Kagematsu

Revisions

Riz — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 08:44:28 +0000

Here you’ll find a record of any changes I make to the public rules text, and the date they were made:

3-16-07: Added a new actof Desperation: “Bribe Kagematsu”

3-16-07: Changed the rule regarding who “calls” for rolls during a Courtship scene; that power used to belong to the village women, but now resides with Kagematsu.

Character Creation

Riz — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 21:46:39 +0000

I said in this post that I was unhappy with the character creation rules. They’re just sort of there, doing the bare minimum to get you into the game. There has to be a better way. I’ll use this thread to brainstorm ideas.

At the very least, character creation (for the villagers anyway) has to produce two values (the Charm and Innocence traits), with numerical values ranging from 0-7. That’s all you really need to play the game. But I want the players to start the game with a little more than that…

Any ideas?

What do I need from you?

Riz — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 11:01:20 +0000

Kagematsu has received a fair amount of playtesting over the past year…just about as much as I can expect from my group of regulars. Thanks to Danielle, it also received a little scrutiny from the GenCon gang last summer. I’m at the point now where I’d like others to give it a pass.

Any comments are useful. Mechanically speaking, I think the dice and numbers are about where they need to be. I’m more concerned now with squeezing the most out of what I have. I want it to sing.

I’m not pleased with the character creation. It’s functional, but uninspired. Suggestions and brainstorming are more than welcome.

The rules for The Confrontation have been drastically re-written and need to be playtested. They look good to me on paper, but I need the melodrama to really come through at that stage of the game. I’m particularly concerned about depriving players of the ability to tell the ending to their character’s story…it’s there to add consequence to the decisions, but is it too big a whammy?

I need to know which parts of the text are unclear. It’s only a playtest document, but even so, I need people to be able to understand it. I’ll be posting examples of play over time, which should help clarify, so let me know which parts specifically need to be elaborated upon.

I’ll have more, which I’ll post in individual threads, but those are the big ones I can remember just now.

Questions?

Riz — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 10:38:08 +0000

I have a lot of questions for you all and I’ll be posting those as I go along. If anyone has any questions of me, post them to this thread and I’ll re-post them as threads of their own so we can discuss.

Who am I?

Riz — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 10:07:21 +0000

Most of you know me as Scott, or hardcoremoose. A whole other section of the internet – and maybe some of them will find their way over here – knows me as Riz, which is short for Charisma, which is a female nome de plume I assumed a number of months ago. At one point I was going to change it, because as names go it’s a bit over the top, but my friends started calling me Riz and it kinda stuck. So there you go.

So why the female nome de plume? About two years ago I stopped fighting the fact that I was transgendered and just started living with it. Although I don’t live fulltime (or anywhere near it) as a woman, it’s been my goal from the beginning to cultivate those parts of my life that would support me in that way. And although the chaos of coming out to my friends, family, and co-workers did, and still does, occupy most of the time I used to devote to the rpg community, I’ve known all along this was something I wanted to celebrate and share through the act of game design.

Even so, I wouldn’t have gotten this far if Paul, Danielle, and Tom hadn’t kept hounding me.

I had planned an entirely different game to be my “coming out” project. But Kagematsu reared its head, and it wasn’t until I had written a first draft that I realized it would be a suitable first publication as well. Interestingly, it might be my swan song too, because I refuse to be one of those people who design games without really participating in the culture…we’ll see, maybe when life calms down, I’ll get my taste for it back.

What is Kagematsu?

Riz — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 22:48:20 +0000

Kagematsu is the role-playing game I’m currently designing.

In it, one person assumes the role of Kagematsu, a wayward samurai who wanders into a village beset by a terrible evil. Everyone else plays the village’s women, who see in Kagematsu a potential savior. The game plays out as a series of romantic (or not-so-romantic) encounters as the women attempt to entice Kagematsu into staying and defending their little village. In the end, they must ply the hope he provides against the thing they fear most, or be lost entirely.

Kagematsu is designed to be played in a single evening. It plays best with around 4 people, and you absolutely can not play it without out at least one female in your group. If you want to playtest it, the rules can be found in the “The Rules” tab up above, or you can e-mail me for a proper pdf document.