I took a small break from this project to shake the dust off of Sinister Hovering OrbandTo Serve (the former has been published, and the latter is now in final draft and just needs illustrations and typographic editing), but now it’s time to get back to rotating birds.
Changes in this version:
The “Playing the Game” section as been supplemented with an extended discussion of how to interpret trait symbols as a player.
“Running the Game” now opens with a discussion of the GM’s role in Rotate Bird and how it differs from the GM role in more conventional tabletop RPGs.
“Assessing Fallout” now includes examples of how the various fallout symbols might be interpreted.
“Special Challenges” now opens with a discussion of the types of circumstances that special challenge mechanics are meant to address; this update also introduces perilous tests as a complement to epictests.
“Rewards and Advancement” now actually discusses advancement!
“Variant Rules” has been promoted to its own chapter (as opposed to being a subsection of “Running the Game”), and now includes optional rules for performing multi-character combos with paired DOING traits.
“Appendix 3: Supplementary Tables” has been added; all it contains for now is a lookup table of random DOING trait themes.
At this point, the game is essentially feature-complete, albeit not content-complete; I’d like to see if I can work something out for random scene prompts to complement the random scenario generator, there’s a lot of stuff that could stand for worked examples, and obviously it needs more random tables.
As always, comments and feedback are welcome!
Ok, i promised this post to myself, and i promised this post to my players. Playtest feedback for Rotate Bird in the setting of Sunless Skies.
Iknow there’s a system for SSkies, Skyfarer, i just don’t like it for… a number of reasons (mostly its treatment of captain and my lack of understanding of how to do non-lethal combat), and don’t have enough energy to do a PbtA hack, so, Rotate Bird.
Three of four players knew and played City of Mist, so we mostly treated Being traits as CoM tags and edges as story tags; two of the players also had they character concepts ready before session zero.
These are our character sheets after first session; traits in blue had been chosen rather than rolled, traits in green had been changed as a first minor advance, and the last row isn’t a character, it’s the party’s train.
top to bottom:
The Extravagant Widower, train’s mascot and signaller, played by Earl; had his character concept ready before session zero, got to choose three of his Being traits. His Doing traits are, in order, My treat,When is mid-day tea?andThe temperature is higher than optimal by 0.02 degree Celsius.
The Mandatory Harrower, train’s quartermaster, played by Malavon; rolled all his traits, changed part of his Doing trait as first session advancement. Doing traits, in order: Exactly to the deep end and back,Careful, still waters!andPreserves for the winter.
The Harrower is the only non-human player character, he’s a devil.
The Fragmenting Widow, train’s chief engineer and captain, played by Svyat; had her character concept ready before session zero so got to choose three of her Being traits, and changed part of her Doing trait as first session advancement. Doing traits: Black Widow,Technically a pilotandTeeth collection.
The Non-Suspicious Secretary, train’s first officer, played by Kir; changed one of his Being traits as first session advancement. Doing traits: Cake is not a lie, it is being recycled,Spring cleaning,Phobia refraction.
The Delivering One, the train; Being traits rolled by the players (each rolled one), Doing trait rolled by me and named by us all. Doing trait: FULL STEAM!
The train was added as a something like a team card from CoM — its traits can be used once per session, by any player, in the context that makes sense. We haven’t yet used them, so i’m yet to see how that goes, but i can already say that it willbite me in the ass as soon as the party decides to fight another train. Welp, knew that something like this will happen.
Doing traits in our game migrated to something like social status and/or learned abilities, rather than superpowers; Widower has enough money to buy his (and party’s) way out of almost anything, Harrower is good at practical planning, Widow beats people up, and Secretary… well, Secretary currently tries to understand who is he, exactly.
The two things that i plan to do, but haven’t yet done, is disaster track for tracking damage to the train (enough failures = train is broken in some way and this isa problem) and progress track for main quest.
After the first session it mostly feels like a muppet movie, with the Secretary being the lone human; it sure is fun.
I also used random scenario tool (but without party’s input); our story is about tentative balanse of powers in the Reach, a mcgaffin that can break that balance, and people who try to run and hide. We’ll see how that goes.
