will you PLEASE explain chuubo's to me? i only have ever played 5e and i run a campaign for some friends and it sounds like a really fun platform
oh hell yes gather round the campfire friends
ok so chuubo’s marvelous wish-granting engine, a tatterpig by the inestimable dr jenna katerin moran, is a game for… simulating narratives? i dont know how to put it but its entirely focused on character arcs. if youve played dnd then youre used to character classes being written around and balanced for combat, but in chuubos combat and even conflict in general take a huge backseat
anyways the general core loop of dnd is ‘go to place, kill monsters, get treasure’ even if a lot of dnd campaigns end up veering away from that, the basic thing you do in dnd is fight things and get stuff for it. the core loop in chuubos is to basically enact certain scenes where you do something appropriate to the genre or character, and accumulate a little xp for it. in this way xp tracks not your combat prowess, but your general character growth. you get xp from genre actions, from making the other players feel things (i believe one of the sample characters gets it for making them facepalm), and from ‘quests’ which are not skyrim-style quests, but rather… hang on let me start a new paragraph
a quest is pretty much ‘something thats happening in your life’, something that goes on for a while and shapes your day to day life. the sample quest given is ‘cleaning up an old house’ but there are also quests like ‘falling in love with an old friend’ and ‘slowly turning into the sun’
thats all you need to know for the most basic grokking of chuubos but im gonna talk about colors now. there are eight colors that dr jkm uses to kind of group together general concepts: purple is the color of the pastoral genre, of hard work and simple living, of shared connections with other people, of shepherds, of taking care of things. a color isnt really a mechanical thing, so you dont absolutely have to know what they mean, but you get a feel for what things are and you understand when people talk about ‘oh thats very gold of you’ or ‘im feeling orange today’.
the analogy of dnd classes, i guess, is miraculous arcs. there are 24 of these, 3 for each color, and they range from ‘noir detective’ to ‘cardcaptor sakura’ to ‘godzilla’ to ‘i am literally the sun’. as we’ve said, though, theres not really situations where people get smashed against each other for miraculous combat (i mean, there are, but its not required or even expected), so its ok for one guy to literally have a wish-granting engine while this other guy just… has a spotlight sometimes? actually there are more than 24, and not all of them are in the book, but you can go on dr jkm’s tumblr to see all the others that she intends to put in another book
the last thing you should know is that theres a sample campaign with sample characters, the glassmaker’s dragon, and that these sample characters are extremely compelling so a lot of the fandom talks about them, a lot of games end up with people playing some variation on them. for example leonardo da montreal is a mad scientist who ripped his heart out to replace the sun and whose nightmares are full of a blasphemy, but the book also talks about an example dulcinea d’avignon who is a dark magician instead of a mad scientist, or a leonardo vii who is in fact a robotic copy of the original leo, etc. so a lot of the fandom loves these characters and treats them like shared characters
so thats what chuubos is, why chuubo appeals to me is…. a) dr jkm has some incredible writing, not just the style (which some people actually don’t like) but in the content. her writing in nobilis could legit be used without editing in a church sermon, and move people to tears. chuubo involves a lot of talk about the wishing power of the heart, about the fundamental nature of people, so on and so forth. she says a lot of beautiful stuff. b) the structure of chuubos makes it a really good model for tatterpigs where you progress in something slowly, especially in character growth or enlightenment or whatever, so i steal the ‘hit x trigger to gain xp’ structure all the god damn time. c) it’s a well written game that lets you do all kinds of wacky stuff, ive heard described as a miyazaki movie simulator, and you can also do stuff like be a talking rat who pulls giant robots out of peoples chests and like, thats fine. thats good
anyways if you ever want to know more you can talk to me or to a wide variety of people who i am sure will soon attach their names to this post, theres a discord, its all good fun
