Maybe it was because you'd been kicked out of all the other schools, and your parents were at their wits' end. Maybe it was because there were no good schools that your parents could afford, and the offer of full scholarship was a godsend. Maybe it was the promise of 'unequaled academic opportunities' that caught their eye. Maybe it was just because your new stepmom wanted you out of the way and this was the first offer that showed up. Whatever the reason, when the big manila envelope with the fancy school crest and shiny full-color pamphlet arrived in the mail, your parents thought it was the end of all their troubles.
For you, it was just the beginning...
Blackfields Academy. It sounded weird to you from the very first moment you heard about it. For one thing, how come the brochure just showed up in the mail? No-one remembered sending off for it. And why did the pamphlet go on and on about Blackfields being established as 'an institute for better learning', but where it says when it was established, the otherwise picture-perfect brochure is illegibly smudged. For that matter, there no pictures of the Academy, just pages of tiny text that make your head hurt when you look at it for too long. Text about how the school is located near a 'quaint local village' out in the middle of nowhere so there are no 'distractions to impede the shaping of young minds'. And no-one else finds this weird at all! They just smile and talk about how wonderful this is. You've got a bad feeling about this...
* * *
So, Blackfields Academy is my proposed setting for the MaoCT game. All the players are going to be middle school students who have received an invitation to attend the Academy, a high-class boarding school far from home. Once they get there, though, they find out the school is much less pleasant than the brochures made it out to be. There's also something... strange about the whole place. As the game progresses, more and more signs of something seriously weird going on will develop, and secrets will start to come into the light.
Character creation is going to be mostly straight by the book, with a few exceptions. Middle school was chosen as the playing age because that makes the characters old enough to have to deal with more complex issues but still young enough that defying authority figures is a big deal. No-one is going to start out with a monster or any Weird Skills; they'll have opportunities to get those once play starts. The other big difference is how Relationships will be handled.
In MaoCT, Relationships are the personal attachments that mean the most to your character. You can have Relationships with your parents, or your friends, or your favorite action figure, or that girl you've got a crush on. (Relationships don't have to be reciprocal, or healthy.) Each one gets a certain number of dice assigned to it. When you're attempting an action, if it's applicable, you can use your relationship to get that many extra dice for the roll. You can use the relationship as often as you want, as long as you justify it, but if the roll still fails, it messes up the relationship and drops the dice rating, requiring effort to fix.
Normally, characters get 6 dice to apply to relationships, but those characters are in their comfort zone, in constant contact with their family, friends, and familiar surroundings. At Blackfields, the PCs are going to be stuck in a strange environment with people they don't know. To reflect this, they only get 3 dice for their relationships to start with. As they build relationships with xp, becoming more entwined in the social bramble of the school, they'll get more bonus dice to work with, and be caught up in all the machinations of the cliques and teachers.
To have a sense of weirdness from the start, the missing three relationship dice are going to be replaced with 3 dice of Echoes, which are from the Candlewick Manor book. Echoes are like relationships, but instead of people or things, they're memories, fragments images or sounds or smells. They'll be used to give the characters a strange sense of deja vu, a nagging familiarity about parts of the Academy or the surrounding area. As they use Echoes successfully, they'll build up a pool of dice I can use to turn the Echo into a new relationship that pulls the character into the weirder secrets of the school.
Okay, I think that's enough for now. Next time I'll post an example character, and also talk a bit about how I plan to handle monsters.
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