Garbage & Glory is a game of dumpster diving and trash divining that blends raccoon hijinks with adventuring party vibes.  We played it as a family and wanted to share our XP with you all, so read on to find out what Garbage & Glory is all about!

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Jump to: 

• Audience for Garbage & Glory
• Setting for Garbage & Glory
• Characters in Garbage & Glory
• Mechanics in Garbage & Glory
• Overall thoughts on Garbage & Glory
• Find a copy of Garbage & Glory

Audience for Garbage & Glory

Garbage & Glory is a TTRPG system and setting (which is wonderfully conveyed through story moments) with some optional pre-made adventures to play.  

I would say the system is “rules-medium” with an easy to understand base and playbook style character callings that introduce enough special skills and variation to keep things interesting without getting super complicated.  It does also include items with stats and a crafting mechanic that uses cards to either build gear to improve dice rolls. 

The game book is about 170 pages long and blends story breaks that build world and character lore while giving play examples between sections of mechanics explanations to keep things flowing in a fun way. 

The pre-made adventures can be easily modified to fit your group and felt pretty PG-rated to me (we played “The Cats of Conway Manor”).

With all of that, I would say this would probably need to be run by someone who can read the book to understand and be able to explain the rules (so, maybe 10+ unless they are an early reader) but can be played with younger kids so long as they understand the rules and their character sheets (maybe starting at 6-8 years old depending on the player). This felt pretty all ages friendly with a capability to keep younger players in the loop without causing overwhelm and keep experienced players engaged and interested in figuring it out… with everyone really enjoying the story.

Setting for Garbage & Glory

Garbage & Glory is set in a modern world, but from the perspective of adventurous raccoons… who are telling some exaggerated stories and generally trying to one-up each other with their glorious tales of daring, success, and failure.

From the raccoons’ perspective, humans are Ogres who stomp about and also leave things in wonderfilled stockpiles (aka dumpsters), geese are terrible angry dragon-like beings with a vicious bite, and rodents of various shapes and sizes have the roles of mystics, merchants, and marauders.  

The setting takes the mundane of our human world and makes it fantastical from the eyes of the raccoons… and you get to adventure in that newly imagined world as if you are a warrior, mage, or rogue on an epic quest.

Additionally, this is all set up through story.  

While parts of the game book directly state how the setting is arranged, it is also demonstrated with dramatic blurbs that sound like they come from a novel.  As we were setting the game up, I read these aloud to my family, doing voices and being as dramatic as the tale seemed to ask for, and it was an immensely fun way to set the tone without having to tell everyone what it was about.

Characters in Garbage & Glory

As you can probably guess at this point, your character in Garbage & Glory is a raccoon!  But they aren’t just any raccoon… they’re an adventurer sent out to collect food and treasures out in the broad world so the whole group can survive and thrive. 

Some raccoons have the ability to build contraptions with the trash they collect while others may be able to use it to summon the arcane to cast magic.  Other raccoons may be clever enough to talk their way out of any situation while others are really good at hitting things (we had a raccoon with maxed out Brawn in the party, and it was really fun supporting them hulking out on everything).

To make your character, you’ll choose a name, a calling (which comes with some base stats and abilities), and some additional stats and skills to add your own unique flair, and then… you’re ready to start your story.

Mechanics in Garbage & Glory

Garbage & Glory uses the +One System, which has a skill dice pool plus stats and cards manipulation mechanic.  

You start with a base pool of d6’s that are generated from your Skills/Abilities (like Pile Magic, which lets you use spells).  Then, you use your Attribute stats in Brawn, Smarts, or Guts AND the Garbage and Glory cards in your hand to add more dice to your pool or change the results (with rerolls or increasing the value) after you roll.  Your result is determined by how many successes (5’s and 6’s) you roll in your pool and if that number meets the target number for the task. 

Now, your Skills, Abilities, and Attributes are all on your character sheet, but where some extra drama comes in is with those Garbage and Glory cards that I mentioned.  These cards, drawn from two decks, one for Garbage and one for Glory, represent the trash you find during your adventures and the hype or fame they generate when telling their exciting tales. 

You earn these cards by completing key story points to earn them as a reward, defeating foes, being epic, and sometimes even letting failures become so epic they generate a Glory card because you failed so hard. 

These cards give you some major boosts in times of need or can be saved for later to level up your gear and your character when a chapter ends, so you really have to think how to use them.  It adds a strategic and mildly crunchy element to the game (and I’m not talking just about the world’s sharpest tortilla chip) that pushes players to make some big decisions while they decide to sacrifice their gear to save a friend and can add some humor and creativity to the process as they describe how they did it with a bendy straw and super stale baguette.

And, of course, there’s more to the rules than that (i.e. how to the suits on the cards factor in, how does leveling up work, and so on), but I can’t give away EVERYTHING here for both time and courtesy to the writer reasons, so you’ll need to check out the book!

Overall thoughts on Garbage & Glory

I LOVED this, and my family really enjoyed it too.  This was one where I got my partner to also join in (he’s not always up for TTRPGs, but he was very interested in this one), and we had a good time playing it.  The family really enjoyed having storytime breaks between rules explanations and action sequences, thought it was incredibly well written, and got up to some fun raccoon shenanigans. 

We also thought the art was fantastic, both in the book and on the cards.  It gave the entire game such a wonderfully fun and somewhat ethereal and humorous vibe that set the tone just as much as the storytime elements threaded throughout the mechanical game.

Overall, we had a lot of fun with Garbage & Glory, and we hope you do too!

Find a copy of Garbage & Glory

You can find Garbage & Glory here!

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