Satan’s been missing for years and some of the substitute rulers of Hell have had it. They’ve taken off to the moral realm for a havoc-sewing vacation. Heaven ain’t having that, though, so they knock on Hell’s door and tell the remaining rulers to drag back the hooky-playing demons or there’s gonna be a war. So Hell sends out some motorcycle-riding demons (the players) to fix things before the whole cosmos falls apart. The year is 1980-something. The game is Hell Night (2022?).

The “game” portion is actually pretty scant, a lightweight thing built for speed and derived from Gavriel Quiroga’s previous games. The vast majority of the book is system neutral source material. You could use any of the lightweight D&D-ish systems floating around (Into the Odd, Cairn, etc) but I actually quite like Quiroga’s arrangement. Three attributes: Guts (strength), Style (dex) and Brains (intelligence), augmented by Grit (a luck metacurrency). Roll 2d6, get under the attribute score. Boom. Characters are class-based (Slayers, Reapers, Usurpers, Revenants) and are all structured so they can sit on top of classes from other games and are further differentiated by Edges, Rituals and Relics.

The world on display here is an infernal delight. You might confuse the aesthetic as a riff on Mork Borg, but it really hews to a cut-and-paste look favored by metal and punk bands of an earlier era—this is a nice hardcover book, but feels like a photocopied zine from the ’80s or early ’90s to me. There’s a clear preoccupation with ’80s heavy metal here, both in its cool and dangerous mode and its campy incarnations. Other clear inspirations include Hunter Thompson and the bikers from the film Mandy. Lotta gnarl here, but don’t miss the silliness hiding in the corners. A real surprising breath of putrid, soul-scorching air.