[Cosmic Combat] First play-test

[Jasper Polane]

We did a first play-test of my Ronnies game Cosmic Combat. It was great! The game still needs a lot of work, of course, but I'm happy to know this will be a good game.

You can find the game here: http://www.1km1kt.net/rpg/Cosmic_Combat.php
And my early development thread here: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=17212.0

The players and their characters:

Frans: Arnoldus, the emperor of Earth. He was a medieval knight, and was refused both by Heaven and by Hell after his death. He returned to Earth as a superhero, and took control of the planet when the Existence War reached Earth.
William: Nathaniel v2.1, an angel who was captured by an Entropy Lord and changed into a techno-organical cyborg. he still has some dormant programming that can come to the front to take over his personality and actions.
Jasper: STSP, which stands for Sentient Transport Space Prototype (I think). He's a sentient spaceship, and sees the Entropy Lords as massive battle stations and spaceships, Death Stars and Star Destroyers.
Me (the other Jasper): Astrid, the valkyrie from the Cosmic Combat rules. After the thunder god Thor was killed in battle with an Entropy Lord, she took his hammer Mjolnir.
Jop: The GM. It was nice to have someone else than me running this play-test, and he did a very good job!

After we created characters, Jop presented the mission: An powerful Lord of Entropy, known only as Lord X, wanted to escape from his prison in another dimension, and we had to stop this. We tied Astrid to him by saying he was imprisoned there by Thor, and their battle was the one the thunder god was killed in. William decided Lord X was also the Entropy Lord that captured Nathaniel and gave him his cyberware. This was very cool, because it ended up becoming a big part of the story: The dimensional prison was locked by a photonic field generated by the Runes of Thor, Astrid had one of the runes, and as it turned out, so did Nathaniel, who had stolen the rune from Heaven.

The final showdown between the Incarnates and Entropy Lord X went completely over the top: The moon was pulled out of it's orbit and thrown on Astrid, the planet was thrown into the sun, and finally, the sun went supernova, knocking us unconscious. Cool.

The basic mechanics work very well. We were stumbling a bit in the earlier conflicts, but after we got used to how the game plays, it went pretty smoothly. It was funny to see that even although I wrote the rules, I had to learn how to play it just as everybody else. We've already made many changes and tweaks to the game, and added new rules, some of which we play-tested right away.

I'm definitely going to this game develop this further.

--Jasper

[Graham W]

Excellent. I love the idea of the sun going nova.

Can I ask something? Is the idea of this game that it produces huge, planetary scale battles? Don't get me wrong, these sound like quite a lot of fun.

Because...I'm just saying...there's other ways you could stretch the game. You could use it to do centuries-long battles between gods with grudges against each other. You could use it to do epic end-of-the-universe battles, with evil gods fighting to destroy all mortals and good heroes battling to save them.

But, yes, any game where moons get pulled out of orbit sounds like fun.

Graham

[Jasper Polane]

Hi Graham,

The game's about a war between incredibly powerful characters, with the whole cosmos as the battlefield. One of the players compared it to Dragonball Z, and that's pretty accurate. But it doesn't really matter if this are gods, or enlightened beings, or superheroes. That's for the players to decide.

Is the idea of this game that it produces huge, planetary scale battles?

You mean between huge armies? Not really. The huge scale battles are there, but Incarnates are just so powerful the mortal armies don't effect them very much. As a result, the fights in the game are mostly one-on-one, or between small groups of Incarnates. Much like in other games that includes combat, but with a bigger effects budget.

You could use it to do epic end-of-the-universe battles

The end-of-the-universe idea is part of the game, that's where the valkyrie came from. But I don't want to spell it out to clearly and say "this is Ragnarok" or something like that. I like it much better just to suggest some color, in stead of providing a lot of setting and situation.

--Jasper

[Spooky Fanboy]

Wow, does this remind me of some New Gods/Silver Surfer comics! Y'know, the ones where the superheroes are all at cosmic level and all the conflicts are world-shattering, and the characters are all broadly-drawn and slightly psychedelic.
It really brought a smile to my face when I read that you could wipe out a planet with 1 Matter Die, and then someone else could restore it at the same cost, but all they did to you was lower a stat for awhile.

I hope you work on this some more. There really needs to be more games about being high-powered and cutting loose!

[Jasper Polane]

Hey Spooky,

Thanks for checking out my game!

Wow, does this remind me of some New Gods/Silver Surfer comics! Y'know, the ones where the superheroes are all at cosmic level and all the conflicts are world-shattering, and the characters are all broadly-drawn and slightly psychedelic.

Yes, Silver Surfer was definitely a source of inspiration for the Incarnates, and Galactus would make a very good Entropy Lord.

I hope you work on this some more.

Count on it! I'm very motivated to turn this into a full-fledged game.

--Jasper