Night Spider for High Five

I’m reading and enjoying some indy comics from Blue Moon Comics Group. (Special thanks to the Maxpocalypse Now blog for introducing me to this great publisher.) 

My favorite titles are the Night Spider Specials:

Night Spider Special Edition #1

Night Spider Special Edition #2

and

Night Spider & Midnight Stranger: Mind Over Murder

The first two special editions reprint Night Spider’s appearances from Diversions (Blue Moon’s flagship anthology title) presenting them in color for the first time. The last one, Mind Over Murder is an all new story teaming Night Spider with another hero from Diversions in true the Brave and the Bold fashion. (Also in full color!) These comics are great!

I thought that it would be fun to recreate Night Spider (a first level version) for High Five. I’m pretty happy with the results!

Art by JW Erwin © 2024 Blue Moon Comics Group

Night Spider

Civ-ID: Denny Knight (He/Him)

Level: 1

Hearts: 3

Attack Detail 2X

Title: Spider Sting

Flavor: My gloves can fire a concussive blast to stun an enemy at close range.

 

Defense 2C

Title: Spider Suit

Flavor: My costume is designed to protect me from harm, even bullets.

Move 2D

Title: Spider Line

Flavor: My gloves can project a cable that I can swing from to move from rooftop to rooftop high above the streets of New Constantine.

Craft 4A

Title: Head of Knightlife Industries

Flavor: Knightlife Industries provides me with the financial and technological resources that I need to continue my fight against crime.

Connection 4B

Title: Police Chief Frank Jerod

Flavor: Frank is a close friend who knows my secret identity. I count on the support that he and the police provide and I help whenever and however I can.

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Golden Sky Stories Review - Part 3

This is the continuation of my review of Golden Sky Stories. You can read the first part of the review HERE. You can read the second part of the review HERE.

Dreams

Once you have established a connection with a character, you’ll want to be able to improve that connection in future scenes. You can’t use an impression check to do that. You only get one chance (per story) to make a first impression. This is where Dreams come in.

Anytime someone does something, cute, cool or funny during the story, you can give them a Dream. The game text recommends using playing cards to award dreams. Keep a deck of cards in the center of the table, and anyone can grab a card and award it to someone else when they do something cool.

You can’t award Dreams to yourself, only other players and the narrator can give you dreams. Likewise, you give dreams to the other players and to the narrator. That’s right, you definitely want to give Dreams to the narrator. The narrator has to use dreams to strengthen their connections to you. This is important because, if you’ll remember, these connections are where your character’s Feelings come from.

Dreams are awarded on the fly from anyone to anyone else besides yourself. These are spent between scenes to strengthen connections to characters, but they can only strengthen the connections to characters who appeared in the scene that was just completed.

(I like the idea of using playing cards to track: Dreams, Feelings, and Wonder. Just use face up red suited cards to track Wonder, face up black suited cards to track Feelings, and face down cards to track Dreams.)

While spending Dreams to improve a connection, you can also change a connection’s contents if it seems appropriate to do so. (You can change contents even if you didn’t improve the connection, if you think that’s a good idea.)

If you ever get both sides of a connection to 5 so that the filled in boxes on your sheet meet at that star in the middle on your character sheet, you get 10 Wonder and 10 Feelings for this connection at the start of a scene instead of just 5 of each! (But both sides of the connection must be maxed out, not just one!) In addition, at the end of the story you earn TWO Threads for this connection instead of the usual one!

What’s a thread? Glad you asked.

Threads

At the end of the story (game session) you lose all of the connections that you made and begin the next story with a clean slate. Why work so hard to build connections if they are just going to fade away? The answer to this is: Threads & Memories.

For each connection that you have at the end of the game session, you get a thread. You can erase this thread in a later story to increase a connection by +1 with that returning character without spending Dreams. This can be a huge advantage. Especially with higher level connections that cost a lot of Dreams to improve.

Memories

Finally, at the end of the story, for every point of strength that you have built in your connections to others, (except the one with the town) you get 1 point of Memories. Memories can be spent like Wonder or Feelings, but once they are spent, they are gone.

Only your connections convert into Memories. Any unused Wonder, Feelings or Dreams are lost at the end of the session. Be sure to spend all the Dreams you can to improve connections at the end of the last scene, so that these will become Memories.

Small Stories

The stories in Golden Sky Stories are small. The players aren’t heroes out to defeat a great evil or to save the world. Almost every story is built around the idea that someone the players encounter has some worry, concern, problem or challenge. The players should discover this problem and help the person to resolve it.

During character creation, the rules have an entire section on how to choose an appropriately Japanese name for your character. My initial reaction to this was that I would ignore it and just let players use whatever name they want, but I get why it's there. 

Golden Sky Stories is a Japanese RPG. It's attitude and approach is very different culturally than anything produced in the US. Picking a Japanese name for their character is going to encourage players to step into Golden Sky Stories' uniquely Japanese mind set. 

These stories are the heart-warming intimate slice of life tales of a Studio Ghibli film. Choosing a Japanese name is going to help players to "get into character" and to play a role that's different from anything they've ever tried before. 

Small Groups 

Golden Sky Stories is about role-playing. A game exclusively about role-playing tends to work best with smaller more intimate sized groups. Golden Sky story recommends two or three henge players plus the narrator. This will provide the best experience.

In my own experience, some of my fondest game sessions were games played with such small, intimate groups. Some sessions saw us play an entire evening without rolling any dice, because we were simply too busy role-playing. That’s the experience that Golden Sky Stories promises and I can’t wait to try it out!

Final Thoughts 

Golden Sky Stories has completely charmed me. I desperately want to get this game to the table. 

I do think that it needs the right kind of group to work. It's written for fans of Ghibli films like My Neighbor Totoro or Kiki's Delivery Service or Ponyo. And it's written for people who just want to enjoy telling a story without all the tactical combat baggage that so often goes with the RPG experience. 

I intend to play Golden Sky Stories as soon as I am able. I will write about that experience as soon as I can make it happen, but for me, for right now, I'm going to bask in the warm fuzzies that this game gives me just by thinking about it. 

If you are interested in Golden Sky Stories you can get it at Drive Thru RPG. (This is not an affiliate link. If you buy Golden Sky Stories, I receive nothing. I recommend the game because I love it for all the reasons detailed in this review.)

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Golden Sky Stories Review - Part 2

This is the continuation of my review of Golden Sky Stories. You can read the first part of the review HERE.

Character Creation

The first thing a player should do is consider what kind of animal they want to be. A player’s animal form is their true form. There are six animal types to choose from in Golden Sky Stories. (There are a number of supplementary books available that expand these options.) 

Pick Your True Form (Animal Form), Powers, and Weaknesses

The six base animal true forms are: Fox (Kitsune), Raccoon Dog (Tanuki), Cat (Neko), Dog (Inu), Rabbit (Usagi), and Bird (Tori).

Each animal comes with its own set of unique magical powers. In addition, players must choose at least one weakness. The sting of this requirement is offset by the fact that every weakness carries along with it a specific bonus power. 

Players can even choose additional weaknesses (up to a maximum of 3 total weaknesses) in order to obtain the associated bonus powers. (Powers cost points to activate, and as mentioned in part one of this review, these are paid for using Wonder.) 

Once you’ve chosen your true form and your henge powers and weaknesses, it’s time to assign some points to your character’s four basic attributes.

The Four Basic Attributes

Henge have four basic attributes that reflect their ability to perform actions. The four attributes are: Henge, Animal, Adult and Child.

Henge is used to perform actions specifically related to the magical henge, their powers, interactions with the local gods, and for the knowledge about other henge and about magical things, myths and legends.

Animal is used to do animal things, identify a scent, climb a tree, run, jump, hide, or anything else physically tied to strength, agility or constitution that an animal could normally do. This is used for these things even when the henge is in human form.

Adult is used to interact with the world without losing your cool. It’s used when you try to do anything related to technology, or act responsibly, or with composure. Its used to think strategically, considering the consequences of an action rather than acting on impulse … you know, adulting.

Child reflects how well you express emotion. It’s tied to empathy and compassion. You can use child to plead, charm, or otherwise cajole others into letting you have what you want. It’s also used when you’re acting impulsively, or when you’re just trying to goof off and have some fun.

Players have 8 points to spend on their attributes. Each attribute must be given a value between 1 and 4. The only exception to this is that Adult can have a value of 0 if you want.

While the math is pretty light, the distribution choice here feels huge to me. These four attributes are really cleverly chosen. They speak not just to what your character can do, but also to how they are likely to behave. The balance between, adult and child, and animal and henge really gives a player a lot of information about how to play their character.

Decide On A Human Form

What does your henge look like when they take human form? This is purely an aesthetic choice, but it will inform the way that you play your character, and the way that others react to and behave around them. This brings us back to connections.

Back To Connections

The final step of character creation is to decide on your connections with the other players. All connections between player henge will have a strength of 2, but the contents of each connection is up to the players.

I talked at some length about connections in part one of this review, but one important aspect that I failed to address is the fact that connections go both ways. There’s what your henge thinks about someone, and there’s what someone thinks about your henge. These aren’t always going to be the same thing.

On your character sheet, every connection has two sides with a star drawn between them, right in the middle. 

When recording your starting connections with the other players you record the strength of the connection by filling in little boxes equal to the connection’s strength (2) and you write that connection’s contents as they relate to your henge’s attitude towards the other character on the left side of the star.

The other players will tell you what contents they have chosen for their connections to you. You will fill in boxes equal to the strengths of their connections to you (again 2), and record the contents of their connections with you, along with their names on the right side of the star.

Once you have done this for all the other players’ henge, your character’s creation is complete.

Connections Back To You

In part one, I said that you got Wonder and Feelings equal to your connections at the start of each scene. This was a simplification. 

Any time the rules refer to “your connections” they refer to the connections on the left side of the star. Those connections on the right side of the star aren’t yours. They belong to the person or henge that you are connected with. That’s part of THEIR connections.

Now it’s time to clarify and bring the picture into focus:

At the start of each new scene you get Wonder equal to the total strengths of YOUR connections. (Those on the left side of the star.) Also, at the start of each scene, you get Feelings equal the total strengths of OTHER peoples’ (and henge) connections to you. (Which is why you need to record them on your character sheet.)

Again, I feel this has a beautiful logic. Feelings are empathetic, they are driven by self-esteem which is strongly influenced by the way others see you. This game mechanism is also a little scary, because it means that you don’t have complete control over the generation of your resources.

Impression Checks

With the exception of your connections to the other players, when you meet a character in the story, and you want to form a connection, you have to pass a test. I alluded to this in part one. Tests in Golden Star Stories are called checks. To make a check you compare one of your abilities to a difficulty number. If the ability score equals or exceeds the difficulty, then the check is successful. The thing that makes Golden Sky Stories different is that you don’t add the roll of a die to this. If you need to succeed at a check and your ability score isn’t high enough, then you have to spend your feelings to make the ability score temporarily higher.

Forming connections requires you to succeed at a check. This is called an Impression Check. The way that your henge is behaving or the action that they are taking at the time that first impression is made will tell you which ability score to apply to the check. The rules also provide some recommendations on what contents to give to the newly formed connection based on which ability was used to make the check.

One important caveat to this is that you can’t form a connection unless the other person wants to make a connection back.

Narrator Created Connections

The stories provided in Golden Sky Stories (the pre-written adventure scenarios) each grant the narrator a pool of Wonder and Feelings that they can use while narrating the story. One big thing the narrator will do with their Feelings is form connections from the characters that they control to the henge controlled by the other characters.

A connection from a person controlled by the narrator to a henge will grant that henge feelings for use in later scenes. (Players only acquire a fresh influx of Wonder and Feelings between scenes.) Providing these connections is vital to the story’s success, but they are still under the Narrator’s control.

Players will want to pay close attention to the impressions that they make on the other characters that they meet in the story. Again, this is a mechanical choice that influences the way players will play their characters, and it all lends itself to a grand sense of cooperation and shared story telling that is far removed from the “kill them and take their stuff” mentality that is cultivated by almost every other RPG I’ve played.

Coming Up Next

In the next post I’ll talk about the mechanisms in the game for character advancement. These take the form of Dreams, Threads and Memories. (You can read part 3 HERE.)

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Golden Sky Stories Review - Part 1

This post was originally shared on March 14th, 2024. However, the links in the original post no longer work because I moved my blog, and I thought ... if I'm going to go in and fix these links, I may as well share this post again, because Golden Sky Stories deserves more love. (Also, changed the Facebook group reference at the bottom of the post to my Bluesky profile.)

I’m tired of D&D. 

I could say that it’s just too complex for my addled old man brain, or that I can’t abide the politics surrounding Hasbro and their apparent attitude of indifference (or outright hostility) toward the D&D player community. But, the truth is – I’m tired of fighting. D&D and by extension the lion’s share of modern RPGs are designed with a focus on the tactical combat mini-game. They are all, all about fighting.

In the last dozen or so years, I have discovered board games in a big way. Board games scratch the tactical combat (and other types of tactical game play) itch very well. I want to role-play when I role-play. I don’t want to fight. So, I’ve been looking at some of the modern role playing game alternatives that try and step away from the D&D mold. Many are very niche one-shot experiences, that just don’t appeal to me. But, a few stand outs have caught my attention. One such game is Golden Sky Stories.

Golden Sky Stories

Golden Sky Stories is a tabletop role playing game created by Ryo Kamiya & Tsugihagi Honpo. The English language version is translated by Ewen Cluney and is published by Star Line Publishing. The tagline for Golden Sky Stories is, “Heart-Warming Role-Playing.” It’s a game where fighting is discouraged, if not completely forbidden. Players must find peaceful ways to solve problems. Is an RPG without combat sustainable? I’m not sure, but Golden Sky Stories has me intrigued.

The Basic Premise

In Golden Sky Stories, players take the roles of beings from Japanese mythology called, “henge” (hen-gay.) Henge are magical animals that can take human form. Note that this isn’t a human who can transform into an animal, but the other way around. This is an important distinction. While magically intelligent and able to communicate through speech like a person, henge are animals. A cat henge wants and thinks cat things, not people things. That alone creates all kinds of interesting role-play handles.

As magical animals, henge are territorial. They stay within the confines of a small rural town and its immediate surroundings, and from their point of view, everything and everyone within their territory belongs to them. Instinctively, a normal animal that has bonded with its human wants to protect them and make them happy. In this same way, the henge bond with and care for the human residents of their town. This provides the motivation and focus for storytelling.

Adopting a New Attitude

If the focus in an RPG is not combat, then all that remains is the role-playing. Players of Golden Sky Stories will need to adjust their thinking to accommodate this new method of play. Role-playing isn’t provided as merely a means to trigger the next combat encounter. Role-playing is the encounter. It’s the only encounter. This requires entering into the game play with a completely new attitude. Golden Sky Stories has rules that support this new attitude. 

Said, “new attitude,” was something of a shock for the old-school D&D nerd in me. I had to read through the rules multiple times to understand what was happening with the game mechanically. The rules aren’t complex or poorly represented, they’re just so … different. 

Your focus in Golden Sky Stories is role-playing. Role-playing in this context involves interacting with the people who populate the world of the game (controlled by a GM, called the narrator) and the other henge (controlled by your fellow players around the table.) This role-play is what the game cares about. So, its mechanisms are built around that activity.

Important Concept #1 – Connections 

When your character encounters another character, they (and you) form an instant first impression, and this creates a connection. 

Connections Are Power

In the game, as you are creating your story, you will want to make connections with every character you meet (assuming that they are connected to your story in some way.) This means that you’ll want to interact with them. You’ll want to (need to) role-play with them. Connections have a strength from 1 to 5, and this is important, because the higher the number, the more it will help you.

The sub-header for this section is: Connections Are Power. Look at that again. I can’t overemphasize the importance of making connections. Connections are about interacting socially with other characters, and that’s the main thing that players do during the game. That’s role-playing.

Contents Give Connections Context

In addition to its strength, every connection has contents. Contents is a keyword that describes the nature of the connection. This helps in the storytelling part of the role-play to inform the sort of interactions these characters might have with each other. The rules provide a list of contents for the player to choose from when a connection is made. These are: Like, Affection, Protection, Trust, Family, Admiration, Rivalry, Respect and Love. (Notice the complete absence of negative contents like hate or vengeance. I suppose a henge could feel such things, but the game system is not going to reward you for it. You can't create connections with those kinds of contents.) 

When players create their characters, they will select contents for, and form connections with, each of their fellow henge. This is a required part of character creation. Your henge know each other because you all live in this shared territory together. You have connections (each having a strength of 2,) but the nature (the contents) of those connections is up to you.

At the beginning of the story (game session) your henge only has connections with the other players. Every story begins this way. 

Important Concept #2 – Resources 

I made a point of defining connections as power in the previous section. It’s more correct to say that connections give players the power to generate resources. 

Resources Make Things Happen

At the start of the game your character only has a few resources at their disposal. As you tell the story and meet characters and form connections, your pool of resources grows. This creates a natural escalation arc in the story and the game.

Players have two pools of resources with which to get things done. These are: Wonder and Feelings.

Wonder Fuels the Fantastic

Henge are magical creatures, as such, they possess magical powers. Using a magical power cost points. These points are paid for in Wonder.

Feelings Enhance The Mundane

While Wonder is about the magical, doing normal things is enhanced by Feelings. Henge have ability scores that measure their “skills” in the human world, but when these skills are not enough, they can be enhanced by Feelings. Personally I love this notion. It’s the combination of both skill and the passion to succeed that makes someone good at doing something.

Important Concept #3 – Golden Sky Stories Is Diceless

Oh, yeah … no dice. Golden Sky Stories is a pure resource management game. This means that it’s really important to role-play in order to make (and strengthen) connections in order to ensure that the resources you need are available when you need them.

Golden Sky Stories leaves success and failure up to the player. Do you spend your Wonder to activate one of your henge powers now, or do you wait and save the wonder to do something more amazing later? If your skill isn’t quite enough to complete a task, do you invest your feelings to ensure success, or do you allow this action to fail and save your feelings for when it really counts? These things are up to you.

The Game Play Arc

At the beginning of every scene, each henge will get a number of resources equal to the strengths of all their connections with the characters (including other henge) that participated in the previous scene. At the start of the game session, because there was no previous scene, players begin with resources based solely on their connections with the other players and the town. 

Oh, yeah ... I forgot to mention that every henge also has a strength 2 connection to “the town.” In addition, each henge will usually start with a strength 2 connection to each other henge. This means that at the start of a game session with three henge, each player would have 6 Wonder and 6 Feelings. 

Making connections during the current scene will ensure that you gain more Wonder and Feelings for the next scene, thus increasing your character’s options and effectiveness as the story progresses. Any Wonder or Feelings that are not spent during a scene are not lost and will carry over into future scenes.

This then, forms the basic arc of the game.

More To Come

This concludes Part One of my Golden Sky Stories review. I still need to talk about generating Wonder and Feelings in more detail (they are generated differently.) Part two will cover this and talk a bit about creating a character.

Stay Tuned! (If you can't wait, you can read Part 2 HERE.)

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Little Colony Joins Five By Five Family

I've blogged about the evolution of Little Colony before, but I'm coming back around because the newest version of Little Colony is joining my zine lineup on itch. For those that have been following along, this version of Little Colony is very much like the previous version, but it's been modified to use the Five By Five dice mechanic and the good vs evil mechanic that I introduced in High Five.

The transition proved to be surprisingly easy. This is largely due to the way that the good vs evil mechanic introduced in High Five expanded the Five By Five resolution method to something greater than a simple binary, yes or no. So, here we are again, but ... Why are we back here? What is Little Colony?

It all started with Golden Sky Stories. I wrote a three part review of Golden Sky Stories, it really made an impression on me. In fact, I will be posting those reviews with corrected hyperlinks for my new blog address in the near future, because I don't think that Golden Sky Stories can get enough love.

I wanted to make a game that had the potential to give me the same feels that I imagined that Golden Sky Stories gives, but is also a game that is mechanically familiar to my more traditional RPG gamer sensibilities. (giving it a greater chance of finding it's way to my table.) This search brought many great games to my attention, but none of them quite fit the bill ... but take a look at Colostle and Cozy Town, two awesome looking RPGs that I discovered during my search and stick specifically in memory.

Anyway, I wanted to make an RPG about people in a community NOT killing goblins and dragons. This pursuit got me thinking about making a "Little House on the Prairie" kind of RPG. But, I needed to figure out what the game play would look like. Eventually, my mind came around to the Icon Relationships in 13th Age.

Little Colony takes the Icon Relationships idea from 13th Age along with the One Unique Thing, idea also from 13th Age. I love those ideas from 13th Age. I love them so much! What I don't love are the D&D trappings that the rest of the game is built on. So, I threw everything else out. I just kept those two great ideas and I built the whole game around them.

I moved from the prairie into outer space, and Little Colony on the Big Moon was born.

This new version trades a dice pool mechanic for the Five By Five rules system as mentioned at the beginning of this post and marks the third Five By Five zine publication to find its way to itch. As always, the PDF is pay what you want (including $0.00) so, feel FREE to give it a look.

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Up, Down, All Around ...

For the past several years I have invited people to join a Facebook Group dedicated to discussing my various RPG projects.

The purpose of this was to share links to my blog posts and hopefully create more interest in my blog, which is the place that I choose to talk about my TTRPG game designs, as well as other things that interest me like board games and geeky fandom. 

The problem was that the infrastructure of blog networking had shifted dramatically, and I wasn't even sure people read blogs all that much anymore. I had hoped that sharing links to my blog posts in a Facebook group would help.

Whether this has worked or not, is moot. I have come to see the community on Facebook as toxic and have stepped away from that platform. This has lead me to a variety of changes as I have begun to reorganize my online presence.

I am going to continue to share links to my blog posts on the social media platform, Bluesky. I do this because, open discussion of ideas in the form of blogger comments is cumbersome and slow, and commenting on a social media post is much easier.

In addition, as I begin to promote my itch.io page and try to set up print-on-demand options for some of my better TTRPG zine creations, I want to make better use of the two domains that I am paying for: dreamsdragons.com and comicbookheart.com. Originally, these were for two different blogs, one about TTRPG design, and the other about comic books.

It didn't take long before I found maintaining two blogs to be too much for me and merged the two, pointing both domains to the same blog address and merging the two blogs. Now, I want to branch the two domains again.

• dreamsdragons.com redirects to my itch.io creator page
• comicbookheart.com redirects to this blog

Changes and posts made to either page will be shared and linked to my Bluesky page.

https://bsky.app/profile/dreamsdragons.itch.io

I hope that you will join me there and continue to follow me in the future.

Regards,

Jeff

High Five Superhero RPG

After working with Five By Five for a few years, I wrote a superhero version. At first, I called this version: Super Five. As the game evolved it became: Hero DxD. I didn't play Hero DxD beyond the initial play test sessions. Like later iterations of Five By Five, Hero DxD deviated too far from Five By Five's original simplicity. The earlier, Super Five was much better.

Now that I have gone back to a more original version of Five By Five, I decided to revisit the superhero version. A Super Five version of a Five By Five game session remains a cherished memory. I know the system can work well for super-heroic role play.

The new version of superhero Five By Five is now available on my ITCH.IO page and is called: High Five. High Five retains the simplicity of the original Five By Five but uses the same trait assignments that I originally designed for "Super Five."

Thanks to a recent review that I watched on YouTube for Darrington Press' new RPG: Daggerheart, I have added a new good vs evil mechanic that will provide some much needed nuance to Five By Five's systems and bring it more in line with modern RPGs. I believe that it does this without sacrificing the game's simplicity or accessibility.

This new zine format RPG uses the wonderful Darrel Miller artwork that I originally commissioned for Hero DxD, and I think that it looks terrific!