Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Knife and Candle, The Echo Bazaar RPG
Over in Stuff to Watch there's a new RPG called Knife and Candle coming out for Echo Bazaar. Looks like a stellar group but I'm curious how you retain the mystery WTF of the setting in an RPG. Will the computer designers be deeply involved in fleshing out the settting or will it be DIY?
Comments
Biggest question: Does the base resolution / situation grabbing machine use cards?
For now, sorry about the stupid mailto: form on the website. It's the only kind I know how to do.
As for flavor: Lots. Go check out the link Lukas posted to see some initial stuff.
Is it still going to be an Apocalypse World-based design, or since it's official, are you thinking of making it its own thing? I agree that a card-based opportunity-deck/oracle thing with rules for adding in new cards based on increases to your qualities and Connections would be pretty hot, either way.
Wait 'til you hear Vincent's ideas about... uh, maybe I shouldn't say yet.
I got a real Stranger Things vibe (or what ST was in my own mind) from Echo Bazaar - so no better crew could have been assembled.
But I eventually forced it to take my info. I think.
I am filled with much squee at the thought of this game. You have no idea.
Okay, you've got four Main Qualities which work like stats, Watchful, Dangerous, Persuasive, and Shadowy.
You've got four "harm" tracks: Nightmares, Wounds, Scandal, and Suspicion.
You've got lesser qualities, especially "Connected: (group name)" some of which have their own custom moves assigned.
(EG: To call in a favor, roll +connected. On a 10+, of course, anything you ask! On a 7-9, they'll do it, but it'll cost you a bit of goodwill, take -1 to your connected quality. On a miss, they'll do it, but oh man, strings everywhere.)
And at the start of the game, and possibly the start of each session, give players a list of locations and a pile of index cards, which can be general, location-specific, or quality-specific ("Draw a different card and shuffle this one back into the deck if the character in question has less than +1 Connected: Hell") let them write "opportunities" on them, which may or may not have custom moves attached ("When you flirt with the Affectionate Devil, roll+persuasive...") And one of your MC moves is, of course "Draw an Opportunity card for the appropriate location" and "Draw an Opportunity from the general deck."
And after that it's just the details of whipping up the appropriate playbooks. Or rules for a lack of playbook (IE, character generation through play, much like Echo Bazaar does it, of course.)
Here's your Echo Bazaar:
Use Seventh Sea. Add goggles, caves, currency of dubious value, tweedy Brit words. Remove sea.
Or you could use, like, a good game as the basis. Whatever works for you!
Harper, that wouldn't be very faithful to the source material.
Echo Bazaar did actually make me think a little bit about how to incorporate variable ratio schedules and various other operant conditioning techniques into a tabletop RPG design, though. I mean, it works well enough for video and social games, yeah?
Yeah, but it kinda makes you think about that by clearly not doing it, right? I mean, you could learn a lot more about doing it effectively from Farmville or WoW or some shit. EB is still at the 'push lever, get cookie' stage of that technology.
But seriously, Ben, why ever in the world would you want to port over just the manipulative part of social-network games? It's like you read Bogost's "Shit Crayon" essay, and thought, man, crayons are overrated.