Galileo Games’ revised edition of Mortal Coil hit RPGNow this week and so here’s a short review.
First off; Mortal Coil places heavy emphasis on cooperative story telling. If you’re not familiar with this approach to roleplaying then be prepared for a challenge.
I know from experience that some gamers will just never get to grips with this; they’re looking for a more traditional structure-and-challenge situation, with rules, regulations and guidelines. I also know that other gamers will take to this like ducks to water.
As an example of how significant the cooperative elements of Mortal Coil are – you’re not even able to make a sweeping decision about any character, not even your own, without consensus from the rest of the gaming group.
For example, you could give your character a history of computer hacking mid-way through the game unless someone objects. An objection can’t be along the lines of “but that’ll make you too powerful” but would be in the tone of “you’ve already said your character has no time for computers”.
Mortal Coil’s emphasis on consensus even extends to the GM’s (the game moderator) own story. Players can object to the plot. The example the author, Brennan Taylor, gives is this;
Bill, the GM, has set a scene in a darkened warehouse. At the back of the warehouse, the players encounter a tentacled horror from Beyond. Russell objects, invoking the threshold of credibility: “I thought we agreed to avoid Lovecraftian details and stick to actual historical mythology. This needs to be some other kind of creature, based on real folklore.” Bill edits the scene, transforming the horror into a monstrous three-headed dog—a change that serves his purposes just as well.
If you can get your head around the need for group storytelling then the rest of the game will be easily picked up. At the root of it Mortal Coil makes use of tokens. Tokens are spent to bring facts into the game, for example, “Vampires only come out at night” and the more magic in the game then the more tokens tend to be available.
As you would expect – the group needs to decide at the beginning just how magical the game will be. Mortal Coil is a game about magic and the supernatural.
Agreement on the level of magic goes into the Theme Document that’ll govern the game. It’s hard to understate how important the Theme Document is in Mortal Coil. In case of argument please refer to the Theme Document. In the Lovecraft versus Greek monster debate given above it would be the Theme Document that supported the player’s objection.
I think the mechanics are pretty simple. It’s somewhat surprising that this is eBook that’s nearly 200 pages long. I’d have enjoyed reading through Mortal Coil if it was a lot shorter. There’s no need for so many rules in a cooperative game.
That said, this is the revision and the introduction does suggest that some (I suspect; a few) players had to get in touch with Galileo Games to ask for clarification. Perhaps the first edition was much shorter, perhaps Galileo also thought Mortal Coil could be a quick and easy publication and perhaps now they’re frustrated that they’ve had to do a revision to spell out in greater detail some of the rules and a reviewer like me is saying it could be shorter.
If you do happen to have the first edition of Mortal Coil then there’s good news. You can download (most) of the extra bits in this edition for free from www.galileogames.com/mortal-coil/. That’s pretty good going from Mortal Coil.
The other challenge in reading the RPG is for on-screen readers like me rather than print-it-out-first readers like so many others (so I’m in a minority here). The PDF alternatives its large margin between pages so there’s a wide left margin on every other page. This makes sense if you print it off and place the pages side-by-side (indeed I notice the PDF is called mortalcoilrevised-print2) but it can be a little awkward when you’re just reading it on screen.
There’s also limited illustration within the PDF. Jonathan Walton has done well with the revised layout to try and break up the flow of text but it’s a challenge without any illustrations. There are illustrations depicting how to move tokens around, which seem unnecessary but are a welcome break for the eyes.
All in all I enjoyed reading the game. This isn’t a play test review and the game wasn’t supplied to me for review as I bought and paid for it.
I’ve downloaded a preview of the first chapter which you can access here.
