Coyote & Crow Review #1

 Coyote & Crow Review # 1

OK, since I am an indigenous game creator it would be a major oversight not to read and play Coyote and Crow, the hit Kickstarter game made by a team of indigenous creators, and which partially inspired my game proposal. The anime inspired cover art kind of threw me at first (22 years in Japan makes me a bit of an art snob), but now that I am reading through it is all making sense.

SETTING

I like the idea of a world without colonialism, but the notion that indigenous people “blossomed technologically” makes me a little sad. Anthropologists who studied the Inuit and Yupik rightly called them the most prolific inventors on the planet. They had a tool for each and every situation. Sun reflecting off the snow and blinding you? They carved badass futuristic looking snow goggles from bone, wood, or ivory.

Badass Inuit Cyclops?

Ditto snow shoes for walking in knee deep snow, many types of ulu knives for different skinning and butchering jobs, komatik for sliding over the snow, intestine parkas to keep you warm and dry, etc etc. In NUNA, this ingenuity of the Inuit is exactly their superpower.

I would say indigenous people were ‘flowering’ in their own right with their adaptation to the land, and even today peoples like the Minto Athabaskan in Alaska have had to advise the government dispatched scientists, whose disconnected scientific domains (biology, chemistry, geology) left them unable to comprehend the ecosystem of the area and the changes the Minto had recorded after centuries living there.

PLAYSTYLE

I like that the authors went into depth with the type of playstyle they expected. They stress that telling a good story is the main objective, something that is huge in indigenous culture and is somewhat lost in the individual western culture reflected in roleplaying. There is an old joke that D&D is a game where Gandalf, Bruce Lee, and Conan band together to save the world, and the implication is that three such heroes cannot possibly be thinking of the group first and themselves second.

I like the C&C advice that just as the players must understand the Who, Why, and How of their character, Story Guides must try to ensure all have a good time. This balance between playing your character truthfully and group enjoyment is the eternal dilemma of our hobby, and grounding it in indigenous culture is just another great part of this game.

DICE

I’ve just read the intro to the dice, which are 12 D12 split into 9 white and 3 black. As a BRP fan I am a little trepidatious about non D100 systems, but the alienness of this set up brings me back to my first RPG days where the whole dice tube was a mystery to me.

Stay tuned for part 2!