Invisible Cuts #03 - Passengers example character and play, The Divide crowdfunding completed!
The Ghost Gates have closed!
The Divide has finished funding on monday the 11th! Thanks for all who have participated and supported the project. The next month will be dedicated to testing and improving the rulebook.
Pre-orders for this game and Temple Punks should be up next week!
Passengers example character
Backstory
Solemn lost her dog a while back and has had trouble sleeping ever since. She doesn’t know what happened to him, but she wonders if her neighboor has something to do with it.
Weeks pass and she tries different things to sleep, including a strange ritual a friend of hers proposed. It was in an old dusty book with thorn pages. She lights the candles, mumbles the words and… nothing happens.
Gary’s been wandering the Hereafter, a place where all souls go to rest. He made friends of all shapes and sizes. He doesn’t really know how long he’s been here… or where he is. Doesn’t even remember much of who he was, of what he was.
In the Hereafter, Gary’s free to roam and do as he pleases. Unrivaled freedom in impossible lands.
But he learns of the corruption. Of the war to come. How to help. Then, a strangely familiar feeling… from the past, from Before. Solemn. She’s out there.
She opens her eyes in a fire, her whole being ablaze in rainbow flames. It does not hurt, it feels like she’s grazed by butterflies. In front of her, a ghost. Rotund and featureless. It speaks to her in her mind.
I need your help.
As the words echo inside of her, she lifts her vision to the horizon. Upside down hills to the east, fields of mushrooms with faces to the north, a cracked, black desert to the west and to the south, a city explodes with mutating lights and borealis, like a gouache painting come to life. She looks back down at the ghost and its form, now, is one of a dog.
Character creation
Passengers is a game where storytelling can affect and transform the mechanics of the game. In this proposed two player game of Passengers, Solemn has a mystery in the real world she needs to solve and corruption to destroy in the Hereafter.
In this storyline, the player knows their Passenger, but this is not needed. The passenger could be as undefined as the player wants.
Once in the Hereafter (when she sleeps), Solemn can be whatever she wants to be (both esthetically and mechanically). Solemn will have a representation of her grief as a strange goop taking over her body, mirroring the Hereafter’s corruption problem.
She chose a ranged attack and parry as her primary combat abilities as she wants to stay away from danger. Ancient Knowledge will help guide her in both the Hereafter and the real world to understand where her dog as gone and what has happened to him, but also how to change the outcome of this scenario.
She’d rather talk than fight, so Court as her moxie ability will allow her to find others and learn from them.
Gary was chosen as passenger to fuel the black dice abilities of Ancient Knowledge and Court and Lapse in judgement and slow are her unforeseen outcomes to mitigate these black dice actions.
Quick example of play
GM : As soon as you recognize your Dog, you hear a loud buzzing.
Scene Starts. Roll 2 white d6s and 1 black d6. Choose two.
A 1, a 5 and a 6 on the black die.
Player : Question, what is around me?
GM : You are in the middle of a crossroad made of cracked concrete. It is barren except for one light that seems to be hanging in place on an invisible pole. There are dry bushes at about 10 feet from you and there seems to be a structure in the distance.
Player : Ok, I will use my white 5 to Jump and my white 1 to hide.
GM : Can you explain me how you do this?
Player : As I recognize my dog that i’ve missed so much, I get overwhelmed by what I see around me. As soon as the buzzing starts I will frantically jump away from my Dog into the bush and cover my ears in panic.
GM : Perfect. Your dog, floats slowly towards you with a look of wonderment you recognize. As he tilts his head, where normally the muscles in his neck would stop this tilt, his face continues turning clockwise until it has done a full rotation. He says :
Don’t worry, Solemn, they’re just birds.
You look up and see a flock of hundreds of tiny creatures made of metal with clockwork wings sharp and golden. They pass overhead and give no attention to both of you.
What do you do?
You can download Passengers for free and try a game yourself!
Thoughts and ramblings on the gamification of
crowdfunding campaigns
Could crowdfunding be made into a euro game where you have a worker placed on the advertisement action space and another in the kickstarter throne room as all players compete for the ‘projects we love’ tag. Do you get random draws from a Hype deck?
Whilst we do have pretty clear intentions on how we approach crowdfunding, a lot of this is still experimental to us. The Divide was a shorter campaign with a more visual approach on the main page than we’re used to. It is still too early for us to have any expectations of you, but we want your expectations to be met as we make games that try to challenge the norm to offer different play experiences.
I tend to stay away from doing things ‘the accepted way’. I believe in the new path, in the way less traveled. Mostly because I find that fun and I believe consumers shouldn’t be constant targets of trends and behaviour assessments. I play games like that too. 'Oh so the game wants me to go all in on this thing… let’s try something else’. Thank you for being part of our new path and letting us experiment on our way to discover new games.
Photo of the week
In Montreal, march is that moment of the year where everything is up in the air and we’re collectively waiting for the weather to finally chill the fuck out as our running shoes patiently wait in the dust of our shoe rack. Is it spring yet? Oh no it’s -10 for some reason. Is it spring yet? No, it’s summer! It’s +25! No wait, we’re going from +25 to -5 tonight… Here’s to another weird end of winter!
News
I have completed an album of music for Stations’ Infinity of Ships project! You can listen to a track if you follow this link! I just can’t wait for people to listen to this. It is an imagining of future music as heard through different snippets of stylistically and thematically disparate tracks. Shit’s happening!
Odyssey of the Giant by Heltung storytelling is currently funding on Backerkit!