM, and mishmash of psychological theories tied together to make a system for creating and defining NPCs. The thematic combination of advanced psych and it's visualization creates something that looks aestheticlly occult. It's a very interesting tool to play with and may help refrees provide realistic portrayals of the human condition.
You should read this.
To The Slaughter is a supplement and mini-campaign for FIST revolving around the modern corporate animal-butchering system.
The PDF is 20 pages, with a rad neon-washed cover and a readable but sort of chaotic and zine-y interior. There's hand-drawn illustrations, photobashed public domain art, jumbled fonts, and a feeling of everything being stuffed onto the page, but it's charming and doesn't interfere much with readability.
The first bit of content in the supplement is the RMPN, an extremely good piece of tech for scenario writing. It allows you to show an NPC's personality, values, emotional precarity, and a lot of other data in a small, somewhat arcane looking graphic---and it also allows you to quickly and randomly generate NPCs at a level of fairly intense emotional depth.
After the RMPN is a mini campaign about small farming vs big agribiz. It's a little goofy in tone, but has a solid narrative structure and a sense of escalating stakes and fun NPCs and setpieces.
Overall, this is a really solid supplement and would work just as well for a more lethal, grounded system like Delta Green. It *is* big CW for cruelty to animals, but if that's not a barrier for you then both the mini-campaign and the RMPN mechanic are very worth using, and the campaign is a great read even if you don't run it. If you like modern espionage horror, farmland gothic, and meaty b-movie gore, I strongly suggest picking this up.
Thank you for your review! I was originally planning on doubling down on the jumbled/photo bashed nature by printing everything, physically cut and pasting it back together, putting in hand written notes, and scanning the whole assembly...but I lost access to the scanner I was planning on using and my attempts to fake it with my phone camera left a lot to be desired.
I'm glad the amateur vibe came through, and that it didn't detract from readability much.
I may extend the RNPM into its own thing later, hyperlinked and with 101 explanations of the psych models employed.
It's a really cool supplement! I'll try to run it for one of my groups when I get the chance.
If you do, and there's a record/synopsis/after action, I'd be stoked to hear/see it. (No pressure/obligation of course!)