The Troubleshooters: 60's Cartoon Themed RPG

With influences like Tintin, Scooby-Doo, and The Man from UNCLE, The Troubleshooters is a "new action-adventure tabletop roleplaying game in the style of Franco-Belgian comics" from Swedish designer Krister Sundelin. The first adventure is called The U-Boat Mystery (which gives an idea of the tone we're talking here). Oh, and your character sheet is a passport. Coming to Kickstarter on...

With influences like Tintin, Scooby-Doo, and The Man from UNCLE, The Troubleshooters is a "new action-adventure tabletop roleplaying game in the style of Franco-Belgian comics" from Swedish designer Krister Sundelin. The first adventure is called The U-Boat Mystery (which gives an idea of the tone we're talking here). Oh, and your character sheet is a passport.

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Coming to Kickstarter on April 7th, with a release this summer in English and in French, it'll be published by Helmgast AB and Modiphius. Here's the full announcement:

"Helmgast AB proudly presents The Troubleshooters, a new action-adventure tabletop roleplaying game in the style of Franco-Belgian comics.

Imagine a world where you travel the world like Tintin, unmask heinous villains like Scooby-Doo and the Mystery Gang, unravel mysteries like Nancy Drew, do heists like Carmen Sandiego, stop evil masterminds like Spirou and Fantasio, solve crimes like The Saint, and even catch spies like The Man from UNCLE. That’s the world of The Troubleshooters.

In The Troubleshooters, the characters are drawn into other people’s problems and band together to solve them. Ranging from athletes and explorers to journalists and mad scientists, the characters will travel all over Europe and across the world. Explore exotic locations, glittering metropoles, lost temples, or valleys that time forgot, and face spies, wild beasts, mafia, villains, and the nefarious graf von Zadrith, the leader of the secret organisation the Octopus!

Written by Krister Sundelin, author of the acclaimed Swedish roleplaying games “Järn” and “Hjältarnas tid”, The Troubleshooters takes you back to the mid-1960s in a world of fast-paced adventure and fun!

The Troubleshooters Core Book will be the first in a line of products for the game together with the adventure The U-Boat Mystery, followed by adventures and background books. The text for the core book is already written and has been playtested for a year and a half, and the text for the first adventure is almost complete.

The Troubleshooters is planned for release in the summer of 2020 in English and French, with a crowdfunding campaign starting April 7th. Modiphius Entertainment will be handling the distribution of the English edition into retail stores from the Autumn 2020. Arkhane Asylum will translate The Troubleshooter to French."


According to the website, "The Troubleshooters will take the characters all over Europe and across the world. They will find themselves at exotic locations, glittering metropoles, deep in the wilderness, or even in cozy country villages, where they face horrible foes: spies, wild beast, mafia, mad scientists, villains, and relatives!"

It's a percentile dice system, with a passport for a character sheet -- "The system is based on d% task checks against a skill value. With skills, abilities, complications and a Story Point economy, the system is designed from the ground up to fit the genre. Skills, abilities and complications are recorded in the character’s passport."

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Undrave

Legend
Oooh, I found a neat blog post on Spirou & Fantasio from the Franquin era.

 

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Kannik

Hero
...but there is also a lot of non-superhero adventures stories. Tintin and Asterix, and also Lucky Luke, are the most famous but not the only ones.

You just described a great chunk of my childhood reads right there. :D

Also, now I'm wondering if they'll include an option to play as the animal companion. It could be a lot of fun playing Milou! (I mean, it might also get old after a while, but he did save the day more than once, so... )
 

Panda-s1

Scruffy and Determined
To the point Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law made a hilarious episode about it.
idk I think the real indicator here is the development and success of The Venture Bros. lol.

also as a 90's kid I'm way more familiar with The Real Adventures; the original show was too old and dated for my tastes, but now that I'm older I can appreciate what it meant during its time.
 

Warren Ellis

Explorer
idk I think the real indicator here is the development and success of The Venture Bros. lol.

also as a 90's kid I'm way more familiar with The Real Adventures; the original show was too old and dated for my tastes, but now that I'm older I can appreciate what it meant during its time.
The Venture Brothers is hilarious.
And truth be told, superscientist dads taking their 12-13 year old son and his friend on their dangerous adventures is not exactly great for mental health, as both Rusty Venture and "Action Johnny" show.
 

Beleriphon

Totally Awesome Pirate Brain
The Venture Brothers is hilarious.
And truth be told, superscientist dads taking their 12-13 year old son and his friend on their dangerous adventures is not exactly great for mental health, as both Rusty Venture and "Action Johnny" show.

The main reason for that is that Doc Hammer and Jason Publick have outright said that the main theme of the show is failure. Post season 5 this is less so, and it becomes less a parody of the boy-adventurer comic/cartoon and turns into its own weird thing. It still has parodies for sure, I mean Dr Orpheous is clearly making of Doctor Strange, but they tend to support the show as a whole or parody something very specific; and most have moved past the obvious parody stage into characters that fill similar tropes and archetypes.

For example Venture Bros. would have a character like Tintin that works basically the same way, but he steals other people's stories to achieve his own success, or otherwise has some other weird hang up like being addicted to snorting ground up porcupine quills.
 

Warren Ellis

Explorer
For example Venture Bros. would have a character like Tintin that works basically the same way, but he steals other people's stories to achieve his own success, or otherwise has some other weird hang up like being addicted to snorting ground up porcupine quills.
Yeah I know. I remember stuff like their Scooby Doo parody
 
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Undrave

Legend
As an American, the only reason I'm asking about influences is because the sub-title of the game is "Action-Adventure Roleplaying in the Franco-Belgian Comics Tradition." And I don't know what that means. If it's copyright-code for Tintin, cool. But if it's something else, I'm curious what it is. I'm with JeffB, finding MFU and JQ pretty cool, and if there are other comics in the vein of those or Tintin, I'd like to read them and then use them as inspiration for running this game.
I mean, it's 2020, I can Google it, I can click the links, sure. It's just always interesting that whatever nerd stuff you're into, there's probably this other nerd stuff that is closely related, but you have just never gotten around to it.

So I just remembered one Franco-Belgian comic book that, while not from the 60s and not in the right genre, might be of interest to a DnD player: The Legendaries!

The Legendaries is the nickname of a group of five famous adventurer, we're talking like epic-tier DnD characters here. In their final confrontation with their BBEG nemesis, something goes wrong...REALLY wrong... and every adult in the known world is turned back into a kid! The population blames the Legendaries and they split up in shame... but a certain amount of time later, their leader discovers there might be a way to turn everybody back to normal and so he gathers his former companion for one more epic quest...
 

Tonguez

A suffusion of yellow
Hahaha, there's a few of 'em on Comixology if you're ever curious.

I think for this game the closest available would be Spirou

It's a bit of a haphazard collection, covering multiple 'eras' of the character (Spirou had a lot of teams working on it, something of an oddity in the Franco-belgian world were creators work on their own characters for decades).

Ooh they also have Clifton and Blake & Mortimer too!

Theres a lot of content on Youtube too, since this thread Ive been watching Mortimer and Blake and Spirou and Fantasio animations (in english), great for getting the feel
 

Undrave

Legend
Theres a lot of content on Youtube too, since this thread Ive been watching Mortimer and Blake and Spirou and Fantasio animations (in english), great for getting the feel

Indeed! I just don't like to outright promote illegal uploads :p even if they really should be available somewhere. I myself watched some Blake & Mortimer. I had forgotten the stories were two parters! And they're more deadly than I remember... dudes get SHOT dead in there!

And I have Spirou DVDs to watch hehe.

I wonder if the game will have rules for getting knocked out by a sap to the back of the head?
 
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