Character Creation: Spectres of Brocken

This makes three games in a row that start with "S," which is a meaningless coincidence. 

The Game: Spectres of Brocken
The Publisher: Aaron Lim
Degree of Familiarity: None
Books Required: Just the one

Spectres of Brocken is a GMless game in which you play mech pilots, first as young recruits in an academy, and then later on opposite sides of a conflict. It's about forming relationships and then how those relationships change, very character focused, looks OK. It doesn't hook me, however, for a few reasons.

First is the title. A "Brocken spectre" is a thing. Specifically, it's the shadow of an observer on a cloud opposite a strong light source. I had no idea what that meant when I started reading the game, I assume "Brocken" was the name of the company that made the mechs, or something. The title tells me nothing about the game, and the cover doesn't even depict a Brocken shadow (I do like the cover art, though). That's minor in the scheme of things, though.

Second, although there's an example of play, I kind of hate it, which I know is out of character for me. But it only involves two players, which means it's weirdly intimate and...I don't know, conversational? Which I know is a silly word to use, since all RPGs are a conversation, but it doesn't feel like a game, it feels like two friends doing a free RP. And what doesn't help is:

This is 100% me being an old man yelling at a cloud, but I hate when this kind of online phrasing (using "haha" as punctuation, missing commas, unnecessarily adding more "o"s to "ooh") makes it into print. Might just because I've been very grouchy about social media and online shit generally, of late. 

And finally, and this is, again, minor, but it's something a lot of similar RPGs do: Spectres of Brocken is weirdly fixated on safety tools and check-ins and just generally making sure everyone is OK. There are phases to the game, sure, but it really overemphasizes revising lines and veils or whatever between every phase, and it just feels a little hand-holdy. 

It's not that I don't think safety tools are important; I do, and I wish they'd been part of gaming culture a lot earlier than they were. There were moments in games I ran in the 90s that I really wish I could have X-carded, and I'm sure I created moments like that, too, as I was finding my feet as a horror GM. But I think there's something to be said for trusting your reader and not beating them over the head with it. 

Anyway, enough blather, let's make a pilot! First thing we need to do is pick a setting, which is called a "World Tendency" in the book for some reason. There are three presented; one is a pretty standard "mech academy" sci-fi thing, one is a kind of riff on Pacific Rim in which the mechs are biotech made of monster parts, and one is a fantasy setting that looks like it draws at least in part from Avatar (though I get the feeling there are other inspirations that I'm not familiar with, maybe Fire Emblem). 

Of the three, the one I find most interesting in the middle one, called Jet Fang Rumble, so we're gonna go with that.

So, I know Theme Song is the last step, but I'm actually gonna do it first because I like to let inspiration come from lyrics, particularly when I don't have any strong ideas for a character (which I don't). So, doing the ol' iTunes shuffle, we get...

That's "I Think God Can Explain" by Splender. I've heard a few different interpretations of this song over the years, over dealing with being gay or just having gay sex (this song was released in 1999, things were different), but I honestly don't know, and I don't know that those interpretations play into this setting especially well anyway. So instead, let's grab onto one of the setting factions, the Silent Roar. Basically, they believe that the "monsters" were actually trying to warn humanity of something ever worse, and we fucking killed them about it.

In Jet Fang Rumble, we're not at an academy, we're young sports professionals training in the Titan League, which uses these biomechanical "mechs" in extreme sport kinds of things. So let's say my young athlete, Bow Capistrano, isn't actually a member of that faction yet, but joined the league because he believes there's a higher purpose to the monsters, a kind of brutal divinity, if you will, and wants to be in one of these mechs to try and learn the truth. I see him as kind of woo, with a sort of surfer spirituality to him. 

So, back to Step One, I need a Trait. Now, Traits fall into one of four categories (Conviction, Impulse, Pride, and Flaw), but I only define one at chargen, the thinking being that the rest get firmed up in play, and that's fine. In Bow's case, I think his belief that The Monsters Mean Something is a Conviction.

Next we pick an Anchor. An Anchor is a person, place, or thing that is or was formative to the pilot, and that can be destroyed during the Conflict Phase later on. One of the suggestions is a juvenile monster, and I think that's goddamn perfect, so we'll say that when Bow was very small he saw a fight between one of the mechs and a monster. The mech tore the monster apart, but the monster's offspring slipped off into a lake and hid, and Bow was the only one that notice. He remembers seeing that the monster looked scared, but also aware of what was happening. He's gone back to that lake periodically since, but never seen it.

Name, pronouns, look. I did name already, and Bow's pronouns are he/him. Bow was about four when he saw the monster fight, the monsters started appearing 20 years ago in-setting, but they'd been around long enough for the bio-mechs to be a thing when he saw that fight. So figure on Bow being about 20. I picture him being played by a younger Dax Shepherd, maybe - sandy hair, strong build, probably a bunch of water-themed and very abstract tattoos. 

And that's actually it, because the other steps (involving Bonds) would require other players, so there ya have it!