Very well written.
Play game
Do Neon Gods Bleed Ivory? - The Quickstart's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| ANTI-CAPITALIST POWER | #15 | 3.878 | 4.750 |
Ranked from 4 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
It was a lot to review, but I managed to collect some thoughts before the end of the jam! Sadly I was not able to run a oneshot as I had hoped, but here are some thoughts from a GM who has not ran it yet.
Big! Lots of fun lore, well explained in the intros and city section.
The character sheet is great! Other than lowering the darkness of the grey highlighted parts, all good!
The attributes are well designed and laid out, but I do think the lines between Spirit's Network & Sway is very very thin. Similar with Slip & Finesse. I got some World of Darkness & Tales from the Loop vibes from that section. I don't recall it being explicitly stated, but I know players will want to negotiate and mix and match what attribute they roll. As the GM, I was tempted to split them into stats & skills style, letting them roll Mind + Slip or the classic muscle of the group rolling Body + Sway. (purely because this is fun, and what my players are used to, not as a criticism of how its set up! :)
Stress mechanics have evolved and changed in the ttrpg space the last 5 years, IMHO. The vocabulary we use with other gamers has sort of changed what that means. For that reason, stress might want to be renamed. Inspiration or luck better describes the mechanic you are using, or even as a fortitude score/stat.
BACKGROUNDS. Backgrounds and vices look cool, but atm they don't matter. There is no change in stats or abilities, no in world consequences, etc. A lot of other cyberpunk content has tables and life paths to roll on, and having it be quick and easy to generate a character using those backgrounds and vices. If and when we see more character creation information and content, it would be nice if backgrounds and vices mattered and had more tables or room to generate over hand picking.
On at least 3 occasions, there was a page that began with a single paragraph, or three or less, leaving 75% or more of the page blank white. Its totally a pet peeve of mine, but for people who print and bind pdfs at home, it is a lot of wasted space.
Overall, I am very impressed by the game. I need to re read it again soon. I want to test it out with my players.
EDIT: spelling,
Submitted
Jailbreak My HeartThanks for such an in-depth review! We’re a new team, so we’re always looking to improve, we really appreciate it.
The lore and setting of Pantopica are close to our hearts, any future versions or expanded games based on this quickstart are going to be full of it, so we’re glad you like it.
If you’re planning to run it for some players soon, please let us know how it goes!
(And not a criticism of your criticism, but in case you missed it - you don’t combine an action rating and attribute rating to roll like WOD or it’s ilk - you just roll the action rating! Dice pools are comparatively small in forged in the dark systems.)
This is a VERY large game for the jam. What made you decide to submit something of this size? There’s even a section for a proposed campaign for GMs to use.
There are definitely big cyberpunk vibes playing out here.
Can I ask what made you want to take part in this jam? This seems to be your only work thus far.
We've been making homebrews and the like as friends in our gaming group for years now, and we figured a jam would be a great opportunity to start making things that are a bit more presentable and actually legible to people besides ourselves. Hence this being our first published work as a team!
The size of the game mostly comes down to the Forged in the Dark rules format that it's based on, it's a design space we're very comfortable in so we decided to start there; cyberpunk specifically is a genre we've been interested in for a really long time and it fit the theme of this jam excellently, so it all sort of fell into place.
Since the very basic rules were adapted from an SRD and added to with things like the Power system, our new playbooks and our modified harm rules, creating the example session was actually what took most of the work! It helps that we're a three-person team, so the scope could afford to be a lot bigger than a solo project.
Thanks for asking!
That’s very smart! To go with what you know and going by an SRD saves a ton of development time. It sounds like this project was really meant to be. It’s good you have a group already because playtesting multiplayer TTRPGs is a nightmare for most people, especially when something is a homebrew. It allows for a lot of balancing and adjustments on the fly.
You should all be very proud of putting this together. Will you offer it on Drivethru RPG as well? I bet people would be interested.
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