For our final little preview of The Sword, The Crown, and the Unspeakable Power (SCUP) this week, I’m going to talk about NEW CHAPTER MOVES.
So Tom and I asked ourselves out loud, at one point, “how could we emulate something like the Red Wedding in SCUP?” When you think of political fantasy, you think of reversals, misfortune, death, and despair. No one is safe for too long, and it’s always a moving equilibrium.
So what we came up with is NEW CHAPTER MOVES. After either some downtime where you don’t play for a little bit or a significant in-game passage of time (your call), you MUST make some changes. Either you retire your character, let them become an NPC, change them to a new character class, or (and this is what we really want you to do!) you take one of the New Chapter Moves to hurry things along.
What are the New Chapter Moves? I’m glad you asked. Here’s an example of one:
The Swing of The Pendulum
Whenever your character experiences even a single moment of joy, tranquility, security, pride, or peace, make a mark. When you reach 3 marks, roll 2d6.
-On a miss, nothing happens. Erase the marks and start over.
-On a hit (7-9 or 10+), you die horribly as it all comes crashing down around you, enveloped in a void so dark it’s as if the night sky itself fell to the earth and covered up all you have ever known in a shroud of burning ashes. You and the MC will work out how. Create a new character.
Ouch. Here’s another:
Reap What You Sow
Every time you hurt someone, physically, socially, or emotionally, make a mark. When you reach 3 marks, roll 2d6.
-On a miss, nothing happens. Erase the marks and start over.
-On a hit, you face the harvest. Those you love will suffer and die, undeservedly. Those you trust will be cut down like so much wheat or betray you. As you have sowed pain, now you shall reap blood. Erase the marks and start over.
Double ouch. And finally, one more we’ll share:
Let the Right One In
Every time you perform some more than trivial act using the Unspeakable Power, especially something epic and/or bloody, make a mark. When you hit three marks, roll 2d6.
-On a miss, nothing happens, Erase the marks and start over.
-On a hit, you and the MC together will choose one of the following: (1) The doors of reality crack and something horrible comes through, most likely devouring you in the process. The MC will create a new Threat based on what slipped through. Create a new character. (2) Something comes through and burns the essence of you away. You’re gone, but there is a new tenant in the building. Your character is now an NPC that LOOKS like you but decidedly is NOT you. Create a new character. (3) Something beautiful and terrible draws you into a world far away. Describe it, in all its indescribable grandeur. Retire your character (to safety?). Create a new character.
You get the idea? We don’t MAKE you take these moves if you want to ensure that your character keeps living on and on into old age,, but we strongly encourage it. These moves are there to give your game a big push in the second chapter, creating new things to worry about or big, dramatic events that change the nature of your world. So even though you don’t have to take one, if you’re the right kind of person to play SCUP, we imagine that you’ll see one of these moves and say “ooooh, yes. I want THAT horrible thing to happen in our game!”
Soon, we’ll reveal a little bit more about the character classes we’ve created for SCUP. Thanks for reading these previews this week!
Very cool!
Todd Nicholas, did you consider something like this before you settled on that mechanic:
Reap What You Sow
Every time you hurt someone, physically, socially, or emotionally, make a mark. Whenever you think the universe might want you to suffer consequences from these actions, roll 1d6+marks.
-On a miss, nothing happens. Erase all marks and start over.
-On a 7-9, you face the harvest. Those you love will suffer and die, undeservedly. Those you trust will be cut down like so much wheat or betray you. As you have sowed pain, now you shall reap blood. Erase the marks and start over.
-On a 10+, as with 7-9 except it happens in front of your eyes before you perish. Make a new character.
Essentially, giving the player agency on when they think their moment may have come, but encourage them to push for those moments to clear their “karmic debt”?
Not saying it’s better for SCUP (or for anything for that matter), just curious if player triggered rolls with accumulating debt was something you considered rather than mark-triggered rolls with a fixed risk of success/failure.
That’s REALLY interesting. Tom and I are going to talk about some SCUP feedback this weekend and I’ll bring that up.
Neat! Interested to hear what you think about it. I really dig the concept of chapter moves!
Off the top of my head, there are things I really like about doing it the way you suggested and things that give me pause. On the one hand, I like the roll+marks, and I like that you could sort of pick when it would be cool to do.
On the other hand, I do kind of like the potential unexpectedness of the other way, going for genre emulation here. Going with the “death is unexpected and always potentially around the corner” thing, I like the idea that someone could just be walking along whistling and doing their thing and then, suddenly, dead. This merits some thought! Thanks!
I totally hear the “death is unexpected” argument. I’m also not a fan of the hack to roll 1d6+marks instead of the usual 2d6+something.
Another thought might be to add “trigger someone’s chapter move right now” as an MC hard move to emulate the unexpectedness. >:)
(okay I’m going to stop poking at your game now, the chapter move idea just made me excited!)
Trigger a chapter move is pretty good.
And don’t worry about the poking: that’s why I’ve been posting these previews. We’re still play testing, so there’s plenty of time to move stuff around!
These moves are so Brutal they are making me sweat to play this game!
The brutal part of The Red Wedding was that it was all avoidable. The signs were there to be seen and a cautious, less trusting person would have noticed the warning signs or set up their own effective protections.
I don’t think something like this can be simulated well by a single die roll. I’d much rather have something where natural 2s and 3s brought harsh hard moves by the MC. Then the player retains their agency, while acknowledging that the universe has a way of dealing harshly with those that draw too much of fate’s attention.
Since the moves are optional, they aren’t a deal breaker for me. I don’t feel like they really hit the mark though.
Duane Padilla: I hear where you’re coming from but have a few problems with that. For one, I think the “natural 2s and 3s” idea gets too far away from the core mechanic of AW which we really wanted to preserve. I see where you’re coming form, but it messes with the 6-, 7-9. 10+ framework too much for me.
As for the avoidable part, here’s where this is in the move: let’s take the first move up there, The Swing of the Pendulum. Note that it just says that your character dies. You and the MC work out HOW. So, in my mind, you and the MC should ABSOLUTELY work out how in a way that is the most gut wrenching it can be. Using the Red Wedding as an example (spoilers if you haven’t read/seen GoT): Rob Stark is experiencing moments of happiness. His player makes his roll on that move. The player and MC say “wait… you know who’s REALLY mad at Rob right now because of all that stuff he did…” Then the Red Wedding happens.
We tried to leave all that pretty open ended. We didn’t want it to be “you die like this” or “you die like that” so that players and MCs could work out, together, something they were happy with (remember: you as a player pick this move, so you are saying you are ready for your character’s story to end dramatically).
Having said that, if that’s not coming through, we might need to make that more explicit in the text of the game so players and MCs know that this shouldn’t be “you just die” and should follow the fiction.
The 2s+3s was just a spitball idea. My main problem was with the mechanic of ‘roll dice (despite anything you’ve done to prevent danger, etc.) and if you roll 7+ (pretty likely), then you will end up dying (in a cool way that follows that narrative).’
Perhaps my mindset is simply that I’d prefer to Go Into Hard Mode ala video games and really feel like I was in peril, but had a chance to make it through if I made good decisions (and got lucky). If I want my character to die in en epic manner, I can usually manage that myself or an OOC talk with the MC can set up something for the future which can surprise me. But, considering the amount of positive responses, it seems like people like having these options and I might be in the minority.
Duane: we actually didn’t post all the moves, and there’s a different one you might actually like. One of the New Chapter Moves has you set a tangible goal for your character when you trigger it (i.e. “I avenge my friend,” “I claim my rightful place at the head of the council,” etc.,), then you get bonuses to accomplish that goal, but when you do, you retire your character. It’s lets your character go out but in a slightly more heroic way.
Either way, what we were trying to do with these moves is take something that we think AW already has, i.e. as you “level up” in AW, eventually you must either change your splat or retire your character (unless you just decide to hoard advancements, which is totally not fun). We took that idea and tried to hook it both into the fiction of the game and the flow of the game a little bit.