From our first update, backers have access to the chapters from the draft manuscript. Chapter 1 is the biggie, of course - it's the Core Rules for Storypath Ultra! If you haven't checked them out yet, you can find all of the updates in the Community section linked at the top of the Crowdfunding page.
Of course, these rules are the how of the game. The where/what/who/why comes when you add them to a setting.
The Storypath Ultra Core Manual will come with three example games - settings plus rules - to showcase how to put your rules options together with your setting. They won’t spell out absolutely everything, but each of them will be a complete game to run for your players. Some room will be left for you to adjust and expand to suit your own taste.
Backers are voting on example setting #2 and #3 during this campaign (you know that already! - Make sure you vote!)
The first example setting is Pinfall from Grace, Body Slams from Hell, which showcases alternative history, supernatural player characters, and a way to add more granularity to combat. Unlike the other chapters, this one also contains a variety of “Under the Mask” sidebars, explaining some of the design decisions of this setting to better illustrate how to create your own Storypath game.
As backers are introduced to new sections of the manuscript, I'll be sharing a few sneak peeks from Pinfall from Grace to serve as examples of the options in action. To set that up, let's dive into the set up for the game...
The Match of the Millennium!
I do things my way. I don’t do things to make people happy or appease them.
- Maxwell Jacob Friedman
Through the ruins of the city walked the ruins of a woman. A year ago, wrestling announcers perched at a folding table might have called Natasha Gray an “empress” when she walked to the ring, but that was before the demons came and the whole world went to hell, literally. Now she wasn’t the empress of anything. Not even her own mind.
<Have we arrived yet, mortal?> The alien, beautiful voice resonated in her skull. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as it did the first time Natasha touched the glowing brand, but the voice was still strangely seductive, like a sore tooth she couldn’t stop probing with her tongue.
“No, Isabell” she said aloud, rubbing the symbol of an angel’s wing that had appeared on her hand weeks ago. “Stop asking.”
<But I sense the enemy is near,> the voice Natasha called “Isabell” insisted. <We should prepare to do battle.>
Natasha started to reply when she realized she was standing in front of what was once a large shopping mall. Through the broken glass doors, she could see most of the storefronts had already been looted. It was only maybe six months since the Y2K problem wrecked computers all over the world, but she’d pissed off enough crowds in bingo halls and gymnasiums to know how fast people can destroy a place when they’re angry and scared, so she wasn’t surprised most of the commercial places were like this.
But this desiccated husk of capitalism isn’t what drew her attention. It was the red-skinned demon wearing a black-and-white striped shirt.
“Welcome, mortal!” the demon proclaimed, as if projecting its voice over a roaring crowd of spectators that weren’t there. It used its elongated tongue to lick its eyebrows before continuing. “Today’s match is one for the ages!”
“Typical booker,” she muttered, shrugging off her trench coat. “Always rushing into things.”
If the demon heard her comments, it ignored them and turned to look at the air around them. “Featuring the challenger, Natasha ‘The Empress’ Gray!”
From the empty air, Natasha could hear boos and jeers from an invisible crowd. She nodded and raised her middle finger in the air, partially at the non-existence audience, but mostly at the small demon. She was used to playing the heel.
At this, the demon pointed behind itself, at an entire wrestling ring that had incongruously been summoned in the middle of a wrecked and broken parking lot. Inside the ring was a towering purple monster with thick ram’s horns on its head and (bafflingly) wearing a black unitard.
The small demon — the referee, Natasha reminded herself — smiled and continued its speech. “And her opponent! It is the ravager of souls! The wrecker of dreams! It is the indigo assassin… Ornar the Obstacle!”
<I did warn you,> Isabell said inside her mind.
Natasha clenched her fists, noticing the brand of the wing on her hand glowed with a piercing white light as she did so. “Stop being such a know-it-all angel and help me pin this monster,” she muttered, slipping a pair of silver knuckles into her boot.
It’s the year 2000, and Y2K was far worse than everyone feared. Not only did it dismantle the computerized infrastructure of the modern world, but it also turned out to be the harbinger for the capital-A Apocalypse… guess the end of the world scenarios were double-booked. Six hundred and sixty-six evil creatures (what you humans call “demons”) invaded the world and took over, establishing a myriad of small fiefdoms, elaborate schemes, and criminal organizations. As a result, Earth has turned into a hellhole, and its resale value is plummeting.
We, the forces opposing them, plan to oust the demons — people like to call us “angels,” and that word works as well as any other. After joining with the souls of humans willing to fight back, our representative brokered a deal with our demonic antagonists: allow us to fight each evil creature in single combat, and if the forces of good manage to defeat all 666, the demons will leave the Earth for good. The demons agreed, but on one condition: such conflicts must be conducted using the method they thought humans most value for conflicts between good and evil. We agreed.
Turns out, that’s professional wrestling. And the demons get to control the referee.
You, my spiritual companion, are a wrestler wandering the world in search of demonic opponents. You’re armed only with your natural athleticism and the powers invested in you by me, your angelic partner — powers you didn’t ask for and can’t entirely control, so sorry about that. It’s up to both of us to take back the Earth, one body slam at a time.
Under the Mask: Setting Fiction Writing fiction for your setting isn’t a requirement, but it can help Storyguides get a better feel for the tone and action they’re going for. Players can also find it useful, along with a short, punchy description of the setting (the kind of text you’d find on the back cover of a published Storypath rulebook). Writing that section “in voice,” as if a character from the world were talking, can also help to cement the feel of the setting in a reader’s mind.
In the Year 2000
Pinfall from Grace, Body Slams from Hellis an alternative historical setting. It takes place in the year 2000, but a version of that year very different from the one in our history.
Two Apocalypses
It all started with a small bit of computer code back in the 1990s. The Y2K (short for “year 2000”) Problem stemmed from the way dates were programmed into many computer systems and software applications. To save memory and storage space, programmers would represent the year in a date with the last two digits instead of the full four, so 1998 would be “98.” But when the year 2000 loomed, “00” could be misinterpreted as 1900 instead of 2000.
It seems like a minor problem, but this small detail caused errors in millions of computations, such as financial calculations and data storage, resulting in malfunctioning software. Essential systems, like those used by banks, utilities, and government agencies, relied on accurate data, so when these systems failed to recognize the correct year, there were disruptions and failures.
In your history, the history of the person reading this, the most significant problems were averted with massive worldwide efforts to update and correct the underlying code before January 1, 2000. However, in the world of Pinfall from Grace, Body Slams from Hell (we’ll call it The Y2K World for clarity), everyone was distracted by a completely different problem: the demons of the Apocalypse.
That is, “demons” are what humans called them, because they sure felt a lot like something from the Bible: Strange spirits appearing and inspiring chaos just as civilization was falling apart. These spirits took over the bodies of six hundred and sixty-six humans, changed them into strange and powerful monsters, and proceeded to give civilization the last shove it needed to topple over.
Most computerized technology ceased working. Major organizations, corporations, and governments lost everything overnight. Financial markets collapsed, and airplanes ceased working (in a few cases, even falling out of the sky when critical systems failed). Oil couldn’t be shipped anywhere, and nuclear reactors ceased working. People died on an unprecedented scale, and it didn’t seem like anyone could stop what everyone assumed was the end of the world.
Throw in rampaging demons and devilishly clever villains, and it wasn’t long before all of civilization was devastated. Now, anything that used a hard drive or a computer chip is dead. Anything that uses electricity or gasoline will work for a while, but eventually the resources to power them will be used up. Currency is worthless, with trade and barter being the only ways left of exchanging goods. Everything has devolved to a technology level of around the mid-20th century, and a societal level more like that of the Middle Ages. And everyone is either armed or knows someone who is, to protect themselves from the human and demonic monsters that dominate what’s left of the planet.
But unbeknownst to most anyone, a different collection of six hundred and sixty-six spirits also appeared at the same time. Unlike the demons, these spirits initially possessed objects rather than people, manifesting as glowing sigils. A human who touched the sigil could communicate with the spirit within, and they would ask the human a single question: “Do you want to save the world?” Those that agreed became possessed by what are now called “angels.”
The angels, like their demonic counterparts, changed the humans they possessed, but in different ways. For one, they didn’t take complete control of their minds, instead preferring to coexist with their human hosts. For another, rather than turning them bodily into monsters, the angels preferred to simply accentuate their host’s form, making it stronger, faster, more attractive, and giving them a keener mind. These (sometimes reluctant) warriors are the only people with the power and know-how to stop the demonic invasion.
The Negotiation
Once both armies had their recruits and the battle lines were drawn, the leader of the angels and the leader of the demons met to discuss terms. Neither side claims to know the name of their respective leader, but both sides agree that, whomever the leaders are, a meeting did happen.
The leader of the angels was the one who got the demons to agree to single combat, and to the condition that if the angelic humans defeated all six hundred and sixty-six opponents, the demons would leave humanity in peace and never return. Granted, given how things evolved, “single combat” is a bit of a misnomer. In truth, the conditions are more complex: The forces on each side must contain an equal number of warriors, each combatant must be a human host to an angelic or demonic spirit (not an unpossessed human), and the size of each force can’t exceed a specific number.
The leader of the demons that required the conflicts to not only adhere to a strict code of honor but said code of honor must be something drawn from the ethos of humanity. Further, they demanded that if they beat the angelic hosts six hundred and sixty-six times, the angels would leave the world to the depravations of the demon invaders.
This was a particularly clever trick, because it wasn’t until after the condition was agreed to that the leader of the angels realized they weren’t bound to the rules of professional wrestling, but to the code of honor of it. And in professional wrestling, the villains of each conflict don’t have any honor at all.
So, these are just some sneak peeks - some excerpts - from our example setting, which we'll see in full in our final manuscript preview on September 23rd. But we'll be visiting this setting many times over the next weeks to showcase some of the possible Paths, some Miracles that characters become capable of, some Relics that characters may gain access to, how matches work, and Storyguide Characters.
Before all of that, we'll get a peek at some of the Character Creation rules for this setting on Saturday.
