#bisexualpiratequeen

[thelovers-thedreamers-and-me]

Halloween. Time to... *BONE DOWN*

[elsewhereuniversity]

Hey, other students! I seem to have mislaid the memory of my mothers name. I last had it in the dining hall. If you find it, please contact - oh fuck. I don't remember my name, either.

[emmacanlearn]

Do you want to be my friend?

A friend is a someone. A friend best undead friend!

[ialpiriel]

bisexualpiratequeen replied to your post: if wasps are vespiform and bees are apiform what...

I know their botanical name is formicae or something but formiform is super awkward

its formicoidea, which i went and compared should be formiciform. ish. probably.

[projectbot13]

I like growing plants from seed. It's like everyday magic. The seed has all the the genetic information it'll ever need in a tiny package. You add soil, water, heat and light and tiny little package becomes a whole big plant. Wonderful. And it just keeps going, too! That plant makes its own seeds and those seeds make new plants which make new seeds which make new plants...

Babies to figure it will stay up with them.

[prokopetz]

My husband has been looking for the right system for his game idea for a while - he wants to run a game where you're all kids from the same small village who get roped into guarding a trade caravan leaving your tiny village, the adventures you have, overspending in town and having to take more jobs to survive... he wants something that gives that idea of a classic coming of age story, but for multiple people, one that has the potential for narrative weight.

I’ve definitely got one for that, and it’s a real doozy:

Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine

It’s a diceless, story-driven game about kids - teenagers around 14-16 years of age, specifically - having adventures in and around a pastoral small town. The default assumption is that the kids in question are actually young gods of various descriptions (hence the game’s title - one of the iconic characters literally built an engine that grants wishes), but it scales down to mortal player characters very easily, which is entirely due to how the gameplay works.

While the game does have skills and health levels and all that good stuff, the core of CMWGE (how’s that for an acronym?) is a system that frames narrative charater development as a series of RPG-style quests. Each character has a personal Arc, which falls into one of eight colours: from orange Knight Arcs, which revolve around finding a role in society, to gold Aspect Arcs, which focus on the pursuit of self-improvement, to purple Shepherd Arcs, which involve taking responsibility for guiding or guarding something. Each Arc, in turn, is made up of a series of Quests.

The way that works is that you’ll pick a Quest or set of Quests - you can be on up to four Quests at a time - that fit your personal Arc and the circumstances of your character’s life, then pursue them by performing various narrative actions. A given quest can fit into multiple types of Arcs, so you have a great deal of flexibility to arrange them as you see fit; for example, learning how to take care of a small child can be the first Quest of an orange/Knight Arc, but it can also be the second Quest of a blue/Bindings or purple/Shepherd Arc, or the final Quest of a black/Emptiness Arc.

(If you’re wondering how the heck child care can slot into something called an Emptiness Arc, it’s because the final Quest of an Emptiness Arc is about finding answers, reaching closure, or reaffirming your purpose in life after the living hell the previous four Quests put you through. Simple, right? ;) )

Anyway, you complete Quests by spending XP on them, which can be earned in one of two ways:

1. Performing genre-appropriate XP actions, which generate XP for a shared pot that’s divided among all players at the end of each session; and

2. Completing Quest goals, which mark XP against the relevant Quest directly.

XP actions are basically stuff that reinforces the game’s genre. Every genre has a list of such actions, which are associated with colours just like Arcs are. For example, the colour blue, which is associated with Bindings Arcs, is also the colour of “Science, Faith and Sorcery” - the act of proposing a theory about how the world works, then gambling your own safety or wellbeing on that theory. If you’re playing a game where that’s an in-genre action, every time somebody does that, a point of XP goes into the shared pot.

Quest goals, on the other hand, are tied to the Quest itself. Suppose, for example, that for the second Quest of your Aspect Arc, you take “Someone’s in Trouble!”, a Quest about helping or protecting a vulnerable person who’s somehow tied to the story of your current Arc. Then your Quest goals might look like this (this is right out of the core book, not an example I made up):

***

Major Goals

The GM can award you 5 XP toward this quest when:

You formally commit to trying to help this person;

They open up to you while talking to you in their home or important haunts;

Some element of their problem bridges from the metaphorical or emotional to the real - e.g., a gate opens from their nightmares to the world, or a fear turns into a curse, or someone who always gets a little carried away gets physically carried away.

You can earn each bonus once, for a total of 15 XP.

Quest Flavour

Once per chapter, you can earn a bonus XP toward this quest when you:

catch eerie glimpses/foreshadowing of a threat to them

have a sleepover/slumber party or visit their dreams

listen to them explaining their despair

are shown one of their secrets

hunt down some specific bit of trouble

drag them somewhere they really shouldn’t be

You can combine this with an XP action, but you’re not required to.

***

Completing Quests and Arcs is the game’s only mechanism for character advancement, and if you’re playing a miraculous (i.e., godly) character rather than a mundane one, it’s also how you awaken your powers.

As you’ve probably guessed, in spite of having relatively minimal diceless rules, it’s a very involved game to set up and play, generally better suited to online venues rather than face-to-face sessions. I’d totally recommend it if you can find the time, however - it manages to give mechanical weight to character development in way I haven’t really seen anywhere else.

[thelovers-thedreamers-and-me]

I do love your aesthetic. Love how you dress. And you.

oh jesus christ that’s gay as fuck and i’m hella into it

[thelovers-thedreamers-and-me]

Hey. Hey bobbie. Do you want a picture of something terrible

if i ever answer no to this question it’s proof that i’ve been kidnapped and an imposter has taken my place