Zephyr (Part Two)

What's that on the wind? A Furious Vexation?

You can find part one here.

5. Disassemble Engine

Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.

Brad

The engine of Zephyr is almost too obvious: its Constitution. The acquisition, expenditure, and even the exact kind of Constitution determine what you do in play, how you do it, and what it means to you.

Let’s take a step back first. Constitution is the energy your windfolk gains from consuming food and drink. This stuff is called Zephyr and isn’t just nutrition, but also determines what emotions your windfolk can feel. Zephyr comes in four colors, and beyond simply allowing you to trigger emotional bonds that make reveals easier is also used for…

• Is used to make Reveals, which determine if an action succeeds.

• Influence the scene, creating new narrative details.

• You may discard Zephyr to make reveals easier.

• As long as you have the correct colors in your pool, Entwining with the very features of the environment, making them part of your character, and therefore giving you narrative say over what they do.

• You will also occasionally add Zephyr from your pool into the environment.

• You lose at least one Zephyr from your Constitution every day, and you lose more equal to incomplete Obligations.

Through the Zephyr in your Constitution, you will interface with every other element of the game, which means that controlling and filling your Constitution is one of the core drivers of gameplay elements.

You primarily gain constitution from eating the food you hunt and forage. You will frequently find at least a portion of your day-to-day objectives being “What can I eat/drink to change my Constitution, and what abilities do I bring to the table to allow these things to be done.” which means that having a cookpot, or a hunters trap, or the technique to know which mushrooms are edible are hugely important and require extensive inter-group collaboration. You are going to be debating what’s for dinner and how to get it, to allow you to roleplay as a mountain, and going to have a blast the whole time.

If Constitution is the engine, Obligations are the gas. Obligations are what motivate your Windfolk on this cool journey with their friends, the promises you made that are tasks you will do that take you across Ophoi. In exchange for doing these, you were given not just the mental technology to know how to glide, or what the perfect cut of meat for a roast is, but the physical technologies like a glider or a windfarming kit.

Your Obligations could be anything from helping bridge an old river, to gathering rare herbs that only grow a huge distance from here, to rescuing slaves from the horrible violence of the Salt States. For completing these tasks, you gain the power to weave patterns on your character sheets, granting you strange mystical abilities, from the ability to simply produce useful items, to the ability to actually breathe underwater.

So you are going to go around, travelling with your friends, eating good meals (or bad ones if you fail a reveal), while completing your obligations, you will probably see most of the continent, and meet lots of new weird people and make some obligations with them!

6. Essentials For Session One

So, you got this game; you are going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, you have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the feeling for what makes this game stand out from similar art.

Brad

Pages 72-73 are vital for Zephyr, they literally lay out all the basic mechanics you, as the GM will need. You should read ahead and understand the comics that discuss the mythology of the windfolk as part of character creation, read and understand what the environments for the different plaques have to offer a wandering group of Ophoi.

Otherwise you just need Chapter 5, specifically the Communal Storefront, which has exactly what technologies do, how much they cost in Oi (the obligation currency), and you are ready to run.

7. Playing The Game Wrong

Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your table, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (or have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line on page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?

Brad

So. The only pitfall I have to warn you about, the starting obligations you get are how you acquire your starting technologies, both external and social. There is no other random determination, no secrets to figure out what’s right for them; your players will take what they think they need, and you will lead them forward. I would remind them of the drawbacks of taking too much heavy gear.

8. What to Steal

Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.

Brad

I went into Zephyr with a group of people who had a little trepidation; they weren’t sure if they would like it. They left asking when we were going to play a full campaign, full of interest and wonder, and joy. Zephyr wears its inspirations and intentions not just on its sleeves, but also takes the time to explain exactly what they mean.

You should steal Zephyr’s willingness to break with orthodox TTRPG stuff, If you pitched Zephyr to a room full of suits, they wouldn’t even look up as they ordered their security guards to throw you out of the building, and that is exactly why it’s so amazing. You should steal the fact that Zephyr has thought out the whole of its setting and your specific place in it.

All to often, we are told to imagine a better world, a different world, a world that is free of the hegemonies and bonds we live in now, and you need to steal from Zephyr, the idea of actually building a space to play in a world free of them. You cannot build a world that is free of these things until you can imagine it, and Zephyr does a stunning job of having a space that is free of some of these things, if you steal that and do it as well as Zephyr, you’ll get a thumbs up from me.