Character Creation: Moth Children

I vant to suck your...moths!?

The Game: Moth Children
The Publisher: Cosmic Mirror Games (although the front of the book says "Genesis Engine Games")
Degree of Familiarity: None
Books Required: Just the one

I've tried to do this game a few times already, and I could never get through it. And it's nothing to do with the premise or the system or the writing (well, mostly, though it is a little overwrought in places), but all about the format:

White text on black background, especially in a physical copy where you can't adjust the text size, is really hard to read, especially because I generally read at night when my eyes are already tired. This is, of course, something that I could correct in several different ways, but the fact remains that the book is very difficult to parse and it's made getting through it slow going. 

In any case: Moth Children is a game in which you play vampires. It's an urban fantasy-ish game; there are lots of other supernatural beings in the world (which the book often refers to as "supernaturals" which still makes me wince, thanks very much WoD). There were no "supernaturals" up until 40 years ago, and then there always had been - see also Dream of 1000 Cats in which humanity dreams a world in which cats have always been domesticated and small, and then it became like that. That means that although vampires didn't exist before 40 years ago, you can still make a vampire character who is hundreds of years old, because history altered when the supernatural came into being. I have to admit I really like timeline shenanigans like that.

Another thing I like: Vampires in this game have moths in them, fluttering around in their hearts. If they steal moths from other vampires, they can steal their powers and their immortality (now, that's diablerie with some flavor!).

OK, so, let's do this. We start off by prioritizing one of three wheels - Violence, Stealth, or Social. Let me take a moment to gripe about mixing parts of speech here. OK, gripe concluded. I get 30 points in my primary wheel, 25 in the secondary, 20 in the tertiary - gee, this is feeling kinda WoD all of a sudden. I can't go over 5 in any one Skill, and if I don't have a rating, I straight-up can't do it. 

Looking ahead, I'm going to have to figure out how many years I have left to live. Each species of moth, if it's your host moth, grants a base lifespan, but if you steal other moths, you can gain more years. But if you sire another vampire, you have to donate years from your own life. This is all really, really badly explained, and it's frustrating because it's a cool idea.

Like, the different species of moth interact differently, so if you have one species as your host and you later obtain another species, you can get "synergies" which give you fun powers. Great. But this all would benefit from, like, a chart or even a fucking example of character creation. And I could probably go through the book and puzzle out how the moth-math works, but that sounds really goddamn tedious for a game I'm never going to play.

Well, I'm going to make a brand-new vampire, mostly because I don't want to fuck about with figuring out how many moths I have. So let's say my vampire was sired by another vampire as a decoy. My sire was being pursued by hunters (maybe therianthropes), and so he found someone that looked a lot like him, made him a vampire, and fucked off, and promptly got torn to shreds because therianthropes aren't stupid. My guy quietly left the area and has been coming to grips with the situation ever since. That sounds like I should prioritize Stealth. But then Social or Violence for secondary? I'm gonna say Violence, and assume that my sire picked someone who has competently violent just to try and slow the hunters down. So 30 in Stealth, 25 in Violence, 20 in Social. 

Christ in a sidecar, this is why it's good that there used to be a barrier to entry for making your own game:

You can hire an editor who can fix your typos, but it takes a development editor to read this and go "this is really unnecessarily chatty and overwritten, you can write with flavor and not sound like a fucking tumblr post." Anyway. 

I'm gonna split my Stealth points up as follows:

Break & Enter 3
Case 3
Conceal (don't feel) 1
Disable Device 2
Hack 1
Lock Picking 2
Loot 4
Misdirect 3
Quiet 5
Safe Cracking 1
Stealth 5 - OMG. There's a Skill called Stealth, as a subset of a stat called Stealth. I should call the police.

Anyway, on to Violence.

Arson 2
Assassinate 3
Break 2
Combat 3
Cyber Attack 1
Demolition 1 (this should be called "demolitions" because it's about explosives or HEY WHY NOT JUST "explosives")
Medical 1 (this is a fucking stupid skill)
Restrain 3
Riflery (this covers all guns. Why is it not called Firearms? WHO KNOWS) 3
Takedown 4
Trap 2

And finally, 20 points into Social.

Bait 3
Bluff 2
Deflect 0
Diplomacy 0
Disguise 1
Distract 3
Intimidate 4
Orate 1
Press 3
Small Talk 2
White Lie 1

OK, now on to Personal Abilities. These are not explained as a group, just individually, but they appear to be mostly sense-based. I have an automatic 3 in Hearing because vampires hear real good. I get 13 more points to split up. 

Hearing 7 (I put 4 points in)
Spot (here boy!) 4
Discern 3
Will 2

And then I get 3 points to distribute into Might, Grace, and Compulsion. Vampire powers, y'see. They're not well explained, or rather, they're probably very thoroughly explained but not clearly. I think I'll just put one point in each one.

And now on to the section called..."vampiric creation." I thought that's what we were doing. Is this a WoD-esque "apply vampire template" thing? WHO KNOWS.

Anyway, this section is mostly about creating an "eclipse" (the compendium for "vampire" in this game, for some reason). There's nothing here that applies to me, I don't think. 

Looking through the various moths, I'll say my host is a hornet moth. 

As a host, hornet moths allow vampires to use Compulsion on other vampires, so I think that was my sire's thinking - compel me to take the fall for him. Just didn't work out that way.

The hornet moth gives a base of 30 years of life, and I'll say my guy hasn't been vampin' for a year, so he's still got the full 30. 

Right. So my vampire's name is John Kostopuolos. The guys in his biker gang use to call him "Kos." Kos looked the part - bushy beard, leathers, gang colors - and the vampire just plucked him off his bike, threw him into an abandoned ice cream stand, and forced a moth into his heart. Then he made him trim his beard and wear a suit so that he looked a lot like the vampire (and they did look a lot alike) and told him "when the wolves come, kill them." The wolves never came. Kos waited a while, then got on his bike and drove off, because he knew that if he stuck around he'd either kill his gang or start using them to do vampire shit, and he respected them too much for that.

The thing is, that command - "when the wolves come, kill them" - is still in his heart, and he doesn't really know that. When the "wolves" come, or whenever something he sees as wolves come, that's gonna be an interesting night. 

And that'll do it! Man, that was too much work for such a short book.