Her Majesty's Royal Health Department

A few months ago, I Joined a My Little Pony campaign. I took the opportunity to bring back somebody who died before their time as Clean Inn, an earth pony aligned to the element of honesty, employed by Her Majesty's royal government.

Essence20

The TTRPG we're playing is the one by Renegade Studios¹. I know Tails of Equestria is older, but I don't know anything about it, so I use that as a comparison.

When I got the rulebook, I was surprised. I was expecting something for small children: rules-light, simple class options aligned around the earth pony/pegasus/unicorn distinction, and nothing too complicated or finnicky to manage. I figured it would have an encounter system that focused on social situations and puzzle-solving, with a couple notes about running an actual fight.

But this was a fully-developed TTRPG, coming in at 338 pages just for the player's handbook. There's a really short adventure at the end (17 pages), but it's otherwise all rules, character options, and background information. It's got six classes and they've released a few books with non-pony races². Every class is fleshed out, with a couple possible builds on your way to level 20, whence you become a princess of your element.

I would say the level of detail and choice they included is on-par with Starfinder 1e when it launched. It's extensive!

The system has some really funky dice rolling, where you've got a pool of different-sized dice for modifiers and you can upshift the die size with specialization or helping other ponies out. It's a little confusing. On the other side of the rolls, I think our GM has had trouble identifying what the adventure wants for DCs on a lot of checks? The problem may be worsened since we seem to be engaging in more social/RP than the system expects.

Actually doing combat requires specializing in a couple abilities, which none of us did³. We're normal residents of Ponyville, so it's not like any of us were walking around with a shotgun ready for 30-50 feral hogs running through the town square while the colts and fillies play. The big section on that felt out-of-place, given the subject matter is small purple horses with friendship magic.

I found out why the system has a combat focus later on: this studio makes the Power Ranges, GI Joe, and Transformers TTRPGs. They made Essence20 for those games, and they're continuing to roll it out to different worlds⁴. Renegade has a hammer and every Hasbro series is a nail, I guess?

Which leads to another question: why did Hasbro decide to license their TTRPGs out to Renegade, and why did Renegade have to make a whole system for this? Hasbro has their own somewhat-well-known TTRPG and a whole business unit to produce it.

Even odder, the announcement about the Power Ranges RPG indicated it would be the 5e rules?

There is a FoundryVTT system module for the various games. It seems like the MLP rulebook added the concept of "classes" (for the elements of harmony), because these folks were working on adding support for 'em when we were getting started. I can't speak to how well this system works -- we've needed to use the Essence20 bits of the VTT sparingly.

I think our GM has concluded that while the adventure module has a pretty cool story, the Essence20 system itself is adding a lot of drag to the sessions. It's got a lotta rules, and we use maybe 5% of them. She's working on a simplified Ironsworn system, which looks like it'll align more with how we're playing.

I wasn't familiar with Ironsworn, but it has 13th Age vibes: narrative focus, simple & consistent rules, and a big focus on the heroes being heroic (or the horses being horse-y, in our case).

Background

Clean Inn is a health inspector for Ponyville. He's gruff, brutally honest, and unafraid to shut a kitchen down when it's not meeting Princess Archaia's standards.

While Clean Inn is very good at finding and explaining problems, he often comes off as intimidating or angry when explaining them. He finds it frustrating when ponies aren't immediately able to correct the problem, and this can lead to problems.

He's very good at sussing out ruses, lies, and deception from years of experience: some times, ponies might try to hide something they know is wrong, to avoid getting shut down before a big day. Despite his demeanor, he does want to help, and will often pitch in to fix something up so a kitchen can reopen quickly.

Occasionally, a pony won't receive his report well. He's no soldier, but he knows how to handle himself if things get rough in a back-alley cider brewery.

In his off time, Clean Inn enjoys cooking his own dishes for his friends. He gets a lot of exposure to the cuisines of the world thanks to his line of work, and it's fun to share the latest haute cuisine from Manehatten with other ponies.

All of these images were done by our amazing GM Lucheek. If the style is familiar, she also did art for my owlin rogue Ayeron a couple years ago.

Adventuring

The party was called together by Archaia, Princess of Truth⁵, when some Shenanigans were occurring in Ponyville. Something had been causing a general aura of irritation, and swiping personal items. Ponies were at each other's throats about the items being taken and moved around town. It was a bad situation.

Clean Inn is, uh, difficult at the best of times. Despite this, the party was able to de-escalate a few near-brawls and get folks to remember we're all friends long enough to find some clues.

The investigation leads the party to a disused mill. A retired guard, Roanbelles, is sniffing around. He's another difficult personality -- who has a pole-axe -- but for the time being, he's sanguine about our handling of the situation. We find evidence that somebody has been using the mill; there are tunnels dug into the basement.

The party's investigation is interrupted by a great big angry mob of ponies storming up to the mill. Roanbelles has stirred things up, and the ponies are out for blood.

PT and Reiner Shine try to keep a lid on things, revealing what we found to the mob in the hopes of mollifying them. An old lady comes forward to take a look at a weasle-weevil-type creature we'd caught in the tunnels. Clean Inn immediately notices something is off: she's wearing a necklace that she had reported as stolen.

Things degenerate into absolute chaos when she's called out on the inconsistency. She starts turning into things, and we've got to manage the mob, Roanbelles (who is armed), this weevil thing, and catch the changeling. Reiner Shine is zipping around trying to pin the changeling, who is turning into things like bears, while Roanbelles is trying to run her through with his polearm.

Clean Inn uses Cop Voice to get both Roanbelles to cut it out. Having been in the guard, he's particularly susceptible to it. It works on the changeling as well, who looks at the forces arrayed against her (a great big angry mob, the guard, & us) and agrees to be arrested.

She's hauled before Princess Archaia, which is kind of terrifying. The changeling had been causing the problems, but we never got a clear answer on why, just that she wasn't sure if she could reverse whatever effect she'd caused. The Princess does not seem interested in explanations: she knows what changelings are, and says she'll deal with it. Rather omoniously, she declares that the prisoner will lead her to the changeling hive.

The party's duty is done, and we get some sleep, expecting the next day to be business-as-usual. But the sun doesn't come up⁶.

I won't say too much about this leg of the adventure, as we're still working through it! But the party name, the Health Inspectors, came from this story arc. Out in the Everfree Forest, there's a house where an inventor and his son live. The kid broke an orrery his dad made that contains a sunstone in the center, and thinks this is what's caused the unending night.

But the kid thought the ponies in town would be mad about it⁷, so he boarded up the house. Clean Inn got the party in by banging on the door and using Cop Voice to declare that Her Majesty's Royal Health Department was here for an inspection. Which somehow worked. But we decided to adopt that as our name. It certainly opens doors (heh).