Let's Read: Coyote & Crow

[deaddmwalking]

In March 2021, Connor Alexander, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation launched a Kickstarter campaign for Coyote & Crow, A science fiction and fantasy tabletop RPG set in a near-future where the Americas were never colonized, created by a team of Natives.

I'm not one that pay a lot of attention to Kickstarter, but I saw Coyote & Crow mentioned by people who love to say 'get woke, go broke'. It was immediately apparent that these types of people objected to the game because it tried to create a platform for Native artists and recognizing that people might have a different perspective on their own cultures than those of outsiders is something that these people can't accept. Not only do they not recognize that cultural appropriation and/or cultural insensitivity are possible, they believe that promoting a voice to ensure diversity is itself racist. No, in their mind, the only way to avoid racism is to continue letting people who look like them imagine worlds that look different from our own.



Pictured: Not Racism

In reading about Coyote & Crow I learned that it imagines an alternate timeline which a major disaster that wreaked havoc with Europe ~1500. As a result, colonization didn't happen. Seven hundred years have passed and we're now in an alternate future. While the idea that a future that doesn't have Europeans as speculative fiction is already a bridge too far for some of these people, Connor Alexander also had advice for players. For native players, he suggested they use the fictional culture presented in the book since this isn't focused on real-world tribal issues and 700 years is a lot of alternate history but if they really wanted to imagine their culture in this world, they should go ahead and do that. On the other hand, he asked that non-Native players avoid bringing in real-world cultures because they wouldn't look the same, and it's very easy to create a racist caricature even without meaning to.



Or deliberately, intent can be hard to read


In any case, hearing people seriously argue that a suggestion to play the game in a way that is respectful to real world cultures is exactly like segregated water fountains certainly made me curious about the game. While science fantasy isn't my preferred flavor, and I have a game that I play with my friends that fills my gaming needs, I decided $76.42 was worth it to actually take a look at the game. Since the game book supports the creator and Native Artists, the author did suggest that there was value in buying it even if you didn't intend to play. Obviously if you believe that promoting diverse voices artistically is the problem, that statement was guaranteed to generate blind, frothing rage. It is ridiculous.

Of course, just because something may have cultural and artistic value doesn't necessarily mean it's a good Table Top Roleplaying Game. Designing a game is really hard, and there are a lot of potential mis-steps. My book is scheduled for delivery today, so I'm beginning my review sight unseen. My goal is to be honest about what I like, what I see as problems, and how much mind-caulk the game requires to play. What I'm going to try to avoid is spending a lot of time explaining why suggesting you not make your character greet everyone with 'How, White Man' plays to negative stereotypes and why the game suggests you avoid things along those lines.

The game is clear that we're getting a fictional Native Culture that is not a stand-in for any particular culture, so I'm probably going to talk about that culture to a significant degree during the course of the review. For those of you who are interested in learning more about Coyote & Crow outside of my review, here are some links that may be helpful:

Coyote & Crow Kickstarter
Coyote & Crow Website - This includes blog posts, including asking people to try the game. Some people don't like that.
Coyote & Crow Core Book at Amazon

Since I didn't participate in the Kickstarter, I'm not able to view backer comments and involve myself in the discussion. Outside of people insisting this is or isn't racist, there appears to be a bit of a kerfluffle regarding donated books. As part of the Kickstarter Connor allowed people to purchase additional books for distribution to Native Reservations and Cultural Centers. They received more than 5000 donations. They didn't expect to have that level of support, and it is not even clear that there are 5,000 places to send those donations. It's also very clear that sending 5,000 donations is more expensive in terms of shipping than they estimated. There are some other issues that are normal for any business (see blog posts if you care), so Connor is asking for patience while this gets worked out. Presumably some people are upset that their donated items haven't reached the intended recipient yet, but as far as I can tell there was no firm date for expected delivery and the only people who seem to care are the people who want this product to fail because it makes them uncomfortable that it specifically promotes Native voices.

Doing a Kickstarter, raising over $1 Million, successfully producing and distributing books to backers - that's all gone well, apparently, which is a bit surprising given that this is a first-time Kickstarter and there's a lot involved. The Coyote & Crow Team is releasing a new Crowd-Funding Campaign on Backerkit that launches 9/13. With any luck, I'll have completed this review before then!

[deaddmwalking]

And my book has arrived!



The thing is massive. It feels a textboox. The cover is 8 1/2x11 and it's over an inch thick. The binding appears to be well-made, so I don't think that I'm going to have major issues with sections of the book falling out. Each section ~20 pages is individually folded/glued and it looks like there are ~14 stitches for each folio, so it's likely to hold up. There are 472 numbered pages. The text is quite large.

Inside the cover there are credits for the writing, additional writing, layout, editing, language development, maps, design, sensitivity consulting and additional rules development. It appears that credited artists that have a tribal affiliation are noted.

On the next page are art credits, web design, mobile app, play test leaders, and play testers. There are at least 33 play testers, and it doesn't look like they're all Connor's parents and siblings.

The initial impression is that this is a professional caliber-work. If we've learned anything from Paizo, having professional-level quality and good art can do a lot of heavy lifting.

The Table of Contents breaks the book into Four Sections:

Section 1 - Welcome to Another World (8 chapters)
Section 2 - Crafting Your Hero (3 chapters)
Section 3 - Rules of the Game (3 chapters)
Section 4 - For the Story Guide (6 chapters)

There are four additional chapters that don't seem to fit, but aren't given their own section. This includes Final Notes, a fictional language glossary, game terms glossary, and the Index.

[deaddmwalking]

Section 1 - Welcome To Another World
Chapter 1 - Maya's Lesson
The first chapter is an in-character story about a young girl trying (and failing) to achieve a culturally significant action (catching a deer on the run) using techno-magic boots, followed by her father telling her the story of Coyote & Crow. The story essentially involves the two animals distributing the gifts of the Great Spirit to humanity, but Coyote, being a trickster, doesn't give the gifts evenly or fairly, while Crow does. The fiction specifically references a 'purple seed' called Adanadi which is not directly defined in the story, but is in the glossary. Adanadi is an Exterrestial lifeform harnessed for bioenginnering from a Kitowayapi loanword meaning 'gift'. It appears that is the techno-magic that underlies the setting like Vibranimum in Wakanda.




I haven't gotten to any game rule information, but I'm pretty sure making characters like Black Panther is where we're supposed to be heading.
I approve.
Following the fiction is the message to players (100% reproduced on his blog at addressing cultural appropriation.

Chapter 3 is the obligatory 'introduction to Role Playing'. This game 'is set in an alternate future, different from ours, where Europe never colonized the Americas, and what we consider Indigeneous cultures blossomed into technologically advanced civilizations. This game uses 'Story Guide' as the title for Mister Cavern and Player Character for the player. The game indicates that creating a Story is the goal, and a set of related sessions composes a Saga (as opposed to D&D campaign). The dice used are 12d12 (9 white, 3 black); dice for this game are available for sale, and there is a free mobile app.

I think that one section on the role of the player deserves being highlighted. While players should strive to be true to their characters, it should never be at the cost of the enjoyment of the group. The Story Guide may be the overall referee of the group, but all are responsible for doing their part to ensure that everyone has a good time.




Or as I like to call it, the no Kender Rule

Chapter 4 discusses Roleplaying in the World of Coyote & Crow. It's set in an alternate history where a massive meteor struck the planet around 1400 that caused a climate disaster (as well as introducing alien matter). This book is focused on North America so stays silent (here) on what is happening in other parts of the world. As a result of the alternate timeline, many things we take for granted as part of the modern world (cars, guns, fossil fuels), just don't exist.




Oh, what we've lost! The chapter includes a map of North America (presented with South as up) to encourage people to think of the world differently and a timeline covering the last 700 years. Most of the entries cover decades; the two seemingly most important things are that some people take a concentrated form of Adanadi to gain special powers (X-men style evolution, I guess) and that North America is organized into 5-Nations.

Chapter 5 provides a gazateer. It starts on page 28 and ends on page 97 so it makes up about 1/6 of the total book and 2x more reading than I've had to do up to this point. So that's where we'll pick up next!

[deaddmwalking]

Chapters 5 & 6

As mentioned above, Chapter 5 is almost 70 pages long; Chapter 6 is all of 2 pages. All through Chapter 5 I kept wondering where was the information that I wanted most - and it was in Chapter 6. But I'm being coy, let's talk about the world and it's setting!

Roughly half of Chapter 5 talks about a major city that is the assumed starting point for adventures. The City is called Cahokia; it is located approximately where St. Louis is in the real world. The chapter includes a 2-page full-color map of the city; this is zoomed out to the point that individual buildings look like dots. The larger map includes a dozen 'zoomed in' areas on the edge where ou can se the shape of individual buildings. I'm very interested in cartography and this is a professional, but uninspired, city map. Basically it looks like the kind of thing you can make yourself with low-cost tools for mapping/automatic city generation and a little work. So basically, it's something that you're not likely to do better on your own and it basically does what you need it to do. BUT, it does one thing that just really annoys the heck out of me. The map includes 40 numbered locations. There is kinda, sorta, a pattern about where the numbers are located, but not really. One is in the top left corner, then 2 is in the bottom right corner, then 3 is in the top right corner, then 4-8 are basically in the same spot, but we jump across the map to 9, then back to where we were with 10-11. Basically, finding ANYTHING on the map is unnecessarily hard. When you're creating a map for your gaming material, you can choose where you put the numbers. And you can put the numbers in order like left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Since the map covers a relatively big area, they could have also assigned each region a designation (like A) and then numbered A1-A10, then B1-B12; then looking up a item would automatically tell you where it should be.




The only reason for a bad map is because it is funny
In any case, the only reason I bitch about bad maps is because I CARE, and the additional investment in time and energy would have been MINIMAL and would have made it more useful. This map and the associated key, as bare-bones and barely adequate as they are, are also included in poster form glued to the inside back cover. Moving on!

Some people have complained that the world, as presented in Coyote & Crow, appears to be an idealic Utopia, without conflict or room for adventure. It is portrayed as a post-scarcity society where there is sufficient food, housing, and socialized medicine that the focus isn't on day to day survival. Now I disagree with that assessment. If it were true, nobody could Role-Play in the World of Star-Trek.




I guess some people just get triggered when you say people aren't at risk of starving to death, even if they choose not to work. So if basic survival isn't the major focus, and things like sexuality, child bearing, gender roles, etc are not major areas of contention (you know, culture warrior stuff that comes up ALL THE DAMN TIME), where are the seeds of conflict? While the chapter doesn't really focus on conflicts, it definitely lays out some areas of tension that can become conflicts. A big one is the desires of the younger generation versus the elders (who are experiencing significantly increased life-expectancy), and issues with adoption of technology versus other ways. And of course, there are five major political groups in North America that have a history of conflict and cooperation (including outright war) that's always ripe for turning into issues in the future.

With the chapter primarily focused on giving an overview of the world and high level information on the social, political, and economic underpinnings it doesn't do a lot to explain what adventuring actually looks like (yet). One thing it does mention is a character role called a Suyata, which is similar to a Marshall - you're empowered to go out and enforce the laws while not actually being directly subject to the laws yourself. It's pretty clear just from a casual reading that would be one way to create a PC party to go deal with some crazy shit happening anywhere for any reason. They even often travel in groups.

There's significant amount of art of mixed quality, but it is all professionally laid out. The art generally does a good job of showing a future-aesthetic; this is more Jetsons than Dances with Wolves, which is helpful because there's passing reference to things like hover-technology and variable-gravity sports arenas, but there's also talk about growing corn, gourds, and beans together (3 Sister cultivation). I think when you're talking about alternate history, especially with magi-tech, there's lots of room for deciding whether the balance is right - but that's a matter of taste. Not everyone likes lightning trains in Eberron, but they're a setting conceit. This book makes similar aesthetic choices that some people think sound too 'Utopian' and probably other people think don't sound Utopian enough.

For my purposes, the world, as described, sounds plausible, and it sounds like there's at least enough setting information to serve as a useful backdrop for building adventures as we delve further.

Chapter 6 - Languages & Communication

Current scholarship indicates that North American native tribes did not have writing systems at the time of European contact. The Coyote & Crow world posits that the North American Natives acquired writing from the South (Mexico & Central America). This seems plausible. Further, the book indicates that rather than an alphabet, they would use a syllabary.

Over centuries, what has emerged is a relatively standardized alphasyllabary. Like the Azayang system, each syllable is represented by a single character. In this system, there are characters for each consonant, which take on small alterations based on the vowel that follows. This means Chahi is writte with just 20 base characters, which can each take on one of three permutations, with an additional marker indicating if a sylable's vowel is long or short. There are also three rarerly used stand-alone symbols for vowels. Each of the characters Chahi uses have diverse origins - some are adapted from Azayang glyps, others are taken from Plains Sign Language symbols, and others emerged from pictographic rock paintings or birch scroll bite-markings

That's some potentially evocative world building stuff, there. You know what would be really helpful? Having the 20-23 symbols that they use.

Now, I happen to live close to the birthplace of Sequoyah, who invented a syllabary for Cherokee, and that's something I've spent some time and effort learning about. Since he largely took symbols that existed and ascribed new sounds to them, it certainly wouldn't be appropriate to just use his syllabary. On the other hand, he had 86 symbols. What it means to me is that there probably aren't enough symbols described in this system to create a syllabary for a real indigenous language, therefore there probably aren't enough symbols to do a syllabary for multiple indigenous languages.

Coming up with 20+ symbols for your fictional game language is hard, but not THAT hard. Using diacritical marks to cover more sounds with the same number of symbols potentially makes that easier. With the emphasis on the Chahi language, providing the symbols and their sounds, maybe a few example words written in Chahi would certainly have been appropriate.


We all have a debt to Tolkien, and he set the bar REAL HIGH when it comes to fantasy languages. Some people take this stuff very seriously
So we're about 25% of the way through the book. So far we've been focused almost exclusively on 'setting information' or 'fluff'. We've got two more chapters in that vein - one on the magic-tech that makes the setting 'work' and a deeper dive into the technology that it creates. This is important to the setting, and it helps inform whether the game mechanics support or detract from the setting assumptions. Just about any aesthetic choice can be justified so I'm describing what choices have been made, but I don't really have any issues or concerns with them - when we get to mechanics, I'm expecting to have a lot stronger opinions.

[deaddmwalking]

Chapter 7 - The Adanadi

So this setting goes with the conceit that there's a special miracle material that has reshaped the world. When given to people, there's a 20% chance that they develop a special talent or ability, but it doesn't do anything for most people. It also powers magi-tech, including anti-gravity. This could be anything, like Vibranium, or even Flubber.


Is this a culturally relevant example?
It's a McGuffin; it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny, but that's okay; lots of science fiction is about 'what would the world be like if we had this technology' versus 'what would it take to make that technology work'. It's interesting to me that Jules Verne thought of himself as a Science-Fiction writer because he tried to figure out how the technology could work and imagine it being used, versus H.G. Wells who just imagined a bunch of magic-crystals and you have a time machine. So this is not hard-sci-fi. Which is fine. But some people care, so I thought you should know.

Chapter 8 - Technology

Knowing that technology is different is one thing, and knowing that they have a magic-tech substance that drives it is one thing, but knowing what actual technology they have and how it impacts the world is different. Chapter 8 covers in 7 pages what those technologies are.

Yutsu Lift Technology - Anti-gravity makes things fly. That's how most people get around. There are no roads, no cars, so flying boats.

Second Eyes - These are Google Smart Glasses that can tell you about the world around you. Because each nation is suspicious of each other, you can't use the tech in the wrong nation. But you can totally watch video recordings (but people only do that by themselves, never in company).

Gats are 3-D printers, and basically everything you need can be printed on demand.

Niisi are forearm mounted tablets. They have the same limitations as Second Eyes in that you can only access fragmented networks that correspond to your level of access.

Space - People don't fly that high. I'm a little sad.



Ever since watching History of the World I've been waiting for Part 2 to become reality
Jews in Space

In any case when I think a magi-punk sci-fi setting, I often imagine that interplanetary travel might be a part of that. But ultimately, connecting the entire globe via high-altitude travel doesn't fit with the setting where the other major continents are disconnected and what's happening there is a mystery. But maybe in a future 'far-future' expansion?


That wraps up Section 1. Next up we'll move on to Section 2 starting with Character Creation.

[pragma]

Thanks for reviewing this. I've kept an eye on it from a distance, and I'm excited to hear your takes after close reading.

[Zaranthan]

I'm pretty hyped about this, and somewhat annoyed that this is the first I'm hearing about it. I'm a huge fan of both "twenty minutes into the future soft sci-fi" and "alternate history that blows up Europe", so the game is pushing a lot of the right buttons for me out of the gate.

I'm also finding it hilarious that less than half an hour ago, I was arguing with somebody about the difference between the scene in Peter Pan and a white person making a dream catcher for their niece. Damn world gets smaller every day.

[deaddmwalking]

So in 1989 TSR released a character folio for $8.95. I think there were 15 character sheets in it, and the inflation calculator I used online says that's the equivalent of $19.11. I know because I bought at least one, maybe more. A lot of places wouldn't let you make photocopies, either, and if they did, they might cost about the same. Things are different, today. Publishers make high quality character sheets available for free. You can download a Coyote and Crow character sheet at:

https://coyoteandcrow.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/CoyoteCrowFormFillableCharacterSheet-v1.01.pdf

The reason I bring it up is that looking at the character sheet might help with the following about creating a character. The book suggests 14 steps to character creation (not in the order they appear on the character sheet).

They are:
1) Choose a Motivation
2) Choose an Archetype
3) Choose your Age and Other Identifiers
4) Choose a Path
5) Receive Starting Character Points (5 points for Gifts/Burdens, 42 for Stats, 42 for Skills)
6) Choose Gifts/Burdens
7) Determine Stats
8) Choose Skills
9) Choose an Ability
10) Equipment
11) Derived Stats
12) Create a background
13) Determine Goals
14) Choose a Name




My class is elf




In D&D, players traditionally pick a race, then a class, but class drives MOST FEATURES of the game. So a Dwarf Fighter and a Human Fighter really have a lot more in common than a Dwarf Cleric and a Dwarf Fighter do. So does Coyote & Crow lay out a character creation method that makes at least as much sense?

I think so.

Since the game wants to emphasize story, choosing a motivation makes sense. Mechanically, if you can show that you're acting consistently with your motivation you receive +1 success (and I don't know what that means yet), and if you're acting against your motivation, you lose 1 success (as determined by the Story Guide). Example Motivations include Acceptance, Curiosity, Revenge and a twenty others. Some could be seen as self-serving and others are not. In the sense that having a primary pursuit is helpful in driving action, this seems like a justifiable place to start. But other than potentially rewarding you/penalizing you when your motivation and actions don't align, this is just a player choice. There are ways to change your underlying motivation, but they're not easy and require fulfilling a quest objective. So if you're motivated by love, but then your love interest dies, I presume you'll be able to replace love with Revenge. But I won't know until I read another 200 pages.

Archetypes provide a Stat Bonus, a Skill Bonus, and to help define a character. In that sense, it seems a lot like D&D One's Backgrounds. There are six Archetypes, each providing a +1 bonus to one attribute. There are actually nine attributes in the game, so there are three attributes that don't have an associated class. The three attributes that don't have an archetype that plays to them are Endurance, Wisdom and Will. Warriors get +1 Strength, Tinkerers get +1 Intelligence. Each archetype gives you a choice to spend a bonus skill. Warriors can choose either Unarmed Combat or Melee Weapons; a Tinkerer can choose either Specialized Knowledge or Crafting.

There are 15 Paths to choose from, each associated with an animal, such as the Path of the Eagle or the Path of the Snake. Each path gives you a bonus to two attributes and access to a a special power. The book implies that there can be other paths, which is probably a good thing. For example, there are two paths that offer Strength as a related Stat (you get a bonus to Strength and Wisdom for one, and Strength and Will for the other). If you wanted a path that offered a bonus to Strength and Perception, you'd have to make your own. Each Special Power is associated with an ability, so if you choose a path with Strength and Wisdom, you may choose either a Strength or a Wisdom power (you only get one).





STRENGTH POWER sounds a little redundant, but I promise it makes sense in context




Now I don't know if there's a reason you might want a character that has Strength and Endurance as opposed to the options presented, but I do know that people really like certain animals, and while the fifteen available paths is a good list, it is NOT a comprehensive list. The animals available are: Badger, Bear, Beaver, Bison, Coyote, Crow, Deer, Eagle, Falcon, Fox, Owl, Raccoon, Salmon, Snake, Spider. So you know that guy in your group that wears a wolf shirt everywhere he goes?




You know, this one




Let's just say that I anticipate that there's going to be a need to expand the paths for one reason or another. No reason you CAN'T - in fact it suggests that there are additional paths. With 9 attributes I'm pretty sure that works out to 36 potential combinations (since A/B and B/A are the same and A/A is invalid) so it is 8+7+6...+1=36 total combinations. That's not an OVERWHELMING number, but on the other hand, no specific group is going to need all of them, and there's some advantage to letting those wolf players choose whether their wolf is Int/End or Agi/Will rather than defining it too strictly. In any case, I'm pretty sure that for one reason or another, additional Paths are going to be something that comes up often enough that you should be prepared going in.







The next step is Gifts and Burdens. You are given 5 points, and severity determines the cost. You can buy a Gift for 3 points, and you can buy a Burden for 3 points. They can even be the same thing. For example, a little sister who is a tech genius (Gift) but you're always responsible for (Burden) might qualify. The game recommends not choosing more than 1 level 3 burden. And we have a REAL MECHANIC that I'm not real thrilled with. A level 2 burden would provide a +2 to Success Numbers, while a gift would provide a -2 to SN. So good things are negative numbers, and bad things are positive numbers. There's more to learn, but generally I'm in favor of good things being represented as bonuses and bad things represented as penalties, and usually that's not hard to do by balancing your equation. x-2=y is x=y+2. We'll flag that for further discussion!

If you don't buy any gifts/burdens, or you offset your gift purchases with burdens, you can roll your 5 points into the next section to potentially increase attributes (spending 47 points on attributes instead of 42). Examples of gifts/burdens include Addictions, Companions and a Spirit World Connection. At a glance, there's some opportunity for abuse. Having a PC-level companion is a 3-cost Gift; having a lucky item that gives you -3 on SN, and take a 1-point addiction so you have to have tobacco every few days. I haven't gotten to Story Guide advice but there's some degree of built in 'if you can justify the bonus, you get the bonus'.


Stats
So Coyote and Crow has 9 stats and they range from 1-5. They have 3 physical abilities, 3 mental abilities, and 3 spiritual abilities. They include a 9-box that divides the three types of abilities into a 'power'/'finesse'/'reserve'. Ie, Strength is Physical Power; Agility is Physical Finesse; Endurance is Physical Reserve. Since your maximum stat is 5 and you get a bonus to stats based on your Archetype and Path, and higher stats are more expensive, carefully planning your bonuses to max out your most important scores is a good idea. A stat of 4 costs 10 points, while a score of 5 costs 15 points. Getting a 'free bump' saves you pretty significantly. With scores costing 0/3/6/10/15 points, you can do a lot of fiddling to try to calculate valid scores for your character. For example, if you wanted to have '3s' across the board, it would cost you 54 points. With only 42 to spend you'll have to reduce 4 scores to 2, so 3/3/3/3/3/3/3/3/2/2/2/2 is a valid array. If you want to bump one 3 to a 4, costing +4 points you can reduce two of those 2s to a 1 (giving you +6 points, but nothing to spend the remaining 2 points on). Basically, spending your building points is unnecessarily difficult. Having some standard arrays would simplify the process. Some valid 42 point arrays are: 4/4/4/3/3/1/1/1/1 and 4/4/4/3/2/2/1/1/1 and 3/3/3/3/3/2/2/2/2.

Skills
Every skill has two related attributes. When you use a skill, you add the dice equal to either the higher or lower the two attributes to your skill dice, depending on whether you have any ranks in the skill. For example, Melee Combat is a Strength/Endurance skill. If you are Strength 4/Endurance3, you would have 4 dice (from Strength) on that skill, before you add any skill dice assuming you had at least 1 rank in the skill. If you had 0 ranks, you would instead add the 3 dice from Endurance.
Theoretically there is no limit to how many skill dice you can have, but the game recommends keeping a cap of 6 for starting characters.

In terms of how many skills are associated with each attribute, it is not equal. Strength applies to 3; Athletics, Melee Weapons, and Unarmed Combat. If you have a higher Endurance, that will replace your Strength for Athletics and Melee Damage, but not for Unarmed Combat. For that skill, Intelligence is the alternate. There are 28 listed skills; the online character sheet will automatically carry-over the appropriate skill (the higher or lower) depending on whether you have skill ranks. I haven't tested it to be 100% certain that it is correct, but it appears to be working correctly. The following is a list of how many skills are associated with each attribute:

Str: 3
Agi: 3
End: 4
Int: 9
Per: 10
Wis: 10
Spirit: 7
Cha:6
Will: 4

It's difficult but possible to determine what attributes provide the biggest benefit to the skills you want. For example, four skills are Int/Wis: Computers, Cybernetics, Knowledge, Medicine. If those skills were very important to you, you could prioritize EITHER Intelligence or Wisdom; you would not gain any benefit from having high values in both for those skills. Ultimately, you'd look at the Intelligence skills that do not have Wisdom as an alternate (Cooking, Farming, Piloting, Science) and the Wisdom skills that don't have Intelligence as an alternative (Ceremony, Herbalism, Husbandry, Investigation, Survival, Tracking) to choose which one makes the most sense for your character. I like that there are two ways to be good at something - you can either be a smart pilot or an agile pilot, but this is a system that rewards mathematical acumen.













A skill of 3 is supposed to represent 'true expertise'. Since the minimum stat is a 1, a low-stat 'trained' person will have a '4'; while a high-stat person might have an '8'.

In addition to General Skills, you may have Specialized Skills. There are none listed on the character sheet, but knives is given as an example of a specialized melee weapon skill and Sun Wings as a specialized pilot skill. If you have 1 rank in Melee Weapons, you can't take Knives unless you put at least 2 ranks in it. If you don't have Knives as a specialty skill, you'd fall back on your general skill, so there's no point in having a specialty that's NOT higher than your general skill. If you have Knives 2 and then raise your melee skill from 1 to 2, Knives does nothing for you. Obviously you'd rather have a high general skill, so specialty skills are available at a discount. A general skill has a cost of 1/3/6/10/15/21; specialty skills start with rank 2 and cost 1/3/6/10/15. So if I took General Melee 2 it would cost 3 points. If I took General Melee 1, but Knives 2, it would cost 2 points. As a result, I could get 2 dice with a knife for one less point than raising the base skill. At least, that's the theory. It doesn't actually work out in all cases. For example, if I had 1 rank in Melee (1 point) and 5 ranks in Knives (10 points) that would have cost me 11 points total. Alternatively, I could have 4 ranks in Melee for 10 points, or 5 ranks for 15, so specializing in knives doesn't really seem like a good move. Moving from rank 3 to rank 4 costs 4 additional skill points, but taking a specialty at rank four costs 6; basically there are a number of break points where going +1 on a specialty skill is a higher cost than bumping your skill.

I don't think I've explained that well, so let me give an example. Rank 4 is 10 points. Rank 5 is 15 points. If you want to go from Rank 4 to Rank 5, you'd have to spend 5 additional points at character creation. If you want to have Rank 4 but be really good with knives, you spend 10 points for rank 4, then buy rank 5 specialty for 10 points. Getting to level 4 general, level 5 specialty cost you 20 total points; getting to level 5 in everything only cost 15. Now if you only spent 1 point on the general skill, then took level 6 in the specialty, you would have spent 16 points total; but if you spend 15 points total you can have EVERYTHING at level 5. Depending on how much benefit an extra dice gets you, generally the 'general skill' is superior.

Now, in the grand scheme of things, these are minor. You can still play the game whether you choose General Skill 5 or Specialty Skill 6. It's just one of those things where I feel like more careful scrutiny of the math would have been justified. It's not that these values don't WORK, it's just that they feel inelegant.

There's another 25 pages of skill specific information before we hit abilities. The skills do include rule information that's potentially important. It does say that some skills can't be used 'generally' and purchasing the general skill just lets you buy sub-skills. It is not obvious at a casual glance which skills require a sub-skill versus letting you make a check based on your ranks in the general skill. I would presume if having the general skill doesn't let you do anything but buy specialty skills that you otherwise can't use, you'd only ever put one rank in those skills. So more reading, more digesting, more analyzing and more to come!

[deaddmwalking]

Skills - In Detail

The general skills are listed on the character sheet, and Art is the first one that does the 'general art does nothing, specialty art is what you need'. Actually, Art is 'art appreciation', but making art requires a specialty. So if you spend 1 point on General Art Level 1 and 1 point on Specialty Art 2, you can make paintings. Personally, as the father of children, I think anyone should be allowed to make paintings, even with demonstrably NO SKILL AT ALL, and I have no idea based on the skill what succeeding on a painting does (as opposed to failing).

Athletics includes specialty skills including Climbing and Acrobatics. It appears that having high ranks in Athletics (general skill) means you have high ranks in all secondary skills (ie, you default to general athletics UNLESS you have higher ranks in a specialty skill). I'm willing to admit that I might be making a mistake, but that's the way I read it on first pass. Acrobatics can give you a bonus to your defense against ranged attacks (you have to spend a secondary action to activate the bonus and I had to skip ahead 150 pages and read a couple of sections to understand how that might work). In this case, you don't have to make a check; the number of ranks you have raises the SN for your opponent to succeed.

Since everyone has the full list of skills, if there's anything that people really want to ask about, feel free. Just a couple of things that seem unusual enough to be worth remarking on. Charm includes specialties like Seduction, First Impressions and Audiences wile Coercion has Diplomacy, Interrogation, Intimidation and Leadership. Good Diplomacy (and trading) should involve convincing people that what you're offering is valuable and well worth the cost. In fact, a lot of successful trade is me giving you something I have too much of for something you have too much of. Charm does have a lot about consent and that it does not override consent (that comes up multiple times in multiple places elsewhere later, too).

This isn't intended as a criticism but simply as an observation. The skill rules include a lot of suggestions for the player and Story Guide, but not a lot of firm explanations. I'm going to use charm as an example, but it comes up in a lot of other places too.

Characters actively hostile to you may be beyond swaying, though the Story Guide will let you know if a Check is allowed...To use this Skill, make a Charm check with a Success Number equal to the Mystical Defense Value of the target, modified as the Story Guide sees fit. To influence an NPC, they must be able to see and understand your Character. With a single Success, the NPC is more favorably inclined to whatever you were trying to convince them of, but not irrationally so. Charm cannot cause creatures to act against their own clear interest. The number of Successes determines how convinced the NPC is and how long they remain so, as determined by your Story Guide. In general, 1-2 Success will sway someone only briefly, while 5 or more will have a dramatic and durable effect.

Before attempting this Skill, discuss the situation with your Story Guide. Some interactions may only take a Primary Action during an Encounter, while others will fall under the Skill Checks Over Time rules.

I cut out some parts about suggesting NOT using this between characters, and the nature of consent, but I really want to highlight that there's a lot of encouragement to convince the SG that a particular action ought to be helpful. Is cooking a good meal going to give you a bonus on Charm checks? Maybe! Will a Performance lower the number required for success on a Charm check? Maybe! It's up to you as a player to suggest it might be fitting and your SG to decide if you're right. So ultimately, the book leans on SG judgement a lot - and I think that the advice to the SG is generally good (but there's more a lot later), but the more judgement required the more an inexperienced/novice SG may struggle to create the experiences they want for their players.

One thing that is important is that the quote refers to a Mystic Defense. It really looks like Mystic Defense was replaced with 'Soul Defense' late in the design process. Body/Mind/Soul are listed on the Character Sheet. It appears that in an earlier draft it was Body/Mind/Mystic and there appear to be several references to Mystic that should have been replaced by Soul. Since I bought the dead-tree version of the book, I'd be curious if anyone with a searchable PDF would be interested in looking for Soul/Mystic and seeing if there are other areas that might be unclear. Ultimately, I think having two 'MG' stats would have been confusing, so the change was probably good on the whole, just overlooked some in editing.

Martial Arts requires a teacher with more ranks than you. How did he get more ranks? By breaking the rules.... Though TECHNICALLY, you might be able to justify a rank in this skill without a teacher by completing a Long-Term Goal, so this one gets a side-eye from me, but I'll let it pass.

Wrestling is probably easier than 3.x style grappling. To establish control you need as many successes as the opponents pool in Wrestling, which sounds kinda hard. For example, if two people with 7 dice each (say 3 from attribute and 4 from skill), to establish Control they'd need 7 successes. Assuming that you're looking at 2-3 successes per roll, it's going to take several rounds to get this established. So it's probably not really a good combat move, but I'll have to see more when I take a deeper look at the Sample Characters and confirm success probabilities.

The next section is Abilities - these are the 'special powers' you get from exposure to extra-terrestrial purple goo.

[deaddmwalking]

Before moving in to the next section, just a couple of things that I wanted to mention around skills.

Ceremony
Some modifiers for the ceremony:
If the character performing the Ceremony has a Ceremonial Kit: -1
If the character performing the Ceremony doesn't have a Ceremonial Kit: +4

Remember that a -1 is a bonus and a +4 is a penalty. To me, this is an example of unnecessary/redundant design. You are ALWAYS applying a modifier. Either set having the kit as expected, or not having the kit as expected; then you only have to use a modifier in the less common case. Maybe they really needed it to make the math work, but it doesn't pass the sniff test.


Brawling
This is a specialty skill under Unarmed Combat. In the rules text it says:

Brawlers can also use their rank in this Skill when wielding improvised weapons, allowing them to attack with whatever random items are available - a chair leg, a bowl, anything - to attempt to main an opponent, granting them +1. Brawlers lower the required Success Number by one for every rank in Brawling they have.

This is an example of inconsistent terminology. This is supposed to be a BENEFIT, so I think it would reduce the SN by 1 (thus a -1). It COULD be intended as a bonus to the actual roll (ie, a 9 is treated as a 10), which is functionally the same as lowering the SN by one. That's why it's a good idea to give benefits bonuses and penalties negatives, but they've gone the other way. So, yeah, I'm pretty sure it should say 'granting them a -1' to be consistent.

Moving on!


Abilities

So the book describes a purple symbiote that fell from the heavens 700 years ago and is now incorporated into animals and plants. Humans concentrate the symbiote from an animal (chosen by each individual), inject it into their bodies at puberty, and between 15-20% of the time they get a special power.

So if you're like me, the first thing you're thinking is:




Obviously that's not the aesthetic, but space-goo can justify a lot of powers, right?



And if we're not talking Venom, surely we're talking:




A power that only a small number of people have that develops at puberty, you could be forgiven for thinking it was an X-gene.




But what we actually get is:






Now that's not a problem, but it's definitely something that didn't meet my preconceptions going in. As a starting character you get one of 27 possible abilities (3 for each associated attribute). You can get additional powers during the course of play. One Strength power lets you gain massively increased Strength, one Agility power lets you increase Agility, one Endurance ability lets you increase Endurance - pretty straightforward stat boosts. So if you are a Strength 5 character, and you have Path of the Bear, you can make your Strength 10. If you're rolling a melee weapon attack you've added 5 dice. I don't know how good that is yet, because I don't know whether extra successes translate to more damage, but in my mind that's clearly 'good' but not 'game-changing'.

Every character has three derived stats: Body, Mind, Soul, that are the sum of your related attributes. For example, if your Str is 5, your Endurance is 2, and your Agility is 3, you have a 10 for Body. Activating most powers has a cost, usually either Mind or Soul. For example, the power to increase your Strength requires 1 point of soul to activate. Thus, if you have 5 Soul, you could potentially activate this power 4 separate times (each for an encounter) before you'd spend your last point and fall unconscious.

Most physical weapons deal damage to 'Body', but there are attacks that can damage Mind or Soul. Since you can also spend Mind/Soul to activate powers, there's an element of resource management - you're literally damaging yourself to activate abilities.

One thing that I think I like but I'd like to see in play is that activating a power doesn't guarantee you immediately get the full benefit. Continuing the example, activating your Strength bonus requires a Will check. Let's say you have a Will of 3; thus you roll 3d12. Each success gives you +1 STR immediately; you continue rolling each round until you reach your maximum of +5 STR. Essentially, there's an escalation mechanic that makes your abilities continue to get better after you activate them (at least in some cases).

Not every ability is directly applicable to combat. For example, one Ability from the Intelligence path lets you use Intelligence for other Stats when making a check. If you have that ability and you have a very high Intelligence, that could potentially be the equivalent of +4 dice on checks, but with the caveat that it appears each use costs you 1 point of Mind. Ie, if you have Int 6, Per 2, Wis 2, you have Mind 10; using this ability more than 9 times would make you fall unconscious.

Some abilities have a limitation like 1/day, or some mechanism that provides diminishing returns for multiple activations. Some abilities have obvious benefits during an encounter; others really can only be used outside of encounters. Some provide direct benefits to the user; others provide benefits to someone else; some are direct attacks.




You remind me of the babe


Because I think that the Powers are a significant part of what makes this game unique, I'm going to provide a brief overview of each power by associated ability.

Strength
1) Double your Strength (possibly over several rounds) with a Will check
2) Increase your resistance to Physical Damage with a Charisma check
3) Activate a rage that gives you +1 critical dice per round and prevents you from following unconscious

Agility
1) Double your Agility (possibly over several rounds) with a Wisdom check
2) When you roll a ranged attack roll, some bad rolls are treated as good rolls [it is clear that what constitutes a success is variable - more on that when we get deeper]
3) Activate super-stealth with a 2xSpirit check (each success adding to your Stealth)

Endurance
1) Increase Endurance (Add Spirit to Endurance, recalculate derived abilities like Physical Defense, Body, Skills) or spend Soul to add dice to End checks.
2) Gain a variety of minor healing powers and/or add +1 dice to any physical or mental check per activation
3) Take a 4 hour nap (no actions possible) to gain limited healing

Intelligence
1) Use Int instead of another ability or gain bonus dice against a target (+1 per use, stacks to max equal to perception)
2) Psychic mindblast people using a dice pool equal to INT + Spirit; if you get 9+ successes the opponent loses 12 mind and probably kills them
3) Gain resistance to social skills, remote monitoring, bonuses on tasks requiring strong focus (SG discretion)

Perception
1) Gain +1 Perception for 1 Soul up to double normal. If you have more than 5 successes on a perception check while active, you might gain supernatural sense (SG choice)
2) Gain telepathy with one or more people
3) Meditate to gain a bonus to Mind

Wisdom
1) Commune to gain supernatural insight into a question
2) Activate an ability to get supernatural luck in solving your problem
3) Scry

Spirit
1) Astral Project (called Walking the Black)
2) Healing Touch
3) Give one or more people near you 1 Mind/Soul [their choice] for each success on the activation check. Each use costs more until you take a long rest.

Charisma
1) Create inspiration (you give people bonus dice on their tasks)
2) Mind-control gaze
3) Calm emotions

Will
1) Immune to stun or unconscious; regenerate soul after an attack [all PCs can choose to substitute soul for body when taking physical damage]
2) Attempts to affect you (good or bad) are harder; any '2s' against the character automatically count as fails; the character may ignore 1 fail on each roll
3) Gain a bonus to Initiative


As previously mentioned, if you want more information about a specific power or a deeper analysis, I'm happy to provide. In another 250 pages I'll be hitting the 'Sample Characters' and I'll be looking at their abilities in the context of fully understanding the rules (presuming that everything is clear with a thorough reading - which so far I feel like I've got a pretty good sense of how it works, so I'm cautiously optimistic).

[deaddmwalking]

Derived Stats
The defense values discuss Physical, Mental, and Mystical defenses. As noted previously, it appears that the Mystical Defense has been replaced with SD. I've been referring to that as Soul Defense but it might be called something else (Spiritual Defense? Mystic Defense but it's abbreviated with an S?). Your defenses use the first two stats (power & finesse, but not reserve), so your Physical Defense is Strength + Agility, but not Endurance. Your Body stat (which represents how much physical punishment you can take) is a combination of all three. Ie, if you have all 3s for mental attributes, your mental defense is 6 and your total mind is 9 (and if you spend mind to power abilities or take damage to mind, you can fall unconscious.

When discussing the derived stats, it indicates you die if you reach body equal to negative endurance, mind equal to negative Wisdom, or soul equal to negative Will. Having a stat reduced to 0 equates to unconscious.



This game deliberately chooses not to feature alcohol, so as far as I can tell, you can't drink yourself unconscious





Background, Goals, and Names
This is pretty much choose your own stuff. If you put it in the background, it's fluff. If you want it to matter mechanically, spend points to make it a Gift or Burden. When you accomplish a short term goal, you gain a Skill Rank or get to buy something you normally can't afford. When you accomplish a long-term goal you can gain a gift, lose a burden, gain a stat point, gain an ability, or acquire an item that you REALLY can't normally afford - more on that in the next section. Obviously, this means that advancement is not level-based. Since each character can have unique goals, it is at least theoretically possible for one character to advance multiple times while another player has not advanced at all. My sense is that advancement is slow enough that even a character that hasn't had many advancements can contribute to the game in a meaningful way, and as such I don't see a problem with starting a fresh character in an established group versus having them advance to meet the same number of LTGs that the existing players have created. Ultimately though, what feels fair may vary from group to group.

There's an online name generator with the link provided in the book: Name Generator

Money and Equipment

The game uses an abstract wealth system where things cost between 1-8. Characters are assumed to have a starting wealth of 4, which is standard. Characters can start with any number of items that makes sense to have less than their wealth; 3 equal to their wealth, and 1 at +1 wealth. Since the game uses abstract wealth, you can buy unlimited number of items below your wealth later (no check required). If you want to buy an item equal to your wealth level, you have to succeed on a check. Now if your wealth is 4, you have 4 dice to roll, and you need to get 4 successes. I'm not sure how likely that is, but I would think not so much.... In any case, you can POTENTIALLY succeed on a check 1 higher than your wealth rank, but you must accept a debt (a level 1 burden which is supposed to reduce your wealth checks until it is removed).

Taking Extra Wealth as a Gift does not raise your wealth rank. Instead it gives you extra bonuses on the roll. Essentially, that means that you're REALLY LIKELY to be able to get things that cost Wealth 4, but buying anything 5+ requires accruing debt and limiting your ability to buy new shiny toys. Buying something of 7 is possible with a Long Term Goal (+2) and Debt (+1). Many of the fun things are Wealth 6, so they're really only possible by accomplishing a long-term goal. I don't see any way to permanently raise your wealth (ie, from 4 to 5), but you can lower it (from 4 to 3). Essentially, that means that there are items in the game (Industrial Gat - a 3D Printer) that are impossible to buy using the standard rules as I understand them. The best armor and weapons have a cost of 6, so obtainable, but not easily. Advanced Cybernetics can raise a stat to 4 with a cost of 6; raising a stat to 5 via cybernetic costs 7. Incidentally, 5 is the 'maximum suggested stat' in most cases, though the book acknowledges you can raise a stat to 7 by stacking your bonus from path/archetype.

Armor
For a near future game, we've got what we expect. There's clothing that gives you a progressive bonus to your Physical Defense to a maximum of +3 (Cost 6). There's also a stealth suit, and a hazard suit. With armor there's bonuses that are given as + (ie, +3PD) and bonuses that are given as - (ie, -2SN Stealth) and penalties that are given as - (ie, -2 Agi). There may be no point in harping on about inconsistency with nomenclature, but it like sand in my underwear - I can't NOT FEEL IT and it makes me cranky.

Technology
Gats (3-D printers), Niisi (personal computer assistants), Hacking Rigs, Second Eye VRs, Communicators and Charging Stations all give a near-future cyberpunky vibe to the setting. Community Gat has a cost of 7 and an Industrial Gat has a cost of 8 - I remain uncertain how they are supposed to be purchased. If you do get an industrial gat, it seems like you could justify making anything else.

Kits
Many kits are Cost 5, which means that if you think having a kit is important to your character, it probably represents your only item higher than your starting Wealth. The Ceremonial Kit (cost 5) and Herbalist Kit (cost 5) give a -1SN to those skills; the Medicine kit (cost 5) gives a -2SN while a First aid kit (cost 3) gives a -1SN. I think that's a place where they could have had consistency - the skill RANKS cost the same, so something that gives you a benefit on the skill should likewise cost the same (in my opinion). Any kit not spelled out follows the cost 3 (-1SN), cost 5 (-2SN).

Drugs
Most of these provide a physical benefit but a mental penalty. Some are Cost 3, so they could be ubiquitous. Poisons are cost 4; military enhancers are cost 5 - as a result I don't think they'll get used much. Why take on a permanent debt to get a temporary 4 hour bonus? Sleep inducers are included in the item descriptions but are omitted from the table.

Weapons
Weapons give bonus dice when making an attack (thus increasing the odds of one or more successes). You have to have at least as many ranks in the skill to get that bonus. Ie, if you have a +1 in melee combat, but you're using a weapon that grants a +2, you're limited to an additional +1 bonus. If you raise your rank to 2, you can get the full +2 (for a total of 4 dice). The highest bonus weapon is a 2-handed sword (+4) with cost 6. Arguably, two other weapons with a +3 are 'better' in that they have additional effects. Many of the weapons listed can be thrown and thus include a range entry. Range is not described or defined until you read the ranged weapon descriptions later. A standard range for a melee weapon is 0/+2/X meaning that at close range it can be used without penalty; at medium range the SN number is +2 higher than normal (ie, you have a penalty to attacks) and at long range it is not functional.

An Aside on Damage
To understand if a weapon DOES anything, I had to skip ahead. So let's say you have 5 dice for melee attack skill and 5 dice for Strength (the related stat assuming it is your higher between STR/END). The Target Number to gain a success is equal to the BD (STR+AGI) which is supposed to be ~5-6. If you use a weapon that gives you +3 dice, you could be rolling 13d12. I don't see anything that indicates there is a maximum number of dice to roll. Let's say I rolled the following:
6, 9, 2, 10, 11, 6, 2, 6, 12, 3, 2, 9, 4
If the target number was 6, then everything 6 or higher is a success. 8 total successes! If there were any 1s, they would REMOVE a success. 12s are a critical success. I roll a new d12 for each 12 I rolled (one total), I roll an ADDITIONAL critical dice (this dice gave me a 1). Since it is a critical die, this is always at least one additional success. If I had rolled the TN or higher (6) it would have been 2 successes. With the critical die, I now have 9 total successes. I would apply 9 total damage to the target's body. For PCs, they can convert some of that damage to Soul damage, so they're not QUITE as bad as it seems.

If the target had a PD of 7, I would have had only 5 successes, +1 for the critical, for a total of 6 damage.

If I was using a waraxe that has a special ability to inflict 'bleeding' on a critical hit, the target would continue taking 1 body damage at the start of every round until they sort that shit.





What are you going to do, bleed on me?

Ranged Weapons
Like melee weapons, some weapons give you a bonus to your dice pool when making an attack. The weapons are techno-advanced mag-slings and mag-bows. Some ranged weapons have a bonus at close range; some have a penalty, but work better at farther ranges. I don't think I mentioned it, but range is a little abstract; anyoen that is within one move of you is at close range; anyone that you can move to with a full action is medium, anything farther is long. It's abstract, but it takes 4 move actions to go from long to medium, or four to go from long to 'gone'.

Vehicles, Drones, and Cybernetics
Overall, I think the equipment they present matches with the setting expectations. There's not a lot of crunch here - a military drone has a PD, but a standard drone doesn't have one listed. Similarly the Yutsu Barges (floating barges) have a simple description like: Agility 2, Endurance 8, PD 9, Cost 7. I would presume that if I hit one with 10 successes, I would destroy it. Complex and detailed vehicle rules aren't required, but they likely will result in disagreements about what is reasonable at the table. For example, a sunwing is a personal flying craft capable of traveling at 300 MPH and making daring aerial maneuvers. If you're being pursued and you want to fly straight toward the ground and pull up (potentially forcing your pursuer to crash), there's nothing here about how that's resolved. Presumably it's a pilot test, and the SG will give a SN, and both you and your pursuer will attempt the maneuver. Does it cause damage to your craft if you're successful? Basically there are a lot of calls to the SG to figure out this stuff within the spirt of the rules (and there's more about that still to come), so I think the FLAVOR comes through with the equipment, but MECHANICS take a back seat.

Current Impressions
I believe the game is playable, and there's nothing here that I think is completely broken or borked. I think a group that spends a little time optimizing together is likely to be significantly more effective than one where everyone chooses their own abilities without regard to the rest. In my mind, it's a little like Magic: The Gathering - there are strategies that I'm pretty sure you can exploit relatively effectively to be 'better' at least in some ways than the game expects, but with an emphasis on solving problems without violence (at least SOME OF THE TIME) that's not likely to break the game in obvious ways. Essentially, the power-level is low enough that you can't destroy the game-world, but it feels sci-fi/fantasy enough that you can feel like you're more than a level 1 dirt-farmer. Without level advancement you're essentially in a low-level game from the beginning, but in 3.x the low- to mid-levels was a sweet-spot, so choosing that as where this game takes place is a defensible choice.


Goals and Progress
The last section on Section 2 covers advancement (completing short term goals and long term goals). We've already talked about how completing a short-term goal can get you equipment you can't normally get. So let's say you want to raise your Melee Combat skill from 4 (chosen at character creation) to 5. You need to play 5 sessions of Coyote & Crow. If instead you wanted to raise a specialized skill take the value you want (say 4), divide by 2, rounded up, so you would need to play 2 sessions to get that +1. If you choose the same stat for both short term goals, each session counts double. You're supposed to use the skill during each session to count. A mentor (someone with higher ranks) can reduce the time by one session, but if a PC does it, mentoring counts as one of their short term goals, so they're not advancing themselves at the same rate. The suggested maximum skill ranks is 7.

Long term goals have session-based costs as well. A new ability is ~8 sessions, an increase in stat is 2x the new value in sessions (ie, raising a 4 Strength to 5 Strength would be 10 session; gain a new gift (~4 sessions), increase a gift (2x the new level in sessions, ie a level 3 gift would be 6 sessions), remove a burden (2x the burden, ie a level 3 burden would be 6 sessions).

There's also a Legendary Rank. Essentially, if 8 sessions is a saga, then at the end of the saga you gain a Legendary Rank. You also automatically get a burden (because when people know you're Superman, they start asking you to do stuff).


Next up we move to the official 'rules of the game'. I've had to peek a head to make sure things make sense. It's about 65 pages total and I expect to tackle it tomorrow.

[WalkTheDin0saur]

This game's chargen looks positively frosted with White Wolf DNA, so let's see how it did at fixing some of White Wolf's infamous problems:

So Coyote and Crow has 9 stats and they range from 1-5. They have 3 physical abilities, 3 mental abilities, and 3 spiritual abilities.

I've got a theory that every game has 50% too many stats. D&D-likes work better with four stats, take your pick between Str/Dex/Will/Per or Str/Dex/Con/Mind. OWoD can lose Stamina, Appearance, and either Perception or Wits. NWoD can fuck right off with it's four synonyms for "Willpower". And Coyote & Crow has no business having both a Wisdom stat and a Spirit stat. Or putting the talking-at-people stat in the "Soul" category when the Wisdom stat that gives flooby clairsentience powers is in "Mind".

Speaking of stats the game doesn't need...

Your defenses use the first two stats (power & finesse, but not reserve), so your Physical Defense is Strength + Agility, but not Endurance. Your Body stat (which represents how much physical punishment you can take) is a combination of all three.

Ok, I'm not gonna try to charop in a game I've never actually read, but you're telling me Endurance is less important than Strength and Agility *for surviving physical injury?* Is there some Fundamental Law of Die Pool Games that you must have a Constitution stat and it must be not worth the points?

And awkwardly transitioning to the subject of points...

A stat of 4 costs 10 points, while a score of 5 costs 15 points.

So the author is aware of the Linear Chargen / Quadratic XP problem, and he bit the bullet and made everything quadratic. That's pretty cool.

Well, that's what I would have liked to say here, but...

When you accomplish a short term goal, you gain a Skill Rank or get to buy something you normally can't afford. When you accomplish a long-term goal you can gain a gift, lose a burden, gain a stat point, gain an ability, or acquire an item that you REALLY can't normally afford - more on that in the next section. Obviously, this means that advancement is not level-based.

If you're going to drop Quadratic XP you don't need to do Quadratic Chargen! It's just clunky for no reason! I think we're looking at an unfinished system that went to the printers mid-revision.

This doesn't look "unplayable" or anything, just... status-quo mediocrity. Hopefully this game can stop soapboxing about how everyone who didn't buy it is the real racists long enough to come up with some in-world antagonists. Like, when we roll up in our hover-canoe shooting laser arrows, who are we trying to kill? Are we protecting civilization from aquatic lizard-panthers and big dick dudes with infinite arrows and impaling anime hair? Is Whitey gonna land at Plymouth Rock with cyberknights riding vibranium space dragons? Is this an off-label RIFTS book and there's a line of Coalition spiderskull tanks advancing on the Mississippi? I eagerly await answers!

[deaddmwalking]

Chapter 12 - Rolling Dice



Yes, they do sell their own special version of dice for this game, why do you ask?


Coyote and Crow is a d12 based variable TN Dice Pool game. They use the term SN (Success Number). Your pool is generally equal to your relevant attribute, your relevant skill, and bonus dice based on equipment or special circumstances. Unless stated otherwise, the assumed SN is 8. Many commonly SNs are instead derived from your opponent. For example, a weapon attack is determined with an SN equal to your opponents Body Defense (BD).

Now I know what you're thinking - how likely am I to succeed on a given task? What does a SN 8 mean compared to a 7 or a 9? How much difference does having an extra die make? If I had a choice between adding +1 die or adding +1 to my roll, which should I take?

In this type of system, those are actually REALLY DIFFICULT math problems to solve. The base chance of getting one success is 1-(chance of failure)^number of dice. For example, if you're attempting an SN 8 check, your odds are 1-(5-12)^1; if you were using 2 dice those odds are 2-(5-12)^2. You can plug the numbers and figure out the chance of AT LEAST ONE SUCCESS using Excel or something similar. Against an SN 8, your odds are roughly 42% with 1 die; 66% with 2 dice; 80% with 3 dice; 88% with 4 dice; 93% with 5 dice; 96% with 6 dice; 98% with 7 dice and 99% with 8+ dice.

Except that doesn't really tell the full story. Since a 1 on a die, removes a success, in the case you rolled 2 dice there's a 1/12 chance that you lost a success. That means that a roll of 8, 9, 10 or 11 on one die could have been negated by a roll of 1 on the other die (but not a 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 - which didn't contribute to success or failure). Likewise, you could have potentially gotten more successes if you had rolled a 12. In that case you could have gotten +1 success or +2 success; or more if they rolled another 12.

Basically, AIN'T NO STORY GUIDE THAT'S GOT THIS SHIT FIGURED OUT. When they tell you that the SN is an 8, they're saying that because that's what the book told them to. And if they say the SN is 5, they probably think it's easy and you'll succeed because with 3 dice, you almost certainly will.

Optionally, you can spend Mind to give a +1 to a die (ie, you could spend 3 mind to give a +3 to one die you've rolled, or +1 to 3 dice). Since this reduces your Mind, it makes you more likely to fall unconscious.

And 12s explode, giving +1 or +2 successes, and if that is a 12, doing so again. So 1 in 144 rolls will be a 12, followed by a 12, followed by something else, so +3-4 successes.



Did someone say exploding dice?!?!

If you have 1+ success, you succeed. If you have 0 successes, you fail. If you have negative successes, you critical fail.

So does it matter that odds of success are really hard to calculate in advance? Is it a bad thing that a really hard task is something that someone rolls a lot of dice is more likely to critically fail than someone who rolls very few (at least, I think???) Rolling 12d12 against a SN of 12 5 times I had 2 successes (rolled at least a 12), 2 failures (no 1s or 12s) and 2 critical failures (at least one 1, but no 12s). It's one of those things that I really think you need to sit down with a group and try out. Since degree of success often matters (especially in combat) having a 95% chance of success isn't really as meaningful as whether you knock that chump out in 2 hits or 8 hits.

Aesthetically, I like d12s - I think they're not used enough, they're an actual platonic solid (unlike a d10). So my sense is that there's probably an unnecessary amount of dice rolling, but since the odds are impossible to calculate on the fly with variable SNs it's probably not as big a deal as whether the story is engaging.

[deaddmwalking]

Your defenses use the first two stats (power & finesse, but not reserve), so your Physical Defense is Strength + Agility, but not Endurance. Your Body stat (which represents how much physical punishment you can take) is a combination of all three.

Ok, I'm not gonna try to charop in a game I've never actually read, but you're telling me Endurance is less important than Strength and Agility *for surviving physical injury?* Is there some Fundamental Law of Die Pool Games that you must have a Constitution stat and it must be not worth the points?

Clarification Previously I stated that Physical Defense was Strength + Agility; it is actually Agility + Endurance. I'm going to chalk it up to a reading ail. It said 'Finesse + Reserve' which is the 2nd/3rd columns; I reversed that. So for clarification, Physical Defense is Agility + Endurance; Mental Defense is Perception + Wisdom; Mystical Defense (SD) is Charisma + Will

And awkwardly transitioning to the subject of points...

A stat of 4 costs 10 points, while a score of 5 costs 15 points.

So the author is aware of the Linear Chargen / Quadratic XP problem, and he bit the bullet and made everything quadratic. That's pretty cool.

Well, that's what I would have liked to say here, but...

When you accomplish a short term goal, you gain a Skill Rank or get to buy something you normally can't afford. When you accomplish a long-term goal you can gain a gift, lose a burden, gain a stat point, gain an ability, or acquire an item that you REALLY can't normally afford - more on that in the next section. Obviously, this means that advancement is not level-based.

If you're going to drop Quadratic XP you don't need to do Quadratic Chargen! It's just clunky for no reason! I think we're looking at an unfinished system that went to the printers mid-revision.

I agree, and I was planning on bringing it up. If you want to raise a derived stat, it doesn't matter whether you raise your high score or lower score. So if you have a 2 for Agility/5 Endurance (since Endurance drives melee weapon attacks if you have ranks, you don't NEED Strength, too), you have a PD of 7. To raise it to 8, you could raise Endurance by +1, requiring 10 sessions. Or you could raise Agility from 2 to 3 (6 sessions). In my mind this incentives choosing high stats at character creation with a focus on raising your lower stats when applicable.

This doesn't look "unplayable" or anything, just... status-quo mediocrity. Hopefully this game can stop soapboxing about how everyone who didn't buy it is the real racists long enough to come up with some in-world antagonists. Like, when we roll up in our hover-canoe shooting laser arrows, who are we trying to kill? Are we protecting civilization from aquatic lizard-panthers and big dick dudes with infinite arrows and impaling anime hair? Is Whitey gonna land at Plymouth Rock with cyberknights riding vibranium space dragons? Is this an off-label RIFTS book and there's a line of Coalition spiderskull tanks advancing on the Mississippi? I eagerly await answers!

I agree that the game is playable; I don't think that it is fair to characterize it as soapboxing. Chapter 19 Icons and Legends is approximately 60 pages of creatures/characters/encounters. I'm not prepared to say that it's ENOUGH without getting through that section, but it at least exists.

[deaddmwalking]

Chapter 13 - Playing the Game

The game divides time between Narrative Play and Encounters. Everyone here is familiar with the concept, even if not every game is explicit about the differences. It's possible to make dice checks in narrative play, but there's a lot of emphasis on story, so if something seems reasonable (like climbing a wall) rolls are discouraged (with Story Guide getting final say). Encounters are more structured and happen when two or more people are opposing each other.


A round is not a rigidly defined amount of time; everyone gets a primary action and multiple secondary actions. Initiative determines who can act first; highest initiative can choose to act after slower people. Initiative is a derived score (Agility + Perception + Charisma), so is largely static for PCs. This means that if John has the highest initiative, he'll ALWAYS have the choice of highest initiative (at least within the party), barring someone activating an ability that modifies one of their scores in a way that also modifies derived stats (some abilities specify that they affect derived stats and some specifically DO NOT). Every player and NPC can choose a lower initiative, but once chosen, it is fixed. Ie, if John has a 12 initiative, but he knows he wants to act after Susie who has an 8 initiative, he could choose 7. Players can coordinate their initiative choices (so Susie would choose her highest possible), but they won't know the NPC initiative until the SG reveals it. In the event that two players have chosen the same initiative, the higher score can choose who goes first. But in all cases, they go on that initiative count; they can't delay to a lower initiative count (with an exception covered in the next paragraph). Once initiative is determined, it is 'set', but characters can take actions that re-order the initiative (ie, modify their previously chosen value to a new value).



Since every player gets to take a primary action, those are pretty important. They're the equivalent of 'standard actions' in D&D and include making a skill check, activating an ability, performing a secondary action (ie, like in D&D you can give up a standard for an extra move, you can give up a primary for an additional secondary action), Delay you Action, or Change your Initiative. When you Delay, you take your secondary action(s) on your original count, but you can 'ready' an action based on triggering conditions (as approved by the SG). This does not reset your initiative, and if the triggering condition fails to happen you effectively lose that turn and choose a new action (or continue to 'ready') on your next initiative count. Using a primary action to change your initiative doesn't let you choose a higher initiative than you could initially. Ie, if your Initiative is 7, you can not choose an initiative of 8+. So only if you chose a lower initiative than you were eligible for and see a benefit in choosing one that is higher than your original choice (enough that you give up a primary action) you can reset to a different number.

Secondary actions are not as rigid as D&D move actions. They're really more like free actions in that you can do a bunch of them, provided you don't do the same secondary action twice. For example, you can move (secondary action), draw a weapon (secondary action), take cover (secondary action) and call to your friend (secondary action). You can't take the same secondary action twice in the same round (unless you want to move twice, in which case you can use your primary action as a second move).

Secondary Actions should be fluid, fun, and held together by common sense. When in doubt, check with your Story Guide and get their approval. A good rule of thumb is that if it has a reasonable possibility of failing, it is not a Secondary Action, it is a Primary one. Additionally, some Abilities are activated through Secondary actions. As with regular Secondary Actions, use your judgement. If an ability requires speech as part of the activation, then the Character cannot also talk to an ally. If it requires someone to sit still, then they cannot also Move.

Defending is a secondary action that applies to a single attacker; it gives you a bonus to your PD (either your STR, Unarmed Combat Rank, AGI, or Melee Weapon Rank) against that attacker. Taking cover is similar, but applies to ranged attacks and is a blanket +4 (or +2 if you also attack or expose yourself in any way). Dodge allows you to add your ranks in Acrobatics to ALL ATTACKS from the specified range (short, medium, long). Sometimes characters make Reaction Rolls to someone else's action.

Following actions in combat is more detail on Social Encounters, Contested Skill Checks, Combat, Player vs Player, Asymmetrical Encounters, Spiritual Encounters, and Movement & Ranges (again).

Winning a social encounter (meaning accomplishing your goal) is supposed to grant you +1 Mind. Losing is supposed to cost you 1 Mind and 1 Soul. This is called out as an optional rule.

So let's say you want to wrestle someone and they want to wrestle you. That becomes a contested skill check. Each round you both roll your skill (on your respective turns) and compare dick size total successes. 'Winning' means getting a number of successes equal to your opponent's dice pool. Ie, if your opponent is rolling 7d12 and you're rolling 6d12, you need 7 total successes to win. Each round, only the higher total success counts. So if your opponent scores 5 successes and you score 6 successes, yours count. There is definitely a lack of clarity in this section. It APPEARS that based on my reading that the 'winner' gets all of their successes, not the net total. I think net total probably is more in keeping with the spirit of the rules, but it definitely doesn't SAY THAT. I would expect margin of success to matter more than total number of successes. I'll look for an errata on this at some point.









So the next section is about combat, and I think it's worth quoting the book.

From a mechanics perspective, if everything in a game eventually leads to Combat, Players often build their Characters that way from the start. It creates a vicious cycle where Players always choose to fight because that is what their Characters are best at because that is what they always do. If, instead, Players have the option to fight, but have sufficient incentive to find other ways around their problems, then they have choices. Choices are what roleplaying games should be about, creating narrative branches that weave unique tales. We believe Combat should be an option, not a default

One of the reasons that I was interested in picking up this book is that the primary author had mentioned non-combat based resolution as a supported style of play. Since it MATTERS that players are in agreement on play style, it ABSOLUTELY MATTERS that the book is laying out information like this. Obviously every group is going to find their own balance, and those of us who have been murder-hobos are entire RPG life may struggle. But with advice like that throughout, if your SG won't let you try inviting someone to a ceremony so you can sweat-lodge with them and they say no, there's at least room to push that they're the asshole in that situation...

At the beginning of this review I said I wanted to avoid focusing too much on racism and appropriation, but since I mentioned sweat lodges I'm going to have to have a minor aside. Smoking Lodges and Sweats were both described as popular activities in the setting. Non-Native players are asked not to emulate real-life cultures in what may be a perpetuation of negative stereotypes. I think it's very easy to portray something deeply spiritual in a shallow and therefore disrespectful way, potentially causing insult. However, there are 574 recognized Native American Tribes in the United States and I am not intimately familiar with all of their cultural traditions. While things like the Ceremony Skill are deliberately vague, to participate in a game of imagination people NEED to describe what the ceremony sounds like, feels like, and looks like - description is how you build a shared narrative. The book asks us to be respectful, and I'm 100% down with that, but I think there are a few cases (like Ceremony) where it's possible that describing a ceremony that isn't INTENDED to be based on any culture might RESEMBLE a ceremony with that culture. There are people that SINCERELY want to be respectful, and they're GENUINELY AFRAID of playing the game in a disrespectful way, and Connor has tried to address it directly in his blog post. Ultimately, my take is that Connor's right. Play the game in a way that you think is respectful, but you're going to have to pretend you're a Native American, and YOUR CULTURAL TRADITIONS are those of Native Americans. Sometimes people aren't going to agree where the line should be, and if you're lucky enough to have a Native American Player, they can help you find it. But if you really don't know whether something is acceptable or not, you're just going to have to go with your best judgement, and if that means you're sitting in a circle beating a drum and passing a peace pipe, and some people aren't cool with that, well, I think I can accept that. But I understand why not everyone does.

But back to combat!




This fight won't happen in this game, but there are plenty of other fights that could

Surprise happens if one side doesn't know that combat is going to happen, and it lasts for 1 round. Stealth is rolled against Mental Defense (which includes Perception and Wisdom). In the sense that the Stealth party is rolling a Dice Pool based on two things (Attribute + Skill) and they're rolling against a value that's determined by two attributes (Perception & Wisdom), the expected defense values are 5-6, making this a really easy check in most cases. You have a 67% of succeeding on a TN 5 with a single dice; with 5 dice your odds are 99.59% (not counting 1s/12s, but they should balance). Against a TN 6, your odds are 98.74%. If a group is using Stealth, the WORST person rolls; if you're trying to surprise a group you use the BEST MD. Surprised characters don't act in the first round (except maybe making Reactions if the SG feels it makes sense).

I think I've covered range before, but it's abstract; people you can move and attack are in short range; people that you have to spend 2 move actions to get to are in medium range; it takes 4 additional move actions to get from Medium to Long (or 2 each if you and your opponent are moving away from each other). If you want to move close to someone that wants to move away from you, it's a Contested Running (Athletics) check (on foot) or Piloting (in vehicles). This is one where difference in success is explicitly referenced (ie, 2 successes difference). That'd be one point in favor of the prior rules on contested skill checks just neglecting to mention that you apply NET SUCCESSES rather than TOTAL SUCCESSES.

Conditional modifiers are all listed as +1 or +3, and they're all NEGATIVES. Ie, if you're shooting something running really fast, their normal PD is 5, well the effective PD is now 8 (the bonus raises the SN). I'm a little surprised that there aren't conditional modifiers that make anything EASIER. I feel like usually game systems are more balanced - a bad position is +3 (because they use bonuses for bad things) so a favorable position should be -3; but nothing like that here.

Vehicles
I had noticed that vehicles had a PD that is not equal to their Agility + Endurance. Turns out that they can have a 'fragility' or 'reinforced' quality (total ass-pull, I think) that modifies what it should be. A Yutsu Barge is AGI 2, END 8, PD 9 while an INDUSTRIAL barge is AG 1, END 9, PD 13. Some common vehicles don't have a PD listed - does that mean that they're just AGI+END? Those are things that annoy me. It's GOING to COME UP, and there's no REASON to be coy about that information. I already know as the SG I can do whatever I think is reasonable, how about telling me what YOU think is reasonable?

Pets




I have mentioned this a time or two on these forums, but I have a Disney Rule: If I've seen it in a Disney animated movie, I think the game should make it possible
Later in the book they provide stats for Bear, Crow, Snake, Bison, Elk & Cougar, but dog is called out as a pet choice and doesn't seem to be there. Maybe they're hiding? Also suggested pets that don't seem to be in the book: racoons and squirrels. Assuming Crow can represent all birds, then birds and snakes (also common pets) are covered).

There are also brief paragraphs on Machines/Robots, Inanimate Object, and Spirits and Gods.

The Chapter Concludes with a description of 'The Black', which is probably most similar to the Astral Plane. Mechanically, Spiritual Stats act as Physical Stats (ie, Spirit replaces STR for checks that use STR). The next chapter is Damage/Death & Healing (18 pages) and the final piece 'for the players'. Everything after that is 'for the Story Guide'.

[deaddmwalking]

Dealing Damage

Under Damage, it does clarify that damage is dealt based on the appropriate type, Physical Mental or Spiritual. As mentioned previously, Spiritual is alternatively referred to as Mystic. That appears to be a late-edit to avoid using MD for both Mental Defense and Mystical Defense.

As a matter of preference, using Physical Defense/Body; Mental Defense/Mind; Spiritual Defense/Soul seem like something that could be rendered more simply. I don't like Spiritual Defense because Spirit is an attribute, and Spirit isn't even part of Spiritual/Mystical defense (only Charisma and Will are included). If you have Body, you should have Body Defense (BD). If you have Mind, you should have Mind Defense (MD). If you have Soul, you should have Soul Defense (SD). Calling it Physical Defense (and knowing that it corresponds to Body) and Mental (knowing that it corresponds to Mind) and Spiritual/Mystical (depending on where you look in the book) corresponding to Soul is just unnecessary obfuscation. If you like Physical Defense, you can call 'Body' Physical - as long as they all have different abbreviations, that's good. It's NOT NECESSARY to bust out a thesaurus just for the sake of using different words.






After covering physical damage, they have sub-types of damage that might do other things, like Fire causing burning damage. Fire refers to burning (below) but then you actually don't find it until four pages later. With the text being so large, it's not a super-pain to have to flip around a little, but there are definitely a few times where I felt that the needed reference was neither obvious or it was described in multiple places and I had to read two different sections to understand a concept.

JESUS MARY & JOSEPH! Electrical damage causes a stun or INSTANT DEATH!!!! Apparently Instant Death only applies to NPCs but if you hit someone with a taser or an electric cattle prod (weapons that DO NOT EXIST IN THIS GAME), apparently people will just die. Now the base odds of getting a 12 on single die are 8.33% (1/12). Even though that will always give you an extra success, it's when you roll over the SN that you get a 'critical success' that triggers. So I totally think that there should be Electro-clubs and it's a shame they're not included (but there are rules for designing new equipment), so with a SN of 7 and one dice, you'll 'confirm' half your rolls, meaning 4% of the time you'll insta-kill ANYTHING. If you have 5 dice, you have a 35% of having at least one 12, so a 17.5% of insta-kill. So that's one of those places where I'm going to ding the designers for creating an OBVIOUSLY ABUSABLE RULE and if you think you MIGHT need to kill people, why wouldn't you use an electro-blade?

Falling is very dangerous. For every 5 feet you fall, you risk 1 damage, thus falling 100 feet risks 20 damage. You can negate 1 damage for each success on Athletics. It doesn't list a SN, so my assumption is that it defaults to SN 8 as advised earlier. Each die you have has a 42% chance of rolling an 8 or better, so on average you'd expect 4 successes for every 10 dice you have. Now, I don't know how many dice you're going to have, but the only sample character that has Athletics listed has 7 (everyone else uses the lower of STR or END with no skill dice and most of the sample characters that is 2). So on average, the guy with Rank 7 Athletics is going to get 3 successes. His body is 10. His END is 3, so he dies at -3. If you push him out of a floating barge that is 100 feet up, you're virtually certain to kill him!. You're GUARANTEED to kill all of his sample companions. Pushing people off floating ships is the BEST WAY to kill people. Technically, he can convert damage to Soul, so he can actually take 18 points of damage, but with 17 either Body or Soul is at 0, so he's definitely unconscious - but Yutsu craft can fly at up to 10,000 feet per the book, so you can just go to 200 feet to ensure that there's no surviving.






Forget nuke 'em from orbit - this is the only way to be sure

Now I know it's 'playing it wrong', but there's no reason for the game rules to INCENTIVIZE behavior that the game doesn't want to encourage. It mentions that people have survived falls from thousands of feet, so there's no reason not to set the damage based on range (short, medium, long) and fix the damage at 5/10/15, or set the damage at 15 but make SN 3/7/10 or some combination to adjust the numbers to generate the narrative element you want. So this is a section where I absolutely would, without doubt issue a house rule on falling damage to avoid bad rules driving emergent play that runs counter to the narrative I want.

Non-lethal damage does Body Damage, but it can't reduce you below zero, unless you get a critical hit in which case it might be regular damage and someone might die. That's another rule that I just don't think is worth using in a nod to realism. Yes, if you hit someone with a club in real life, you could kill them. But in movies and TV shows knocking someone out with a blow to the head is standard. Making it so if you accidentally critical you kill them INCREASES violence in the game, and so reliably being able to disable someone without risking killing them seems like a good thing in most cases. Maybe that's just me.


I mentioned in the falling example that you can convert Physical Damage to Soul Damage; that's only a PC option (unless the SG says otherwise), and there are times that will limit your ability to activate abilities and things along those lines. This is called Fortitude.

Following the types of damage, there's a description of 'effects' which are damage over time. They include exposure to the elements, poison, bleeding, stun, and burning. Several of these effects are triggered by specific weapons if they score a critical hit.

Two Poisons were introduced in the Equipment chapter. The neurotoxin can do +2 damage when used as part of an attack, but if ingested it does 1 damage every round that they fail an Endurance check until they succeed on 2 CRITICAL SUCCESSES in a single round. Five of the six sample characters have an Endurance of 3 (one has a 2). My quick calculation is that you have a 2% chance of rolling 2 12s on 3d12. If you have to roll a success again against SN 9, so doing that TWICE is 10%. That's about 1/5 of 1% per round. That seems....too difficult. You can also have people use Medicine or Herbalism, so better plan on having someone good at that.

Bleeding continues until you die or treat it, so that's pretty bad, but the resist check to avoid bleeding is relatively easy (Endurance SN 7) so you have ~90% chance of making it each round with 3 or more Endurance dice.

Stun is bad news - your defenses drop to 0 and you can take no action but trying not to be stunned. You can try Endurance OR Will (higher stat) and it requires 3+ successes in a single check. Once again, using our sample characters, virtually all of the characters are 3/3 END/WILL. That works out to about a 20% success rate. Now I'll remind folks that you can spend MIND to give each die a +1 per point spent, so if you get CLOSE, that's probably a good option. Stun is a critical effect on several weapons, so this is likely to come up. As an optional rule, the game suggests that that if you take more damage in a single round than your Endurance you can make an Endurance check (TN 8) and you're stunned unless you get three successes.

Be aware that this will greatly increase the deadliness of combat.

Burning is similarly not good. A fire has a rating from 1 (campfire) to 5 (burning building). If you take fire damage you make a Reaction Survival Skill Check SN 8 and you need successes equal to the fire rating to put it out. The majority of sample characters have Survival 6 (the other two are 4 and 5) so using the same math before where you're 40% likely to get an 8 or better on a d12 you should get, on average, 2.4 successes with 6 dice. Fortunately, if you can dive into water you can extinguish the flames without a check. If you have a Yutsu barge, invest in the jacuzzi option, you know?

Some attacks can do stat damage. Each type of damage (Physical/Mental/Spiritual) can deal damage to each stat. Physical damage is twice as likely to target a physical stat as a mental or spiritual; a mental attack is twice as likely to target a mental stat than physical or spiritual, and spiritual is most likely to target a spiritual stat. What this means is that you roll a d12 and conduct a table-lookup. For a physical attack, 1-2 are Str, 3-4 is AGI, 5-6 is End and 7-12 are the other stats. Ultimately, this isn't a difficult concept, but a table look-up is not the most efficient design. For your table, you can do the same thing more easily by saying 1-9 is the stats in order; then 10-12 is the appropriate line based on the attack. Now I don't care about remembering whether 5-6 or 6-7 are the break points and anything 1-9 is always the same - as written an 8 is Perception for Physical attacks, Wisdom for Mental Attacks, and Spirit for Spiritual. I'm a big fan of that type of easy simplification and a half-way decent gaming editor should have been able to recommend it. Like I've been looking over this book over the course of 4 days in addition to taking care of the family and work... Basically, I really wish publishers would swing by the den and beg one or two regular posters to look over their near finished product. For the LOVE OF GOOD GAMES we'll tell you what we think FOR FREE. In any case, stat damage can recalculate all of your derived values. If you lose one Endurance, your maximum body drops by 1. If you're at 'full', you drop, but if you had already taken 1 point of Body Damage you don't take another point just because your maximum is reduced. In the event that a stat would be reduced below 1, it might result in Death or Instant Death (SG's prerogative).

Unconscious and Dying
The rules on unconsciousness state that you can remain conscious at 0 or negative with a Will check (SN 8) each round, but can only take partial actions. Dying says that if you're at -1 in any stats you're dying AND AUTOMATICALLY UNCONSCIOUS. Ultimately, if you're at negatives YOU WILL FALL UNCONSCIOUS EVENTUALLY, but these two rule statements are in conflict. Personally, I think it's more interesting to let people stay conscious with the check; with 5 dice you have a 93% chance of making the check each round, but iterative chance being a bitch, you will go down. In any case, while you're conscious but at 0/negative you can't take primary actions. While you're at negative and depending on whether we follow the rules as outlined in the Unconscious Section or whether we prioritize the Dying rules, at some point you have to find out if you're going to actually die. Each round you roll a check (SN 8) of either Will or Endurance REGARDLESS OF WHICH STAT IS NEGATIVE (player choice) for EACH attribute that is negative. If you have a critical fail, you take 2 damage (moving closer to death), if you fail you take 1 damage (moving closer to death), if you succeed nothing happens; if you get a critical success you stop making checks and stabilize. Someone can try to stabilize you for body damage by rendering first aid; success means you don't take damage; Critical success stabilizes. There's no first aid for mind or soul (but there are some abilities that give you a benefit). I suppose, and this is a little out there, that if your friend is dying from Mind damage, you could engage them in a social encounter deliberately lose and they gain 1 point of Mind. I'm not sure they can do that, but might be worth a try. Check with your SG.

Ultimately, even if the results of the dice indicate that your character dies, you don't have to accept that. Character Death is a player choice.





You'll be stone dead in a moment

There are some items that can restore a character, but Short and Long Rest are the two methods that get covered here. A short rest (5min-1 hour) narrative time allows each character to make an Endurance, Wisdom, and Will check; every success gives +1 to the associated stat (body, mind, soul). You can take 2 short rests per day, and it can only happen after an encounter. A long rest doesn't always mean sleep, but it is longer than a short rest. You must be conscious or sleeping (ie, you can't get a long rest in when you're unconscious or dying). With a long rest you automatically gain Body equal to Endurance, Mind equal to Wisdom and Soul equal to Will. You ALSO make a check like with a short rest and get an additional point back for each success. The SNs aren't given, so assume 8. You can combine a short rest with a long rest and gain the benefits of both.

Stat damage (outside of abilities) heals a maximum of 1 point per day total, not per stat. Ie, if you have 1 STR damage and 1 WILL damage, best you can do is heal one of those. To gain the benefit from a long rest you can't have had any encounters the same day. This stat healing is INSTEAD of the check for healing to your Body/Mind/Soul, and it only works if you get a critical success. The normal healing (not based on number of successes rolled) still applies for the long rest. Ie, normally under a long rest you heal your Endurance to body, plus a number of body damage equal to the number of successes on an Endurance check; in this case you do not roll for additional successes - raising your 1 stat is THE ONLY OPTION.

That's the end of Section 3. I feel like my review in this section might sound harsh - but it's not really! I definitely think there are things that don't work as well as they should, and I think there's some tension between the rules as written and the intended style of play. Those are things that CAN BE SOLVED prior to publishing. Most game designers struggle with these things, and Coyote and Crow is not so far off the mark that it can't work as a game. A few gentleman's agreements about not trying to push people off flying barges or minor changes to falling damage are MINOR ADJUSTMENTS AT MOST. But let's call a spade a spade - if something CAN be improved based on a relatively simple read-through, it probably SHOULD have been improved before it went to print.

For myself, I really like the Healing Stat damage rule - at least on first inspection. I've recently watched Yojimbo, and a major plot point is that he was seriously injured and it took a long time for him to recover. In a D&D style game, that kind of extended recovery doesn't work (and I'm not sure it actually works here), but I think that the rule creates a space where that time of extended healing makes sense.




Most games would benefit from having more Toshiro Mifune


And that's the end of section 3. The next section is 'For the Story Guide', so if you're only planning on being a player, make sure to stop reading now.

[deaddmwalking]

Character Optimization

So before hitting the next section, I wanted to talk a little about Character Optimization strategies.

The first big one is that with stats broken into 'POWER'/'FINESSE'/'RESERVE' and FINESSE/RESERVE applying to your defenses and POWER not doing so, it's clear that you really want to boost Finesse and Reserve and not power. For example, if you have a choice between STR 5 AGI 2 END 2 or STR 2 AGI 2 END 5, you want to choose the second. Why? With the same base stats your PD is 4 with Body 10 in the first example, and PD 7 Body 10 in the second. What that means in practice is that instead of someone scoring a successful hit with 75% of their dice, they'll only score a hit with 50% of their dice. Since net hits equate to damage, you're 25% tougher without spending a single extra point in character creation.

Now intuitively, you would presume that Strength will help you with attacking. But Melee Weapon is STR/END, so if you prioritize Endurance, you're not losing anything. The other two skills that use Strength are Athletics (also can use Endurance) and Unarmed Combat (can use Intelligence). Since Intelligence is also a 'non-defense stat', prioritizing armed combat. Since weapons often provide bonus dice (and unarmed combat does not), you're going to be further along the power curve using a club than your fist no matter what. The Endurance Ability Gecko's Heart allows you to add your Spirit to your Endurance and lets you spend 1 point of Mind to negate two points of body damage. While Spirit doesn't add to defense, knowing that it will add to your PD means prioritizing it might be worth it. With a 5 Spirit, while this ability is active your Endurance is 10; your PD is 12. You're now only hittable on a 12+ on a d12 (8.33% of each die roll). Plated Armor gives you +2PD (Cost 5), raising it to a 14. Not only are you a defensive behemoth, you have 10 dice on your weapon attack rolls just from Endurance. With weapon skill 3 using a weapon that gives +3 dice, you can have 16 dice. If your opponents have a defense of 7, you're hitting on half those dice. Spending a little Fortitude to bump those hits and/or a couple of 12s that explode to '+2 additional hits' you can hit hard when asked to hit. With the 'expected defenses' of 5-6 you're going to get a couple more. Basically, you can expect to one-shot most opposition pretty easily, and you're mostly not worried about retaliation. If you can bump Agility a little, that'll further increase your Body AND increase your Initiative so you're more likely to go first.

Now, that doesn't let you deal with Spiritual Threats - you can't smack them with a club - but this highlights the sort of issue with what happens when you take expected values and deliberately try to stack them to the breaking point. Since you can't normally start with 2 pieces of equipment with cost 5, there's a cost 4 war club that also gives +3 dice, so the build stays the same. High Endurance also works in a lot of the checks you might care about like overcoming Stun. Making 3 successes is a lot easier with 10 dice than with 2-4. In fact, you should expect to succeed against the TN 8 with 4 dice, on average. With the ability to raise at least one die a +1 with Fortitude, you're one bad hombre.


I'm sure that there are other concepts that would similarly work very effectively in the game. I think prioritizing PD makes sense because there are so many Physical Threats. While there are things that deal MD or SD and that's concerning, building a tank is pretty straightforward. And the only thing that stands in the way is perception that you're 'playing the game wrong'. That's a tension I don't like - why wouldn't you want to make a warrior GOOD AT FIGHTING? Why wouldn't a character make the choices that make them less likely to die? Isn't being successful give you a chance to choose which narrative options you want? This is something we've talked a lot about on these boards. It comes up in D&D all the time, and while I LIKE THIS GAME and I think my final thoughts are going to be positive, there are definitely trap options and optimizations that can make a big difference at the table. And that's not all bad - if your group is all about optimization and you all do it, this could be REALLY AMAZING to see how crazy you can get in what's basically a low-level setting. But if you're the only one doing it and the SG isn't on board, well, I guess it doesn't really matter what your PD is if someone pushes you off a floating barge at 10,000 feet.

[deaddmwalking]

For the Story Guide
Chapter 15 - Getting Started

Good news - players are ENCOURAGED to read the Storyteller section. Of course, that's in the first paragraph, so I'm not sure how they would have known that unless they were reading it anyway. It is suggested that players not read the 'monster manual' and 'sample adventure'. The chapter opens with general overview of the StoryGuide role, how to make players feel safe and free to express themselves and good suggestions for setting and respecting boundaries. This is possibly more 'formal' than some people like, but for decades I've always talked to players about what type of 'movie rating' our game is, what types of scenes include 'fade to black'. These are good conversations to have, and suggestions like 'X-Cards' are just ways of being respectful.

Although the book has offered a lot of advice about setting aside rules when appropriate, it does encourage you to use the dice for influencing NPCs, regardless of how well a PLAYER speaks. At other points it also stressed that CHARACTERS have abilities that PLAYERS do not, so allowing the player to roll to generate new avenues of play is appropriate. I've probably harped on some of the advice to 'ignore rules' when they get in the way, so I want to make sure I highlight that this advice also exists in the book (in multiple places) and it is advice I agree with.

The game emphasizes story elements and offers advice about motivations in an encounter beyond 'kill the other guy' and stakes and addressing setting, theme and tone.


Chatper 16 - Forging Your Saga

This chapter explores ways you can run 'stories', the C&C version of D&D adventures or Shadowrun Runs.

..we want to call out what we think of as sort of the default starting point for Stories you will tell in Coyote & Crow, the Suyata. We suggest this because it's an easy way to introduce new Players - both new to roleplaying games and new to Coyote & Crow - to the world as well as giving them and the Story Guide a built-in reason for Characters to team up and work together.

A Kolisoo (group) of Suyata have a built in Mr. Johnson to give missions, and they're expected to work together to accomplish them. This opens up a lot of potential play space from X-Files to Dungeon-Delving to Monster-of-the-Week and more. As far as a default assumption, they could do a lot worse. The chapter continues with examples of types of stories including Protection, Exploration, Espionage, War, and Horror. Each includes three 'story prompts'.




You know, stuff to get your creative juices flowing



Chapter 17 - the Three Path Concept

Basically, when designing an encounter, the SG should think of at least three ways that the PCs might 'solve' it. In D&D, the assumption is usually 'kill the bad guys', but by figuring out how they could be negotiated with, won over, intimidated, or bypassed, the SG will be prepared for more ways of moving the story forward, and therefore the game is likely to be more rewarding.

Besides Combat or a Social Encounter, what other things might your Characters do? What options can you present to them that make them use a different Skill or engage with your NPCS in a unique way?

Chapter 18 - Interpreting the Rules

Situations will arise that aren't specifically covered in the previous sections of this book.... With this chapter, we hope to go beyond the letter of the rules and dive a little deeper into the why's and how's of things so that you, as Story Guide, will be better equipped to make those occassional interruptions as smooth and brief as possible. We beleive that if you have some understanding of the underlying reasoning behind some of the rules, you will be more comfortable interpreting them at the game table.

This has advice on how to use some abilities that lean on the Story Guide more and the advice is 'be more generous than you think you should, not less'. Mostly good advice.

Chapter 19 - Icons and Legends
This is the bestiary including sample characters, monsters, animals. Outside of commoners and animals that have several listed on a single page, there are twenty entries that include heroes, spirits and montsers. The stat blocks are simplified; for skills the attribute is included (ie if someone has MELEE WEAPON 7 listed, you'd look at STR/END and if STR is higher (4) you'd PRESUME that the weapon skill is 3. Which means that if they have a listed weapon that adds additional dice, you have to add that. It's not super confusing, but it might be EASIER to audit if the skill was listed as (4/3/7) meaning Attribute/Skill/Total. Since there are attacks that reduce attributes, and a character uses the HIGHER of two attributes for skills they have ranks in, a little more information would help. Since the text is SO BIG, I think they could choose a smaller font and lose virtually nothing in readability.

Next up - a sample adventure.

[deaddmwalking]

The end of the book

The last chapter of the book provides a brief adventure and follows the advice given about presenting a situation and considering three ways the PCs can engage with it. That's followed by six sample characters (pre-gen PCs), notes from the authors, a glossary of Chahi words, a 4-page glossary of game terms, 2 page Index and a character sheet. And that's it, the journey has come to an end.






Final Thoughts
I think it's clear that I've kicked the tires, tried to poke holes, and point out every possible flaw or misstep that the authors made, so now that we're at the end and I've been critical, let me say I am impressed. First off, this is a high quality book with great art, and honestly, that's enough. But that's not ALL that this is. Fundamentally, the game works.

Rolling d12s isn't inherently better or worse than d6s or d10s - this is a dice pool game and that's an appropriate mechanic for the type of game. Characters can be noticeably better than others, but the ability levels are human to low-superhuman. Basically, dice pools are good at making sure that people with lots of dice in their pool succeed, and people with very few dice COULD succeed, but are much more likely to fail. Compared to many games that use a d20 or roll-under percentile, characters are actually competent and likely to succeed where they should. There are no major math fails like in Riddle of Steel where characters don't succeed when they should. Having the 1 negate a success is, on average offset by a 12 equating to an extra 1 or 2 successes, but it does produce slightly more variance, meaning that the result of rolling dice isn't a foregone conclusion. Essentially, you get a relatively reasonable possibility curve; the 8.33% chance of rolling a 1 per die doesn't cause major break points where rolling more dice is BAD - ie, you're more likely to critically fail, the way that some systems do with either a fixed number of ones, or just high odds due to a smaller die range (d6, d10). Adding a new die is going to make you better which it should, but you're not going to push yourself off the RNG in most cases.

In the World of Coyote & Crow, some animals and sacred objects are thought of as having a 'Spirit'. In my mind, the book also has a Spirit. It is one of inclusivity, creating a safe space and really allowing people, as a group, to focus on building a Saga. Having read the book cover to cover, I can have a conversation with the book - I know what it would tell me and why. So let's take a look my character optimization strategy stacking a high Endurance with the ability Gecko's Heart to get a Physical Defense of 14 (virtually impossible to hit, and even if they do, you can soak half the damage using Fortitude to convert two hits to 1 Mind damage). Someone else in the party creates a character with a Physical Defense of 2 (lowest possible) and a Body of 3. Obviously the second character is in more danger of being knocked unconscious during a fight - but not dying. That's a player choice! So when I build the optimized character, the book would say, "It's clear that you're making a character that is very difficult to be defeated in combat. There are stories that might be worth exploring where the heroes lose and suffer severe setbacks - why would you prefer to avoid stories like that"?




Like seriously, the stories where the good guys lose are the best
And the truth is, I would be making a choice about what types of stories I'm comfortable with, and if I dig deeper there's probably some D&D trauma somewhere that I can take a look at and examine. That's what this game wants to do - let's ask some questions together, let's explore some stories together, and let's de-emphasize the competitive elements where we can. So while I can point to a few rules and say that individually, they don't incentivize the style of play the game is striving for (falling is the big one in my mind), taken as a whole, the game actually does a good job of promoting the exploration of our underlying assumptions - not to challenge or preach - but just because they're worth examining. And if you do that, you will have a chance to build a satisfying narrative without worrying too much about winning or losing.





Some of the minor errors like renaming Mystic Defense to Spiritual Defense inconsistently aren't going to interfere with your ability to play the game. Personal preferences like consistently stating bonuses as "+x" and penalties as "-x" may have some solid reasoning behind them - but even if my preferences really are BETTER, the game has sufficient clarity that in virtually every case* it is clear from context how to apply the bonuses/penalties.

*in the Brawling Description for the Specialized Unarmed Combat ability is says: Brawlers also use their Rank in this Skill when wielding improvised weapons, allowing them to attack with whatever random items are available - a chair leg, a bowl, anything - to attempt to main an opponent, granting them +1. My interpretation is that they are given +1 dice for the attack, the same way certain weapons provide bonus dice. I certainly don't think it RAISES the SN. There is a possibility that it was intended as a -1SN on the PD of your opponent and was misprinted. In any case, I'm going with my first take: you get +1 dice when you use an improvised weapon.



Some people like extremely crunchy games that involve high degrees of realism; where absolute position is tracked and your specific position in relation to everyone else in combat is rigidly defined. This is not that game. The level of abstraction still allows for compelling action to be described, but we have more than Bear*World levels of success being redefined as failure by GM whim with no real input from the dice or abilities. Essentially, the game provides enough structure to create a shared narrative - if someone isn't using the rules and you think it detracts from the game, you can call them on it. As a result, I think this works better than most games in the rules-lite space. When there aren't many rules, each of them has to do a fair bit of heavy lifting, and defaulting to Stat + Skill to create a dice pool is pretty straightforward.

Considering that this is an initial offering by a new publisher, I'm blown away. I WANTED to like it, but I was expecting that I WOULDN'T BE ABLE TO. There are so many potential design pitfalls, and while the game made choices that don't 100% align with the ones I would have made, I think that most of them are very defensible. As written, I think it's playable with minimal 'mind-caulk' - you can pretty much run it as written and it'll work. There's still a couple of tweaks I'd do. For example, while the default resolution is stat + skill, there are some cases where a check is stat only. For example, overcoming a Stun requires an Endurance or Will check, and requires 3 successes. Likewise, healing requires making an attribute check using the Reserve Stat for each type of damage, Physical, Mental and Spiritual. Tying those checks to a skill in addition to a stat will potentially give players more dice to roll, raising their chance of success. I'd be inclined to add a skill called 'Focus', that can be used with Endurance/Will checks for overcoming stun, remaining conscious, and healing - just a chance to add a couple of extra successes in those cases. Alternatively, I could allow characters to roll a END+WILL for those types of checks and get the same effect. The fact that I'd consider some very minor tweaks/house rules is really a very strong endorsement - if you have to change all the rules, what are you even paying for? The core is solid; minor adjustments for preference are really all that's required.

As part of a review I think it's important to ask if the designers hit the goals that they set out for themselves, and I think they did. This book provides an interesting setting, the rules are sufficiently mechanically sound that they don't interfere with the ability to play or REQUIRE discarding in order to generate reasonable results. There are references to future products that will fill in some additional information about setting, and I think more content is good, but I don't think what's not included detracts from what is.


As an aside, the Forums for Coyote & Crow were closed down, so I popped over to their Discord Server and notified the creator and his fans about this review. I welcome input and clarifications, rebuttals, questions, comments and criticisms. One user did offer me a point of clarification regarding Paths and the attributes that are 'linked'. When designing Paths, the creators avoided choosing two stats from either the same line or column. Ie, you can't choose STR + AGI because those are both physical stats (same line), nor could you choose STR + INT because those are both Power Stats (same column). All existing paths conform to that restriction. With that restriction there are 18 possible permutations so 3 of them are not among the 15 presented in this book. I am not certain that the restriction is necessary. Each path provides a +1 to two stats; if you added a +1 to END/AGI you would be adding +2 to your Physical Defense, which will make you tougher than perhaps anticipated. In regards to whether that helps or hinders telling interesting stories and building sagas I don't know - I'd probably lean on the side of being MORE PERMISSIVE, especially if the player felt strongly about their Animal association and/or how that animal should be represented. In any case, the 3 additional viable paths under this rule that were not listed are: Agility/Wisdom; Endurance/Charisma; Perception/Will.

Outside of questions or requests for additional clarification, that's everything.

[MGuy]

Good to know this exists. I was looking for this exact kind of thing some time ago.

[deaddmwalking]

As mentioned in my original post, Coyote & Crow launched a crowdfunding campaign on Backerkit. They've raised $83k against a goal of $30k with 1,225 backers. This is primarily around releasing 10 new stories set in the world of Coyote & Crow.