Progress Report on Look! Up In The Sky!

Last night I went over the current status of Look! Up In The Sky! with Klaxon. Progress has been slow because of his workload - he's just completed his classwork and is now working with his project team and writing his thesis - but Association Creation, City Creation, Character Generation, and Skills Traits & Edges sections are essentially complete. This means the game is ready for internal play test!

I have the current pdf. Klax and James have separated Powers out into Paths of Power, as in the Blood Games games. When BG first came out in 2004, Almafeta told me that it was a good base for a supers game, and I guess Klax agreed. The Paths are Tank - defensive options, Skill - basically ways to get skills, Nuke - offensive powers, Healer - healing and curing of various types, Buffer - making others perform better in various ways, and Strange - a collection of leftovers from the other Paths. Characters choose a Primary Path, in which they spend at least 50% of their points, and may spend what they like in the others.

The game is using the StarPool variant of StarCluster, the TR subsystem used in Blood Games II, OHMAS, and Sweet Chariot 2, and will not have multiple resolution options - though it could be easily enough hacked to use one of the others. You can scale the game from normals - not it's forte, but doable - through Pulp to Cosmic. Internally, scaling is done by multipliers on effect rather than changing Attributes. Attributes are meaningless except as TNs. For example, A Super-Strong character may have a 9 STR, whicle a normal character may have an 11 STR. Thing is, for each success, the Super Strong guy may get 40 points vs 10 for the Normal.

As I mentioned before, Skills have been vastly reduced in number by increasing their scope. They remain center-defined, but all science, for example, is represented by Academics, Bioscience, and Wierdscience.

Like OHMAS and SC 3, Klax has an Association Creation section. It is assumed that the game revolves around Sentai - Superhero teams - rather than lone heroes. You choose what you want to do by creating the Association all PCs belong to before actually creating the characters. Thus the PCs are created to fit into the team, and are motivated to work with it rather than creating a team to work with a disparate group of existing PCs with widely varying motives.

You also have a section on creating your team's home city, analogous to the system/world design section in SC 3. You can do this randomly, or pick from the lists, whatever inspires you best. The city creation sub-system is designed to define the city abstractly, rather than giving specifics, allowing you to build up a picture in your mind as to how it all fits together. Cultural Traits are used to define the gestalt City culture, which is then varied by neighborhood.

It looks really good and flexible so far! Now to set up a game or two!

-clash