Grimcleaver

This is what has been said so far: "We are happy to announce that after a little over three months, the Nythera worldwide event has reached its conclusion. We had over a thousand players play games of Malifaux and Through the Breach to help shape the future of Breachside. Within Malifaux, the Guild managed to pull off a last minute, stunning victory against the Arcanists, securing themselves a Nightmare model in 2016. They fought a long, hard campaign, and proved that slow, steady growth can achieve a win. Within Through the Breach, a new Governor-General is rising to power: Franco Marlow. The Fated characters pushed for his victory over his three rivals, forever shaping what lies ahead. In addition, Doctor Alexei Sokoloff proved most adept at controlling his own fate, which means that a model is somewhere in his future... Wyrd would just like to take a moment to thank everyone who took part in the Nythera event. It was great to see our community come together to discuss and play games set in the Malifaux universe, and we hope to be able to do this again in 2016. After all, who knows what bad things might happen..." http://www.wyrd-games.net/news/2015/12/8/nythera-aftermath

That sounds about right.

Sparksman: Something like a Locals' Guide would be really fun. I totally get wanting to have something spoiler light for folks who want to get their bearings but not know more than they would in character--actually a really good idea. It'd be cool to set it up with a bit of a timeline as well. One thing that gets hard is figuring out what stuff happens to who at what time. That can get really frustrating for those of us who are fairly new to the mythology and are trying to keep our Kytheras and Nytheras all neat and tidy.

Just finished Shifting Loyalties. Whoa...I'm surprised the setting came out of that in one piece. That was as much of a full setting near TPK as I've seen in a product. It was awesome!

Well I'm currently wading through the fiction so hopefully I'll get to it--I've acquired all the versions of the Malifaux skirmish rules, the two core books for Through the Breach, Shifting Loyalties, a handful of Penny Dreadfuls, all the Chronicles, all the Breachside Broadcast aethercast shows. I'll see where (and how old) I am after I'm done reading all that. Yikes.

Well Malifaux City is 36 miles long by 25 miles across with a mile and a half wide river running through the middle of it. So assuming the world map of Malifaux is to scale you can kind of use the shaded section of the city to guestimate the distances between places--basically the silhouette of the city beneath the caption is about a half inch long, which if we assume is about 30 miles, then on the 8.5x11 printout I have of the worldmap you're looking at just over 600 miles by almost 450 miles? That means barring bad terrain or getting ete by monsters you could probably walk from Malifaux to any edge of the known map in 15 days or so. I did some quick research and that'd mean the square milage of Malifaux's known map is roughly the size of Texas (actually pretty darn close, down to percentage points). So plenty big but not unnavigable--especially with train lines set up. All of this is just spitballing though. I wouldn't be suprised if a bunch of my calculations are way off.

I am hugely excited about all of this. As much as I love Malifaux, just having the two core books it feels like just playing all humans is just a little...like it doesn't let me really dive in and take full advantage of the awesome stuff in the setting. I'm hoping to snap up all the other books as they roll out, and a bunch of the Penny Dreadfuls too. Just as soon as I can crawl out of the giant pile of setting information and fiction I'm slowly reading my way out of...

So in the Fated Almanac there's a big beautiful map of Malifaux City with an impressive sounding list of locations numbered off to the side. I'm currently running (and panic researching) the setting and so I'm interested in all the information there is about any of these spots. A lot of them are pretty self explanatory: Malifaux Station, no big mystery there. Others are downright intriguing: The Ruined Observatory? The Malifaux Exploration Society? Those sound awesome. What are they? Has anything been put out for any of them? Also in case folks are interested, I've crunched some numbers with regard to the city. It's vaguely football shaped, so we'll talk about it like that--from point to point Malifaux is 36 miles long and at it's widest point around the middle it's 25 miles, which by the way I love that the scale of the map is set to 3 miles to an inch, because human footspeed is 3 mph average, and wagons are about 6--so working out travel times with this map just couldn't be better! The river is wide, but not unbelievably so, at about a mile and a half across average (for comparison, the Amazon River is 6 miles across). This is roughly the same width as the Detroit River. What this means is that the bridges across the River in Malifaux are huge, requiring 15 minutes to cross by carriage and half an hour on foot. I love maps. And I'm a nerd.

Hi there. Yeah I'm only recently discovering how out of the loop I've been. I figured most of the stuff I was using as research materials for my game were pretty up to date. Turns out not so much. Heh. Into the Steam does look really fun, as does Under Quarantine. Neither have made their way to our local gamestore yet, but I'm hoping to order them both here soon if they don't turn up on their own. That said, hopefully things nowadays aren't too un-weird, considering Malifaux is a setting known for killer sock puppets, gremlin hillbillies, zombie hookers and giant om-nom teddy bears.

So in 1888 in Victorian England, an average person earned about 660£ a year (which assuming the showgirl monthly rate, you're looking at about 600§ a year, which seems right on the money for an upper middle class income--the lower classes lived on about half that). About 113 of that went to food (about 9.4§ per month) Another 145 or so went to rent, taxes and utilities (around 12§ per month) The rest (about 33.5 per month) was spendable money, which mostly went to things like clothing, travel, entertainment (and liquor), repairs, medical visits and the like. So you could expect an average person to reasonably have a spending budget of about 2§ a day if you're looking for the spending cash normal folks would have on them.

7-10 is our usual block, though we've been known to push that back to 11 or 12. Not too often though. Folks gotta' work in the morning. The developers have said before that about 4 hours is what they had in mind when they talk about session length, that if it's much shorter or longer than that you may want to change things accordingly.

Wow...this is fantastic stuff. Just read the exchange between Perdita and the Governor General. Did I ever peg that guy wrong! ...He's kind of awesome. I'd sort of pegged the Governor General as sort of hiding in his mansion, buried in debauchery and hedonism, sort of this sad, fat old helpless character who's bit by bit reliquished all of his power to Lucius until now he's less the man in charge and more a prisoner in a golden castle. Yeah...not so much. For folks interested in a physical description, here's what I get from the story: a blunt, craggy faced man in an outfit that's somewhere between a union general's uniform and a fascist dictator's. I picture Ray Wise when I read him.

Whee! I've fallen down the rabbit hole of metaplot. Thanks Cinnamon Bear for the reading list. I've got a copy of Shifting Loyalties and am reading through all the fiction--and wow I am so lost. It's like I'm not even playing a game in the same setting--so much is in motion that I didn't even know was going on. Do we know what the falling red star is yet? Why are everyone's eyes glowing blue (the Governor General, Perdita Ortega...)? Yep. Totally out of my depth. Yay!

Ohhh! Nevermind then. The only gamin I was familiar were the ones from the Anaslea Kaeris set, I didn't realize, for example that Rasputina's little ice minions were gamin also--until I just now looked it up. Yep. I'm wrong.

Ba-Pef (whose name literally means Soul-Dread) was the Egyptian god of anxiety and woe and about as close as they had to a fear deity. There were a few that were plenty scary, but not so much that they were associated with fear as much as they would freakin' EAT YOU. Ammut was a soul eating wolf-crocodile that ate those in the afterlife that were judged unworthy. Apep was a giant serpent who tried to eat the sun and engulf the world in eternal darkness. Set was the beast headed god of wickedness and evil--kind of the egyptian devil figure. Hope that helps.

I'd just lump that in the same as a character who has a pet bear or a brother who's a gunslinger or a wastrel who whips up a bunch of goons at the local saloon and sends the mob out with him to go fight. I like Through the Breach best when it's concerned about telling the story and not sweating balance issues so much. Yeah sometimes folks bring other guys to a fight--sometimes they're summoned out of the aether, sometimes they're stitched together out of bodies, sometimes they're friends and allies. I just consider that an aspect of the world not something to sweat enough to counter with some balancing mechanic. Then again our group is very narrative. Your milage may vary.

Another perspective would be this: Peacebringers are six shooters with three-foot long blades attached to them. So really anything can have a blade attached to it I figure. If you look at history around this time they were still attaching revolvers to the basket hilts of swords to make gunblades! This was kindova' era where lots of gonzo combinations of weapons got cloodged together, so a combo shotgun/bayonette seems fine to me. Here's a hilt design from T.A. Rauh and Co. from 1866 of a 9mm revolver that came attached to a 32" sword blade. This is awesome.

I'd imagine a Gamin is a type of fire elemental...like a magmin or a salamander and probably a different creature than whatever is the equivalent elemental creature for light or electricity. That said, gamin basically just comes from French--it means 'boy'. So it's really up in the air whether a gamin is specifically a type of fire creature, or if it's more like a mephit and that has all sorts of different elemental flavors. (All this stuff is from D&D if you need to look it up to know what I'm talking about here. Heh. Sorry.)

Invested seem to be more along the lines of: Magical panther with an awakened humanlike soul Creepy living magical voodoo doll Water elemental with glowing bubble eyes that clomps along in a big kettle Steampunk robot with a huge soulstone heart that has been imbued with a sophisticated consciousness Enchanted armoire with a mirror that shows a human face (anyone who's looked into it) and moves around on it's four lionpaw legs on the run from the little girl who once owned it. I think things like the brain in a jar or flesh and metal hybrids, things with human souls that were once human, or parts of humans, are something else (Stitched is the term)--at least from what I gather from what gets said in Breachside Chat #5.

So with us it tends to work like this: There's a coffee table in front of the players with a bigger than normal set of cards (that I got from the dollar store) that we use as our Draw Deck. Each of them has a clipboard with their character sheet as well as their own deck of regular sized playing cards, from which they have drawn up Twist Decks (they usually have them in a Magic card type box, rubber banded with the discarded cards from earlier sessions below and flipped the opposite way, so at the beginning of a session they can just draw the top three and we're good to go). I have a stack of jumbo sized black and red checkers (also dollar store) that I use as poker chips to represent "+"s or "-"s off to one side of the chair I FM from. I also have a map of the City of Malifaux and a Malifaux World Map that I can use for visual reference as well as my copies of the Fatemaster's Almanac and Fated Almanac and a bunch of pencils. I also have a messy bunch of notes jotted down on a bunch of folded in half pieces of paper--usually one boiled down cheatsheet for the current session with all the important names underlined in red and events bulleted in red. Generally the game takes the form of them telling me what they want to do and me telling them what happens--what's fated to happen basically. If the story ends up taking a bad turn (they get spotted sneaking around, someone shoots one of them, they fall while trying to leap between rooftops) they interrupt by reaching forward and flipping a card off the Draw Deck. I then lay down chips, positive and negative based on the circumstances, cancelling down to whatever mix of "+"s or "-"s they end up with--and have them draw extra Draw Cards as necessary. They give me the total of their Aspect + Skill + Draw and letting me know how they would like to change their fate. I let them know, based on their Draw compared to their TN how the draw would change things--and they decide if it's worth it to ante a Twist Card. In our houserules you don't swap the Draw Card with the Twist Card--you add them together...which really amps up the power of a good card and makes twisting fate really powerful (as it should be). Combined with the fact that they only have to Draw when something goes wrong, it makes the characters end up feeling pretty heroic. Most of the game is entirely narrative and as richly described as I can make it--we just tell the story, no maps or minis or anything. I may point something out on a map, or flip to a illustrative piece of artwork, or every once in a while jot out a map of a floorplan or what-have-you on some scratch paper--but it's all in our heads much like reading a book. I try to really get into playing the FM characters and portray them as well as I can, but I also make sure to try and have them fail plenty and die gory to demonstrate the peril of the setting and to keep any of them from feeling like My Favorite Mary Sue Super NPC. There's a lot of jokes, puns and asides, heck we might even derail entirely for a half hour or so and just chitchat before getting back to the game--because it's just fun hanging out. Everyone seems really serious about their characters though and invested in the story and folks seem genuinely delighted by some of my FM characters which has been fun. As far as how we approach locales and such in game, we have a few set piece locations in a neighborhood in Riverside just west of the Howling Slums along Perdition Street. One of the PCs owns a factory and lives in the row house next door with her father who's suffering from senile dementia. It's cluttered with schematics and wooden prototypes and big chunks of steamwork in pools of grease. There's the rickety Loose Corsets Playhouse, full of gold and marble painted finery and moth eaten velvet drapes where another of the characters does a mix of vaudeville and saloon-girl burlesque with a troupe of fellow performers working for the elderly owner the vivacious and magnetic Maudlin Saint Claire. The last character is a down on his luck convict gunslinger and his surroundings are the slums and alleys of a section of half flooded quarantine zone he shares with half a dozen dangerous psychos (like the sadomaschistic brawlers the Butcher Boys, the obese and violent yet scrupulously polite Mr. Jingles, the asian opium den owner Black Maggie, and a pit fighting promoter named Two-Teef O'Keefe) with an opening in the wall in view of a cross section of Perdition Street where he and others of his ilk can jump out and mug people. A lot of the action happens in these set piece locations, or it moves to a new place, like a section of the Sewers that the senile father ended up wandering into, forcing the Fated to go track him down...and finding a hellfire club of stylish Resurectionists. Not sure how much that all helps, but hopefully it answers your questions a bit. If there's any other questions you have, just let me know.

The lack of religion, according to the developer podcasts (Breachside Chats on YouTube...worth watching) come down to two issues: too little authority on various schools of religious belief to be comfortable writing about it and not wanting to potentially offend people who they don't have to by misrepresenting a belief system folks care deeply about. That said, talking about it on the forums is a whole different thing. Honestly it's something I think needs hashed out and I think it'd be a blast to spitball some ideas anyway--since I'm kind of a fan of history and different religions.

The Fated are currently embroiled in a plot by a gang of ex-convicts to abduct the Governor-General, clap him in irons and make him toil away underground as they had been forced to do. Which is all awesome. But who is this guy? Do we know anything about him? Like a name or a description? Anything will help--even knowing for sure what isn't known will help. Also I hear there's been a new adventure and as a result there might even be a whole new Governor-General...uh-oh. How much is this going to mess things up?

So here's my take: The Trinity "Dodge this!" moment is very cool. Mechanically I'd want some kind of Stealth check to get in position to try something like this, probably with a "-" unless there's some really amazing distracting going on as some kind of Intimidation check from your allies. If that works, then I'd have them roll damage with a "+" and a free roll on the Severe Critical Effects table for a headshot as modified for the enemy's current wounds (as though a Red Joker was pulled). Then again in my view, coolness and story trumps mechanical gameplay and if someone wants to do something audacious like this then it just makes for great gaming moments. Your milage may vary.