Interest Gauge: City of Mist Game
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Just checking in to see how much interest there'd be in this concept before I devote time and resources to it, usual disclaimers apply, nothing may ever come of this, yadda yadda.
City of Mist is a new RPG based on the Powered by the Apocalypse system, which is really simple, popular, and fun.
The default setting is kinda-sorta Scion meets Changeling the Dreaming -- certain people become channels for legendary powers and figures with a built-in mystical Veil (the Mist) for mortals that hides all the supernatural shenanigans. Characters can basically be anything; the example sheets include a fox-spirit ninja, a lady with a magical shapeshifting weapon, a gadgeteer zombie, a pyrokinetic, a giant Hulk-like beast dude, while the book mentions characters as literal avatars of the gods like Thor or mystical creatures like dragons, like it's just whatever you want really.
What I'm envisioning is the 1980's "neon noir" setting briefly outlined in the book, with a restricted theme for players to draw inspiration for their characters (so it's not QUITE as insane fever-dream as some of the above seems, lel); think cult classics like Lost Boys, Highlander, or the Howling, or modern sources like Stranger Things, with sort of an amped-up Hotline Miami feel.
What I'd like is feedback on the system, suggestions on how something like this might be run, and suggestions for location and flavor. Not really looking for help yet. GO!
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This sounds really neat, and I'm always excited for non-WoD urban fantasy. I'd give it a look at least.
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I've mentioned this before, but the 1st edition 7Th Sea had a player survey in the back, where players rated their interest in a list of topics (like warfare, intrigue, espionage, romance). While I am sure that might be useful in that form for this, it might be a good way to assess interest in what unites the players as group, by taking the suggestions they have in the book, adding in ones you think would be cool, and taking out ones you aren't interested in.
My feedback on the system is I like the changes to the base PbtA: the way you build Themes about your character, which have Tags, and how instead of attributes you add applicable Tags to rolls that they apply to. I am always a little uneasy about the PbtA use of things like a gun as a tag item.
The meat of the experience will be in how the Moves are written up (and then played out). I haven't gotten into that part yet, but if they are decently designed, or well designed, you'll have enough to power some fun events.
I DO think you want to decide how shenanigansish it will be, perhaps using various movies or TV shows as examples.
EG are we Altered Carbon, Lost Boys, Buffy, Lost Girl, Big Trouble in Little China or Shaolin Soccer?
I have a waggish sense of humor.
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@three-eyed-crow said in Interest Gauge: City of Mist RPG, small MU*/OTT, 80's Supernatural Big City:
This sounds really neat, and I'm always excited for non-WoD urban fantasy. I'd give it a look at least.
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@misadventure said in Interest Gauge: City of Mist RPG, small MU*/OTT, 80's Supernatural Big City:
EG are we Altered Carbon, Lost Boys, Buffy, Lost Girl, Big Trouble in Little China or Shaolin Soccer?
I think the biggest influences I'd want would probably be Big Trouble and Buffy, if they had had the Hotline Miami 2 OST, hahaha.
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@wizz So a setting that seems normal, but if you are in the know it is fairly easy to find some weird stuff going on, strange people, and if you drive down the wrong alleyway you may stumble onto something really bad once upon a time in the west?
I have a waggish sense of humor.
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So non-stop monster-squishing?
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Now it's a race. Now I have to finish my big trouble game.
Zobi will be pleased.
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@lithium Please ... I am so ready for that game to be realized.
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thenomain said in Interest Gauge: City of Mist RPG, small MU*/OTT, 80's Supernatural Big City:
So non-stop monster-squishing?
Angel (the series) had elements of "oh no but it is I, I are monster no!!!" in bucketloads!
There will be some punching and/or kicking at appropriate times though yeah
@misadventure said in Interest Gauge: City of Mist RPG, small MU*/OTT, 80's Supernatural Big City:
@wizz So a setting that seems normal, but if you are in the know it is fairly easy to find some weird stuff going on, strange people, and if you drive down the wrong alleyway you may stumble onto something really bad once upon a time in the west?
Maybe more dangerous than that, y'know kind of Guns 'n' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" instead of just Creepy Smalltown, Ohio.
Like the city is just straight-up a pretty strange place, and dangerous, but it's just a mundane and mortal sort of strange and dangerous on the surface. (Like super strange though, c'mon it is the 80's.) It's not difficult to find the weird if you're a Rift (person who has some balance or imbalance of Mortal and Super in them in a nutshell) and more often the weird just manages to find you. It doesn't matter if you're turning down an alley or driving down Main Street; the minute the Mist starts rising from the ground, you know shit's about to get real spoopy.
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The only thing that turns me off is the 80's, but it doesn't turn me off so much I wouldn't play. I too would like some non-WOD urban fantasy games.
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@wizz oooh, so Miami Vice plus Sunset Strip plus Hollywood plus New York That Never Sleeps, and everywhere you look, if you can see past the Veil, Things and Events are right before your eyes?
I have a waggish sense of humor.
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@misadventure said in Interest Gauge: City of Mist RPG, small MU*/OTT, 80's Supernatural Big City:
@wizz oooh, so Miami Vice plus Sunset Strip plus Hollywood plus New York That Never Sleeps, and everywhere you look, if you can see past the Veil, Things and Events are right before your eyes?
Basically! That's why I think the setting has Dreaming influences, or maybe Lost, or kinda both; the supernatural is all real, characters really are vampires or werewolves or avatars of Thor or King Arthur or zombie cyborgs or whatever, but literally everything is on the other side of the Mist, which is kinda like the Gauntlet if the Gauntlet also randomly just swallowed mortals all the time, even big crowds of them, and forced them to the "other side" briefly before spitting them back out with altered, missing, or patchwork memories.
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So just to bring this thread back from the murky depths, discussion in this thread over here made me consider a conversion of the system away from the default setting to SUPERHEROES!!! instead.
To recap, two issues I can think of:
- You'd need to chop off the "Mist" part of "City of Mist," which refers to the built-in Veil that hides all supernatural activity. This just isn't a very comic booky thing, heroes and villians do their thing (for the most part) in the public eye and even the really weird stuff like three-headed alien monkey-fish from Jupiter are casually acknowledged as real by Joe Everyguy in most series.
- The core of the character revolves around a fluctuating balance of the super and the mundane. You'd need to decide whether this was literal or very abstract and probably need to be willing to do a ton of handwave-fu in either case.
One way I thought of to take on the second issue, from the other thread and including a summary of the mechanics:
Some setting element [means] all characters were supposed to fluctuate between like, street-level and cosmic a la Doctor Manhattan, for example: actually all superpowers do come from A Thing, like some sort of SCIENCE!-y collapse/explosion of an LHC kinda thing that randomly empowers people all over the globe, and the only way heroes don't become weird super-detached godlike assholes (again, late-arc Doc Manhattan) is to maintain their secret identities.
The City of Mist mechanic I'm referring to gives each character four "cards" that represent either a supernatural powerset or a mundane story element that's kind of equivalent to a Chronicles of Darkness Anchor, something that ties the character to mortality. If you lose a mundane card, you gain a supernatural card and vice versa, and your power tier/level/whatever obviously fluctuates depending on how many supernatural vs. how many mundane cards you have. If you lose your last mundane card, your character becomes a completely supernatural entity with no trace of humanity left and basically runs amok as an NPC, and if you lose your last supernatural card you (obvs) become completely mundane and you're stuck on the other side of the Veil.
This COULD be made into something very comic book, ie like how Superman works at the Daily Planet as Clark Kent to both monitor global crises and maintain his ties to people. If he were to lose the job for whatever reason, he'd go sulk in his weird alien Fortress of Solitude and become just a little more out of touch with the people he's supposed to be protecting. (Which, come to think of it, is something I'm pretty sure I regurgitated from the book verbatim as an example they used.)
Not everybody's bag, and that is a very super specific setting that does restrict like ALIENS AND MUTANTS AND GODS or whatever, but it could be cool IMO.Like it? Have a better idea for the adaptation?
Or do you like the original "80's SUPERNATURAL HORROR BONANAGONZA" better?^_______^
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@wizz I love this idea, I'm already enthused to play! Just to confirm - you would be doing all OC too, right? It's not going to be City of DC/Marvel?
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Yep, I'd be all about original content, no licensed characters but familiar archetypes are fine, etc.
I think FC games are kind of played out. -
This thread got me to check out the City of Mist game. The more I read about it the more I dig it.
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It's also somewhat possible to hybridize the two.
I mean, as it is, a lot of people play WoD as 'superheroes with fangs or fur'.
Pretty sure that indicates an audience for something that might be along the lines of a superheroes game, but with supernatural overtones and supernatural sources of powers. You could make a few basic templates of a sort if people want a simple pick-up-and-go for basic creature 'species' of a sort (generic vampire, generic animal shifter, etc.), and allow for more freeform things as well for those willing to crunch it.
As it is, there are characters like John Constantine and Doctor Strange in comics that have a much more mystical/supernatural bent. A society in which these types are 'out of the coffin' could be pretty damn creative and fun, I'd think.
I will admit, it was one of the fun aspects of Darkmetal: supers were known. Hunted/illegal, but known. If stripping out some of the edgelord trenchcoats and katanas and grimdark and cyberpunk from that sort of arrangement? I would think that could be a heck of a lot of fun. (And even some of the edgelord grimdark could be a thing in certain parts of town, etc.) You could create a fairly interesting world out of that pretty easily -- like licenses for being a thing, etc. in a similar fashion to Nigthwatch/Daywatch/etc. as well, and so on.
Oh fucking well.
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@surreality said in Interest Gauge: City of Mist Game:
As it is, there are characters like John Constantine and Doctor Strange in comics that have a much more mystical/supernatural bent. A society in which these types are 'out of the coffin' could be pretty damn creative and fun, I'd think.
I've waffled a lot over the years as to whether or not I enjoy "out of the coffin" urban fantasy/horror settings, but I've come to realize it really is the tone and themes that are the deciding factor. This really would also be a lot of fun and require probably the least justification, since by default the veil in the setting is literal and could just have mysteriously...burned away or whatever, leaving everyone exposed...
..............in a big city
IN THE 1980'S :0 :0 :0
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@wizz ...you know, that really would explain so much about the 1980s when you really think about it.
Could even be semi-regional, like... solid as a rock on the east coast, then you hit the Rockies and it sorta... starts to putter out until you hit the west coast, where it's just gone.
"If there's one thing about Santa Carla I never could stomach, it's all the damn vampires."
Oh fucking well.
