Since I'm currently pretty hyped about City of Mist, I thought I'd share here as well.
City of Mist is a new RPG that's getting a kickstarter towards the end of October. A Quickstarter with characters and a sample adventure can already be found on
http://cityofmist.sonofoak.com/What's it all about?
The setting is solid urban fantasy. You are a Gateway, a person that has a connection to the Mythos and draws incredible power from it. Sleepers (as regular folk are called) can't see past the veil of the Myst and will quickly forget even the weirdest things they see. But every power comes with a question. A Mythos that needs an answer.
The system is a mixture of Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) and Fate, using the best parts of both. Each character has 4 themes that define them. They are a bit like Aspects in that regard. Each theme has 3 Power Tags and one Weakness Tag that further defines the theme. There are also 2 types of themes, Mythos and Logos. Mythos describes your supernatural aspects and the questions related to it, Logos represents your mundane identity.
When you do something, you use a "move", there are different ones, depending on what you want to do. There are moves like "Sneak Around" to hide, "Change the Game" which is basically a maneuver (or "create an advantage" from Fate Core) or "Hit with all you've got", when you want to go on an all out attack. Once you've decided which move to use, you gather up your Power. For each Power Tag that can help you, you add 1 to your Power, for each Weakness Tag you add you subtract 1. The GM can add Weakness Tags as well, if he thinks one of your Weakness Tags could affect the action.
Then you roll 2d6 and add your Power. If you get 7-9 you've got a partial success, on a 10+ you got a success. What exactly this means is different for each move, mostly a failure and even partial success allows the GM to activate moves of his own.
One very neat feature the system also brings with it are statuses. A status is basically like a temporary aspect, but rated 1-6. When you do something, you can create statuses as well. For example shooting at someone can give them the "Badly Injured - 3" status. There are not really any Hitpoints or even stress tracks. Once you get a level 5 status, you're out for any action this status could feasibly oppose. This is called "narrative damage" in the system and works really well. You can also add statuses to a roll, if they could help or hinder the action. You always take the highest helpful and the highest hindering one.
But wait, there's more. I talked about Weakness Tags before. And they add another really cool feature. When you add a Weakness Tag to a roll, the theme it was on gets "attention". For every 3 attention a theme gets, you can improve on the theme, add more Power Tags or cure a cracked/faded theme.
Cracking or fading on a theme occurs when you act against the theme. Logos cracks while Mythos fades. There is even a move that forces you to choose between 2 themes, if appropriate. If you lose a theme, you get a new one but from the other type. If you lose a Logos theme, you lose part of your identity and go further into the Myst. If you lose a Mythos theme, you lose your connection to the Myst and revert to a regular mortal.
As with all PbtA games, the GM doesn't roll, just uses moves. Since this was my first experience with a PbtA game and I was running, it felt a bit weird at first,but it works really well. Running the sample adventure was all kinds of fun.
Ok, so I'm incredibly excited about this game. I'm looking forward to the kickstarter and the full game. Thought some of you might like it as well.
