Winning Praise The Hawkmoth King: Something that is normal to want and possible to achieve
The door is solid metal this time. Burnished shining steel with one of those push bars across the middle. It's also glowing, softly, with a blood-red heat that's crawling from its center towards the edges. I recommend you grab the note quickly — and perhaps find someplace else to read it. It begins:
(Quick warning: Praise the Hawkmoth King involves a lot of subjects that would generally go under a content warning. I'm going to be talking about some of these in this post, and talking about them with a certain levity that they do not normally inspire. If this would discomfort you, perhaps skip this one.)
Praise the Hawkmoth King is fucking fun. Oh yes, it's also dark and erotic and disgusting and has all sorts of important things to say about gender and consent and sex but listen — if the door between us had bars I would be gripping them in emphasis as I say to you that Praise the Hawkmoth King is also Really. Fucking. Fun.
I'm not saying that all that other stuff isn't important. If you tried to separate the mechanics of PTHK out you'd end up with a handful of sawed off tendons with no meat or blood or bone to make them move. The mechanics are the context are what the game is saying about gender and consent and sex, it's just that all those things come together like a well oiled machine to create the most satisfying combat I've ever experienced in a TTRPG.
Let's back up. Take a breath. Is it getting hot in here or is it just me?
PART ONE: THE BAIT & SWITCH
Praise the Hawkmoth King is a Powered by the Apocalypse game about once-dead teens who will die again (and again and again and again) as they fight Devils and fuck each other (and most other things that enter their line of sight).
Playbooks are two-fold, you get one for who you society tells you you are (your Role) and one for what The Hawkmoth King tells you you are (your Blessing). These playbooks all come with moves (called plays) and other such PBtA staples.
One main mechanic that is unique to Hawkmoth is insults. Other players and NPCs can give you insults as the result of several plays, and you can give insults to others in the same way. These insults can then be leveraged to either boost or lower the result of a roll.
ie. You roll a 7-9 to "Push Someone Away..." but you've got a "attention whore" insult so I call it out — "Hey now, I don't think this is something an attention whore would do." — and lower the result of your roll to a 6-. Alternatively you could have the insult "frigid bitch", which someone could call out in the same fashion to boost the results of that same roll to a 10+.
In this way you're able to influence and sculpt the other characters into who you think they should be — or simply into the version of them that's most useful to you.
An example. You could play a Lamb-Doll Girl (blessing) who is also a Champion Son (role). Her playbook descriptions would be thus:
The Lamb-Doll Girl gets buttons. Five, to start, and an unending hunger for more.
Well, not really. She could maybe scrape by with just the five, but given how easy they are to lose, and that she dies if she ever end up with zero, she'll probably want more. Even more importantly with more buttons she gets more control. More toys to play with.
Cause The Lamb-Doll girl uses buttons to turn other characters into dolls like her:
Not to mention that with enough buttons she can turn dead mortals into new dolls; dolls that have her memories, dolls that have her plays, dolls that are her.
This could be hugely advantageous, but every time she tries to make one there's a chance of losing quite a few buttons. So she better stock up.
She can get buttons in three ways:
Getting fucked, if she rolls well, nets her three.
Fucking someone else can get her three as well, but they're stuck to the person she's fucking.
Molesting someone lets her stick one button to them.
Now, fucking people isn't a bad idea either. If the Lamb-Doll girl sticks enough buttons to someone she can turn them into a Good Doll. Good Dolls can act together as a Gang, giving her advantage when making plays with certain stats.
Right, stats. You get five of them: GIRL, BOY, THING, FLAME, and ROT. Your two main sex moves, fucking and getting fucked, have you decide if you're clearly and enthusiastically consenting to sex. If you are, you'll roll your BOY (for fucking) and GIRL (for being fucked) stats. Otherwise its FLAME and THING for you.
ROT is used for other things. Most importantly for the Lamb-Doll Girl, if she ever has less buttons than her ROT stat she becomes a Bad Doll, and being a Bad Doll is, well. Bad.
Or, rather, it's not optimal. It makes achieving her goals harder. It makes winning harder. And fuck me if winning in Praise the Hawkmoth King doesn't feel good as hell.
You may ask what I mean by "winning" in this context. Well, as the book says:
This is the main goal of PTHK: figure out which mortals are really just Devils in disguise and fucking kill them — hopefully before they kill you or too many of your friends.
Though, I mean, it's not a huge loss if a couple mortals get killed. After all, they have to be dead before The Lamb-Doll Girl can turn them into new dolls, right?
That right there is just one of the ways that PTHK gets you to forget that anyone besides the player characters — really anyone besides your player character — is another human being with wants and hopes and dreams. They're all just resources for you to use so you can get stronger, strong enough to finally protect yourself.
Being strong feels fucking great, also. Whether you're an Orb-Weaver Girl, trapping characters in your web so you can control their body, or a Pig-Iron Boy, crushing foes under your enormous weight, or our little Lamb-Doll Girl with her army of toys. When you get into a fight with a Devil, all these plays come together to create incredibly satisfying sequences — a successful fight genuinely feels like you've just collaboratively pulled off a frame perfect combo sequence in a video game.
It is very easy to get lost in the desire to master these systems and forget what these systems are, what they're emulating.
I mean, it's patriarchy, right?
I feel like this is pretty obvious. GIRLs get fucked, BOYs do the fucking. This and a million other little systems within PTHK bait players into playing out societal norms.
This includes the Hawkmoth King, despite His claims of deliverance. He assigns you a new gender as you are re-born under His wing, and as Hawkmoth-Chan (your friendly cute magical girl creature companion!) says:
Not exactly #ally behavior, Hawkmoth-Chan!
You're left as beholden to your new gender as you were to your old, and its a matter of luck for the characters if their player gifts them with a Blessing that leaves them more or less dysphoric (note that there aren't any options for non-binary identities).
No, what the Hawkmoth King really offers your characters is power. Power that could be used for a lot of things. But Praise the Hawkmoth King's greatest trick is that if you're not paying attention, you'll use that power to perpetuate the system that's been hurting you this whole time. And it'll feel Really. Fucking. Good.
PART TWO: FUCK THE SYSTEM
The systems of Praise the Hawkmoth King incentivize you to hurt each other. After all, there's no "aid another" action, you can't add your dice to a friends roll, and all your fun plays are about getting others at your Mercy or ripping all their clothes off or eating them alive.
I mean, one of the main mechanics of the game is literally insulting each other! And it's set up in a way where if you don't use them, other people will, and you'll end up worse for it.
Not to mention Boons, which feel like the most carrot on the end of a stick thing in the game. You get them in a couple of ways: using certain plays on other PCs, staying in the good graces of your Guardians (important NPCs, each player gets one tied to each one of their stats), playing into the insults given to you, and as the result of some general plays — some of which even allow you to steal Boons from the other players.
I want to talk about that first way a bit more. These sets of plays are called your Bindings, and also define a relationship that your character has with another PC.
Here's one from the book:
They're a great incentive if a player is feeling nervous about using plays on other PCs; here's a couple good options, and part of why they're good is cause you'll get a little treat for doing them!
And Boons are really good treats. They're how you get advancements (level up), but they can also be spent to Change yourself — literally change your stats around by one for every Boon spent, adding +1 to one stat and -1 to another.
Here PTHK says, again, that the only way you get ahead, the only way to improve yourself or be who you want to be is by enforcing your power over other people and doing what the people who hold power over you tell you to.
Except that there's another main way to get Boons: playing into the insults you've been given.
You can do this whenever you make a play, as long as you have an applicable insult. Take the hypothetical "frigid bitch" from my earlier example, she could gain a Boon when she makes the play "To push someone away..." by leaning into her insult:
"Fuck you, you know what? I am a frigid bitch. Now get the fuck off me."
Which is empowering as hell. It's reclamation. And it's rewarded by the game.
Now you could say that this is unintentional, that getting Boons for leaning into insults is meant as a consolation prize, or to incentivize players into making themselves worse (after all, those insults are all things a person would never want to be, right?). Which might be true, if you take the game at face value.
Or you can consider that Praise the Hawkmoth King is a faggot game, an expressionistic game, and that it might have a bit more to say than all that.
There are cracks in the system, and we're going to widen them until it all breaks apart.
PART THREE: THE FAGGOTRY OF IT ALL
By turning all these implicit social systems into literal rules in a game, PTHK shows how fucking ridiculous this all is.
I've seen some people criticize the game for the fact that your GIRL stat is what you roll when you get fucked — like what, only boys can fuck people? And, yeah!! You're so close!! You've almost got it!! It is ridiculous, it's obvious, its stupid!! Obviously boys aren't the only ones that fuck, and even besides that, the fact that every time you have sex you have to label one person as fucking and the other person as being fucked brings up a lot of questions.
What does it mean to fuck someone? I guess you can go with the old standby: if you're doing the penetrating, you're doing the fucking. But what if you don't have a dick? What if you do have one, but the other person doesn't have anywhere for you to stick it in? Isn't it kind of frustrating and reductive to have your complex actions and motivations stuck into one of two categories all of the fucking time??
It's the same thing with consent. What does it mean to consent? When can a person consent? Consider that if your THING stat is your highest one it makes it mechanically advantageous for your character get raped when having sex — but how does one actively try and do that??
There are ways — inebriated people can't consent, right? So say you're playing as The Hemlock Boy, your bodily fluids all turned to toxins and drugs. You're already high all the time, and it's only a matter of a few good rolls to get the other person high and bait them into fucking you. Never mind the fact that the person you're doing this to isn't in their right mind either. If I'm raping you and you're raping me, who's the victim?
This is how every mechanic in the game works, each of them has something to say. Every time you go to roll a stat you wonder why it is that "To pin someone down..." uses BOY, all while Hawkmoth-Chan is underneath the move helpfully reminding you that, essentially, "Boys will be boys!"
I love the part about boys bodies not being "built for subtlety." Ironically it's one of the least subtle things Hawkmoth-Chan says.
Remember earlier when I said there's no assist move in PTHK? This is true, but it doesn't mean there aren't any ways to assist other players. There are actually a ton of ways you can do this! The number of synergies between plays is incredible, you just have to work a bit to find them.
That's where the core power fantasy of PTHK lies: what if you and your friends could use the parts of yourselves that the people around you call disgusting and repulsive to utterly annihilate anyone that dared say that to your fucking faces.
But you need your friends there for you to use those synergies, and you need to trust them, at least enough to know that they aren't aren't going to fuck you over in that exact moment.
My favorite move in PTHK is "To lay bare your wretched heart..."
In the midst of all this struggle, PTHK gives you a moment to go to someone and be entirely vulnerable with them. To show off the hidden and monstrous part of you.
There's a fantasy here, too. The idea that you could do this and not be handing the other person a weapon. The idea that being vulnerable actually makes you stronger, gives you the upper hand. Wouldn't that be nice?
Now here's the real important part: you can recognize all of this and think about how it could apply to your real life while not doing so in the game because sometimes playing as a shitty person who fucks up a bunch is fun and cathartic and doesn't mean that you're going to be that person in real life.
We understand this when playing games about killing people, there's no reason why the topics Hawkmoth covers should be different.
The fact that PTHK incentivizes you to use the systems of the game is not a bad thing. It is, in fact, incredibly good game design. This also applies to the fact that using and mastering these systems is fun.
I know, hot take: I think games should be fun!
So Praise the Hawkmoth King is fun, it’s just also a warning about how easy it is to become complicit. How easy it is, once you’ve been given a modicum of power, to turn around and use it to punch down out of fear of becoming one of the powerless Them again — out of fear that if you don’t turn and take advantage of Them now, you’ll lose all your buttons and fucking die.
But I’m not playing Praise the Hawkmoth King to take it easy, I’m playing it to struggle and bite and scratch and kick and kill and fuck!! If I wanted something easy I’d play a fucking “cozy game” and, yeah, no thanks.
PART FOUR: OK BUT WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE GAME?
Thank you so much for asking! I think Praise the Hawkmoth King is really good. It's the best PBtA game I've seen in recent years; it makes the system feel harsh and tactical, visceral and full of viscera, and it does this not by adding a grid map or hit dice but by leaning hard into the social aspect of the system — aka what it does best. Every move ultimately does something to yourself or the people around you, tangling you all into a tight and fucked up net. It's honed PBtA to an incredibly sharp edge that I'm desperate to cut myself on.
And it does this while providing poignant and important commentary on society and how it drives us to fuck each other over (and over and over again), and how it is really hard to get out of that cycle when these systems are built to keep us from doing so. All while entirely accomplishing its goal of treating sex how other games treat violence, making it feel like how violence feels in other games, showing how blurry the line is between the two when it's really all just about power in the end.
And it's hot! And fun! Two great things for a game to be, in my opinion.
It's just fucking awesome. You should go read it, and back it, when it goes up on Backerkit, and play it with people you trust — and take its content warnings seriously and play a different PBtA game first if you haven't already and all those things. You know, be safe.
I like to think of PTHK like a knife: knives are dangerous weapons, but they're also tools, and maybe we need both right now.
Also you can use them during sex, if you're into that kinda freak shit :3
- N.A.
p.s. theres a bunch of other stuff i didnt even mention in this post — things like how all the Girl blessing playbooks have themes of gaining control over others while the Boy ones have themes of losing control of yourself — but i think i could write a whole other essay about what that could possibly be getting at and this one is very long already. sooooo somebody else should do that and then @ me so i can read it :3
id also loooove to link you to the playtest version of the game but itch struck it down so. but im sure if youre clever and determined enough youll still be able to find it somewhere (or just wait for the finished version to come out)
if you have questions or comments about this post feel free to hit me up on tumblr or bluesky and we can talk about them. just know that i have a downright fetish for the block button if youre not gonna be nice <3