Spectres of Brocken - Crowdfunding Soon!

Hello chums and bums!

So, I'll just get the news out of the way: I'll be running a Kickstarter campaign in the coming months for a full digital release of Spectres of Brocken. I'm still sorting out a bunch of stuff for that so I don't have a firm date to announce just yet, but I can say that I'm very excited to be working with a bunch of cool artists and designers on the project. I'll be shouting about it more on social media as well, and I'm planning to do some livestreams to showcase the game, so watch out for those!

If you don't know what Spectres of Brocken is about, here's the pitch:

Spectres of Brocken is a storygame for 3-4 players about ace mech pilots and the tragedy and tyranny of time.

You start off playing fellow students at an elite academy for mech pilots,  developing your skills and forging bonds together. Years later, you meet  again as ace pilots on differing sides of a pivotal conflict.

Where you once joked with clumsy words and played at fighting with awkward exertions, you now command steel-clad limbs and blazing implements of war like they were your own bodies.

Explore how much or how little you’ve changed in the intervening  years, and how you now relate to each other on opposite sides of the  battlefield.

The system is a take on Belonging Outside Belonging games, only you gain and spend Words instead of Tokens. The Words act as additional prompts for action and provide some continuity between the Academy and Conflict Phases (I think of them as "Tokens with memory").

You have prompts but they're tied to the types of scenes you're playing (a little bit like Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands) rather than being tied to playbooks because I want the act of figuring out who your Pilots are and what Traits/Bonds define them to be a key act of the game. This is actually the latest addition to the game after I played Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands recently and thought about how to build better scaffolding for Spectres of Brocken.

Here's a peek at the new sub-prompts tied to each scene prompt, and the attendant tweaks to the moves to reference them, which I am getting ready to playtest:

I've come up with these sub-prompts to help out players who might not be familiar with mecha tropes, and also to remind players to look to their Traits and Bonds when making Moves. For this first pass of the sub-prompts, I'm just keen to explore what format of prompts works best, so I'm trying out a few different methods for each type of sub-prompt.

• Reveals try different ways to get you to think about your pilot and their goals, past, and relationships.
• Academy Pivots explicitly reference your Traits and Bonds to help you build them up to use later.
• Echoes atry to draw back to cool moments that may or may not have actually been in played scenes to get players thinking about filling in the gaps in the time-jump as well.
• Conflict Pivots are more directly just about "winning" a battle, which I've found to be a thing that players who aren't familiar with mecha tropes struggle with and also hopefully give some context for the scale of narrative control you can have. Currently this is the most "vague" of the sub-prompt types.

If all that piqued your interest, go click the notify button on the pre-launch page to keep track of it and I'll be doing updates through the newsletter too. I'm super excited to share more about this project with the world!

Trepidatious regards,

Aaron