Sunday, February 26, 2017

Golden Sky Stories - Learning to Play!

Hi everyone,

This weekend we had a chance to play the Golden Sky Stories RPG with our friends Mr. M and Mr. B.
Image result for golden sky stories 
Here is the rulebook for Golden Sky Stories.

We had a terrific time!  Here is what we learned :)

1) In this game you play the role of Japanese animal spirits - HENGE.  You have several to choose from.  Maybe a cat, or dog, or bird, etc....  And, then, you set to work solving the problem of the story [in our case, finding a lost child] as a party of animal spirit HENGE.  

 Working on our HENGE "Fishy" the Bird

2) It's a game of building connections.  As you start the game, you define your relationship with the other players (maybe "like" or maybe "family" or maybe "protective").  And, as you play the game, you have chances to build those connections.  You can also create and strengthen connections with NPCs.  And, as you increase the number and depth of your connections, your HENGE grows in capability, power, influence, etc....

Making the quick decisions for "Mu" the cat HENGE.

3) Set-up is fast; rules are simple.  There are really only a few decisions to make in creating your character.  And, I'd say that our group (where two had played, and two had not) were ready to start within 15 minutes.  And, as we started playing one fun thing is that the game was really all about building the story together.  Our GM (Mr. M) was really more of a "story master" -- guiding the story here and there as the three players worked out ways to solve the problem of the story.  And, talk about simple rules - no dice roles; no cards.  Just three piles of points or manna (or whatever you want to call them).  Points for "wonder" -- which generate every turn; points for "feelings" which also generate every turn; and points for "dreams" -- which are given out by the players (and story master) to each other whenever anyone feels cool things have happened.

Quick overview of our session:

- One of us played a very bird-brained bird, named "Stinky"
- One of us played a very lazy cat, named "Mu" (like the Greek letter)
- And, one of us played a selfish rabbit, named "Chizu"

Very early in the game so only a few connections - and you can see our pool of Wonder on the left; our pool of Feeling points on the right.

And, how did we do?
  • We ended up forming connections with four children who lived in a boarding school
  • We did save the child which was lost
  • And, we managed to avoid being overly frightened away by a ghost who was haunting a building near the boarding school

Much later in the game.  Fishy now has a very large pile of feeling points accumulated!  He also had enough wonder points to give all four of our human kid friends wings so that they could fly :)

All-in-all, it was a very fun game to play.  We're looking forward to session #2!

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