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If you've been playing RPGs for long, you've probably heard of Jenna Moran. Possibly in hushed whispers from readers in awe of her genius! Or possibly from people complaining that they don't understand her books. Jenna Moran is a designer and novelist with naturally curly hair, who has worked on games such as Exalted and Weapons of the Gods in addition to her own game lines. Her published works include: Nobilis, a diceless game of gods, raised up from men to guard and guide their Estates, the concepts which combine to make up reality. Drawing inspiration from Sandman, among other things, this game's second edition was famous as a jaw-dropping artifact of incredible art and layout (and incredibly inconvenient proportions) before vanishing as the result of malfeasance on the part of the distributor, Guardians of Order. It has since become available again as a PDF. The third edition was published by Eos Press before disappearing as the result of malfeasance on the part of the publisher. It has since become available again as a PDF with a new layout. A fourth edition of Nobilis (self-published) is now in playtesting. Glitch is a diceless spin-off game from Nobilis in which you play retired void gods who solve mysteries. Did I mention that the Nobilis are supposed to defend their Estates? The ones they defend them from are the Excrucians, the sexy gods of emptiness, and in this game you get to play as Excrucians. Specifically, Excrucian Strategists, who can unmake anything they like with a wave of their hands. Specifically specifically, you play as retired Excrucian Strategists, who have given up on trying to unmake the world and are attempting to get along while living in it and having no life skills except "being a horseman of the apocalypse". It's a powerful meditation on the meaning of life, chronic illness, and depression. Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine is a cheerful anime spin-off of Nobilis that draws, sooner or later, on every Japanese thing you ever heard of. Its unusual mechanical structure puts planning out your character's arc on the front end, while actually figuring out your magical powers is almost secondary. This game is also notable for being the home of The Glass-Maker's Dragon, probably the best and most ambitious campaign book ever written. Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist is really more of a game about making games. It's a bizarre, unfinished, unpublished ruleset, where the only rules that actually work are the ones for resolving disputes about how the game should be played. Turning this into a successful story where the player characters successfully create the world and themselves is an exercise for the table. The Flood is Jenna's new game, the story of poetry farmers suffering as a result of the assetization of their livelihood, based on Madelieine Fairbairn's "Fields of Gold: Financing the Global Land Rush". It's funny and bleak and you should give it a try! Jenna has also written a bunch of novels, including:
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Aug 30, 2022 02:07
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I like Nobilis 2e. I like the rules improvement of Nobilis 3e (although I'm still iffy on mortal actions actually needing rules... can't we just say "these armed goons are an aspect 2 force in aggregate" and be done with it?) but it is sorely missing the example of play and examples of NPCs that Nobilis 2e had. Glitch solves this problem and I did kickstart it but the amount of points tracking going on means I have always felt wary of playing it. I have actually played several sessions in a miraculous-tier Chuubo's game which makes me feel very rare. It worked OK! The biggest problem was how poorly the book is organised in terms of trying to create a character. I have no clue what it would be like to play using the Glass-Maker's Dragon campaign and pregens even though I own it from a bundle. Anyway Jenna Moran is still a good designer, people should check out that stuff.
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Aug 30, 2022 02:57
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Oh hell yeah. I've never played any; one of the guys I play with wanted to do Chuubo's years ago but never got it off the ground before we played 80 AW/WOD campaigns. I'd love to hear some trip reports, the only rulebook I have is WTF and it's genuinely hard to imagine what the gently caress that looks like at the table.
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Aug 30, 2022 03:19
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Glass-Maker's Dragon is maybe my infinite white whale campaign. One of these days I'm just going to have to run it, even if I can only get a few players... but drat do I ever want to just play in it.
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Aug 30, 2022 04:22
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I got the Nobilis/Chuubo bundle from Bundle of Holding earlier this year and I've been meaning to run it. What would be a good place to start, maybe the Halloween one-shot that I remember Chuubo's has?
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Aug 30, 2022 04:24
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The Halloween Special is definitely where I've considered starting, the times I've considered running Chuubo's as PbP. I'm not sure if it's a true one-shot (there seems like a lot of content, and I don't have a good sense of the game's pace), but it's a limited scope and designed to work with a small player group.
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Aug 30, 2022 04:38
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I bought Chuubo's, but I have a hard time reading it. I don't think it lays out its concepts well before going into them. Examples of play are sorely needed. Sometimes when you're turning some TTRPG paradigms on their heads, it's nice to show how gaming at the table should behave. Nobilis 2e was my first god game, and by far my favorite. I honestly think the changes in tone between 2e and 3e shows off just how strong Moran's character is. 2e is almost melodramatic, and despite having rules for all of your god powers, the text focuses more on the minutia and the relations between the characters. 3e is kind of an acknowledgement that if you give your characters the opportunity to build a character that can put out the sun, they will build such a character, and then the sun will be put out in the first few sessions. Dunno if I can get my players to care about flowers, but godly powers that have defined limits are a huge draw.
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Aug 30, 2022 04:50
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ninjoatse.cx posted:I bought Chuubo's, but I have a hard time reading it. I don't think it lays out its concepts well before going into them. Examples of play are sorely needed. Sometimes when you're turning some TTRPG paradigms on their heads, it's nice to show how gaming at the table should behave. There are two examples of play published in Finding Home: Two Examples of Play. I need to read through it myself.
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Aug 30, 2022 05:43
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bewilderment posted:I like Nobilis 2e. This is where I’m at— had a lot of good times running and playing N2, but ultimately bounced off 3 despite loving a lot of the rules changes because so many were poorly explained (I had to read WTF before really understanding what was going on with the mortal-scale actions) and ultimately its underlying “yes, but” philosophy conflict resolution of was less useful to me than N2’s “no, try a different way” when you’re trying to resolve constant clashes of impossible things without having every interaction of miracles get bogged down into metanarrative haggling. I mean, I like that kind of thing in general, but apparently not for Nobilis! I remain hopeful that N4 will be more to my tastes. Played WTF twice, once with great results and one with middling. It’s definitely a game that relies heavily on what the players bring to it, but then I guess it is unfinished. I tried running the Chuubo’s Halloween Special when it came out but ultimately we couldn’t quite get into the game’s groove. One day we’ll try again. Weapons of the Gods is an amazing read full of lovely kung fu microfiction but ultimately the game just has too many moving parts for battles to flow as smoothly as I’d like. (Legends of the Wulin *may* have fixed at least some of that at least). Haven’t read Glitch or the new one yet. One of my players has actually been obsessed with World-Breaker’s Hand for years so I’m mildly afraid of running a game where he’d straight-up get to play an Excrucian!
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Aug 30, 2022 14:43
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The thing I find oddest about GMD is that there's a lot of talk about how amazing the characters are, but nowhere near as much about how many of them are gutted by their standard Arcs. Chuubo basically gets put through the wringer and loses his wish-granting ability.
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Aug 30, 2022 17:33
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Antivehicular posted:Glass-Maker's Dragon is maybe my infinite white whale campaign. One of these days I'm just going to have to run it, even if I can only get a few players... but drat do I ever want to just play in it. Online? Because I'm down. I've owned CMWM and Glassmaker's Dragon for ages and to this day I don't really understand how everything is supposed to play out in practice, but I'm prepared to work it out with other players.
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Aug 30, 2022 23:08
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Antivehicular posted:Glass-Maker's Dragon is maybe my infinite white whale campaign. One of these days I'm just going to have to run it, even if I can only get a few players... but drat do I ever want to just play in it. How many players do you need?
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Aug 30, 2022 23:18
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I'd be down to join too, I believe Glass-Maker's Dragon is listed as for 2-9 players.
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Aug 30, 2022 23:26
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PerniciousKnid posted:How many players do you need? That's an interesting question! GMD has eight pregenerated PCs and one "create your own with this specific plot hook" PC slot, so it can run up to nine, but there are references in the text to running the game with like three PCs and having the other pregens around as NPCs if they become relevant. I'd probably want at least three or four players to make sure there's some decent diversity and energy at the table, but I really don't know how the game runs well enough to say for sure. Does anyone have any experience with Chuubo's/GMD and have any insight as to how it runs with different party sizes?
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Aug 30, 2022 23:30
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Chuubo's runs differently depending on how you play it, because it's designed to work well as a play-by-post or as a live game, but not as a text-based chat. As a pbp you can easily have a lot of players. As a live game (voice over discord is fine) you probably only want as many as the GM can wrangle. The main reason is that your main drive as a player (and the thing you're kind of trying to do as you RP) is to get XP. You get XP by doing stuff every so often. If you've basically squeezed as much XP out of a scene as you're allowed to then you 'fade into the background' and mostly just react to other players for a bit until the next chapter. This is pretty easy to handle in PbP, you can just have everyone commit to writing one post per day or so, then then once everyone's faded, the 'game clock' advances and the GM explains what happens next. In a live game you don't have a record of everything you've done and you don't have hours to compose what you're doing so you'll be more on the lookout for opportunities to do your thing.
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Aug 31, 2022 13:29
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I'd also be very much down to join a GMD campaign, particularly one conducted over voice.
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Aug 31, 2022 14:25
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Very much down to join a PbP chuubo's. If we could start it sometime in the future so I could reread the dang book, that'd be very cool.
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Aug 31, 2022 15:22
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Antivehicular posted:That's an interesting question! GMD has eight pregenerated PCs and one "create your own with this specific plot hook" PC slot, so it can run up to nine, but there are references in the text to running the game with like three PCs and having the other pregens around as NPCs if they become relevant. I'd probably want at least three or four players to make sure there's some decent diversity and energy at the table, but I really don't know how the game runs well enough to say for sure. Does anyone have any experience with Chuubo's/GMD and have any insight as to how it runs with different party sizes? Why not start with the largest small party and go from there? If you think another is fine, they can be added in. Most of the games have people dropping out all the time, so I don't think having too many players will materialize is as too large of a threat.
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Aug 31, 2022 15:38
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I've been trying to get a group together for GMD over Discord voice chat. Here's a link to the game room thread with details. Advertising aside, I really enjoy her work. I'm excited to read Glitch whenever I manage to get the money for it.
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Aug 31, 2022 15:57
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So, if you're interested in Nobilis Fourth Edition… Jenna has announced that if the first-day or first-week sales of The Night-Bird's Feather are enough to push her out of her usual band of readers, she'll make the playtest draft of the game publicly available, although preorders aren't anywhere close to where they need to be yet. Jenna Moran posted:Besides "some of my best," it's ... an epic fantasy with a veritable smoothie of other fantasy subgenres mixed in (and a dash of the literary, too), with a focus on the social construction of worth, the internal process of constructing experience, the weight of accumulated preconceptions of the self, and dysmorphia. Lately I've been calling it Vita Nostra meets Spirited Away. ^_^ You can pre-order the book here.
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Aug 31, 2022 19:50
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Anyone read An Unclean Legacy? I like the way she writes her TTRPGs, does it carry over to her books?
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Aug 31, 2022 21:27
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I was extremely into An Unclean Legacy back in college (back when it was just blog posts), and I would say that it's at least worth a shot if you like her TTRPG writing. The style is pretty similar. Anyway, to get back to GMD: running voice isn't really feasible for me (I have a work schedule that precludes real-time play at the moment), but to ask formally, what would the level of interest be in a pure PBP game, either on the forums or on Discord text?
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Aug 31, 2022 21:52
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ninjoatse.cx posted:Anyone read An Unclean Legacy? I like the way she writes her TTRPGs, does it carry over to her books? I think it's great, I've lent my copy to people who don't know who Jenna is and they've enjoyed it, and if you like the way she writes RPGs you'll be able to handle the narrative style flourishes that some others bounce off of. Go for it.
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Aug 31, 2022 22:18
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Lambo Trillrissian posted:I think it's great, I've lent my copy to people who don't know who Jenna is and they've enjoyed it, and if you like the way she writes RPGs you'll be able to handle the narrative style flourishes that some others bounce off of. Go for it. I went to go buy it for Kindle on Amazon to discover I already own it.  Musta heard about it a long time ago and forgot
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Aug 31, 2022 22:39
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After that time I was dared to read WTF I still can't help but read it as a deconstruction of the mystique around RPGs - that there is no "jewel of all desiring", and that you can't get it. My favorite quote is still:WTF posted:You may construe the characters' participation in the stories of the fairies as evidence of a creeping broadening intrusion of irreality into their existence. Their acceptance of narrative causality---the need to accept narrative causality---implies the fundamental nonexistence and contingency of the world in which they live. Fundamentally, the centred realistic expersion isn't achieved by either narrative focus or simulation, so it just isn't there.
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Sep 2, 2022 19:54
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My group is on break right now due to life complications but after a few short false starts alternated with one shots in other systems they've requested that once we reconvene we play "that therapy game" (Glitch) for a long campaign, I couldn't be more excited.
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Sep 6, 2022 22:40
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Lambo Trillrissian posted:My group is on break right now due to life complications but after a few short false starts alternated with one shots in other systems they've requested that once we reconvene we play "that therapy game" (Glitch) for a long campaign, I couldn't be more excited. This is very interesting, how did it work therapeutically?
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Sep 7, 2022 19:40
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hyphz posted:This is very interesting, how did it work therapeutically? Well, when I make Glitch characters I usually go for something esoteric and weird to be their Bane... but some of my players make the thing that's killing their characters something they struggle with in their own lives. And exploring that in the game, even filtered through the high weirdness that happens in a game of Glitch, can be really cathartic. So it's not a formal therapy session or anything, but players have come away from sessions feeling like they worked on some of their stuff, and I think that's incredible. This is the character creation quiz I wrote up for a new player who wanted to be dying of evangelicalism because it's a big trauma of theirs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSCnUAvswGmMsr0N43dygbjufhJUDDzqNJbpBhQZFLjWWExHX83Fsy7bY2Xyg6wdR34bC0f605pesMv/pub (The bespoke cosmo quiz format was also pretty much the only way to get them to the table, these are a lot of work to put together but I've found them indispensable for people who get overwhelmed by all the decisions and can't really give me anything more than "I want something like this??? Please make my character for me.")
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Sep 7, 2022 20:50
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For the love of God, someone run Chuubos. I have run two campaigns in it. Three if you count a one shot. It is a phenomenal title and one of the only titles in the world that does series like Adventure Time, Gravity Falls, Steven Universe, Infinity Train, Owl House, Amphibia, and other such series perfectly. It is an absolute shame that I never get to play, only run. It is so loving amazing. I even made some documents back in the day to help people run it. It is my favorite game from Jenna Moran and I would love to play it instead of only run it.
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Sep 8, 2022 03:42
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I can confirm that I played Chuubos with Covok (I think we managed three sessions? could be less) and it was good. It is a game where you can (if you were me) play 'half a person' in a metaphysical sense - he could only fill glasses half full, only crack half a smile, always cut his sandwiches into triangles, and so on; and it had game-mechanical and metaphysical weight and it was accurate to the setting.
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Sep 8, 2022 04:24
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If you're looking to find a game of Chuubo, it might also be worth checking out Jenna's personal Discord server, Ninuan. I don't think there's a permanent invite link, but I can give an invite to anybody who's looking for one.
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Sep 8, 2022 07:56
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Rand Brittain posted:If you're looking to find a game of Chuubo, it might also be worth checking out Jenna's personal Discord server, Ninuan. I don't think there's a permanent invite link, but I can give an invite to anybody who's looking for one. I’d love an invite but I don’t have PMs here is that a problem?
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Sep 8, 2022 17:39
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weast posted:I’d love an invite but I don’t have PMs here is that a problem? I'll make a temporary link; that should work for now. EDIT: This link has now been used up; ask me again if you want another one. Rand Brittain fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Sep 16, 2022 |
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Sep 9, 2022 03:01
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Rand Brittain posted:I'll make a temporary link; that should work for now. quote:• No pressuring people into engaging with your content.
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Sep 9, 2022 04:04
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Joined! Thank you very much.
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Sep 9, 2022 05:02
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I finally finalized the ePub of The Night-Bird's Feather with Jenna, and all I can say is, god drat Amazon's tools for actually knowing what your ebook is going to look like when someone actually buys it are amazingly terrible. Anyway, just under a week now until the book becomes available, so now's a good time to preorder if you want to increase the chances of getting a preview draft of Nobilis 4e. Here's somebody talking about it: quote:I will not say that you should immediately go and pre-order The Night-Bird’s Feather by Jenna Moran; encouraging people to put down money for media sight-unseen is not something I’m given to do.
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Sep 16, 2022 22:19
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The Night-Bird's Feather, is now available on most platforms, including Kindle, Kobo, and itch.io. All my work putting the ePub together worked out, and no weird errors have cropped up on Kindle so far, although Amazon is not yet admitting that the print-on-demand option exists. Remember, if this sells well in the first week, Jenna will be making the playtest of Nobilis 4e available to the public, so please read it and remember to tell your friends and family, if you happen to like it. Reviews are also very important to catching the attention of the Algorithm!
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Sep 22, 2022 17:24
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If the first page is at all representative, Night-Bird also seems to be set in either the Chuubo's universe, or a variation on it. I am pleased, and also curious! Going to dig into it tonight. I wish Jenna did more interviews, because I'd dearly like to know what the setting of Fortitude and its environs are to her. They're clearly near and dear to her heart, and I'd love to know more about her relationship with this beautiful thing she's made.
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Sep 24, 2022 02:39
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Some commentary from Jenna on Night-bird, including only the second reference to her transness that I've ever seen: https://twitter.com/JennaKMoran/status/1573488428184141825
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Sep 24, 2022 03:53
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I'm halfway through The Night-Bird's Feather and it's incredibly good. I bought my epub off itch.io to get it right away, has anyone received the Barnes & Noble physical book yet?
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Sep 27, 2022 22:34
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