Witch’s Cat and Visitor
about 6 years ago – Thu, Mar 01, 2018 at 12:23:27 PM

Another day, another stretch goal. And also we’ve come to the fifth and final mononoke introduction!

Witch's Cat

The witch character type that originally became part of GSS by way of a special convention booklet in Japan was partly based on a Japanese RPG called Witch Quest, which Adventure Planning Service originally published all the way back in 1991. It’s a nifty little game, if one that shows its age in some ways. Ages ago I translated the rulebook part of the free text-only version of the game that they originally put out on the Japanese version of CompuServe (seriously), and in some ways it’s a predecessor of GSS, enough so that Kamiya did a sort of crossover doujinshi with replays for both GSS and WQ, co-produced with the doujinshi circle that currently publishes Witch Quest. One of the interesting things with Witch Quest is that it’s meant to be played with pairs of players where one plays a witch and the other plays her cat, each with their own distinct stats and abilities. With the witch already in GSS, it was a natural step to make an alternate version of the cat henge to go with it, hence the “witch’s cat” character type.

I already finished the first draft of the witch’s cat, which worked out to be a blend of cat henge and powers inspired by the cat magic from Witch Quest. They have cat henge powers like Cat Burglar and Cat Paths for feats of feline agility, but can also have magical powers like Witch Form (where they temporarily transform to look like the witch they work with) or summon the Cat Bus. I’m hoping that this will be a fun way to bring the witch and cat dynamic from Witch Quest into Golden Sky Stories, though you can also have the witch be an NPC if you prefer. Now that it’s funded, I’m looking forward to commissioning art of a tuxedo cat wearing a little bowtie, and his dapper catboy form.

The Visitor

I originally did a translation of the first half of Golden Sky Stories as my graduate thesis project for my M.A. in Japanese at SFSU, and when I told my advisor about Twilight Tales and mentioned that it added a marebito (visitor) character type, she told me how from the word she was envisioning a tall, dark stranger from parts unknown, and then to her amusement I showed her the art of Repushi, the book’s signature Visitor character:

Visitors are probably the most varied type of mononoke. What they have in common is that they come from somewhere far away and may be leaving soon. Repushi, as a cute little alien with a flying saucer, fits that perfectly, but so could a snow woman, a seasonal spirit, a genie, or even Santa Claus. The very first time I ran a Golden Sky Stories session—at the Embassy Suites during Gen Con 2008—it involved an NPC time traveler named Karin who was trying to find her way home.

Their powers and weaknesses are a mixture of unnatural abilities from technology or magic, and things that make them an outsider who can find their way to form connections with the inhabitants of the town. This culminates in a power called Farewell, which erases everyone’s memories of the Visitor. Karin, knowing that she couldn’t leave them knowing about a visitor from the future, used it as she rode her time skimmer into the temporal vortex, back to a time where the seeds of understanding planted in places like Hitotsuna Town had already blossomed into a brighter future.

So yeah. In case you couldn’t tell, I’m a fan of Visitors. They’re a bit of a departure from the game’s basis in Japanese folklore, and in a few pages the Visitor character type substantially expands the range of characters the game supports.

The Western Fox and Other Stuff
about 6 years ago – Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 03:30:41 PM

On Sunday I had a successful playtest of a game I’m working on called The Dungeon Zone (a weird, meta thing where you play gamers playing D&D), which was the first time since Tuesday that I stopped thinking about this Kickstarter for a little bit. But here we are and I’m back into it.

At the rate we’re going, we’ll run through the remaining stretch goals and have multiple weeks of Kickstarter left, so I’m looking into what else we can do that’ll be fun without going way overboard. I’m looking into things like scenarios, dream cards (thanks to Charles E. Miller for the idea!), and I need to fire off some emails to some potential artists and designers, so I’m hoping to be announcing a few more stretch goals in the next week or two. In the meantime, we’ve hit another stretch goal, so I want to tell you a bit about that!

The Western Fox

Foxes have captured people’s imaginations since ancient times, and in enough different parts of the world that mythical versions of foxes come in many different forms, albeit usually as tricksters of some sort (though sometimes as divine messengers instead). The fox henge in Golden Sky Stories are mostly based on the fox spirits of Japanese folklore (which have close equivalents in other parts of Asia, such as the kumiho of Korean folklore), which makes them a great addition to Golden Sky Stories tales set in Japan, but a poor match for some other kinds of mythical foxes. That’s why I’ve been wanting to make a “western” fox henge writeup for a while, one that would be a bit less of a supernatural creature and a bit more of a clever animal. This is going to be a character type that draws more on foxes as seen in works like Aesop’s fables, the Reynard the Fox stories, and more recent works like The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Zootopia. While I call it the “western” fox to distinguish it from the standard (Japanese) fox henge, you could as easily use it to make a Japanese fox henge who happens to be of a less supernatural persuasion, or even take some powers and weaknesses from each to make your own custom kind of fox.

I’m nearly done with my first draft of this one, and I ended up using a lot of powers and weaknesses from cats and mice, with a few fox-specific twists, resulting in an agile trickster that can have some distinct foibles. I’m still doing some research on fox stories (as well a yokai to help with the tsukumogami), which is a nice excuse to do some really interesting reading.

I’ve been digging into the Reynard the Fox stories by way of James Simpson’s translation released in 2015. The Reynard stories were one of the most popular works of medieval European literature, and a blatant, cutting satire of the society of the time. There’s a definite nastiness to the stories that wouldn’t at all fit with Golden Sky Stories, but then a totally unaltered version of kappa folklore isn’t something you’d let near a GSS story either. But despite that, Reynard emerges as a charming rogue who if nothing else is a thorn in the side of authorities who are even worse scoundrels that he is. Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (the one Wes Anderson adapted into a stop-motion animated movie) and Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mr. Tod (“tod” being a Scottish/northern English word for “fox”), though certainly more suitable for children, do seem to have a bit of Reynard’s literary DNA in them.

Anyway, up next is Raspberry Sky Stories, which will be a new way to experience the world of Golden Sky Stories, as a card-based free-form RPG with no preparation required.

Story Seeds and Things to Come
about 6 years ago – Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 11:49:19 PM

Hope you're all having a nice weekend! For my part I'm hanging out with some friends and generally feeling good about how this Kickstarter is going.

Story Seeds

Another stretch goal unlocked! This one is a collection of short story ideas, usually around a paragraph long, that a Narrator can easily turn into a full story. It may not be the flashiest item on our list of stretch goals, but it gives us the opportunity to provide a larger collection of interesting story ideas without needing to lay out entire scenarios. Among other things I want to explore the new possibilities afforded by new character types, both from this Kickstarter and the previous one. This is still a work in progress, but here are some of the ones we have so far that I especially like:

• A UFO sighting turns out to be a rabbit henge from the moon who needs to get back home.
• Looking for a missing boy leads you to Lady Nishiki, a tropical fish henge who is the beautiful but silly leader of the area's underwater yokai.
• The spider goddess falls in love with the new teacher who just moved into town from the city… but he's afraid of spiders.
• A witch's cat caused a big mess by impersonating his witch.

The next stretch goal coming up is the western fox, and I have a copy of Reynard the Fox I'm all ready to crack open for ideas.

Things to Come

Since people inevitably ask, I wanted to tell you guys a bit about the remaining Japanese GSS supplements. To be clear, these aren't going to be part of this Kickstarter, but we are definitely planning to publish them in the future. Also we haven't settled on English titles for them because those always take us ages to figure out.

Hitotsuna Komichi ("Side Streets of Hitotsuna") introduces the Elder Henge, who are older and more powerful henge that take the form of animals that have grown enormous with time. There are spider, centipede, and snake henge, all of which have unnaturally large animal forms that people find scary. The Hitotsuna Town writeup hinted at the existence of the snake goddess Towa Gozen, but here she's the signature snake henge character, a sake-loving braggart featured in the intro comic. Twilight Tales says that mononoke are for more experienced players, and elder henge are for players a bit more experienced than that. This is especially true of snake henge, who have two different powers that manipulate time itself (albeit for a hefty cost of 20 Wonder). This book also has a set of guidelines for creating new types of residents by mixing and matching powers and weaknesses from other character types, with the turtle henge as a worked example. There's also a story that delves a little into the history of Hitotsuna Town-and the human husband that Kaminagahime once had-and two scenarios ("In the Spider's Web" and "Time for Fireworks!") round out the book.

Kore Kara no Michi ("The Road From Here") is billed as the finale of the GSS line. The one character type it adds is humans. The GSS rulebook has very simple guidelines for playing as a human character, but this is a full character type with powers, albeit decidedly non-supernatural powers that make little to no use of Wonder (the biggest exception being the ability to give it to friendly henge and such to help with using their powers), but three pages of Weaknesses and Additional Powers to make it easier to create a wide variety of human characters. This book is mainly a collection of scenarios and stories, further developing the backstory of Hitotsuna Town and exploring it in new ways. In the scenario "Shopping In Town," your henge get some money to buy a present and have to go into town on a shopping trip, while in "The Road From Here" you help a cat henge who is a new mother find a place to raise her kittens. It ends with an afterword where Kamiya thanks everyone who's helped the game line reach its conclusion (and mentions that everyone likes to joke that Kaminagahime is his waifu).

Ghosts and the Land of Illusions and More Stretch Goals
about 6 years ago – Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 02:13:01 AM

We just hit $10k! Time for more important updates, so let’s get into it.

Land of Illusions

At the $10k mark we hit our single biggest stretch goal item, which we’re calling “Land of Illusions.”

The product line for the original Japanese version of Golden Sky Stories (which goes by the title “Yuuyake Koyake”) consists of the core rulebook and three supplements, but there have been a bunch of other assorted items related to the game in various ways. We already brought a lot of that out in some form as part of the first Golden Sky Stories Kickstarter, but one we haven’t, and one of the oddest, is the Touhou Yuuyake Koyake book, a doujinshi that the Japanese publisher did as kind of a side thing. As the title implies, it’s a book that combines Touhou—the hugely popular series of bullet hell shooters—with Golden Sky Stories. While it lets the characters be a little bit more violent than in vanilla GSS, it’s still about telling simple, heartwarming stories with those characters.

The book consists of special rules for Gensokyo, plus two new character types (the miko and fairy), a library of powers and weaknesses for customizing characters, writeups of all the game characters up to the point when it was published, and two replays. Because of legal issues we can’t publish an English version of the whole book as-is, but we can bring you the character options. “Land of Illusions” will thus consist of all of the character options and special rules from the book. This will let you play your ⑨Baka Strongest Ice Fairy, and provide tools for making a pretty massive variety of other beings within the GSS rules. If you’re a fan of the games, you’ll be able to run games in the Land of Illusions and stat up most any character from there, and regardless it adds some interesting character options that can still fit into a normal Golden Sky Stories session.

Ghost

Next, let me introduce another type of mononoke, the ghost. Ghosts are probably the type of mononoke that’s easiest to explain to a Western audience, particularly in the case of Sumire, the book’s signature ghost character:

Virtually every culture has some kind of belief in ghosts, intangible supernatural beings that are the spirits of the dead. The specifics vary a bit, with Japanese ghosts often appearing in traditional funeral garb and lacking legs, while Western ghost lore has fixations on things like unpleasant deaths, strange omens, and methods of communications, partly from the era of séances and mediums. In Twilight Tales, ghosts are creatures with a faint presence in the world, a person’s feelings given form. This includes “old sheet ghosts” like Sumire, haunted dolls, animated skeletons, the likes of Toilet Hanako, and even vampires.

The ghost’s powers and weaknesses mainly have to do with their supernatural nature. They can float through the air, pass through walls, make themselves appear on a TV or in a photo, and make themselves invisible. Their weaknesses can make them creepy to be around, bound to a particular place, too faint to easily interact with the physical world, etc.

New Stretch Goals!

Now for the meaty part, where we announce more stretch goals!

$11,000: Witch’s Cat: Inspired by the Witch Quest RPG released in Japan in 1991, this is an alternate cat character type that is a witch’s companion. You can play one alongside a witch PC (as featured in The Colors of the Sky) or with a witch NPC, and they have some nifty magical powers that make them a bit different from a normal cat henge.

$12,000: Story Seeds: A collection of paragraph-long story ideas that you can easily spin into a full scenario.

$13,000: Western Fox: Where the fox henge in the core rulebook are based on the fox spirits of Japanese folklore, this is an alternate fox that’s more in line with Western folk tales, good for games set outside of Japan, or if you just want a different take on foxes.

$15,000: Raspberry Sky Stories: We’ll make a Golden Sky Stories version of Ewen’s card-based schoolgirl slice of life RPG Raspberry Heaven, with character cards for the six signature henge and a set of 12 scene cards for stories around Hitotsuna Town. Backers will receive a PDF and a code for ordering the cards at-cost from DriveThruRPG.

That’s all the ones we had planned in advance, but we’ll be looking into doing more depending on how much funding we get. If you’re a game designer/writer with ideas for Golden Sky Stories material, feel free to contact us!

Tsukumogami and Kappa
about 6 years ago – Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 07:51:29 PM

With the base funding goal in the rear view mirror, we’re starting to hit more stretch goals! (These updates will slow down before long, I promise.)

But first, a tiny bit of housekeeping: It turned out that the mistake with US shipping costs affected the Mononoke pledge level as well, so if you're a US resident and you already pledged with a $22 shipping charge at the Longtime Resident or Mononoke Levels, or if you were holding off because of the mistaken shipping charges, you may want to take a look at the "(Fixed)" versions of these pledge levels. Kickstarter's support told me that there's no way to change a pledge level once people have backed at that level, so OMG I'm going to be way more careful about it in the future.

Anyway, on to the fun stuff!

Stretch Goal 2: Tsukumogami

The first of the original character types we have lined up as stretch goals is the tsukumogami. These are man-made objects that have come to life after a long period of neglect (100 years according to folklore) and become a kind of yokai. While the selection of mononoke in Twilight Tales covers a wide variety of mythical creatures—enough so that it thwarts a lot of my ideas for new ones—living objects are one that it doesn’t directly address. Tsukumogami also encompass some of the most distinctive and whimsical yokai in Japanese folklore, so when it came to further exploring Japanese supernatural creatures in this game, they were the natural choice. There’s the karakasa-obake umbrella monster (though those can also be a kind of michinoke), the chochin-obake (a living paper lantern), the biwabiwaboku (a biwa/Japanese lute), and the bakezori (a living straw sandal that’s sprouted arms and legs). There’s also room for more modern tsukumogami, so you could easily make one that’s the result of an old game console or rice maker coming to life.

The first draft of my tsukumogami writeup isn’t quite done yet, but it’s close. What’s emerged is a type of creature that has aspects of both the michinoke and the construct character type I made for Fantasy Friends. Tsukumogami can be scary at times, but they also display their artificial nature and have a certain loneliness about them, an unrequited desire to be useful. My signature tsukumogami is going to be a karakasa-obake named Plemo, a more modern umbrella who came to life and took the brand name printed on his handle as his name.

Kappa

Next, I want to introduce you to another type of mononoke from Twilight Tales, namely the kappa. The signature kappa is Ryuuichi, who in his human form looks like a lanky boy with a bowl cut, but in his true form looks kind of like that crossed with a turtle:

Kappa are a kind of water imp from Japanese folklore, and while not quite as over the top whimsical as tsukumogami, they’re pretty distinctive nonetheless. A kappa looks like a green-skinned humanoid with a turtle shell and a cavity in the top of their head that contains water from their home pond. In folklore they’re unnaturally strong until someone managed to knock the water out from their head cavity, at which point they become virtually helpless. They lurk in water, and sometimes cause trouble for people who venture too close. Also, for whatever reason they really like cucumbers.

You can reskin the kappa writeup to make most any kind of aquatic creature, so to give a few examples, you can also play a mermaid, magic frog, otter henge, or a relative of the Loch Ness Monster. (Looking at it now, you could also use it for making a kelpie, naiad, selkie, hippocampus, etc.) Their powers have a lot to do with their ability to skillfully move through water and interact with other aquatic creatures, and their available weaknesses mainly concern potential difficulties with dry environments.