Putting the World of Darkness to rest via Mortal Coil

It is late and I miles to go before I sleep. Hear that, Butterfly? Miles to go before you sleep.

Mortal Coil Revised is sitting there on my bed, taunting me with its purty pictures and revised text. In a few days I’ll get to take a gander at it. When I brought Mortal Coil home from Gen Con ‘0X I really thought it was going to be my go-to game of that year, my Dogs in the Vineyard and I GMed it a few times and liked it, especially the theme document stuff but something wasn’t quite cooking and I couldn’t put my damned finger on it. Here’s to hoping the revised text put’s that baby to bed for me.

I’ve always wanted to put the old World of Darkness to bed with that game, where everyone plays the named characters from each line: Cain from Masquerade, King David from Dreaming, Charon from Oblivion, Some Werewolf dude from Apocolypse and some Mage dude from the Ascension (little help on those last two?) and we play out the end of that world through an arc or two. It’d be neat to take the parts of that fiction that we enjoyed and use Mortal Coil’s magic to make it all do what we always wanted it to do.

I have one last paper to write and after that Mortal Coil will be waiting on the table next to my bed and my poker chips will be itchy for action.

10 thoughts on “Putting the World of Darkness to rest via Mortal Coil”

From Werewolf: I’d say either Accolon the Stargazer Kailindo master from Rite of Passage (the first published WW adventure) or Albrecht Morningkill, the Silver Fang who slew the crazed King of the Silver Fangs.

From Mage, maybe have either the virtual adept Dante (the iconic character from the front of the 1st edition) or perhaps Secret Agent John Courage, my favorite Technomage.

I’ve run 1st ed Mortal Coil (a Survivor-turned-horror-story game) and am interested in the clarity that is said to be provided by these new rules.

mortal coil rev 2

I’m really curious to hear some AP reports on Mortal Coil revised, whatever you go with. I loved the idea of the contractual game world, but the token/action management thing seemed a little challenging to parse, particuarly when more than two people were involved.

I’d love to kick out all the metaplot, but run a WOD game where all those critters are running around and they’re defined by the players. Make them fresh and mysterious again.

I hope the new rules help, Judd. I didn’t fundamentally change the conflict system, but I did rework the rules slightly so that they describe the system as I actually use it.

Interestingly, I started work on Mortal Coil when my group got fed up with the White Wolf system in Vampire. I put World of Darkness to bed with it for myself.

Re: mortal coil rev 2

Did you pick up the revision? I have several extended conflict examples in there with more than two players. It can be a bit tricky. The big final example is a conflict with six players.

Re: mortal coil rev 2

SOMEONE told me I had a copy coming due to being a contest winner, so I’m trying to be good and not buy a copy NOW NOW NOW. (Since I can instead force all my friends to buy a copy.)

I’d love to see the new rules for Mortal Coil, always thought it was a cool game. It worked a little for my group, but there were some issues. Though I think some of the issues were my fault in that the players didn’t really agree on what the game was going to be focused on. This was a hard notion to try to get them to work out.