Going Color, System Overview Part 3: Character Knowledge
about 8 years ago
– Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 11:08:03 PM
Metagame Update
Current points: 321! Since we're just four points shy, I'm going to post the next five goals on the main page now. Check 'em out!
At $30,000, K&T Goes Color!
If the campaign were to end today, Katanas & Trenchcoats would have enough money to be a pretty fun hardcover book. But there's one goal that's so expensive that I actually have to a money-based goal: making the interior of the book full-color. We've got ten days left, and at the time of this posting raised around $22,600.
But the Darkest Cosmos doesn't have to mean "simple black and white"—blood reds and eldritch purples are in its palette. At $30,000, I'll have enough money to print with richer blacks and starker grays, splotches of red and arcs of blue, all the colors of the moodiest of rainbows.
So if we raise $7400 in the next 10 days, that gloriousness will happen!
To switch gears to this week's system post, I'll get into a segment someone asked about last week…
How K&T Handles Character Knowledge
You can tell a lot about what a game assumes about play by how it handles different sorts of character knowledge. Katanas & Trenchcoats needs a central way of handling immortals and vampires have generations of knowledge, sorcerers and technomages having esoteric understanding, and car wizards having focused expertise.
The best way to handle that is to look back on what K&T's system is: an adventure engine that follows some television drama logic. What happens in TV drama? Characters reveal knowledge as needed and dramatically appropriate, and once that knowledge is revealed it's a part of the character's makeup. Some character knowledge is broad, and some weirdly specific.
Characters in K&T have Knowledges, which are just words or phrases that define the important things that characters know intellectually beyond boring mortal stuff.
Each splat has some default Knowledges—immortals have "Immortal Lore" and "Damascus Steel Production"*. Each character has a couple more Knowledge slots to fill it at character creation or later. There are guidelines for what Knowledges to use, but the mechanic is intentionally broad.
(*D.S.P. still means what it did in Episode One: "Everything that’s worth knowing about swords, sword making, sword culture, all things sword-like. It somehow also covers ancient and modern Damascus, as well as the global steel industry.")
Just like in TV, sometimes Knowledges are broad; those justify being able to do actions that other characters couldn't do or would be disadvantaged at doing. When a Knowledge is weirdly specific, that grants an advantage when that Knowledge applies. There's flexibility there for each group to handle Knowledges differently in different situations, but that's the long and short of it.
The interesting part isn't how they work though. It's how you get more.
Revealing Knowledge
If your backstory can loosely justify it, you can describe a flashback or use some dialogue to suddenly establish that you have some Knowledge applicable to the current situation. Each character can do this once per short story arc. (Think in terms of a TV episode or short miniseries.)
This pacing element has some fiddle to it, and we're discussing ways to handle "catching up" to someone with more Knowledges that you, but by and large that's how revealing things you know from your background and history works.
At least, until you involve the Force Apeiron…
Beseeching the Darkest Cosmos for Knowledge
Need to know something your background can't justify, like how to ritually banish a demon (which angels, demons, and hunters already know for free)? Already used up your Knowledge slots, but need to know how to defuse a complex bomb?
The Darkest Cosmos is more than happy to hook you up. To simply ask for knowledge out of nothingness is like that scene in The Matrix where Trinity requisitions knowledge of how to fly a helicopter from Tank… if she ended "I need a pilot program for a Bell 212 helicopter" with "and also maybe put some dynamite in my brain, surprise me."
Doing so is covered with the Apeiron Essence and the Intuit Domain, with the action about pulling just the information you want out of the aether. Failing will get you the knowledge you want for a scene, but at a cost—psychic backlash, losing some other knowledge (like how to speak English), some disfigurement, leaking a toxic being unto the world, etc. Succeeding gives you temporary knowledge that's weirdly specific, fading away after a scene or two. Critically succeeding gives you the opportunity to retain that knowledge forever without taking up a Knowledge slot, at a further cost.
Implied, Minor Knowledge
Questions like "can I speak French?" aren't important questions from the Katanas & Trenchcoats perspective. (Those are in other genres, like espionage or globe-trotting pulp.) But if something like that becomes a concern for your character and your background doesn't just immediately answer it, what you do in K&T is reveal Knowledge that would imply that minor element, like "France during Napoleon" or "Trafficking in Priceless Stolen Art," and say "well of course I spent some time in Paris, so I can speak French."
That's because the game wants you to address the question as "Where/how did you learn French?" than simply pose "Can you speak French?"
Or the Story Master might just shrug and say "Yeah, you speak French, that's cool." if the pacing that night is moving so fast that no one wants to stop to deal that question, then come back later to address it. That also happens in TV shows, to reveal surprising knowledge without disrupting the pacing of the scene.
#YOLF
—Ryan
My Ethos as a Creator, and Hardcover Editions!
about 8 years ago
– Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 08:07:07 PM
Metagame Update
Current points: 304! That means we've got the variant tarot rules, Lore Immortel, the Buffet, and the funky Fate version unlocked! Next up is an expanded writeup on Darkest Vancouver. Once we hit that, I'll unveil the next set of five unlocks.
My Ethos as a Creator
In update #5, I talked about "The Darkest Legion": my term for all the writers and artists and everyone working on Katanas & Trenchcoats. I've said there are around 100 writers all contribution parts—some large and many small—to the project so as to create a beautiful cacophony. That's only part of the story.
Our world is filled so many wonderful people—many ethnicities and cultural backgrounds, different sexual orientations, and the full spectrum of genders. So I need a creative crew that isn't homogenous. More to the point, I want that crew of writers and artists to be a part of this vision.
It's important to me that lots of different people could see themselves in the characters Katanas & Trenchcoats portrays, in the writing and in the art. In Year One, the angel was a Laotian woman. The iconic technomage shown in the project video is an Indian badass. The iconic vampire is from what today is Ethiopia.* I have other art notes about making sure Darkest Vancouver's supernatural scene reflects the entire world, so anyone could see themselves as fitting into the larger story.
I want my friends and people like them to want to play this game and find themselves already represented in it. Katanas & Trenchcoats should say "you folks are awesome" and give them a welcome mat to the Darkest Cosmos. If I can make it welcoming to my friends, I can make it welcoming to a much larger group of people.
The thing is, I know that as much as I have this ideal, I'm gonna mess it up if I try to do it on my own. I have plenty of blind spots, and I'm going to be pulled in many directions throughout the project so my attention to any one will be limited. That's why I have Josh Roby with me—he has the same ideal, and he does meticulous research. That's why I have this legion of writers, to be the voices for those characters and concepts. That's why I'm bringing on Anna Kreider to help me with art direction, so I have someone to tell me when I'm too enamored with a piece of good art or too overwhelmed with my producer duties to make the best choices for the book.
(Which is also me announcing that Anna is an important part of K&T. I love working with Anna. She helped me with Mythender's cover.)
This game should celebrate all the fans of this meta-genre. I should celebrate all the fans of this meta-genre, because they've collectively contributed to my personal love of it. I strove to do that in Year One with the stock art I was able to find that worked. Since I'm getting actual artists for the full edition, I have the full freedom to make that happen.
The fact that I can do this, and that people are eager to help me with this, makes me really happy as a publisher and as a person who loves games.
*An aside: handling inclusivity with ancient characters in a strong, supportive way is a place where I definitely don't feel like I'll hit the mark square on if I were to do it solo. But that's where having amazing, knowledgeable collaborators is such a boon.
Want a Hardcover Book? Done!
I have a new reward tier available: Hardcover! A bunch of people have asked me for this option, and I've listened and explored that option. :)
At $45 you can get the limited edition hardcover edition in place of softcover. All the the reward tiers above that will automatically include being hardcover, so you don't have to pledge more.
Oh, and having the hardcover will also grant your characters 1 bonus Grandeur point at creation. Since I did that for the Premium Edition of Year One, I suppose it's tradition that I offer such a thing here. :)
#YOLF
—Ryan
What Are Car Wizards, Really?
about 8 years ago
– Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 07:25:05 PM
Metagame Update
Current points: 223! Soooooo close to the 225 unlock, and I'm sure we'll get that over the weekend. Why? Because, the weekend bounty: Each person who tweets microfiction on Twitter with the #YOLF hashtag gets an extra two points!
What Are Car Wizards, Really?
Blue and red light punctuates the night where police cruisers block off an avenue. Suddenly the rev of a titanic engine breaks the silence, and a monster truck surges from a side street, making a 90º turn that should be impossible for a machine its size. Corrupt cops dive for cover, their gunfire clattering off the flames painted on the truck as it crunches cop cars underwheel. As an armada of motorcycles roars into pursuit, the truck driver’s manic grin flashes in her rearview mirror. She pulls her goggles down off her forehead, grabs her Colt Peacemaker from the glove compartment, and tunes the radio to a rock and roll station.
After all, living forever is for immortals. She’s a car wizard.
----------
The other side of the "Why the focus on immortals?" question is: "What's are car wizards, really?"
Car wizards are the stunt performers of the supernatural world. They achieve feats that you see in big-budget special effects movies. And so long as they follow a way of life that mimics their Hollywood icons, they defy death and look awesome doing it.
What Car Wizards Can Do
Car wizards don't play by the normal rules of the Darkest Cosmos. They're what happens when some younger aspect of Apeiron decides to get a tattoo and start a punk band just to piss off its parents. Just in this case, that takes the form of creating its own proto-immortal being.
To start all car wizards are capable drivers, because the very first car wizard to catch Apeiron's eye was a stunt driver. But from that common avenue, there are many side streets. Car wizards follow different paths, or Roads. Three sample Roads:
The Stone Road: These car wizards are unrelenting pugilists. When they use the Fight Essence, their fists can become Greater Weapons and they can force those who fight them to play by action movie rules or risk disadvantage.
The River Road: These are brilliant con artists who can manipulate people into vulnerability… but only against those who aren't already vulnerable. Those who follow the River con casinos, mobsters, warlords, not your grandmother (unless she's a warlord).
The Gear Road: These are uncanny mechanics, to the point of spontaneous invention. While they don't possess technoarcana, they built machines that endure just as much as they do, and this engineering knowledge extends into other arenas where a "smart gearhead" in a film could solve problems.
No matter what Road you travel down, there's a commonality: car wizards must play by certain rules—rules that involve action and adrenaline—if they want to keep their abilities.
What Monsters Fear
These exceptional mortals scare the hell out of the supernatural establishment. In the Lore Immortel, it's said that the first immortal was born in the moment where a death was rejected by the Apeiron Essence. Vampires have their unlife given to them by Apeiron. But no other beings have their origins connected to defying death, until the birth of these exceptional mortals.
That's why car wizards give others pause: everything the primary supernaturals know about the world state that these mortals shouldn't exist. Yet, here they are, and those wise are uneasy. This could be just the beginning of a complete cosmological upheaval.
Under the Hood
The whole car wizards concept, as last as far as Katanas & Trenchcoats is concerned, started as a series of posts my friend Drew made about characters from The Fast & the Furious movies, wherein he detailed the various powers that these "car wizards" had as if they were RPG characters. Also being a fan of those movies and other action/driving films, I was super into this idea.
When Furious 7 and Mad Max: Fury Road came out, I wanted to make an expansion for K&T that shoved that concept into a supernatural world. The name "car wizard" stuck as I was writing it, and in the expansion I wrote the basis for how actually play exceptional mortals.
Like most of K&T, it started as a joke that had some function to it. But when we started seriously talking about car wizards—as serious as one can while saying the phrase "car wizard" over and over—we examined what roles weren't being filled by other beings. Immortals, vampires, and werebeasts were clearly the top tier threats. Sorcerers and technomages are the weirder, fringe elements of the setting, but not unfamiliar ones. Hunters are the mortal-scale-but-empowered antagonists (or the protagonists of a Supernatural-esque story). Angels, demons, ghosts, and the feytouched represent different facets of alienness. What's left?
The spirit of rebellion. The "teenage force of Apeiron" idea. So that ends up threading three elements together: a parallel counterpoint for the immortal story, something for the establishment in the supernatural world to be wary about, and something for people who just "want to play someone normal" can gravitate toward.
Hope that satisfies the curiosity some of you've had! Until next time…
(Opening fiction by James Mendez Hodes, one of the writers in the Darkest Legion.)
#YOLF
—Ryan
System Overview Part 2: Basic Rules
about 8 years ago
– Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 09:13:32 PM
Metagame Update
Current points: 205! Deeper detail on the cosmology and metaphysics have been unlocked, and five more unlocks have been listed on the main project page.
New Interviews
If you haven't listened to it yet, check out episode 174 of the GoingLast podcast. I talk about K&T, including much about the Story Master philosophy and how that intersects with playing a hostile world.
I was also on Hyper RPG's Easter Eggs show earlier today, and the audio for that will be up later this week.
The Basic Rules
The meat of this post is short… because I'm linking to a longer Google doc that gives you the overview of how actions and reactions work in the game. Fans of Year One will see a lot of similarity, but refinements and advancements. Otherwise, you'll see some of the game DNA I've been talking about over the last couple weeks—Fate, Cortex Plus, Apocalypse World, etc. through the lens of '90s-style dice handling.
Check out the document at: bit.ly/kty2rulespreview
And feel free to comment on this post with questions! The nice thing about it being a Google doc is I can address your questions with clarification notes in the doc itself.
More Writers Announced
I got to talk with some great people at Emerald City Comicon last weekend, and it's with great pleasure that I get to mention some more people:
- Jay Edidin (Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men, Adventure Time, Sleep of Reason, Hellboy: The Companion)
- Brian Clevinger (Atomic Robo, The Avengers and the Infinity Gauntlet, and most importantly Katanas & Trenchcoats Year One)
- Jeremy Kostiew (Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th, Changeling: the Lost 2.0, and the first K&T fanfic)
THE SONG!
Tim Rodriguez of Brooklyn Indie Games (my publisher for Backstory Cards) wants to crowd-compose a Katanas & Trenchcoats song. Here's the loop of it:
soundcloud.com/ogreteeth/katanas-trenchcoats-loop
"In the spirit of maximizing grandeur, I've written a K&T song and I want to assemble a full song/video with contributions from anyone who's interested."
What to contribute:
-
Video clips: dress up as your immortal avatar, use dark backgrounds, show off your swords (especially katanas), kick-ass goth makeup, etc. Record at 1080p/60, ideally, sound is unimportant.
-
Instrumentals: download the rough-cut sample loop and play along. That loop will run approximately 12-15 times; make a loop, play a solo or mix it up however you like!
-
Vocals: Sing a verse, or be part of the "you only live forever" chorus at the end.
-
Lyrics: write an awesome new dark verse that represents the grandeur of '90s RPG characters
Upload your finished bits and pieces to a Dropbox, Google Drive, and link your contributions in the comments to this update or tweet at him (@dicefoodlodging) with the #YOLF hashtag.
Each contribution to the song will increase the reward: the first one grants 5 points, the next 6, and so on. Once the main song is done, Tim said he'll make stems and loops available so that a K&T Remix EP can follow.
Rock on, my immortal friends.
#YOLF
–Ryan
My Darkest Legion & the Beautiful Cacophony
about 8 years ago
– Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 07:34:51 PM
Metagame Update
Current points: 187 points! Woah, that's a 50-point jump! That means we've unlocked:
- Extraterrestrial locations and characters
- Detailed magic rules for sorcerers, technomages, and other mojo-slingers (sounds like Dave Chalker and I need to get to work!)
At 13 more points, we get deeper detail on the cosmology and metaphysics. If we reach that on Wednesday, I'll unveil the next set of unlocks then.
My Darkest Legion & the Beautiful Cacophony
For this update, I'm gonna talk about some process stuff. In my interview with Brie Sheldon published this morning, I said:
"I'm talking with around a hundred writers now for this new edition Katanas & Trenchcoats—all fans or past contributors of the meta-genre, and all jazzed to make a bigger, badder version of K&T happen."
Ian Watson referred to all of them (including himself) as the Darkest Legion.
Each time I tell a friend "yeah, I'm talking with around a hundred people," I get a look of incredulousness. I get people telling me that the project will be hell. I get people telling me that I'm a mad man.
Then I say "last year, K&T had 27 writers for 22 pages." I know the workload I'm committed to, and that's very much worth the effect it'll produce, which I call the Beautiful Cacophony—a setting that intentionally feels rough and textured because of dozens of different perspectives, passions, and histories filtered into each paragraph, character, group, etc.
A Cacophonous Setting
I could hire five writers to write the setting material, but even if I told them to be chaotic, there would be inherent through-lines and consistency in writer voice. Normally, that's what you want in a game book, but I'm throwing that rule out the window to go for something else.
In television, if a series goes on long enough and trades through enough hands, it starts to eat at itself. This is definitely true for plenty of sci-fi and fantasy series. That's the feel I'm going for with this full-size edition of Katanas & Trenchcoats, but (a) in a compressed format and (b) with full intent rather than by happenstance.
I see two awesome benefits here. First, when it comes to reading the book, there'll be humor some readers will get that even I won't—I don't know every side of fandom, so my writers will write things I don't realize are playful riffs. You won't be bored.
Second, when it comes to playing the game, there'll be so many different things you could grab on to for an adventure or campaign that your Darkest Vancouver will be very different from others'. The number of loosely interconnected ideas are like threads for your own tapestry. If you continue to play with the same characters, then as one set of plot elements fades away, you have plenty more already set up for you.
The book will be upfront about this, and not expect you to guess or remember this intent. The setting is huge and compressed, and definitely not something you should try to use all of at once. Look at how fantasy TV layers their threats and worldbuilding, and take that approach to the material.
How I Manage This Process
It's not all chaos. Josh Roby and I will take the material and shape it around the themes we want to make sure are evened out. If twelve people give me a writeup for a biker gang, there aren't going to be twelve Totally Unique Biker Gangs in the setting. If we did that, then not only does it look unoriginal, it also leaves you no room to make up your own without feeling like you're treading on worn ground.
The original setting was drafted up by a half-dozen people, so the baseline already exists for people to riff of. We know the building blocks we want, and we know how we want to arrange them in the book. This would certainly be even harder—maybe even impossible—if I hadn't done the first Katanas & Trenchcoats last year and thus not have the blueprint for the full edition. But I have that blueprint, and I'm working with accomplished game developers (including myself) and editors to keep all the building blocks from melting into an unplayable mess.
But Not a Cacophonous System
You may have caught that I'm only talking about the setting here. My system designers are a tighter circle of (currently) six people. I've said before that I want the system to be genuinely playable and fun, and the only way to do that is to not have a hundred writers on that side of the game. :D
Even still, each piece of the setting has to something the system can reflect (or intentionally call out as not reflected). There's little more I dislike than a setting that describes PC-scale characters only to find you can't actually make them with in that system. That's an unfun joke; I want to keep such things out of K&T as much as immortally possible.
#YOLF
—Ryan
