We played a brief playtest of Umläut last night. It was a lot of fun. The main purpose was to test the new Gig structure and audience over a longer play than I had previously.

Created bands were:

Black Rainbow (Dave) - A Death Metal band fronted by a colour blind goth with a talking codpiece.

Quantum Odyssey (Greg) - A geeky Prog-Rock band doing concept albums based on sci-fi movies.

Rancid Manflesh (Claire) - An all lesbian Thrash band with tracks like Rug Muncher and Crimson Tide.

Rock:Awesome! (Rich) - A Japanese band speaking very little English and trying to make it big in the US.

We played about half a game. Claire had 6 fanbase by the end, so I think one more session will finish things up.

We didn't create any NPC bands. Partly an an experiment and partly because we couldn't be arsed. This meant there was very little time between gigs for most people. I didn't really like the structure without the NPCs and I'm sure they'll be staying in the game.

The Gigs went very well. They played fast and were a lot of fun. The choice of song styles was much more diverse than it used to be, which was great. In one Gig, Claire managed to gain three of her 4 glory by matching the audience's desired style. This made the glory from wining Impressions more valuable and made things more tense, forcing bands to go for big payoffs...

There were a couple of Split scenes too, using the new rules. They seemed to target Dave's band mostly because they were almost always ahead in terms of hope/ego. He effectively lost all his money on both occasions, which is pretty much what I expected. It worked well, but needs more testing before I can be sure it's right.

Another interesting thing: There is no roleplaying. there is plenty of story being told, but nobody plays any roles. The whole thing was played in a style somewhat like one of those VH1 documentaries. That worked very well for me. I need to think about how to pitch that in the book. There's no reason you can't assign role and play scenes out in that way, it works fine and is fun. But the game is being designed with not doing that in mind.