Zombies, Magic & Mere Mortals

[Brother]

Concerning the important part magic has to play in MC, I was wondering how you would go about playing in a setting where the characters are 'ordinary' folk, trying to survive a Zombie apocalypse? How would you juggle the magic v ordinary issue?

Thanks

[Brother]

I guess another way of looking at it is, what else could the magic tokens be used for?

For an extreme example, lets say I was using MC to run a straight world war 2 campaign, nothing magical and nothing remotely supernatural. We still have the four tokens:

Action Tokens = For conflicts by adding to Faculty + Aptitude totals

Passion Token = For extra potency 

Power Tokens = The big guns, used for all kinds of things

Magic Tokens = ?

Would the game be ruined because of the mechincs the magic toksns offer, or would it be ruined because no magic tokens simply means no magic in the game? i ask this because, if all players agree the session will have no magic in it, wouldn't the game be just as enjoyable anyway?

[Brennan Taylor]

Hi, sorry for the late reply!

Well, I usually say that Mortal Coil can be used to play any setting so long as there is magic in it. If you want to use the rules to play a game without magic, you are losing a lot of the cool world-building that Mortal Coil produces. You could certainly do it, I think the rest of the system would hold up, but that kind of misses the point of the game.

As far as a zombie apocalypse game, you can play Mortal Coil with player characters who have no magic whatsoever. That works fine. The player's magic tokens are all about creating facts about zombies now, instead. I'd definitely go with a low magic level for this one or else it would get pretty wacky.