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quote:This is what we know:  What is After Kaiju? After Kaiju is a rules-light cinematic storytelling game of massive monsters, political machinations, and low-budget documentary filmmakers shedding light in the darkness, designed by yours truly. It helps you tell the story of a kaiju attack on human civilisation, discover how these events were distorted by social, economic and political forces, and explore the consequences of revealing these truths to society. Well, that's the plan - this is a playtest, after all. The game takes a broad view and we collectively play the documentary crew and the public and institutions around them. It explores how the out-of-this-world disaster of a kaiju attack – and the institutional response – shattered and distorted the physical and social geography of the world. The bulk of the game takes place a generation after the attack, after decades of doubt, speculation, and even misinformation, and focuses on the beliefs and actions of the old, the young, and those in between as they make their way through a post-kaiju world. How do you play it? After Kaiju is a turn-based game for 3-5 players. The game is split into three parts:
During the Edit, we run through the shots in order, taking turns to narrate and, if we choose, to Contradict the narrative (either honestly, with evidence, or fraudulently, through Deception). We start out with just the footage we recorded and play until the end, turning it into a coherent story of the kaiju’s attack and society’s (and the government’s and corporations’) response. During the Show, we take turns to zoom in on different revelations and see how a segment of society responded in the short term, starting with the broadest, shallowest reactions. We do the similarly with different institutions. However, the more Deceptions we introduced, the more likely they’ll be revealed – not only exposing the other lies, but casting doubt on the truth. We then repeat these actions to explore different reactions over the long term. We start out with the map we made during the Shoot and add the reactions in new layers over the top, and continue until each truth has made its mark in the short and long term. All players will receive a full run-through of the WIP rules. As this is a WIP, the rules may change in minor ways during the game (but major problems have already been ironed out by previous testing). We’ll be using miro (with a shared account) for making the map. What expectations should I have? After Kaiju is part map-game, part timeline-game – it’s a little bit like The Quiet Year, a little bit like Microscope, and a little bit like Mars Colony. The players don’t necessarily play characters in themselves, but put together a map and timeline where shared characters take action. Here are some more specific points:
How do I sign up? Join this discord server (you're welcome to join even if you don't play, it's a server for rules-light/story-games in general). There’ll be a channel for each game we start, and it’s where I’ll provide a link to the full rules summary and invite info for the platform we’ll use to play the game. Post here with some music and/or pictures that get across the sort of mood you’re after. After a couple of days we'll start setup. If there are more than 3-5 people (including me) then we'll split into groups of 3-5 as best we can.
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May 2, 2019 17:20
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 19:35 |
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So is it basically like microscope with a very specific focus?
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May 2, 2019 17:27
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  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rtr3BClsGI
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May 2, 2019 17:48
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Azhais posted:So is it basically like microscope with a very specific focus? The part that's most like Microscope is the Shoot, where you take turns adding setting details and public opinion/popular history in an achronological way. However, anything introduced in the Shoot is open to contradiction later on in the game, unlike the way everything is unquestionably true in Microscope. That, and unlike Microscope, where each turn is a 1-person job, every part of After Kaiju splits turns in two, with one player doing something (e.g. narrating the kaiju's actions, describing how people react to the documentary) and another player responding somehow (e.g. narrating humanity's actions, describing how institutions react to the documentary). Also, true, kaiju attacks are a pretty specific focus - but the game can be about any big event, and people telling the story of that event and revealing some hidden truths at the same time. It could be played as a Middle Ages account of a sinister, Red Death-esque plague; a report on an attempted rebellion in a space colony; a post-mortem of an executed serial killer; or something completely different.
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May 2, 2019 18:26
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This looks interesting. I really like the idea of "history is made by the telling of facts to others, rather than the facts themselves" that flows through the game rules. (For my part, I wouldn't mind the "Kaiju attack" being something more mundane yet still totally incomprehensible to the layman--a massive, Operation Focus style air raid, for example.)
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May 3, 2019 04:29
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Current players:
Davin Valkri posted:This looks interesting. I really like the idea of "history is made by the telling of facts to others, rather than the facts themselves" that flows through the game rules. That said, the relationship between air raids and regular people is the focus of another minimalist game I have in the works, but it’s still a WIP.
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May 3, 2019 15:55
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Interest post. Spectral Voice - Visions of Psychic Dismemberment I imagine people are trying in the post-kaiju world, but it's probably grim. Anomalous Amalgam fucked around with this message at 20:57 on May 3, 2019 |
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May 3, 2019 16:08
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I said this in the Discord but I'll say it here, too - this sounds very much like my jam so I am really excited to see how it works. As for mood, my mind immediately jumped to concept art from Pacific Rim, showing how cities just kept on growing over the bones of fallen kaiju. Life keeps on going - you can put a community through absolute hell but at the end of the day they still need to do poo poo like build homes and hang laundry.   
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May 3, 2019 20:51
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I'm interested 
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May 4, 2019 00:40
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Currently we have enough for 2 4-player games (with me in both). I'm going to semi-arbitrarily split people into these groups: Group A
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May 5, 2019 11:18
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 19:35 |
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Got the rules and I'm looking forward to seeing it in action. I really like the "Framing the Shot" mechanic - introducing elements of the fiction by mentally composing a shot that you'd want to get for the documentary is a really cool idea.
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May 10, 2019 18:08
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