Hey look, a post! I will discuss where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to in another post, but for now, inspiration demands expression, so here it is without delay. I would greatly appreciate feedback, commentary, and associated ideas since I may actually run this very soon.

Members of each faction poised to fall in love with enemies and fight their friends.

Vincent Baker’s relatively new game Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands has captured my imagination this week. I am drumming up a minor adaptation so that it can tell stories of supernatural relationship drama in a modern high school/college/professional setting similar to Smallville, rather than the cool, mecha-powered drama of the original scifi economic-politically charged setting. If my players are open to try something very different, I may get to try it out this weekend. I love that the game starts with characters that are mostly undefined, but gameplay builds “emotional momentum between characters,” as Vincent says, as they discover and refine each other. Prepare your pretty little angsty, super-powered, teen or 20-something heart to fall in love with your enemies and fight your friends, all in the context of family, homework, or your day job.

The Main Changes

Here are the primary changes I am nearly done drafting. There are only five that I see as necessary or helpful, along with one peripheral musing about Skirmish.

1. New factions that retain a volatile love/hate balance of equally attractive characters with strong, conflicting desires
2. New Solitaire options for each faction, accordingly
3. New suggested topics for A Conversation Over Food (this was easy and quite fun)
4. A new game derived from the Dance called A Brush at a Gathering.
   • This is for mingling in the school hallway, interactions during class, insufficiently connecting at the big game, church, a large house or holiday party, field trips, or other structured events and gatherings that strangely hold people at bay from one another. I love the idea of internally building anticipation and hoping in the potential for connection in such events that inevitably leave you disatisfied, aggravated, or simply more confused than before. At least I often connected with people in that tantalizingly awkward sort of way quite often in my high school/college days.
   • The Dance can probably stay as it is for actual dances, but I anticipate A Brush at a Gathering would be more common and poignant.
5. Options in the duel and Free-for-all are now more generic (about striking blows and unleashing power rather than mentioning specifics about swords or mobile frames), ideally allowing for any sort of aggression whether super-powered or mundane. I’m hoping that the more generic approach doesn’t deflate too much of the juicy nuance provided by the original specifics.
6. I am not convinced the tactical Skirmish game fits in a relationship drama in any way that Free-for-all doesn’t adequately cover. I can see how a modified version could do faction conflicts where players lead follower NPCs, like gang fights, clique conflicts, sports competitions, or maybe even macro-level business maneuverings, so it may be worth keeping and tweaking later if it seems valuable. The main emotional momentum generated between characters in the Skirmish is similar to a brutal game of chicken: “How much are you and I willing to sacrifice to get our way? Who will back down first?” These issues could perhaps be pushed in other games that are more fitting.

Setting and Factions

Initially I’m envisioning the setting of any town that is preyed upon by mysterious threats, supernatural or mundane far more often than your average town. Theoretically, these modifications could also easily work for Hogwarts, but I’m not particularly inclined that way so it’s mainly just back of mind and will be neat if it happens to work. For factions, I’m leaning toward Light, Dark, and Grey, but I am also considering other division ideas such as Insiders, Outsiders, and “Adults”/Professionals, or maybe even Haves, Have-Nots, and Old Guard. I’m not sure which would be most juicy yet broadly applicable:

Light

Members of light circles may be public figures, authorities like law enforcement, clergy, or lawyers, unmasked heroes, or privileged, pupluar members of prominent cliques. While what they actually do is not necessarily all that great, what matters is that they think it is and they do it out in the open. They’re roughly equivalent to the Landowners in that they bear obvious power and influence along with obvious responsibility and vulnerabilities associated with that power. They are largely known to or even sanctioned by the general public, but they are not necessarily good, and are often out of touch or misguided in their pursuit of what they consider improvement for their jurisdiction.

Dark

Members of dark circles aren’t evil (necessarily), they simply harbor more secrets than members of light circles. Masked vigilantes, ambitious but misunderstood savants, outsiders with potent souls, big business investors or white collar criminals quietly profiting through veiled exploitation, as well as actual underworld circles like gangs, covens, organized crime, and the occasional one-off vampire, werewolf, or other freak of the week. They’re roughly equivalent to the Bantraesh, in that they have inherited great potency and influence of some kind, often coupled with pride or ambition and emotional baggage or grudges, but they are somehow restrained from being completely forward about it.

Grey (I’m sure there is a better term)

Grey characters (or Common, Civilian, Mundane) are largely defined by their relative lack of power compared with either the light or the dark, but what they lack in obvious power they make up for in sincerity, spirit, passion, tenacity, empathy, and desperation. Either through past trauma, growing evidence, or unrelenting curiosity, members of this unorganized group has strong reason to oppose either light or dark influences, but they are also often internally conflicted, isolated, scarred, outmatched, ill-equipped, harboring a grudge, victim mentality, or martyr complex, and therefore often self-defeating. Maybe they or their intimates have been caught in the fallout of injustice, corruption, crime, supernatural depredation, or simply less than careful heroics; maybe they’re just the new person in town, the unnoticed but hardworking kid in school, the boy or girl next door, the barista just trying to pay the bills, the weary school counselor, the scarred journalist seeking truth, or the parent just trying to help his or her family thrive. They’re roughly equivalent to the revolutionaries in that they are the underdog everyman in a world all but dominated by powers both strange and all-too-familiar, seeking to assert their voice and needs, but lacking resources, organization, and means to do so.

Feedback Please

So this is what I have been thinking about this particular adaptation so far. I know that the factions could use better terms so characters can more easily refer to them in-game. The trouble is that in this setting, the factions are not as unified in any easily nameable way.

What do you think? What other tweaks would be necessary or good to push wedges between characters to stir messy angst and relationship dramas about school life, strange manifestations, falling in love with enemies and fighting your friends? Do these factions seem to offer good, clear options for player characters, as well as clear avenues for imminent messy entanglements, rivalries, and antagonism?