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Metatopia 2017 Recap
Brendan went to Metatopia on November 3rd and Armored Society
The goal of this playtest was to try out a new character creation system for Armored Society, Brendan’s PbtA Jane Austen Regency/Game of Thrones-esque mash-up. The system used cards and a set of categories (like Heritage, House, History, Belief, and Burden) to create fully-fleshed out complex characters embedded in the iron-clad world of Serland. The playtests went great, and the tables got to see characters ranging between a soulless royal from far-off lands to a changeling duelist who abandoned house and home for the dangers of the road to an infamous general trying to make up for the crimes of past wars.
Hacking Apocalypse World
Justin Rogers, one of the IGDN Metatopia scholarship winners, joined Brendan to run this repeat of the panel Brendan and Mark ran at RinCon. In one hour they went over holding environments and the core principles of starting up an Apocalypse World hack, then got the audience to help them come up with a theme. They landed on a fun idea to take to next steps—Nightmare on Elm Street meets Murder on the Orient Express, in which the PCs are trapped on a train being killed by some nightmare creature, and have to monitor their own wakefulness or be sucked into deeper dream layers, Inception-style. (No one else can steal that idea.) While the goal of the workshop wasn’t to fully flesh out a new PbtA game, we hope the participants left with a better idea of how the system works, and what goes into hacking it.Halcyon City Adventures
Brendan brought the very earliest prototype of a Masks board game, tentatively titled Halcyon City Adventures, to Metatopia! He got in two games during his scheduled slot, and both were great fun—even as they pointed to the need for plenty of adjustments. Sureshot, Skysong, Toro, and Hornet took down Vanquish twice as he rampaged throughout the city hunting for the Exemplars! It was awesome to see the players get excited as they pulled their cards, especially when they had to deal with their characters’ own unique dilemmas—like Hornet’s mentor Mantis showing up to make her feel inadequate, or Toro being hunted by agents of VENOM hoping to take her down.