“For the glory of Wal-Corp!”
In which we playtest our new game, Souls of Steel (by Dave and Elle)!
Souls of Steel is a Powered-by-the-Apocalypse game that emulates ensemble-cast ace pilot military dramas like Battlestar Galactica, Top Gun, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, the various Gundam series, etc. and computer games like Wing Commander. The design goal is to develop entertaining social drama, punctuated by intense action sequences, against the backdrop of a larger war.
Here we’re testing an incomplete beta of the game. Some elements are missing and some need to be refined, but this is the third playtest and we’re fairly happy with the overall structure and gameplay.
Enjoy!
I’ve been growing to like the PbtA system very much without having played it yet and this seems like a great addition to the many genres that it can be played in. I’d hope that eventually I may be able to acquire a copy.
The plan is to publish eventually. We may do a Kickstarter to produce a book with professional quality layout.
Very cool. I would likely support.
For some reason, even though I love the idea of mecha, I tend to feel “meh” about the mecha anime that I’ve watched. The idea of getting to play in one with my friends is totally awesome. This was super rad, and I’m excited to see how it evolves into a final ruleset.
If you folks need any proofreading help, let me know! I love using my copywriting talents for good instead of 40/week of evil.
Thanks!
I really wish I could say this privately, but I can’t find a way to do so without subjecting myself to social media. I hope then that you will forgive me if my commentary seems too curt for a public forum, but I’m constrained by the available avenues of communication. I will however offer this apology by way of disclaimer; I can only base my opinions on the rules as presented in the AP, so my opinion may be woefully outdated if you’ve rewritten most of the stats, all of the splats, and the moves used in this game.
I’m afraid your AW hack simply fails emulate either of the Japanese robot genre at all. It seems to me that you may have fallen into the same sort of trap that both Godzilla movies Cloverfield Monsters and to a lesser degree Guillermo del Toro fell into; that being that you attempted to emulate an extra cultural artifact, and you wound up making a strictly western product.
That’s not actually bad since you seem to have wound up with a fully functional product. More over it may be that if a bunch of dyed in the wool weeaboos or actual Japanese otaku were to play this game they would force the narrative into a style more consistent with super robot, and real robot manga, but nothing in the rules that you shared on this actual play do that. We both know that enforcing genre through the language is one of the most important parts of an Apocalypse engine game, and in that regard your game fell woefully short.
I could waste your time pretentiously telling you how to rewrite your game to address this problem, but I’m not because there’s a simpler solution. Also I’m feeling a little inspired and don’t want to share.
Take heart though, because your game does sound like it’s a good match for Starship Troopers, Battletech, Strike Suit Zero, Pacific Rim, and other western mecha works. I don’t actually want to say, ‘and other western mecha works,’ but I cant for the life of me remember the name of that cartoon from my childhood with the blue artificial humans, and the wearable mech suits that took place in system… (exo- something I think.) Additional I it’s important to note that the play structure of your game, if the AP is any indication, specifically emulates the Mechwarrior, Starcraft, and Wing Commander narrative structure in that your social interaction is explicitly framed by the missions on either side.
So basically I’m saying your game is terrible at emulating the Japanese genre, but if you hang your ambition it works great inside a narrower context. That is my advice to you moving forward re-brand it rather than rewrite it.
We certainly appreciate your candor. And yes, or first goal was to emulate military dramas like BSG so perhaps we missed the mark on anime a bit. But there’s a difference between constructive criticism and just criticism so…
What can we do better? What does or game not capture about Japanese mecha stories that it succeeds at with stories like BSG and Pacific Rim?
Thanks!
We certainly appreciate your candor. And yes, or first goal was to emulate military dramas like BSG so perhaps we missed the mark on anime a bit. But there’s a difference between constructive criticism and just criticism so…
What can we do better? What does or game not capture about Japanese mecha stories that it succeeds at with stories like BSG and Pacific Rim?
Thanks!
I’m glad I didn’t upset you with my critique, although in hindsight I guess you are right in that it doesn’t offer suggestions to move the game in the direction which initially drew me to this AP from the Jankcast. Recall however that I’m of the mind that you do currently have a good mech game, even if it’s not what the advertisement led me to believe.
But as per your request:
It occurs to me that your splats are explicitly military, and very western. That may seem like it works for the real robot genre, but if you step back and look at those series I think you’ll find many characters cant be mechanically fit into your current selection. Worse still is that the closest match for the many casts will likely leave you with 4 rookies, or 5 hot shots at the table rather than a diverse set of characters primed for interesting interactions. If you want your game to evoke the feel of a Japanese narrative you should probably look to mech anime and manga, (and I mean LOTS of mech anime and manga, I’m pulling from 20 years of casual viewing so the kind of work you’d have to do is obscene) and pull your archetypes specifically from there rather than western fiction.
Practically speaking I realize that this basically means you’d have to completely rewrite the core of the game, which is why I simply suggested that you keep what you’ve done, and just drop the anime theme that’s not really supported by the language of the splats, and moves.
Secondly, and this is more easy to implement, you could probably stand to overhaul your setting and mech creation engine, possibly even collapse them into one step, so there are more levers to pull that will help you and your players figure out whether you are all playing a real robot game, or a super robot game. There’s nothing wrong with a diversity of mechanical designs in the super robot genre, but the rest of your game is clearly screaming, ‘we want real robots!’
Alternatively you could just keep the game as is, and it all fits quite nicely into the same head space as Battle Tech, Pacific Rim, and Exo Squad. (HA! I GOOGLED THAT IN BETWEEN NOW AND THEN BECAUSE NOT KNOWING WAS DRIVING ME NUTS!!!)
I suppose that’s part of the reason why I didn’t suggest any changes in my initial commentary since it seems to me that the only problem is marketing it as, ‘like anime.’ In many ways the game that I was attracted to, and that you perhaps hoped to make is incompatible with your current work, but there’s no reason to scrap SoS in it’s current state if you just keep focusing on what it’s already good at instead of what you may have originally wanted it to be. Call it a happy mistake.