Rough Mechanics for Iron Edda - Memories of Metal and Bone

A dear friend told me the last post was fluffy and asked too many questions without defining things.

Let’s change that.

Laby Blackbird and Always/Never/Now use pregens to increase the speed of getting to play. Memories will do the same. I’ll create 5-6 pregens (7-8 if I need to) to give players the opportunites to pick from a diverse group. I know for a fact that we’ll need a pilot, a captain, an engineer, some muscle, a magic cannon, at least one trans* character, and multiple PoCs. I’d like to keep the PCs human, but that’s a conversation to have with Tracy.

In LB/A/N/N (Ed: I’m starting to like the arcane feel of this acronym), each character has several Keys that help define the character and award XP for playing to character. In both games, a player can Buyoff a Key and take another. One thing that Will did with A/N/N is to give some of the pregens a locked Key (one they coudn’t Buyoff); I like this approach, and I think I want the Clans and the Bonebonded to be a key. This would make the Clans pretty central to the experience, which I like.

LB/A/N/N characters also have Traits and Tags (think Fate Aspects with Tags from Technoir). Traits and Tags fit well without having to do anything, so in they go. The Traits and Tags let the players know what kinds of things their PC is good at.

I haven’t decided whether I want to use LB’s more freeform style or A/N/N’s structured narrative branching. I could go either way on it. If I want the PCs unraveling a mystery related to Ragnarok, then A/N/N’s structure would work better. However, the holdfast generation lends itself well to LB’s style, so that might make more sense.

An idea that came to me earlier in regards to how to handle the ships involved making one of the pilot’s Keys be tied to the ship (it makes sense for this to be the Bonebonded’s “Clan” Key). The ship itself would have a Trait (possibly two), and I’d want to bind the ship and the pilot together. This means I need a feedback loop between the two that I need to think through more.

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Comments

Jesus Howard said:

Long-lived monstrous races in your background can have interesting consequences for your character—though the ancestor’s misdeeds happened decades ago, that relative may still be active in the campaign. For example, the shapechanging red dragon who polluted your bloodline may awaken after a century of rest, or the vampire queen of a nearby land may turn out to be your rebellious great-grandmother. Adversarial relationships like these provide a campaign villain and allow all the PCs to participate in your family’s story, and can be the key to unlocking traits or other abilities for your character.

TriskalJM said:

I appreciate the idea, but I definitely want the protagonists to be all-human. The fiction could support something akin to what you reference, but that’s not the direction I want to take things in.