So there we were: three fellows, after ending a short (six-session) Capes campaign. We would still have two or maybe three sessions to play something else. "Something short", "something different", "something a bit dramatic", we pondered. Yeah, it sounded like Contenders to me too.

However, no boxers this time. I had mentioned to one of these guys earlier about my Contenders / Tekken -variant, so we returned to that. After some discussion we finally ended up emulating Soul Calibur style. It came out really beautifully and worked like a charm.

Character creation and stats

I thought that the narrativistic premise of the game needed a bit boost, so I guided everyone to give their character a clear reason to become the champion (in this case, claim the Soul Blade). The hope & fear with a connection was another thing that the character wished to achieve. For an example, Qi Shuwei's home village was burned and her master Huangzhi was murdered. She wanted to win in order to gain power to avenge, but she also wanted to help the survivors (connection) to prosper in future (hope). Burning hope and Bringing down the pain became a bit more relevant questions due to these stakes.

Hope and Pain we took as given. They make sense in this genre quite well. However, we changed the others a bit. Cash turned into a kind of Prestige. It makes sense that characters gain it from fights and that characters who possess it have access to advanced training (no-one said you were just "a tiny little grasshopper", when you had Cash / Prestige 5+). It didn't make too much sense connection-wise, but we rationalized that pushing on one's prestige would make connections trust them, have faith in them. And more importantly, we just abstracted it: the player used Cash, we draw cards and then we just narrated how the meeting went down. We twisted reputation only a bit. We agreed that the legendary Soul Blade was in the hands of the Master, who wanted to retire (Li Mu-Bai, right on). He would choose an heir and the more Reputation you had, the more he was looking in your direction. So it was reputation in the eyes of one person only.

In-rings traits were pretty much as they stand. However, one player had Siegfried as his character. Once he dediced to train his Cover, he just narrated how he bought a superior armor.

Scene Types

Connection scenes were pretty much as one could expect. As mentioned above, it wasn't about taking money to them but just meeting with the Connection. For an example, I framed a flashback about Lou-Garouf's last meeting with the connection before my character started to roam the land seeking for the Soul Blade. We just drew cards and narrated the good-bye scene according to the result.

Work scenes were used to emulate SC's Mission Mode, where characters fulfill some tasks mainly by fighting. Qi Shuwei fought against German bandits in order to prevent them from destroying China's countryside and Siegfried took up a task to get rid of werewolves living in a Romanian forest. I don't think we used the "3+ is illegal" -thing at all. Should add it into the variant, somehow.

Training scenes came in various kinds. They could be tasks - Qi Shuwei travelled through a bambu forest and wiped out a band of ninjas, hence raising Techique - or buying better equipment (I already mentioned about Siegfried's armor) or training, as it stands: Lou-Garouf asked Baba Yaga to show him a couple extra special moves (though in the end it was the house with chicken legs that gave the lesson). Oh, and there were just plain exhausting thingies, like Qi Shuwei climbing up a mountain to meditate (Conditioning up a notch, of course).

Promotion scenes were, likewise, various kinds. They could be about gaining access to somewhere, like get to talk to people who knew where the Edge / Weapon Master was last seen or getting the only ride on a raft. They were also about settling a score with someone, like when Qi Shuwei challenged the leader of German bandits, Heinrich. There were also re-matches and just plain "show me your worth" situations.

Threat scenes weren't used at all. They probably wouldn't have required any changes.

Fight scenes were just that. We did toy around a bit with the arenas, though. One fight was held on a raft, or actually on two rafts, as Siegfried knocked his opponent from one raft to another and followed up. As Lou-Garouf won Taki in the middle of shacks, I narrated how he punched her through a wall in a shack. I don't think there were any ring-outs or actually meaningful interaction with the arena, but naturally this would have been easy to do in narration.

Tactics

Street style meant special moves for our game. They weren't denied by the rules, but once used, you had to succeed - otherwise the Master didn't think you as worthy (altered rep here, remember?). So when I turned my character into a werewolf by using street style and lost the narration, all my slashes and bites and stuff were misses and just made my character look incompetent.

KO gave the change for "Finish him/her". However, no-one of us used the chance: Siegfried and Qi Shuwei were too nice and I couldn't kill Qi Shuwei (in other words, no fatalities on player characters, altough this could've been circumvented with "but I thought you were dead!" -moments). Pity, 'cause I was looking forward for it and I even haven't seen KO too often.

We decided to follow the SC fight rounds too and ended up playing three-round fights against the NPCs and four-round fights between the PCs. The fighting purses were extremely slim: with three-round, the winner takes 1 and the loser gets 0.5 Cash / Prestige (+ Rep, of course). I thought in the beginning that this was way too little, but no, it turned out just fine. Of course short matches were quite favorable towards characters with low Conditioning, but since this wasn't about who is going to win, it didn't matter that much. My Lou-Garouf lost a couple of matches in the beginning and was constantly at the poverty limit, but I never had any real problems with it.

The plotline and the two layers of narration

Following the SC style, there were no actual tournament, but our characters travelled all over the world seeking for the blade. Different scene types were just adjusted to this, and they adjusted neatly. We regulated the finding of the sword with Rep points: once they got above 5, it was revealed that the master's resident was at Himalayas. As my character got to the mountain and outside the master's hideout, but had only Rep of 6, I narrated how the cave was empty and the master himself was in Shanghai, where Siegfried and Shuwei were with Reps 10 and 9, respectively.

Besides the actual SC game we had going there we also made constant references to the idea that we were playing a console game. For an example, when I got Lou-Garouf's ass majorly kicked in the first fight, I was like "oh bummer, the A button is stuck, I cannot perform the special moves" and "Are you sure this is on Easy? Because this seems a lot like Normal difficulty". The metanarration was that this was Don's Mix, a fan-made mod on the old Soul Calibur. So we cracked endless jokes about the American gaming culture and ethos: "I swear, Ivy's breasts were never that big. I mean that they are now bigger than her head", "You can show a naked maiden being ritually sacrificed with all the blood and gore, but you cannot show the wolf ears my character gathered as a token after beating the werewolves", "An India arena? Let's see... there's a guru sitting on spikes and a cow".

So we did laugh a lot, goes without saying. But the game happened to be very nicely balanced with drama too. Lou-Garouf agonized about his inner beast, Qi Shuwei was tragically lost with her thirst for revenge and Siegfried seeked atonement for his past cruelties with the Soul Edge. It was cool when Qi Shuwei broke down into tears after releasing her pheonix powers and burning down a whole village and when Siegfried finally claimed the Soul Blade and turned into an angel-like creature.

Time consumed

We played the game on two Thursdays. On first we started at 6 pm and made decisions about the setting and variant until 7:30 pm. The first session ended at 9 pm. The following Thursday's session started at 7 pm and ended at 10:35 pm. So that makes 1.5 h preparation + 5 hours of gaming. The game could have ended at least 45 minutes earlier, had Shuwei not been knocked out by Ivy. So Shuwei had just 9 Rep and a it was Siegfried who then overtook her and reached Rep 10 first.

I didn't count the rounds we played, but I assume the number was high - we truly flew through the less meaningful scenes: "I meet up with Shiro and ask him to show me the dragon punch. There we are, doing tai chi under a waterfall. Tech +1. Next!"

Summary

This game truly, really, beyond doubt, rocks! I never though fight-filled narration could be so fun, dramatic and utterly entertaining. I join the long line of men who thank you Joe for making this game. (Wow, wasn't that a bit too overwhelming for a thanks?)