Beneath A Cursed Moon - Castlevania inspired monster hunting

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DragonChild
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Beneath A Cursed Moon - Castlevania inspired monster hunting

Post by DragonChild »

Late last year, I finished work on Beneath a Cursed Moon - my RPG about monster hunting in a gothic fantasy setting. It pulls inspirations from Castlevania, Bloodborne, The Mummy (1999), Dracula, Hellboy, Disney’s Gargoyles, and you’ll find some After Sundown ideas running through it, too. The players are heroes who hunt monsters and solve mysteries and get into fights, and it focuses more on mystery and action than horror.

You can find totally for free on:
Itch.io: https://karrius.itch.io/beneath-a-cursed-moon
DTR: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/25 ... ursed-Moon

I wanted to talk about it for the Den, especially because it’s a PBTA game. I haven’t had a lot of success with PBTA games in the past - my disappointment with Monster of the Week is part of what drove me to make this game, because nothing can teach you how to design a game better than seeing how another game failed. While I know PBTA isn’t quite to the Den’s flavor - it isn’t really to mine, either! - I wanted to see if it was something I could “fix”, and it felt like a closer starting point to an idea I wanted to make for a long time. So here’s some things I did that I think are important:

There are no surprise bear moves. There are no moves that are going to summon more dangers that *might* have been there. The closest I have to a “size up a situation” move is Hunt, which is “When you’re playing cat and mouse with something, roll to see who ends up on top.” If there’s not something that’s hunting you or you’re hunting in the first place, it doesn’t apply! Investigation stuff especially can easily end up with surprise bears - to fix this, I specifically inform the MC to write up a timeline of events. The longer the PCs spend investigating, the more these bad events progress. But if they act fast enough, the PCs can prevent them - these monsters always “exist”, and it’s just a matter of time before they show their face.

All characters can participate in both major parts of the game. This game is focused on both investigation and combat. All the playbooks can participate in both, and how they participate in each is usually somewhat different than other PCs. Nobody is ever left not doing anything, especially because for investigation rolls, the only thing you lose on a failure is time - the cost is incurred as a group, when you go to investigate.

Monster strength does effect roll difficulty. So this is another big den complaint I share, and I fixed… halfway. Monsters declare their actions, and then your interrupt, and your character rolls and moves and interfere with how well you interrupt. So there’s no “Stop an attack, be it from a shitty skeleton or Dracula”, but there IS a “Take 1 less damage from an attack, which stops a skeleton from hurting you, but is a tiny chip of Dracula’s damage”. So for monsters, this complaint is handled. Even things like “Turn Undead” work based on the monster’s rank, so you can’t really ward Dracula away with a cross as well as you can one of his lesser brides. Now, admittedly, this problem still exists for non-creature obstacles, like scaling a wall or whatever. I don’t know how to fix that, frankly, and because those things aren’t a major focus, I kinda just let it slide. I don’t have a good answer!

There’s no taking stuff from other playbooks. I’ve never seen anyone on the den complain about this in particular, but holy hell do I hate having to dig through 12 playbooks to pick a new move for my character, when most of them don’t even make sense stat-wise or use mechanics my playbook doesn’t have. It’s the worst! The worst!

Does this fix PBTA? Is this a significant improvement? I dunno! My ideas were fed by a lot of discussion here, and I hope at least my designs can contribute more to someone else’s ideas.

And honestly, if you can do better, I’d love to see it and buy it. I made this game because it’s a thing I want to run, but doesn’t exist usably otherwise.
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Post by Blicero »

Why did you use PBTA as the baseline engine, instead of Shadowrun 4 or GUMSHOE or whatever?
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JigokuBosatsu
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Post by JigokuBosatsu »

So how would you say this compares with something like Rhapsody of Blood (the other PBTA Castlevania game)? And more to the point, what kind of game do you see this playing as... Netflix Castlevania, Darkest Dungeon, or Bloodborne But Not Just Stabbing Everything? I can see any of these kind of working but there isn't a lot of meat to what I see so far.

If you don't have a specific type of gameplay in mind, will you have a handful of suggestions in the text at some point? I've always like the concept of having a main book for the system that also includes a few different specific settings with rule tweaks for the individual kind of game they represent.
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JigokuBosatsu wrote:so a regular glass armonica?
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Post by RobbyPants »

Blicero wrote:Why did you use PBTA as the baseline engine, instead of Shadowrun 4 or GUMSHOE or whatever?
DragonChild wrote: I wanted to talk about it for the Den, especially because it’s a PBTA game. I haven’t had a lot of success with PBTA games in the past - my disappointment with Monster of the Week is part of what drove me to make this game, because nothing can teach you how to design a game better than seeing how another game failed. While I know PBTA isn’t quite to the Den’s flavor - it isn’t really to mine, either! - I wanted to see if it was something I could “fix”, and it felt like a closer starting point to an idea I wanted to make for a long time.
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

PBTA?
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RobbyPants
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Post by RobbyPants »

OgreBattle wrote:PBTA?
Powered by the Apocalypse. Also seen in that thread you posted in two days ago. It tends to be called "bearworld" here both because

1) they have a lot of *world-named games, like "apocalypse world" and

2) its mechanic is known for creating problems where there were none. The "bears" come from a mechanic in the game where a person looks to see if there's any trouble, and one of the results literally has the GM creating bears where there were none before. These have been dubbed "quantum bears".

Anyway, it looks like DragonChild is attempting to address some of these PBTA issues in his game.
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Post by DragonChild »

Why did you use PBTA as the baseline engine, instead of Shadowrun 4 or GUMSHOE or whatever?
I like GUMSHOE a lot, but it's pretty bad when it comes to actual action stuff. I think it's better for more modern-day games, where you have a wild variety of investigation techniques, too. I can't justify having a skill list anywhere near as long as I think would be fun for GUMSHOE. I also really do like the common mechanic of "Player asks questions from a preset list" that some PBTA games do, especially when different players have different lists based on skill or class.

Shadowrun is basically just "why not a dice pool system", and I could see that working, but I kind of wanted to play with the 2d6+(skill of 0-3) RNG. It's actually a pretty decent flexible one, and people seem to grasp it easy.
So how would you say this compares with something like Rhapsody of Blood (the other PBTA Castlevania game)? And more to the point, what kind of game do you see this playing as... Netflix Castlevania, Darkest Dungeon, or Bloodborne But Not Just Stabbing Everything? I can see any of these kind of working but there isn't a lot of meat to what I see so far.
If I'm remembering right, Rhapsody of Blood is way more focused on the specific castle, as well as the generational aspect. And I think the generational aspect is super cool and a neat thing to focus on, but it wasn't quite what I was going for. Netflix Castlevania and Bloodborne But Not Just Stabbing Everything is really the goal - you go to a place, something is wrong and you've gotta figure out what as things start getting progressively worse.

I've always like the concept of having a main book for the system that also includes a few different specific settings with rule tweaks for the individual kind of game they represent.
I would have loved to do something like that. I considered getting other people to write small setting books with little essays and rules tweaks, maybe a new playbook or move or two attached. I wanted to see general reaction to the system first, though, see how well it did, etc, before trying to go too out there, especially because it's pretty important to me that I'm giving away the book for free and only doing PWYW.
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JigokuBosatsu
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Post by JigokuBosatsu »

Well, if you want someone to do a couple writeups like that I have some trunk stuff that I could expand. Trying to distract my melting brain here and there with low stress projects.
Omegonthesane wrote:a glass armonica which causes a target city to have horrific nightmares that prevent sleep
JigokuBosatsu wrote:so a regular glass armonica?
You can buy my books, yes you can. Out of print and retired, sorry.
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