Coyote & Crow Joins The $1M TTRPG Club!

With just a few hours to go, the Native American tabletop RPG Coyote & Crow just went past the $1M milestone, making it the 7th tabletop RPG Kickstarter campaign ever to do so.

Coyote & Crow is the third Kickstarter in the last month to do so. The first was 2016's 7th Sea from John Wick, followed by campaigns from Matt Colville (the undisputed champion of TTRPG Kickstarter) and Hit Point Press in 2018 and 2019.

Date	Kickstarter	Creator
March 2016	7th Sea: Second Edition	John Wick
March 2018	Strongholds & Streaming	Matt Colville
April 2019	Humblewood Campaign Setting for 5e	Hit Point Press
November 2019	Kingdoms, Warfare & More Minis!	Matt Colville
March 2021	The One Ring Roleplaying Game, Second Edition	Free League
March 2021	The Seeker's Guide to Twisted Taverns	Eldermancy
April 2021	Coyote & Crow the Roleplaying Game	Connor Alexander

Congratulations to Connor Alexander and the team! If you want to get in on Coyote & Crow, you have about 6 hours from the time of writing this.

Coyote & Crow the Role Playing Game

A science fiction and fantasy tabletop RPG set in a near-future where the Americas were never colonized, created by a team of Natives.

www.kickstarter.com

 

[Umbran]

After I've downloaded and read it over, sure. Someone with more free time in the next day or two might beat me to that, though.

 

[Umbran]

Ooohhhh!!! Will you give us a bit of a preview?!?

Hey, a bit of slow work time came up, so I can skim a bit...

The art is evocative. The sensitivity notes for players of Native American and non-Native American backgrounds seem pretty cogent, to me.

Skipping to, the basic mechanic:
So far, only d12s are used. You may need a lot of them.
Broadly, you assemble a number of dice, and roll them - this looks to usually be adding your rank in a Stat and a Skill, if you are proficient.
There is some target number (it may range from 5-12, is typically 8).
You count how many 1s you get (these are Fails, and subtract from your total successes), how many meet or exceed the Target Number (Successes), and how many 12s (Critical successes - they have a way these "explode", possibly into two or more Successes).
Before you determine the result, there are a couple of ways a player might edge some of the dice up to be Successes.
Subtract your Fails from your Successes to get a net Success number - the higher, the better you do.

If you net negative successes, that's not good, and dramatic things happen.

 

[Umbran]

So, they take a position I like - while characters have some abilities that today would be considered superhuman, the writers specifically and explicitly do NOT say whether these are "magic" or not, and give you an in-world reason for them to possibly be sufficiently advanced technology.

The reason for this is that no two real-world peoples agree on what magic is - if the game took an official position, it would contradict someone's real-world beliefs. If you want them to be magic, and describe how they work, you can do that for your own table. But canonically, the printed rules do not take a stance.

 

[Ixal]

So, they take a position I like - while characters have some abilities that today would be considered superhuman, the writers specifically and explicitly do NOT say whether these are "magic" or not, and give you an in-world reason for them to possibly be sufficiently advanced technology.

The reason for this is that no two real-world peoples agree on what magic is - if the game took an official position, it would contradict someone's real-world beliefs. If you want them to be magic, and describe how they work, you can do that for your own table. But canonically, the printed rules do not take a stance.

That sounds very limiting from a world building view. At some point the setting must establish how things work.

 

[Umbran]

At some point the setting must establish how things work.

I disagree. One only has to denote how magic works if the way it works is going to specifically be a plot point in play - like, in the Forgotten Realms, if something goes wrong with the Weave, then you need to know how it works to fix it.

You can go through many (indeed, a lifetime of) D&D campaigns without knowing how D&D magic works.

 

[Ixal]

I disagree. One only has to denote how magic works if the way it works is going to specifically be a plot point in play - like, in the Forgotten Realms, if something goes wrong with the Weave, then you need to know how it works to fix it.

You can go through many (indeed, a lifetime of) D&D campaigns without knowing how D&D magic works.

But you still know it is magic and even if it is divine or arcane.

 

[Morrus]

But you still know it is magic and even if it is divine or arcane.

Don't play Numenera whatever you do!

 

[Umbran]

Oh, and they make no bones about this...

 

[Umbran]

But you still know it is magic and even if it is divine or arcane.

So, the thing is that the terms "Divine", "Arcane", and even "Magic" are not generally mechanical terms. They are flavor text. The mechanics and interactions are dealt with in the definition of the particular thing you are using, and are not really linked to some meta-mechanic that uses those terms. This is part of the nature of D&D's exception-based design - I don't have to know anything about how magic works to play the game, or make choices.

I expect could scratch all the serial numbers off, and run a game using the D&D ruleset, but in which all those "magical" effects are a result of different kinds of cyberware, and not have to change a single mechanical element.

 

[Umbran]

Oh, cool. The game has an initiative system. It goes like this:
You have an initiative score. When an encounter (where we do round-by-round task resolution) starts, you may just pick your initiative, anywhere from 1 to your Initiative Score.

So, if you know what you want to do, you choose high. If you know you want to wait and see before choosing what you want to do, you can pick lower.