Cosplay Closet
Welcome to Part 2 of the Handbook’s ongoing sponsored-content-crossover with Capes and Cloaks and Cowls and a Park. And not coincidentally, welcome to the Cosplay Closet, a very magical armoire located in the ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶-̶f̶a̶n̶t̶a̶s̶y̶ Renaissance festival part of the titular theme park.
While Street Samurai seems a bit uncomfortable with the sudden genre-shift, this brand of in-character hijinks is right up my alley. Playing a character who’s playing another character is exactly my kind of scene-chewing. Just imagine a barbarian trying to blend in with a princess dress; a learned sage clanking around in ill-fitting armor; a horny bard sharing parables from the depths of a nun’s wimple. Putting characters outside their comfort zone is always good for a laugh. As players though, I think we tend to be more risk averse.
“Let’s stick with Xth edition.”
“I don’t do sci-fi.”
“What do you mean we’re playing talking animals in this game? Hard pass.”
If you’ve read 67o pages of this comic, you know that I love dungeon-crawl fantasy as much as the next gamer (and probably more than most). I’ve slain my share of dragons, saved a kingdom or twelve, and cast more prismatic sprays than a Jack Vance compilation. I doubt I’ll ever leave the genre behind. Even so, there are times when I want something new and different. In the present example, C&C&CandaP brings a “magical clothiers” theme to the table. The setting is populated with witchy seamstresses, loom golems, an appendix of magic garments, and even an Adjectives to Describe Fabrics table. While I’m usually the sort of fantasy fan who reads about “scooped necklines” and “opulent cotehardies” with the glazed eyes of a skimmer, this mess caught my eye. That’s because a setting that leans into its themes (up to and including giving my PC an automated cosplay closet) is a setting that wants to deliver a unique experience. It’s the same deal with high-concept campaigns of all kinds. Let’s play as intelligent weapons. What if we we all started play with amnesia? How about a one-shot where we’re all the fractured consciousness of a fairytale heroine?
In a hobby dominated by genre tropes, novelty has real value. And when a GM bothers to shoot for something new and weird, you better believe I’ll put in the effort to learn the ropes. (Even if I still have no idea what an “ill-fitting partlet” might be.)
Question of the day then! What is the strangest theme you’ve added to a game? Did it turn out to be new and different and integrated into the fabric of your game world? Or was it just a fresh coat of paint daubed atop the same old experience? Tell us all about your favorite high-concept campaign premises and weird twists on old favorites down in the comments!
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That sure is a very Rita Repulsa look she’s sporting. I wonder if cosplaying an enchantress that was trapped on the moon for 10000 years counts as fantasy, or sci-fi.
All of Street Samurai’s lines are dubbed from the original Japanese.
Today’s comic sponsored by Laurels insatiable dresslust.
You’re not wrong.
https://www.deviantart.com/fishcapades/art/Tessandriel-Zapswizbo-Commission-713921002
https://www.deviantart.com/fishcapades/art/Belle-693852145
https://www.deviantart.com/fishcapades/art/Apple-and-Raven-656714266
Paranoia with mission to take down a secret society. My plaers choose to infiltrate, turns out it was a society of larpers and I made them fill a simplified DnD character sheet and play with that for a while (yes, I’m one of those Paranoia guys who make players actually fill the forms). suffice to say their natural reflexes took over and as soon as we return to “normal” one of the players says they cast a spell. I just tell they throw the piece ofplastic that represented the spell in the larp they had. We haven’t played much paranoia since 🙁
Game in a game! Very nice.
I’m curious what the simplified DnD characer sheet looked like. You’d want it to be quick and dirty indeed so as not to bog down the game too much.
Also of note: https://xkcd.com/244/
the bare minimum, roll stats, pick class, choose weapon. it was basically just normal DnD sheet where I had crossed over the unneccesary parts, like save bonus, saves other than plain AC and skills. it was mostly predone the players just crossed over what thwy didn’t take thta was available to that character. And the tempo had been a mild stop earlier as I said I like using forms. I handed over the questionaire for team duty in first session (fools admitted to being members of secret society) and later on if I wanted to trap or warn them I used actual forms… people are really bad at checking what they sign.
I once played in a game in which each player was tasked with designing a god for the homebrew world. During the first session, we discovered a fallen meteorite which contained the gods, each bound to a legendary weapon. Unfortunately, due to this GM’s propensity for adding way too much stuff, the plot was soon derailed when we were asked to deliver a baby beholder, and then after what was meant to be a tutorial ship battle we ended up becoming the leaders of the cocaine-fuelled Banjo Bandits. The game stalled after that, as it had just too many things going on.
Personally, I’ve been trying for years to get a game going where the players play as all-powerful creator gods, but I can never get enough consistent players for it to coalesce.
Nine years into my own sprawling epic of a campaign, I have some sympathy for the “too much stuff” GM. Feeling like you’ve got to pay off 1,001 different plot points can get overwhelming after a while.
My own take on the “creator gods” campaign (that I also never got to play) was a Sidereal game in Exalted 2e. The concept was to run a campaign where centuries passed between every session, and the PCs got to watch their fate-crafting slowly take shape over time.
What system were you going to run for your creator gods?
I was planning a system based on FATE for the first phase, in which the party plays as gods, then doing a mashup of Godbound/Stars Without Number/The Space Hack for when they inevitably get slapped down into demigod form and have to play the rest of the campaign in the worlds that they created. It’s a neat combo, but both sections do require a lot of player buy-in and somewhat more involvement than a traditional TTRPG.
We’ve run a home-brew D20 Future/Traveller/Paranoia mash-up wherein everyone was a redshirt with the same stats; a home-brew D20 Past steampunk campaign; a home-brew D20 Modern/Past/Future/Apocalypse/Urban Arcana superheroes campaign (see a recurring theme?), but the most gonzo “It’sa one-shot, who cares?” fun we’ve ever had came from turning published modules inside-out.
I ran an adapted verson of *Desert of Desolation 1: Pharoah* where the PCs were all of the original NPC encounters inside the pyramid. They had to a) survive, b) find each other, and then c) find a way *out.*
I also once bought a real turkey of a module that shall remain nameless. (Somewhere out there there’s probably a creator who was very proud of it, so I won’t identify the flawed *thing*.) Rather than chuck it on the pile of useless junk or (as often happens) rewriting all the text and redrawing all the maps and making essentially a *new* module that shares only the barest resemblance to the original, I brought it to game night and ran it “as-is,” weird warts, rail-roading, and unexplained motivations and all — the one exception being that since the module assumed that the PCs would be six to eight 10th-level+ good-aligned generic humans, we would instead use three or four 10-HD monsters who had each arrived separately to claim the macguffin as their own and had just eaten the original expected heroes. Each big-bad monster (Beholder, Lamia noble, Lizard King) had a 10-HD thrall (or 20x 1/2-HD minions) to round out the numbers. It was a blast, the monsters ruled, and all of reality was threatened! (I keep wanting to include one or more of the now uber-monsters as a villain in a regular campaign, but I never have the nerve.)
> I ran an adapted verson of *Desert of Desolation 1: Pharoah* where the PCs were all of the original NPC encounters inside the pyramid. They had to a) survive, b) find each other, and then c) find a way *out.*
Brilliant. I’m fond of saying that modules are raw materials for actual games. You’re straight up *supposed* to cannibalize that mess to tell your own story. And the way you did it sounds like Egyptian-themed *Cube.* Very cool!
https://wickedhorror.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/cube.jpg
The RPG where you play an intelligent weapon was done first, AFAIK, by the French RPG “Bloodlust” (1991). The setting had a number of “god-weapons”, which were literally gods incarnated as weapons or shields, and who live and compete through their wielders. As the wielder achieves whatever the god-weapon craves (glory, fame, wealth, romance, to each their own), the power that the weapon can channel increases.
It’s long out-of-print and I don’t think it was ever translated to English (despite having an English title), but there was a so-called “Metal Edition” with a new game system published in 2012; the SRD for which can be freely downloaded on the Internet (though still in French).
Looks like you play sword + wielder in that one. Always interesting to see how “companion PCs” are realized in terms of GM / player portrayal.
Honestly Street Samurai would probably have an easier time fitting into a renaissance-pastiche than a medieval fantasy-pastiche. Literacy and firearms would be much more common for one.
Indeed. For a time, my group were playing Victoriana, and while there are a few ways you can go with that game, Victorian Shadowrun seems to be a popular one. My character was a pistol-wielding upperclass adventuress with a (founding) membership in the Young Ladies Shooting Club, so she’d probably get on fine with Street Samurai…
I suspect Street Samurai’s time-based adventures will result in Shakespeare adding Cavalier Arms Crockett EBRs and Onotari JP-K50s and whatnot to his plays. And that mess is hard to cram into iambic pentameter.
What’s written on the signs on the side of the closet? And how does one pay with a Wiza or Munchkincard in this setting?
Rogues probably swipe them…
The currency of the realm is the AR. I believe the setting has a great many coin-operated vendors.
Graceful Wicked Masques – The Fair Folk 😀
You roleplay a faery that roleplays being a real being 😀
Also once we played as agents of the six alignments pushing and conveying people towards our respective position. Was fun 😀
I continue to be proud of Laurel for her part in that one. She made it into her favorite game, and that’s got to be a pretty good feeling. 😀
Cheers to Laurel and her awesome work 😀
The two “weirdest” games I’ve run were ye olde amnesia start and a Magical School game where two characters were Familiars.
The first was where they had blank character sheets and had to bid and make choices during the first three sessions “figuring out” their characters as they went. This was a GURPS Wasteland/Fallout spin-off. By “choices” I mean, for example after everyone bid for “starting package” (Smart Hero, Tough Hero, Fast Hero, etc – no one actually bid against one another, they decided to each bid for a different package and bid the minimum to keep points available, those cunning bastards!), they then picked how they woke up, choices included “face down in your own vomit in a tiny ventilation shaft” (gave Climbing, Stealth, Unarmed Combat, and either Knife or Garrote skills, and started lost FP from having been sick), “on a bunk in lock-up with a splitting migraine, bruised knuckles, and busted up face (Unarmed Combat, Tactics, and +3 HP, but also started with injuries and lost FP from being hungover), “in some one else’s bed, next to someone else’s spouse” (Charisma +1, Sex Appeal, Fast-Talk, but full HP and FP), and the last player chose “face up under a computer workstation that is on sparking dangerously with tools and a black-box module in hand” (Electronics Repair, Computer Repair, Computer Use, and Bonded Tools Perk).
Later the hung-over brawler was being escorted through the security station while the alarm was blaring and as they moved past a workstation with a dazed security officer sitting at it the brawler was given the choice of “move them aside and turn off the alarms, or order them to turn off the alarms” (giving either Electronics Operation (Security) or Leadership skill) – and as they’d already chosen to have the Grizzled Old Chief of Security be their Father*, I let them immediately spend build points on either Security (Security) or Courtesy Rank (Security) (the first coming with Duty and the perks of rank, the second only giving a Reaction bonus from Security personnel) deciding if they were a Security Officer (who was also a rebellious troublemaker) or the Security personnel’s troublemaking mascot that most of them looked out for.
And thus by the end of the third session, all four PCs were mostly built, having grown ‘organically’ through play.
.* The choices were “Disapproving Father”, “Uncle who laughingly approves of your mischief”, and “Stranger who has a stack of files on your behavior” – these choices didn’t give skills, but later options for Advantages or Disadvantages in the scene.
The magical School game was ‘weird’ not only because it had two PCs who were familiars (a black cat was personally unlucky and who also had an Evil Twin and a Vampire Foxbat, she was a foxbat bat who was also a vampire), but the other PCs were a “Standard Magical School Girl” complete with bad dubbing or good subtitles, the Wherewolf quarterback of The TEAM (he only became a wolf in certain locations), an Ancient Weather God who’d been reborn with no memories of their previous life, magical ‘Richie Rich’ who’d bought his way into I.O.U†, and The Completely Normal Girl.
Those character were so wildly disproportionate to each other in power levels, but it mostly didn’t matter as it was a “College Hijinks” game, so vast cosmic power rarely mattered. I wove all kinda of wild plots into it, usually some other plot was occurring, from some fantasy or sci-fi story, in the background and the PCs were there to do or learn one specific thing from a character, the events, or the McGuffin of the backdrop story. The campaign’s premise began with the College of Magic disappearing and only their Professor’s TAs (the two familiars) remaining. I’d prepped the two familiar characters with a bit of script and told them to come up with a class syllabus (they had one from the Professor’s previous year to reference) and then based all their adventures off of that class syllabus. Which was “college kids have to learn the fundamentals of magic and myth theory in order to save their College from whatever fate had befallen it”. So it immediately became a ‘cross-time, cross-world, cross-genre’ tripping game… and the campaign couldn’t have worked without that very specific set of players.
.† Yes, it was a GURPS I.O.U campaign, which is weird to start with, so the Player’s characters only dialed it up. But it’s alos the exact style of game where wild and woolly fits perfectly.
I’ve often wanted to run a Night in the Lonesome October game. The “you are the familiars” shtick sounds like a lot of fun.
I’ve played in a couple of games inspired by A Night in the Lonesome October, they were LARPs, socpol style LARPs so less emphasis on combats, more on investigation and social maneuvering.
However they weren’t based around familiars, but rather the Closers and Openers, and both times I was randomly assigned the same character, the Summoner, and both times I’d buy a couple packs of Pokemon cards, break out my Pikachu stuff (Pez dispenser I treat as wand, stuff Pikachu as a familiar, Pokeball that held Pokemon cards) and use the cards as my Summons… fun stuff.
I’ve also tooled around trying to redo Amber Diceless to use to run A Lonesome November, but I never thought about running it as familiars… it would be hard to find things for the familiars to do that the bipeds weren’t involved in, unless all the bipeds were incapacitated… hmmm….
“the Wherewolf … (he only became a wolf in certain locations)”
I am stealing that
Finally got a Deadlands campaign going. I’m running it pretty much verbotem, but the switch from Fantasy or even Pirate Fantasy to the Weird West has been a very big one. It’s going great so far, though!
Added twist: every single member of the party is under a curse of some kind. This started as random chance, but after failing to come up with anything interesting for the Joker player 3 drew in character creation, I decided to complete the set and gave him a cursed relic instead.
Actually, I also started a campaign journal for this one, if anyone wants to read about the adventures of a bunch of cursed weirdos in the supernatural Wild West. https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?642054-Collection-of-Curses-A-Deadlands-Campaign-Journal
Did you mean you’re “running it pretty much verbatim”?
Verboten (with an “n”) is German for “forbidden”.
Verbatim means “exactly as written”.
Right. That’s what I get for not spellchecking that one.
> the switch from Fantasy or even Pirate Fantasy to the Weird West has been a very big one
Well I mean, you still got pistols and big hats and lawless gangs of cutthroats holding up innocent merchants. Sounds pretty close to me. 😛
Sadly I can’t say I’ve run enough games that have gone anywhere to really feel like I’ve earned much of a say on this topic.
But for the sake of saying *something*, my most recent D&D game I’m running (though it’s pretty much running on fumes at this point and I don’t think anyone has posted in like two months now so….) is centered on the literal plot device of a magic map that will show the PCs options of where to go next to eventually arrive at a mysterious treasure.
Obviously this is pretty paper thin (pun intended) if you were trying to construct a serious narrative game. But the premise of this particular game is just an excuse for a series of extremely loosely connected not always particularly serious events for the (unusually powerful and strange) PCs to encounter.
Setting wise, it takes place in a world which was very recently made up of the gods-stiched together remains of several previous worlds that all apocalysed for one reason or another. (I think this idea is pretty cool in general… and also happens to very conveniently explain why even with a magic map they aren’t going to be particularly forewarned about what’s over the horizon a days walk in any particular direction.)
Sorry to hear about your games. 🙁
I do enjoy a good magic map though. First evil game I ever ran, I new my more immature players would backstab each other immediately as soon as they found “the magic treasure map.” I engineered the situation such that the map, which was tattooed on a dead man’s back, seeped off and ran onto each of the PCs, becoming an unintelligible mess. Only when they all physically touch will the map reassemble… temporarily flaying them in the process. The process was so painful that the could only look at the map for a few seconds at a time.
In practice, I effaced a copy of the map, tore it into strips, and gave each one to a player. When they wanted to play their next move, I’d pull out a stopwatch, set it for 15 seconds, and toss a proper version of the map onto the table. It was great fun watching them fight and shout to get a good look while the seconds ticked by.
Easily the most fun I’ve had letting players figure out “where do we want to go next session.”
That’s brilliant, I love it!
I’v had a gig teaching 3.5 D&D (back in the days) at a youth center (yes i got paid to game, was great).
in the 2nd year with the bit more experienced (high-school) players, for the first session i wanted to encourage them to start coming up with their own schemes. so i set up the first meeting is a one-shot.
they were all playing really old, leg in the grave, high level casters who are worshipers of the god of lying, betrayal and discord. and they were given a special boon. they have one last chance to rack in as many ‘points’ for their god by turning people against each other. the worse they get out of them the better their boon would be. which would allow them to stat their next life, as in their ‘real’ characters for the on-going campaign, better off.
after talking about it a bit they asked for an example. so i told them, ‘well your leader takes off, cast disguise self and appear as old miner. he then casts fool’s gold on a big chunk of stone, steps into the local tavern and yell:
‘there’s Goal in tha mon-tin!’ (think old weastren accent).
it went really nice from there on.
Nice! I’d be curious to know how you scored the boons, and what exactly that looked like in the follow-up game. Really solid premise to get buy-in from the group though.
a reminder, this was a study group that i was teaching the game to. so i let them be as powerful as they could as long as it didn’t overly break the game too much (went for the more fun game then rule lawyered to encourage them to play their dream characters). while keeping them informed that it was not a balanced game, so not to expect every gm to pull this.
had a calculated rolls chart on how much distrust and betrayal each act evoke. (and if it had a domino effect of making the targets betray and o such things to others as a result etc) . was a scoring chart with minor, medium and major values for lies, betrayal and general worsening of relations.
and after adding the points they could use them to ‘buy’ specific racial boons. bonus ability scores, extra feats, or even unlock a monster race to play.
one player ended up playing a Minotaur barbarian. was crazy strong, but crazy dumb as well. had a fear for written words ,remember back then barbarian didn’t know how to read.
(on a side note when later on they got into a magical library with predator books he kept shouting ‘I TOLD YOU SO!!”).
an other player got his +12 to his initiative from he boons alone.
the bonus to initiative was important since i was house-ruling a rule from shadowrun.
if your total initiative score -20 is still a positive number you get a standard action on that initiative score. (and again if you can even get -40 and still have positive initiative score). since i also house-ruled that rolling a nat 20 on skills and initiative got you an added d20 to the score (and again if you keep rolling nat 20’s).
we had a fight where some1 got 76 initiative so he acted on 76, and got standard action on 56,36 and 16 as well. was crazy fun 😉