For the last few weeks, I’ve been working on stuff related to the Mountain Witch, specifically:
- Prepping for a traditional “ronin samurai” play-through of the game, hopefully on Hangouts, hopefully soonish.
- Pondering various settings hacks for the game, including Dwarves/Dragon, Adventurers/Castle Ravenloft, Spark Prisoners/Escaping Castle Heterodyne, and so forth.
The basic criteria with these settings/setups are:
- Protagonists have been, until the start of this game, pretty much on their own.
- Everyone is generally pretty good at what they do, and what they do isn’t usually very nice.
- Any ‘special abilities’ they have don’t really make them better than they already are, they expand the scope with which they can apply their skill (for instance, having a bow lets you be a combat threat a much longer range than with the default daisho).
- Trust – who you trust, how much you trust them, how that changes as the story progresses, and how that trust is used for or against you – is a huge deal.
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- Related to that: there is a ‘matrix’ of default relationships sort of built into the characters, so that the trust everyone has for each other is a bit uneven, right from the outset. (In the baseline game, it’s based on the zodiac of your birth, in the dwarf version it’s based on your birth stone, with Adventurers it’s… I dunno. Something something handwave figure it out before we play.)
A new setting hack occurred to me today, though, that’s really pretty interesting – the basic idea is using Mountain Witch to run The Hunger Games.
- Protagonists are or have been pretty much on their own.
- Everyone is generally pretty good at what they do.
- Any ‘special abilities’ they have don’t really make them better than they already are, they expand the scope with which they can apply their skills (which is why everyone’s scrambling for special supplies at the outset of a Game).
- Trust and how it’s used is a huge deal.
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- There is a ‘matrix’ of default relationships sort of built into the characters; in this case replace the Zodiac with the Districts, with a similar network of “you start off trusting these guys, and not these guys” for everyone, plus a bonus “and you really trust (or really don’t trust the other person from your own District).
At this point, all I’d need to do is map the basic outline to the four acts that Mountain Witch defaults to, with bonus points if the game actually starts well before the beginning of the Game itself (in the Capitol or something).
Well, that and change the two default questions players answer during character generation.
Double-bonus points if it’s not literally Hunger Games, but something in that general ‘survival YA’ vein.