Forbidden City
Genre: War Story
Themes:
- technological superiority
- cultural superiority
- betrayal
Introduced Themes
- war as a mental struggle
- seeking to return home
Rules
The story is not about whether or not the characters overcome obstacles, but how they come to do so and whether or not they accept their methods of victory.
The mechanics are such that characters are almost assured of giving in to cowardice or smoke at some point. Facing that is integral to the story, but there is little sense of consequence in the rules themselves.
The process of narrating to get dice is a nice touch, encouraging involvement without having to jump into resolution mechanics
The rules for wounds are partially in the example of play, rather than in the rules section itself. A little clarification is needed on whether wounds become a generic pile, or if each player has their own pile. Wounds increase in likelihood the more dice are rolled, so teaming up to accomplish tasks is actually a bad idea.
It seems like losing control occurs too often. In a way I think it’s an unneccesary mechanic, since losing by an unwanted means feels like losing control anyways.
Right now the Emperor’s only power over mechanics is to determine when rolls are needed. Some minor influence would be really interesting.
Pools create an interesting play between the players, wherein they can effectively attack one another simply by grabbing as many dice as possible. I could see some need for moderation to control a pushy player.
Setting Resources
The setting is not detailed per se, but the “Emperor” is given some guidelines that are useful for maintaining the feel of the game. The hallucinatory nature of the setting makes fixed descriptions innappropriate to the game, but I can’t help but think that vignettes might be very useful (look to the Metropolis Sourcebook for the Kult rpg for some excellent examples).
I really think it would benefit from the slightly allegorical elements being played up more.
How do the character background details come in? Are they used for success via smoke?
Finally
This is the game that won the “Surprise Me!” point. Every war story game I’d played before was about whether or not the characters could defeat the enemy, but this one wasn’t. It took a lot of thought to review, and I like things that challenge me to think.