Lover of Jet and Gold hides some real story potential

As pretty obvious by now, I am someone who enjoys looking into quirky little role playing games. Unlike my interest in boardgames, I'm not looking for games that I'm planning on playing. Instead, I am interested in the ideas that people come up with and the ways that people tell stories. 

Lover of Jet and Gold is a tiny little RPG that is beautifully written and a little vague about what you're supposed to do. Seriously, not counting the cover and a list of names, the thing is six pages long and I had to read it three times to get a sense of how it was played.

Vaguely set in an Arabian Nights world (although, I can see how you would easily be able to use these ideas in just about any setting), the players are mortals who have an understanding of the power and influence of names. Over the course of the game, they will struggle to survive and to not  be forgotten.

As mortals, the players are doomed to die and to be forgotten. They deal with the names of force is more powerful than them, in order to gain favor and to deal with their enemies. While they will inevitably pass into the sands of time, the players can hope to have a lasting impact on their descendants.

The actual mechanics of the game consist of generating dice pools for your times of trial. Everyone gets to jet (or black) dice that serve as their mortality. You need to deal with powers and their names to get gold dice in order to bulk up your dice pool.

Of course, dealing with a power that has its own desires and interests and agenda is something that could come back and really bite you. If the dice rolls go bad, they may harm you or make new demands of you. Of course, at the same time, if you don't deal with the powers you're only rolling two dice at best and are probably going to fail horribly.

At the same time, along with the jet dice that represent your mortality and your hit points and the gold dice that represent favors from names, you're also trying to accumulate destiny dice. While that you can spend those dice to reroll jet dice, the cool part of destiny dice is that you get to roll them after your inevitable death see what lasting impact you had on the world.

Basically, as the game goes on, you're getting yourself deeper and deeper into the debt of powers that can easily destroy you. However, that's really the only way that you're going to succeed in your trials and the only way that you are going to build up any destiny dice to be remembered. Live a boring life and be immediately forgotten or take terrible risks in order to become a legend.

Lover of Jet and Gold reminds me of two games that I really like. The trial mechanic reminds me of the moves from Apocalypse World, where successes will let you pick from a selection of benefits. The destiny dice reminded of Fiasco, where the dice pool that you're building up for the end of the game will determine what kind of ending you have.

I can easily imagine using this exact same system without any problems with the theme of doom-laden Vikings or stone-age cavemen struggling to understand the world around them or even computer-age hackers. Like so many story telling games, Lover of Jet and Gold really is what you put into it.

The first time I struggled to understand Lover of Jet and Gold, I  thought the language was beautiful but I didn't have a good idea how the game was played. But it was really short so I read a few more times and got a sense of how the game worked.

And now I actually DO want to try this game!

I am worried that a game could get derailed if one player loses all their jet dice and dies long before anyone else dies. I have a feeling that would require some extreme swings of luck but that can happen. Still, there is some potential for good stories in Lover of Jet and Gold.

 http://glyphpress.com/talk/2015/lover-of-jet-gold-roleplaying-bad-ideas-as-a-universal-law

An interesting little Kickstarter about madness and divinity

The Name of God is the Kickstarter project that brings together two things that interest me. Indie style role-playing games and micro games. At its heart, it consists of eight cards that are all you need in order to play the role playing game 

Now, before I say anything else, I want to note that I have never played this game and I actually don't have the strongest idea how to play from the Kickstarter. After all if it is that small, if they actually gave way how to play the game, that would take away some of the incentive for people to actually back Kickstarter.

What I do know is that the Name of God is designed to be played with no GM and minimal setup time. Essentially, pull out the cards and go. Pretty cool if it can pull that off.

The American Gods and Anansi Boys are cited as inspirational works for the names of God. Which is really cool, I like both of those books. Apparently, the players are the homeless and the insane... and they just very might be gods. The idea of starting off as the wretched of the earth, people who are on the very fringe of society and transcending that to become something very special, that could make some great story telling.

Particularly because no one promised a happy ending.

The mechanical side of the game comes from the fetish cards. In this case, we mean fetish like a similar ceremonial objects as opposed to a kinky behavior. These fetish cards grant characters moves like in Apocalypse World. (And its no secret I'm a big fan of Apocalypse World) I don't know if folks hold onto one entire game or if they are interchangeable and get mixed up as players need them.

Now, the cool part is that the stretch goals are more fetish cards. But not by the designer of the game. Instead, each one will be designed by an established indie  game designers. Honestly, if the game is any good, that'll just make it better.

At the very least, The Name of God is a very interesting experiment. And, who knows, it might be fun.

Looking at the increasingly large shadow of Apocalypse World

Over the course of a couple days, I found out that a second rdition of Apocalypse World is getting Kickstarted and I read the short form RPG Crossroads, which uses a streamlined Apocalypse World Engine. 

Crossroads isn't the first game that I have seen that is Powered by Apocalypse and it is far from the most out there. Dream Askew or Murderous Ghosts both do far more experimental things with the system. But reading through it in conjunction with the Kickstarter got me thinking about why the system is just so nifty.

It's hard to pinpoint what makes it's so good. There are elements like characters being made up of qualities, as opposed to statistics. It isn't what you do but why you were doing it that helps determine what stat you use. There is the fact that the only person who ever rolls the dice is the player, never the GM. This all makes the game both narrative driven and player driven.

Oh, in theory, any game can be narrative driven and player driven. But I have seen games that ended up being just about the dice rolls or being controlled by the GM. But the Apocalypse Engine not just encourages it, it makes doing streamlined and easy.

Players can be creative about what they do and one die roll resolves it all.

Crossroads strips away most of the mechanics. It leaves the player making the die rolls and the failure, success and success with a price outcomes.

That last one it's actually something else that makes the engine special. You don't get partial success. You get what you want. You just get a nasty little bonus. It's actually a very important way of doing things. The story keeps on going but things just got a little more complicated. Which actually makes the story better.

Crossroads is based on a web series which I had never heard of called the Booth at the End. There is a man who sits in the last booth in a diner. He can make any wish come true but there's a price. You basically have to do something horrible to get that wish. How far are you willing to go to get what you want? Will you kill someone? Will you plant a bomb in the hospital? What price can you handle? How important is your wish?

As near as I can tell, the only set in the show is the diner. People sit down with the guy and tell them what they want. And later scenes, they come back and give him progress reports. It's all just conversations and flashbacks and decisions.

Which makes it a pretty decent form for a short RPG that should be completed in two hours.

Crossroads comes as a preset scenario with pregenerated characters with pregenerated desires and horrible tasks you can mix-and-match with them. Even under those circumstances, there's a lot of flexibility about how the story will develop.

But, I realized that it wouldn't be hard to come up with new characters with different desires and new horrible tasks. As long as you are willing to stick with the whole premise of the man in the last booth, there's actually some decent replay value here.

Apocalypse World is one of the most impressive RPG systems that I've come across in recent years. I am very impressed with Dungeon World and Monsterhearts, two well thought out uses of the engine. Crossroads, in comparison, is a pretty dinky little application of the engine. And I still think that it has real potential. That says something about the Apocalypse Engine.

http://apocalypse-world.com