Character Creation: Chuubo's Marvelous Milking Cow

There is virtually no chance you know what I'm talking about, so here:

 

 

Also, this being December, we shall once again indulge in the 12 Games of Xmas! I had a bunch of my friends look at the list and decide what games they wanted to see characters for, so....

THE FIRST GAME OF XMAS, TWENTY-TWENTY-THREE IS (deep breath) CHUUBO'S MARVELOUS WISH-GRANTING ENGINE!

The Game: Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine
The Publisher: Jenna Moran
Degree of Familiarity: None
Books Required: Just the one, but it's a doozy

Chuubo has a been a darling in some circles of the TTRPG internet for a while now. I remember it getting a lot of positive discussion back when I was still looking at RPGnet. I remember not being interested because it looked/sounded kinda anime-ish to me, and I'm not generally into anime (which I know is like not being into "movies" to some people, but gimme a break). 

And now having read it...I'm still not into it. If I had to sum up my thoughts, it'd be "needlessly complex." I don't say that about the game system, necessarily. It's just that it's often described as a slice of life pastoral Studio Ghibli inspired kind of thing, and like, I have a few of those. I have Golden Sky Stories and The Whispering Road and probably others I'm not thinking of, and they don't take 600 goddamn pages to get there. Plus, it's written in, if not the same poetic, high-falutin' style as Nobilis, then an equally flowy sort of voice. It's not that it's hard to follow, necessarily, but as a technical manual (which is what an RPG is, at least partially) it's weird. 

And very meta, which normally I'd be into. Lots of discussions of characters having Quests and different Genres and suchlike, but in the end it just made me tired. But it could very well be that this is one of those games that sings at the table, and based on the number of positive reviews I'm seeing I suspect that's the case. 

Well, anyway, let's see if chargen is quick. Let's assume we're building a mortal, rather than a miraculous, character.

Now, is that a sequence of chargen? I don't know, let me try and parse this. Oh, no, wait, the sequence for chargen is actually on the next page.

OK, so "campaign concept" is a group or GM thing (rather, "HG" thing, because here as in Nobilis the GM is the "Hollyhock God," which is still after nearly 40 years the weirdest and least informative title for the GM I've ever heard). 

Anyway, let's assume we're doing a kind of basic Pastoral game in the Town, since I think that's the closest to default we're gonna get. That means we start with an Arc! I'm asked to consider my goal or mission statement right now. 

Well, let's say I'm playing someone who's recently returned to Town because his father died, and he's deciding whether to stay in Town and take over "the shop" (I'll decide what kind of shop later) or sell everything off and get gone. Yes, that's very Hallmark Xmas Movie, but 'tis the season. Looking at the types of Arcs, that seems to me to be Otherworldly (torn between two worlds). 

And now I need a first quest. Also, there's no place on the sheet to write one's present Arc or Quest, so it must not be that important. I will give my dude a name, though, I'll call him Jaime Stabler. A lot of the characters presented have Japanese names, but I don't think that's necessary and if it were, surely the game would tell me so up front rather than making me read 600 pages to figure it out. 

Anyway, his Arc is Otherworldy, his Quest is Changes. Now I have 8 points of Skills. Skills can be anything from an actual skill to a philosophy (one of the examples is "People are Good") to a more complex concept. I'm encouraged to come up with what I think the character is good at and then make those fit into 8 points ("0" is an option). 3 is really the upper limit for humans, though if I go to 4 or 5 that's much more legendary. 

So for Jaime, I think he needs a Skill in City Boy, to reflect his time away from Town and being all cosmopolitan and shit. Likewise, I think he's Educated. I want him to still be capable of whatever his dad was good at, so I'll take Small-Town Apothecary as a skill. I'll take Business, and then I want something a little more rustic...ooh, actually, I'll take Everything Seemed So Much Bigger to reflect that he knows the Town, but it all seems new and yet familiar and yet smaller to him. 

I'll arrange the numbers thusly:

City Boy 2
Educated 1
Small-Town Apothecary 2
Business 2
Everything Seemed So Much Bigger 1

Cool, moving on. Special abilities? Kind of. I get a Bond and an Affliction. A Bond is really three things: Something I can't do, something I must do, and something I'm driven to do. Neat. This is all meant to be related to my Arc, too. 

So since Jaime's Arc is about being pulled between the Big City and his life there or his family legacy and the memories of the Town, let's say Jaime can't refuse a call or a contact from the City. He must listen to any story or anecdote about himself or his family, no matter what else is going on. And he's driven to seek out places and people he remembers from his youth.

Now, what's an Affliction? Oh, this is weird. They're the same as Bonds, in terms of structure, but they're cosmic. It's about destiny, not choice (and in play the HG activates these). But they stem from the same narrative space as Bonds, so sure, for Jaime:

I can't leave town until my father's spirit releases me. I must discover why my father pushed me to leave in the first place. I'm driven to learn what really happened to my mother. (This doesn't have to be nefarious or violent, of course, it's just something Dad never talked about.)

OK, goddamit. There's six of these, but five slots on the sheet. What the hell. NEXT. "Bonus XP emotion." Um? Oh, I like this, actually, it's something you get XP when you elicit this reaction from other players. Not a million miles from the Virtue in Epyllion, I guess, or maybe closer to the audience moves from Pasión de las Pasiones. Well, for Jaime, I think I'd want people shake their heads and go "city folks," so let's call that "Culture Clash."

Last couple of things are details and the basic quest. So. Jaime is maybe late 20s, but acts older and looks younger (I picture him kinda like Percy from Vox Machina, actually). When he got back to Town he was very buttoned up and well-dressed, but he's gotten more casual as he's been here. He used at carry a briefcase and it's still on the counter at the shop. As for his basic quest, looking at it, I think it's a Struggle quest - he's torn between his City-self and looking down on the rubes, and his Town-self and acknowledging his roots and the beauty of life here. I'm not gonna fill out the card, though, because I'm done!