Second playtest: Colossus Creation & Balancing

The second playtest went pretty well. A lot of the balancing issues from the first session were fixed and this time the game was much harder but still a lot of fun!

The best part of the game imo is the World building, which is based on three Tarot cards the group draws at the beginning.

The first card represents the colossus' shape, the second card the society's ideology and the third card the colossus' death drive or the reason why the characters start their rebellion.

With the our cards, The Fool, The Magician and Adjustment, we went for a pretty frightening and slightly absurd colossus. 

We decided that the colossus would be a giant caterpillar about to go into its cocoon before transforming into a butterfly. Every card will get its own page with suggestions for colossi, ideology and death drives and I thought a butterfly would fit the lightness and naive approach of The Fool. The caterpillar came up during brainstorming and  so we went for pre-butterfly and that's totally fine as well.

The Magician represents human creation, art, creativity in general, so we decided to go for a society based on an ideology of aestheticism. Artists ruling over everything, beauty being valued over reason. 

The death drive card Adjustment suggested self-righteousness and austerity as deathdrives so we said, that the artist rulers would be completely amoral and basicaly used drone strikes (it was actually an elite squad of dragonfly riders) to destroy anything they deemed ugly. Which of course meant, that all of our characters would be some kind of uggos as well... 

So, I noticed that a game about a revolution will inevitably lead to a bunch of topics being discussed that are pretty rough. So I will definitely add a content warning and a section on players' safety tools. 

Anyway, the game is getting better and in the next couple of weeks I will have much more time to do some writing and editing. 

Thanks for reading and have a great one!