5.28.24
CUT N PLAY
well first off i am thrilled to announce that max (max moon, of MAX MOON GAMES) and i (kyle reimergartin, of THIS WEBSITE) are hard at work preparing a print-yr-own ashcan RUMPUS for you! for your very own! and that will happen SOON. that's what we have been up to: taking more than a year's worth of playtest notes and half-written rules and late-night text message rants about fairyland and turning them into a proper rulebook. i'm very proud of the work we have done and very excited to share it with you! here is the introductory paragraph and List of Stuff You Need:
"Rumpus is the favorite pastime of the trouping fairies, those mysterious beings that some call the wee folk, good neighbors, or any number of conciliatory and misleading names. You will gather a troupe, discover their names, magic, and favorite incidentals, and lead them to vie for the affection of the Fairy King in contests both funny and fell! Let's begin.
What you need
- Playmat with 12x12 inch grid
- Pencil or other mark-making fidgety thing
- A pocketful of six-sided dice
- And all the rest of the stuff that is in this game"
i started planning out all the assets on paper but then gave up
i mostly want to talk about "and all the rest of the stuff that is in this game", the cut and play assets that you will hold in your hands and put on the table and that will dwell in your mind saying always, "you are in fairyland and you shall never leave." when we first started making rumpus, we would just create tokens and obstacles and magic effects willy-nilly out of sticky notes and graph paper and tape and pennies* but when we started to think about Other People Who Are Not Us, Gazing at the Print Preview and Wrinkling Their Brows, we wanted to make absolutely sure that an asset was Necessary and Fun! so we have done a lot of Simmering and Reducing and i am fairly certain we have a good set of things. eventually they will transform into specific examples at the bottom of this post but now let's take a general look.
there are a few basic kinds:
- obstacles
- figures
- objects
- chits
- cards
some actual obstacles from the prototype; an example of a standee but not a real example because the real ones are SECRET
obstacles are toadstools, stumps, logs, and the like, and they are pretty straightforward. fairies cannot see through obstacles and cannot move through them, so they can sometimes be used to avoid magic and ranged attacks. safety is not guaranteed, though! sometimes a fairy can smush you up against an obstacle, or explode the obstacle, or pick you and the obstacle up and throw you. there are also some weird obstacles that fairies sometimes create with magic, such as bogs, heartbroken humps, and lava. my favorite obstacle is the humble toadstool, for secret reasons, although i am also fond of the heartbroken hump.
figures are fairies, mostly, although there are also some beasts, and the dreadful blobby thing. anything that can move around and do things is a figure. i am not showing you any of the fairies because it is a SURPRISE! what they look like! you will find out when we make the Official Announcement and you can download it but i am beside myself, it is a dear dream come true, they are wonderful, wonderful.
objects are like obstacles, they plonk onto the board and lay there but they are a little different because they are Interactive. the all-important ITEMS belong to this category, and also TRAPS are objects, but there are slightly obscure ones like BIG BLACK CLOUD and GATE and STENCH, they don't appear every game but it is important that they exist so they can be real and everything can be real.
i do love chits even though i have played more than one game where you have set out all of your demons or skeletons or tanks and then you bump the paper and they have gone Everywhere so we have tried to make our chits not like that. the most common chit is LIFE! it goes on your fairy card and you can have so much of it. there are some bad chits too like POISON and FALSE HAND, you don't want those but you probably won't have a choice. mostly we didn't want to make you keep track of things for more than a round but if we did, we made a chit for it.
cards and some embryonic fairy playmats and the discontinued end-of-round event table
then there are the cards. there are 108 item cards, 36 magics, and 36 qualities. there are also 11 treasures, 12 traps, and 12 wild magics**. there are so many items because actually there are only 36 items, but we wanted 1 in 3 to be peculiar, and it's nice to have a lot of them because items are the main way your fairies advance (i.e., they are persistent between games). it kind of bothers me that there are 11 treasures and not 12 but it's because all items in the game started as lookup tables; you would roll d66 for items and magics and qualities and 2d6 for treasures, with common treasures in the middle of the curve and really wild ones on the 2 and 12. but now they are all cards, and we didn't add a treasure when we converted it, so there are 11, which bothers me. maybe you, dear future playtester, will have a great idea for a treasure.
max is in the final throes of LAYOUT! it's almost real! i am working on updating the tabletop simulator mod to match the ashcan assets. i can't wait to play this with you!!! FOR FAIRYLAND!
some hand-drawn standees, glimpsed thru the hagstone; hotel rumpus, with quick reference zines
i did promise specific examples up there so here are a few:
- at first when we were making the scenario, TAKE THE BABE, the mortal house was a giant 9x9 obstacle you would put on the map, and there was a specific CRIB obstacle that was only used for that scenario. but now we use 2x1 logs to make it, and a 2x2 stump for the crib, and it's like a log cabin, which is fun.***
a blurry snapshot of the TAKE THE BABE scenario, pick-a-pocketed from max's computer
- the magic GROW used to cause something to double in size. but that meant every single thing needed to have 9 different sizes because you have to plan for that one ding dong that only uses their magic every single round and multiplying the entire game by nine is NOT FUN, so now you can GROW a new arm and that is fun.
- there used to be a few different sizes of BOGS and CLOUDS, including a 3x3 bog that would often appear when fairies died, and a variable size bog a fairy could create using potent magic, but we mostly got them under control and turned them all into 2x2 bogs, and should a fairy wish to make a truly gigantic bog, they can fill in the remaining space with toadstools, which are at home in any bog. there are still two sizes of clouds, alas, but we think it's important.
- the MUD VOLCANO trap used to create up to 36 tiles of mud, which we both agreed is too much mud for one trap. now the mud is imaginary Instant Mud that is resolved Instantly and does not require a token.
- the treasure UMBRAL VEIL used to allow a fairy to "grow every obstacle by x sizes, where x is the number of fairies in the game", which i thought would lead to a lot of delightful smushing of fairies between obstacles, but had all the same problems as the magic GROW, detailed above, so we changed it to "remove all obstacles from the board and place them back randomly. if an obstacle lands on a fairy, they are smushed to death.", which still allows for SOME smushing.
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some footnotes:
*something i did early on with all our paper tokens to make them feel Substantial and Nice was to tape pennies to the bottom of them, including the four corners of the paper gameboard. totally do this! make sure you tape them tails-side-down so you avoid the Curse.
**there used to be only 6 wild magics and 0 traps; both of those decks were written after we had converted the game to cards. so that's why. there are also unique items you can get through campaign play and they should probably be cards but they aren't yet, but you don't shuffle those so i kind of feel like they don't count?
***it's fun AND it kind of reminds me of the mortal house on the border of fairyland at the beginning of george macdonald's THE GOLDEN KEY, which is one of my favorite favorite stories, and it feels like the boundary between THE WOODS and THE HOUSE is very permeable indeed, so it is nice to get a little bit of that feeling into rumpus.
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