Sunday, 1 January 2017

Project Coma v0.2

Here's a slightly revised and updated Project Coma. There are some tweaks to the moves, a few formatting minor changes, but the main addition is the GM's pages which has suggested effects as static climbs, GM moves, and guidance for choosing the NPC's simultaneous counter-mission.



I have a chunk of this written up as a gaming text (as opposed to just a bunch of reference sheets) but holy crap is there ever a difference between some skeletal mechanics and a document that explains itself. I'm pretty sure the latter isn't worth tackling until the game is quite far along, it's an entirely separate task from just presenting mechanics.

This is all as free from playtesting as a field of fresh-fallen snow. I have the feeling I'm going to need to rip the basic procedures apart to cover a bunch of ordinary espionage situations a bit more economically.

Having said that, I'm super interested which of the playbooks (if any) grab you, and which look like duds.

I'm also interested whether you feel that there's enough structure here that you could comfortably run this, or whether you look at it all and wonder how the heck you'd get started.  (I'm aware that the sample missions just trail off in incompleteness.)

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In unrelated news, Dropbox is ditching its public hosting, which kinda blows, so at some point I'm going to have to shuffle a zillion files and links to another location. Yay!

Veil of the Once-Queen

Deep in the forest is the citadel of Tanibel, once the capital of Martoi. Although their time has passed, they have found a way to cling to the world by straddling the veil between life and death.


In my home campaign, the three Lords of Tanibel have ridden out and poisoned entire watersheds with the black draught, leading to the terrible undoing of society hinted at in the Unmended Way.

Even if you don't go quite so apocalyptic and campaign-defining, Tanibel is still easy to slot into any forested region of your campaign world. Treat the Martoi like a fey court with a particular obsession with treachery.


The gray proctors are probably my favorite part of this one, if players haven't figured out what's going on with the veil by the time they get to the gates, I think there's potential for a truly horrible realization.