Hi there

I was planning a TSoY campaign set in Near, but then something happened. My group got so fed up with the lack of dice in our Mortal Coil campaign that we decided to switch systems, and since I'd been selling the idea of TSoY and people had been especially fascinated with the keys, we decided to switch to TSoY. So obviously the game is not set in Near, it is modern occult fantasy based roughly on the Hellblazer comics. There is a number of practical problems that we need help with.

First, some of the characters are seriously powerful. One of the PCs is no less than Nicolas Flamel, a 700-years old kabbalistic alchemist. One is a semi-fallen angel that walked with Jesus. One is, perhaps, a human avatar of Wotan, and one seems to be a son of Mars, the roman god of war. So, how many advances are a lot? 30? 40? 50? How many have your characters racked up towards the end of a campaign? I had an idea for dealing with ridiculous amounts of life experience for really old characters via a variant of the Elf Secret of Past Lives, but they still need to be seriously competent.

Second, we need really flexible magic which fits the flavour of the campaign, and which can be pretty freely expanded on the fly. A good deal of it will be simply powerful but expensive specific Secrets, but for stuff that needs an Ability to take part in a mechanical conflict, I was thinking something like this: A central ability represents the magical tradition, be it kaballah, seithr (Norse style sorcery) or demonology. In purely magical conflicts, these can clash and fray directly, but when you are trying to do something practical that would tend to fall under the purview of some other general ability, you use the magical tradition to generate bonus dice for the actual skill. Example: Carl von Erzwald brews a magical potion that changes his appearance (a specific Secret), in order to use it as a disguise. So, he pays some Pool price for attempting the otherwise impossible feat of disguising a great big old man as a fifteen-years old girl, and then uses his Seithr ability to generate bonus dice for his Deceit ability, which will then oppose the Discern Truth ability of whoever he's trying to fool. Does this sound sensible?

I will probably come up with more questions soon.

Yours, and hopefully

Troels

There's been discussion of high-powered campaigns before... ah, here.

My take on it is that high power compared to mortal men should be modeled through the system, preferably by organically growing such a character. If we're talking really high levels like you're doing here, the trick is to elevate characters with individual Secrets and Abilities qualitatively above the mortal level. Make these Secrets cost serious Pool and make sure to not slip in any "general" auto-win stuff. The central theme of almost all American metahuman fiction is the conceit that the metahuman, despite his powers, can still be swayed in his heart by a mere mortal. So think carefully before putting in something like a Secret that makes the character immune to social Abilities.

Ideally the way you'd re-stat your characters would be a communal story-telling hour: sit down and start reminiscing about what you know of each other's characters. Add statistics to the characters as you go, inventing Secrets, Keys and Abilities as you need them. Do not care about the number of Advances, it's no big deal if one character ends up with more or less than another one. You will probably not be able to add more than around 50 advances anyway.

The only actual change to the rules I would do for a high-level campaign would be to make the cost of raising a Pool scale: +1 to the cost for each full ten points you already have, instead of topping it out at 2 per.

Some examples of the scale and type of stuff I might use to depict the character concepts you mention:

• An immortal kabbalistic alchemist might have his Reason Pool at around 20, while all the semi-gods sound like all of their Pools would be around 20-30.
• An ancient being with immense knowledge, like that kabbalist, probably doesn't have a specified, long list of known recipes or whatever. Rather, he'd have a Secret of the Ancient Master that allows him to set aside Advances for spontaneously buying any Secret of a certain type after a bit of perusing his library, a successful ability check and some Pool. He might also have another Secret that allows him to "remove" such a Secret to regain the Advance for investing it elsewhere. This way you don't have to pin him down at the beginning, and can just create any effect he wants when he wants it.
• Less fiddly powers that need to have a qualitative feel that just sweeps over minor resistance can be done as flat-priced special attacks. I might consider a simple "Secret of Evoking Divinity" at 10 Pool that'd allow a character to strip the opposing stakes from the next conflict altogether (replacing them with "I stop this god-guy from immediately succeeding in whatever he's doing"). Perhaps another Secret called "Secret of Immense Power (Ability)" at 3 Pool that forces the opposition to resist with a Passive ability in any one check made with the named Ability. Just putting in those two and high Pools is pretty much enough for a given character to evoke a divine style without completely overrunning lesser folks. (Also consider what happens when two gods meet with those; pretty interesting.)
• If your style is more earth-bound than the above might suggest, just use lower Pools. If a character isn't supposed to ever get crazy and call lightning, just put him down at around 5-10 Pool each, like a normal TSOY character. It's better to use Pool expenditure as a gauge of power scope than a Secret chain, say, because the latter is so much more difficult to balance.
• Lots of interesting qualitative Secrets. I'd have a "Secret of Immortality" or perhaps several different ones, a "Secret of Having Walked with Christ", "Secret of Wotanhead" and so on, each with their own effects. This is what TSOY does as a system.

Ah, one important point: the default Pools work pretty well for your genre, but you might also consider using "Traditional", "Modern" and "Talent" as the Pools, or some such, depending on how you view the genre. TSOY will regardless be largely about the frailty of metahuman hearts, but picking the right Pools with their associated refreshment methods will color the topic greatly.

As for your suggested magic system, it seems solid to me!

Thanks Eero, thats really good!

The characters aren't four-colour superheroes who can flatten buildings with their bare hands. They probably could flatten buildings with a little preparation and ritual, though. Looking at your post, I guess I'd tend to put their high pools in the teens and their low pools in the ordinary range, though possibly in the high end of it. I like Evoking Divinity and Immense Power, and it creeps me out to think what our game master could do with it... Now, your remark about frail metahuman hearts is spot on. That's very much what we're going for. The Secret of the Ancient Master is a cool, and actually, that's the part of Mortal Coil that we'll keep. Hmm, I had thought of buying Secrets that you "really had all along", but a mechanic for getting rid of them again is a good idea, this should make it unnecessary to drown everyone under a flood of advances from the get-go, so thanks again.

Now, next question:

How do you handle characters of different power levels in the same group, when intragroup intrigue is a distinct possibility (I'd say that about a third of all conflicts in the game is PvP)? In the pre-conversion game, we had a house rule allowing the players of the younger characters more aggressive narrative authority, or a small conflict bonus after the tokens were revealed. Example: Josie March the businesswoman demonologist walks into her apartment and is jumped by cultists who want to kidnap her. The player expends a "plot point" and sets a brief flashback scene, in which we see the cultists falling afoul of subtle spells of warding that warn Josie of their presence. Cutting back to the action, we now know that she is aware of their ambush and has a plan. The oldies had one per session, the newbies had three.

Now, the characters don't have to be meticulously balanced, but sort of generally. Aggressive scene-setting is fun and I'd be inclined to recommend that the group keep that part. As for the conflict bonus function, how about this: Each point lets you give one side of a conflict (normally those opposing) a penalty die. The thinking here is that there seems to be lots of bonus dice floating around already, but not many penalty dice. Also, this will be specifically useful for conflicts, not for mere ability checks, underscoring the aggressive function and avoiding getting the rule tangled up with the friendly, back-patting Gift of Dice rule. Does this sound like it would be interesting and workable in TSoY?

Troels

Troels wrote:
How do you handle characters of different power levels in the same group, when intragroup intrigue is a distinct possibility (I'd say that about a third of all conflicts in the game is PvP)?

Yay!

This makes so much sense! The game is very much about destiny (and transcendence too, but that's for another day). And given how many advances these destiny-related matters can swallow, the oldies and the newbies might not even that far apart in number of advances. I heard your rant, mind you! The purpose of the plot point thing hasn't been to let the young ones slug it out with the ancient masters, and where that has happened so far, the young ones have tended to come out second best. The purpose is to keep them from getting sidelined, or from ending up in parallel kiddie-pool plotlines, and it does that. Your destiny rules integrate the function into the general rules, and hook up with the themes of the campaign rather better than what we already had, so like I said, yay!

We should have enough to get started, now. I may be back in a panic in ten days time or so...

Troels

Let us know how it goes. It's always fun to hear how people might field-test my musings. For all I know this stuff bombs horribly for you, but it's a lesson anyway, eh.

I will. And by the way, the campaign seems to have acquired a name:

The Shadow of Mortal Coil

Heh!

So far, it seems to be working very well. My ageless seithr-master Carl may have 89 years and 20 advances on young Beatrice, but she's got me by the Key of Unrequited Love, and so far Carl doesn't seem to be the one wearing the trousers. But I'm getting very nice XP out of it, not to mention a quite decent roleplaying experience. Those Keys really focus the game in an amazing way.

So far, we haven't brought much of the destiny-related crunch into play, but when it gets up and running, I'll post some AP. We have had one Destiny Pool activated by a portent. Poor Josie, who had just been roughed up by her demon possessed loser ex, was having a pint or ten down at the pub (Refreshing Vigor), when Beatrice (another PC, a hot-tempered young Blood Sorceress) cursed whoever was responsible for getting her brother lost in dreams with a curse to change anything they drank into blood. And poor Josie's lager turned into blood in her mouth. Hey, way cool portent!  Even if it technically resulted from a PC action.

It's looking good.

I am a fellow player, and I must say, so far it has been quite satisfying using the TSOY-rules. The keys function rather well, allowing the players to add themes into the scenes, as they're being awarded by XP for it.

So far - second TSOY-based session - we still haven't used the Destiny rules much (besides the one scene, Troels refers to), but the ability to temporarily buy secrets and then buy them off functions rather well, and suits the campaigns style with creating new magical facts on the fly.

For example Troels' character Carl is battling two fly demons, and (since we keep using flashback scenes and interludes) it was possible for Beatrice's player to define her bloodmagic to create a scrying pool using the targets blood (in this case Carl's blod), and then influencing the target or the targets surroundings using bloodmagic, so she could make assisted rolls increasing Carls chances of succes.

With these positive experiences I gonna try and convert TSOY to the Transhuman Space-setting since GURPS ain't my cup of tea.