Friday 3 July 2015

Body swap!

A boost for Crosswind, a new comic written by Gail Simone, after she retweeted me today(!) due to hopping on a hashtag she boosted mocking Dogfood Dump. (Everyday cyberpunk again...) It’s about a body swap, one of the standard plots for a genre series but here given star treatment, and built to be as awkward as possible for both parties.

Have you ever done one? I have, inevitably in TWH, and it was the involved players’ idea. As above, they worked to make it maximally awkward for their characters and everyone else involved. In rules terms it was fairly straightforward - PCs had the physical stats of the body and the mental stats and skills of the soul. The players suggesting it and doing most of the work avoided the obvious potential issue with a plot like this - a player not wanting to go for it if you dropped it on them without warning.

NPC-to-NPC swaps are easy, and more likely to result in horror than comedy as the change can be a secret and a mystery, but do the players know the NPCs well enough to spot when someone’s acting out of character? An obvious tell of some kind may be required. This is where the whistling in Fallen comes from, for example.

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