Hey Man, well this is Babylon

I’ve released the first two chapters of Cannibal Contagion as a free PDF preview download. These two chapters cover the introduction to the game’s concepts, setting it all up, and character creation.

Click here to download it!

I’ve been doing a lot of musing on the mechanics lately, and feel I should share some of that work here.

First off, I’ve decided on what I think will be the final core function of the Clip Gun Characteristics. Clip seems pretty ideal to be used as the determinant for the maximum number of bonus draws a player can get before a Showdown is played (with each draw they make giving their Hand of Fate a bonus Bullet Token to use against them. The higher your Clip, the more “potentially versatile” your Gun is, allowing more room to augment your conflict success chances at the exchange of potentially bringing on your Dark Fate a little sooner.

Casing… I’m still working on that one. My initial desire was to have it set how many tokens your Hand of Fate must use to mess with you, but I don’t like that so much as it could make the player of your Hand less likely to even bother – and that would be detrimental to the intended inter-player dynamic of the game. My current idea is to have it give the player one or more “Bullet Dodges” – one-time-only effects allowing them to ignore any single increase to their Lifetimer. I’m not sure about this one yet, and I still need to mull it over some more. Any suggestions?

I’ve also decided to tie the Stash limit to the current position of a character’s Lifetimer. The closer you are to your inevitable doom, the larger the size of the allowed “Stash” of cards you can hold on the side. If your Lifetimer is in the first quadrant, your Stash size is only one, but by the time you make it to the fourth and final quadrant, if has increased to four cards. My intention is to have this make the conflicts at that stage of the game even more intense, by giving the characters more options and “aces in the hole” to play with.

I’ve also been musing over the differences in play template that I want to bring in with the “Director’s Cut” game mode. In “Theatrical Mode,” each player gets their own personal Hand of Fate, and another separate player functions as a GM. In DC mode, the Hand of Fate role and the GM are merged. Each scene is spearheaded by a new player, who temporarily takes on the role of the Hand of Fate. While normal play gives each HoF their own pool for screwing around with their chosen character, DC mode would have a central pool available to whoever takes on the role for that scene. The Pool would then pass to the next HoF for the following scene, and so on.

Of course another idea would be to scrap Theatrical Mode altogether and make “Director’s Cut” the game default…

I end this musings post with the following newly-developed back-cover blurb:

“This is a game about knowing the difference between when you should pull the trigger, and when you should empty the clip.”

I fucking love it.

I have some ideas for changing the flow of the Showdown mechanic for this game. Instead of a continuous round-the-table flow of back-and-forth smack-talking, I want something with more of an “eyes-over-the-cards” tension feel. I want there to be a bit of “What’s she got up her sleeve?” questioning on all sides of the conflict. To better enable that, my current idea is to change the flow to one more suspenseful.

Here’s the idea. After all sides of the conflict have drawn their cards, each side then picks a number of cards from their hand equal to the number of players involved in the conflict, and then lays those cards face down on the table. The first player then narrates their involvement in the conflict, followed by the second player, and the third, and so on. Once all have narrated, each player reveals one of their cards at the same time. Whoever got the lowest is removed from the conflict – their removal from the conflict must now be narrated by the player with the highest card. If this does not end the conflict, then the higher-card player then narrates their further involvement in the conflict, followed by the next-highest, and so on again. Again a card is revealed from each side, and the results are handled as before. This repeats until the conflict is resolved.

When it is finally over, I’d like to be able to somehow involve an assessment of all the cards played. I want the “ultimate winner” to be able to make some kind of mechanical use for any pairs, straights, sets, and so on that might arise from the revealed cards. I have had more than one player of Cannibal Contagion state that they would like to see some use for matches and pairs in the final Showdown results. I intend on introducing such a rules extension in a planned future expansion to that game, but for this one, I’d like to involve something like that right from the start.

While the proposed above procedural change remains to be tested, I think it could add a lot more suspense and strategy to the flow of the game.