Coyote & Crow gaming in Vancouver

 So yesterday (Sunday), I ran my homebrew Adventure for Coyote & Crow, Initiation Day.

It was a blast!

Here’s a tip for game masters. Always get players to make something for the game. It engages them and you can use it later as a prop. Players made this great art when we did a review of the setting at the start, but then it was used by NPCs as a projection in history lesson later in the adventure.

Here is an honest self appraisal of the game.

The good

The story was solid and players brought their best game. They were actually a table of people who had played together and so their acting in collaboration was top-notch, and I gave them lots to work with in an adventure about young Suyata or superpowered marshals coming to the big city to be initiated. I found the adventure that came with the Coyote & Crow book a bit lacking, and so I thought this would be a far more fitting adventure. And it was, with them being engaged with several NPC’s, making their way through a big action set piece, using their superpowers to help in investigation, and having a good showdown at the end, all followed by a cliffhanger surprise that came out of left field. 

(I will be publishing this with the Coyote & Crow publisher program in future, so no spoilers!)

The bad

Although my game mastering in terms of acting and prompting was some of my best, my mastery of the game system was lacking. My printer didn’t work the night before so I had to just come with everything on the laptop, and the rules are quite unique and complex, so I ruled several things on the fly or negotiated solutions with players. Luckily, they were very forgiving and open to learning and being more creative with how rules were applied. 

The ugly

Nothing really stands out. I think if I was a younger man with lots of free time, I would’ve mastered the game better but the textbook is admittedly a wealth of information and I didn’t want to wait until I had mastered all of it. I decided to jump in and learn as I went and invited the players to come along and do the same thing. And we all put in the work and had a great time.

And there was some talk of me running the game again for an organization they knew, so we’ll cross our fingers and see where that goes.

Now back to Nuna, thanks to the great feedback from my fellow Chaosium contest winners, and the amazing Welsh play testers, it will be a lean and mean psychedelic indigenous role-playing Quickstart.

Quickstart will be out in time for summer gaming, full rules will be out in time for Christmas gifts.

This next few months are gonna be fun.