Riverdale RPG: What System?

I’m not embarrassed to admit it: I love Riverdale. I love the mystery, the drama, the characters staring pensively across the classroom. Maybe it’s my yearning for the high school experience I never had.

So, if you’re gonna run a Riverdale RPG, how do you pull it off? There are a few options to give a try. If you can think of any else, lemme know below, and I can add it into the list.

School Daze: Tracy’s game about high school works perfectly for Riverdale, as it’s a light system meant to simulate all the fun and excitement of hormonal teens. It’s really versatile.

Bubblegumshoe: Solvin’ crimes and getting in trouble! As you remember, I showed how the rules worked for Harry Potter, and they work here as well. Bubblegumshoe simulates the crime solving high schoolers, so it’s perfect for Riverdale: Who killed Jason Flowers? Who’s Archie sleeping with on the side? MYSTERY!

Smallville: Smallville converted the Cortex rules over to facilitate pure drama. Character creation is all about building relationships. Your basic stats are all your character’s values, and every relationship between characters has a die value. All you need to do is not allow characters to make anything supernatural at all. It would work really well. Sadly, it’s out of print, and the PDF isn’t for sale. Fortunately, you can still find it over on Ebay.

Monsterhearts: This one is a little bit of a stretch, but would work. Monsterhearts is an RPG where you play monsters in high school who are overdramatic and want to have sex with each other (I’m really simplifying it here, but you get the gist). It’s Powered by the Apocalypse, and you can definitely just either ignore the supernatural stuff in it and focus on the teen angst, or you can go with the whole Afterlife with Archie thing, and have Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Vampronica, and all the other great horror in that series.