Author: Todd Nicholas

Hey all! More The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power (SCUP) previewing. Once again, feel free to share.

Something that Tom and I wanted to do to push the status and social capital elements of politics. We have a handful of ways for doing so that I’ll discuss here. 

First off, characters can have PATRONS. In other words, you can work directly for someone else. This can be another PC, or it can be an NPC that holds dominion over you somehow. When you have a Patron, you roll at the beginning of each session to see how your relationship with your Patron is doing. If they’re happy with you, you get a little coin in your pocket and all is well. If they’re displeased with you, however, they may call on you to fulfill your duties to them at some point during the session. If you refuse, it could hurt, or even break, your relationship with them.

Second, characters have PULL with each other. PULL is a mechanical gauge of social capital. You gain Pull on other characters by doing things for them, no strings attached.

“So good to see you, Pax. If I remember correctly, you wanted to know the name of that cook who’s been spreading rumors about you, right? Well I looked into it and his name is Zadkat, and he likes to spend his coin at that brothel down by the market. Of course! Happy to help! What are friends for, eh?” 

As you can guess, “no strings attached” isn’t how SCUP actually works. No strings attached just means they owe you, they just don’t know it yet! So when you do something nice for someone, you get Pull on them, representing their debt to you. You spend that Pull to cash in your social capital with them. That big, bad brute that you have Pull with? Are they about to put their sword through someone you need alive, at least a little bit longer? Perhaps spend that Pull to make them think twice about it. Do you want something of theirs that they don’t seem terribly willing to part with? Perhaps spend that Pull to remind them that they owe you. Status runs on the subtleties of social capital, and no one does anything for anyone for free when everyone is looking to climb the ladder. Pull is the mechanical gauge of how the webs of social capital, who owes who, effectively, crisscross through your game.

Finally, to give the MC a way to make social status come alive in SCUP, we have provided the MC with different lists of moves for low-status characters vs. high-status characters. Why? Because the perils of being privileged and oppressed are quite different, and we wanted oppositional moves that reflected the very different realities of those at the top of the pyramid and those at the bottom. 

For example, MC moves for elite status characters include things like “compel them to fulfill their duties” and “hint at vast conspiracies against them.” When you are at the top, you are always aware of what you stand to lose, the pressure of maintaining your status, and all those people below you smiling to your face but sharpening their knives when you turn you back.

For common status characters, it’s a very different set of problems, including “crush them with debt to those who have everything” and “put them in their place with degradation or humiliation.” When you are common, the boot of power presses down on your throat, robbing you of  your money, your power, and your pride. It’s enough to make someone go a little crazy, huh? 

Tomorrow, I’ll talk a little bit about how magic works in SCUP. 

Hey all! More information about The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power (SCUP) coming your way! Once again, this is shareable.

So SCUP is trying to emulate dark, political fantasy. Think Game of Thrones, or the First Law series by Joe Abercrombie. As such, Tom and I thought it was important that it was a HIGH INFORMATION GAME. In other words, players have a LOT of ways to get information on each other and the world. We also thought it was important that the world had a lot of interesting places and people in it, the kind of places and people that bring a dark fantasy world to life.

Towards this end, as you finish up character creation, you collectively, as a group, create PLACES and FACTIONS for each character at the table. Your Place is where your character feels most comfortable and at home. Where you belong, so to speak. We encourage players to not go for the obvious choice. Sure you can say the Queen’s Place is her castle, but wouldn’t it be more interesting if her Place was actually the forest beyond the town’s wall where she meets her forbidden lover each full moon, or perhaps the rowdy, local pub she hangs out in incognito on those cherished occasions when she’s able to slip out of the throne room? 

Your Faction, on the other hand, are the people who you relate to. They’re your tribe, your clique, your crew, your clan, your peeps. It can be as narrow as “those who sit on the royal council” or as broad as “the starving artists of the city.” When you are among your people, you feel at home. You may or may not be a “leader” among them, or even recognized by them, but you get them. You move among them with ease. You know the lingo, you fit in, you blend. They’re your Faction.

Once again, this is created as a group. You get final say on where your Place and who your Faction is, but you don’t get FIRST say. Other players get to make suggestions before you do. Why? Because we want to leave some room both for collective buy-in to the world and the characters as well as room for you to be surprised by your own character. Sometimes, in play tests, someone has had an idea of who their character is and when the player next to them says “perhaps your people aren’t the noble folks in the community, but are actually the local musicians because art and dancing are so important to you,” it shifts their understanding of their character in really cool ways. Once again, you get FINAL say on your character, so no one can tell you what to do, we just want to leave the space for you to be surprised.

So what does having a Place and Faction do for you? Well, first off, it fleshes out your character a little bit. It also gives the MC something to play with, telling them who lives here and where those people hang out, helping to map out and populate your world. Beyond giving some color and shape to your character and world, however, there are direct mechanical benefits. When you are in your Place or among your Faction, you can use moves that allow you to hear rumors of interest to you, gain information on people you might want to know about, or get a bonus to trying to figure things about the world out or manipulate other characters. Once again: we are trying to create a HIGH INFORMATION game, which means it should be easy for you to learn about the world, learn about other characters, and find out things of interest to you. We want to give you all the tools you need to know who to trust, who to double cross, and who to take care of… permanently. That’s why we’ve given these mechanical benefits to Factions and Places: so you not only have some extra color for your world, but also some extra ways to find out everyone’s dirty little secrets in it! 

Tomorrow, we’ll talk a little bit about another tool for how to make the social system of your world work: Pull.

Hey everyone! As promised, each day this week I’ll be talking a little bit about something that Tom and I are excited about in The Sword, The Crown, and the Unspeakable Power (SCUP). Today, I’m going to talk a little bit about our Mythology Creation system. Also: feel free to share this post if you know folks you think might be interested.

A fantasy world is nothing without a good mythos to it, right? So Tom and I wanted to make sure that the players at the table had some collective buy-in to a cool, evocative mythology that would serve as the backbone to their world. When you sit down to play SCUP, one of the first things you do is, as a play-group, build a mythos for your setting to give it some flavor. To do this, you go through the following steps: 

First, you select several names for the key characters in your mythology from a long list of different kinds of fantasy names.

After that, you select several plot elements from a list. Examples are “Balance is restored when a brave leader vanquishes an enemy” and “Two lovers cannot be together without first confronting an obstacle.” 

When you have selected your plot elements, you reach the most fun part, picking some bits of evocative imagery to drive your imagination. Examples include things like “A cracked and charred battlefield, where tattered flags fly over a sea of corpses,” “A woman, clad in the stars themselves, riding a great winged beast, her eyes fierce as fire and her hair dark as onyx,” and “A thief, standing upon the gallows, is revealed to be the long-lost, beloved princess, thought dead by her usurper uncle.”

Once you have your names, plot points, and evocative imagery, your group has a discussion about how to weave all these elements together. Perhaps you selected the name “Viv” and decide that Viv is the thief on the gallows in the final example in the previous paragraph. Perhaps her lover, who you give them name Taya, cannot be with her until Viv has reclaimed her rightful place on the throne from her usurper uncle, who you call Pembrooke. Perhaps Taya is the woman clad in the stars themselves: a powerful sorceress fated long ago to marry whomever sits on the throne at the next blood moon. Does Viv succeed in reclaiming the throne from her uncle so that she and Taya can. at long last, be together? Or does your story end in tragedy, with Viv hanged and Taya forever pining for her as she rides her great beast through the night sky?

Once you have written your mythology, you ask yourself what this tells you about your world. What sorts of virtues are celebrated? Honor? Love? Loyalty? What does this tell us about magic and the supernatural? Is magic common and benign, or obscure and feared? What does this tell us about geography, or social status? Through creating the mythology of your world with this exercise, you color in the various corners of your setting. What does it feel like, what do people believe, what are its aesthetics, and what is its history? This gives all the players a foundation with which to build their characters and the various systems of your shared world. We’ve had a lot of fun in play tests with world creation, and had people come up with some truly awesome mythologies. 

Tomorrow we’ll talk a little bit more about what’s going on in world creation for SCUP.