Wrestlenomicon: Cultist Rules

 

(all art from the wild pen of Kurt Komoda)

I’d always hoped to add servitors of the elder gods to the game, cards that would have the same card backs as Cultists. When we started the Kickstarter, I presumed that new Cultists would be a project for the future. But the future arrived during the KS. Shane and Dennis found a way to add The Dead to Hastur’s Cultists and recruited the Deep Ones for Cthulhu. Kurt handled the art, I did some mechanics, and ta-dah, mission accomplished. But maybe I missed a step: I didn’t adjust the Cultists paragraphs on page 13 of the rulebook to account for these KS-exclusive cards. Some people have asked about it.

So here’s a rewording of the rules to account for the new Cultists. I’m going to phrase these rules to reflect the way I use the Cult tile, which is different than how the rulebook recommends using it. I’m also not going to use the terse style that saves space in a rulebook. This will be wordier.

Cultists

Cultist cards are in a separate category from the other cards in the game, distinguished by their own card back to prevent them being mistaken for cards that are part of your normal deck and your normal hand.

Before the game, shuffle your Cultist cards and place them face-down as a separate Cultist deck on your Cult tile. Use as many Cultist cards as you have available for your god. (For Kickstarter backers who bought everything, Cthulhu will have 8 standard Cultists, 5 Willing Sacrifices, and 5 Deep Ones. Hastur will have 8 standard Cultists, 5 Willing Sacrifices, and 5 The Dead. If you’ve ended up with fewer Cultists than that, don’t worry, just use what you’ve got.)

Neither player starts with any Cultists, but some cards can grant them to you. When you gain a Cultist, draw the top card from your Cultist deck and keep it on the edge of your hand of cards so that it doesn’t get mixed up with the rest of your normal hand of cards. Given that there’s not a lot of text on the Cultist cards you’ll need to refer to often, my method is to turn them upside down so I don’t confuse them with the cards that are officially in my hand. You could even just turn them backside up so that all you can see is the Cultist card back. Because a Cultist card doesn’t count as a card in your hand, you’re just holding it with the rest of your cards to keep track of it as an available resource. If you feel like setting it somewhere else, go ahead! There’s no limit to the number of Cultists you can accumulate.

 

(upside-down Cultists on the left of a three-card Cthulhu hand)

When you sacrifice a Cultist, place it face-up into a separate Cultist discard pile. You should have room on your Cult tile for both the Cultist deck and the Cultist discards. If you ever need to gain a Cultist and don’t have any left in your deck, reshuffle your Cultist discard pile.

 

(using the Cult tile as the spot for a Cultists deck and discard)

The full rules for each type of Cultist are printed on that card. In other words, if the Cultist in your hand is one of The Dead or Deep Ones, you won’t be able to use it for the standard Cultist sacrifice.

When you use a standard Cultist or one of The Willing Sacrifice bonus art Cultists, Cultist sacrifice works like this: When you advance an attack on your track (using Momentum), you can sacrifice one or more Cultists you’ve gained earlier to move that card an extra space for each Cultist sacrificed. (If you move multiple cards due to exclamation point momentum, each Cultist sacrificed moves a single card.)

At the moment the Willing Sacrifice cards don’t accomplish any more than the normal Cultists . . . aside from the possibility of making a mid-game sacrifice of a loved one (or the first friend I played D&D with) who strongly supported our Kickstarter! But when the game has expansions down the road, we’ll find a way to add some zing to the Willing Sacrifices.

 

Elder Rumble: Multiplayer Rules for Wrestlenomicon!

The Wrestlenomicon Kickstarter is in its final 25 hours. We've kicked, and now we're stretching towards the goal that will add the third elder god to the game, Nyarlathotep, who in Wrestlenomicon terms is less a crawling chaos and more the Chaos that performs an Elder Ollie On Your Head. 

To honor the many backers who are putting in an extra $15 to $30 *before* we've reached the Nyarlathotep stretch goal, pushing us towards the line, we thought we'd share some of the current multiplayer rules. (The Nyarlathotep deck will cost $15 plus shipping and handling, and people adding a full $30 are hoping to also add Yog-Sothoth.) 

These are the rules for three or four player games where it's every god for itself. This is the first draft, details may change as we playtest more and if Shane and Dennis decide they want to revise my placeholder names. 

These rules are fun, even just playing with multiple Cthulhu and Hastur decks. A couple of my friends who started by playing three-player games think of Wrestlenomicon mainly as a three-player game, they love the shifting priorities created by the attack arrow. 

Elder Rumble

Elder Rumble matches three or more combatants against each other, fighting until only the winner survives.

Set-Up: Each player uses their own track, meaning you’ll set up more than a single track of space cards. Add a line of space cards for each additional player. For example, for a three-player game, set up two sets of space cards so there are three columns. Cards are placed between the space cards, one column/track per player. 

First Turn: As usual, each player chooses a card simultaneously. High Momentum takes the first turn. Break ties with alphabetic order.As usual, the first attack to reach Ground Zero slams. But only that first attack. Even if a following attack lands before the target has a card on Ground Zero, that later attack does not slam.

Turns go clockwise: Once the first player has taken their turn, proceed clockwise around the table.

The Attack Arrow: Each player in an Elder Rumble has an attack arrow that sits down under their Ground Zero and flips between left and right. Each player's first attack goes against the foe whose track is on their left (or around the table to the player on the right if you’re the left-most player). As soon as a player attacks, and their attack is totally over, they flip their arrow to point at the enemy in the other direction. In other words, you’ll attack a different enemy with your next attack that reaches Ground Zero. Keep alternating attacks back and forth.

Important multiplayer rule: All card and rule references to “your enemy” or to effects that are meant to hurt a specific opponent refer only to the player you are presently aiming to attack!

Rumble Bonus: When your card is the card that take out an enemy’s last Guts card, you gain bonus Guts equal to the number of players who are left in the game. Draw the right number of cards off the top of your deck and place them on your Guts pile.

Remove the dead god’s track. If there are still three or more players in the game, keep using the attack arrows. When the game is down to two players, remove the attack arrows and bash each other like a regular two-player game.

Bring on Squishyface!

Lisa hanging out with someone clean cut for a change

We've played soccer together for 33 years and card games for 30, so really, I should have known that Lisa's favorite card art wasn't going to be something subtle! Her favorite Wrestlenomicon move is Squishyface, a Combo for Hastur that will enter the deck when we hit our first stretch goal and expand to 70 card decks.

Back the Kickstarter! Summon the Squishyface!

Adding Nyarlathotep & Yog-Sothoth to Wrestlenomicon

Arc Dream has announced our targets for adding new elder gods to the Wrestlenomicon Kickstarter! Actually Arc Dream announced a whole bunch of new stuff, including playmats, wallpapers and even a special card illustrated by John Kovalic!

Perhaps the biggest piece of the announcement is the plan for adding new elder god decks to the game. Cthulhu & Hastur made sense as the first to engage, but what's a cosmic battle between elder gods without the Crawling Chaos? The new gods will also come with rules for three and four player games. Battle Royale is grand melee style, every god for itself, or fight as a team. If fighting as a team feels too goody-two-shoes for you, there is of course an option for fighting each other after you've wiped out your rivals.

I've already designed the first draft of the Nyarlathotep deck. Same system that we used for Hastur and Cthulhu: Dennis and Shane supplied the names and I'm coming up with mechanics, though obviously we need the Kickstarter to fund and push through to the stretch goals before Kurt handles the art. Yog-Sothoth isn't as far along as Nyarlathotep but the first draft is in progress.

Here's how I summarize the new-elder gods.

Nyarlathotep messes with opponents by using Mastery cards that slam their own type of attack as well as their usual target. For example, Nyarlathotep's Bizarre Mastery card, Nyarly Don't Surf, slams Bizarre as well as Dominance. And while Nyarly's attacks and permanents slow the enemy down, Nyarly is busy building a pyramid of cards! Each attack that hits Ground Zero adds another block to Nyarly's pyramid. Cap the pyramid off, power Nyarly up,  and your enemy is gonna get capped.

Yog-Sothoth plays from two angles with twister cards that can use their Momentum to move its cards backwards on the track, looping all the way around to the lowest spaces near Ground Zero. Meanwhile, Yog-Sothoth has 'Groove Thang' cards (like When a Singularity & Matter Love Each Other Very Much, or Let's Smoke a Bowl of Antimatter) that mess with the enemy all the way down the track. Groove Thang cards generate random aggressions that are printed on Yog-Sothoth's Cultist cards. Trigger a Groove thang ability higher up the track (not at Ground Zero), draw a random YS Cultist, and find out what grooved.

Wrestlenomicon vs. Epic Spell Wars ! ! !

That's pro-wrestling-style hype for a grudge match that's more likely to be a team-up!

Three of the card games I’ve designed are somewhat similar to Wrestlenomicon’s style, play time, or ambition. Here are notes on fun elements of Three-Dragon Ante, Inn-Fighting, and Epic Spell Wars and how those elements compare to what’s going on in Wrestlenomicon.

Three-Dragon Ante

3DA is a game world artifact, the card game people in D&D worlds entertain themselves with in taverns when they’re not brawling.

Ambition: Like Wrestlenomicon, Three-Dragon Ante features a simple mechanical innovation I was surprised hadn’t been used before. In 3DA’s case, that’s the idea that high cards help you win the stakes but cards lower than what your opponent just played provide micro-rewards that set you up for later success. That makes Three-Dragon Ante the deliberate opposite of poker, that rewards folding out of bad hands instead playing through.

Wrestlenomicon’s ambitious streak, mechanically speaking, is that it models big slow cosmic wrestling attacks by giving them no immediate effect when played, except for moving a previously played attack (or attacks) further down the track towards Ground Zero, where attacks go off. This style of obvious-incoming-attack and uncertain-momentum seems to me to do a pretty good job of modeling a wrestling match, and I was amused to come up with a fun mechanic that apparently hasn’t been used before.

Inn-Fighting

A card and dice game of tavern-brawling.

Play-style: This one is a bit more like Wrestlenomicon in that it’s definitely a fight that rewards offense more than defense. There’s a lot more uncertainty about what you’ll be able to accomplish on your turn—dice are like that. So it’s much less strategic than Wrestlenomicon.

Inn-Fighting is also a game that is meant for multiple players, not a great two-player experience. In that, Wrestlenomicon is different than all three of these games. Wrestlenomicon was designed as a two-player game.

But towards the end of the development cycle, Bebo Boe asked me why Wrestlenomicon couldn’t be played by more than two players. My answer was something like “I tried it and that didn’t work,” which didn’t exactly satisfy her. So I thought about it some more and came up with an easy solution for making it a three or four player game. (More players are possible, but relatively slow.)

Even if we don’t do more decks right away, you’ll be able to play good three or four player games as grand melees or team matches if you have more than one copy of the game. If the Kickstarter does well and we publish more decks soon, even better.

 

Epic Spell Wars

ESW is definitely the closest of my little card games to Wrestlenomicon, if only because it benefits so hugely from co-creators card concepts and sense of humor!

I submitted a game of dueling wizards to Cryptozoic. But by the time ESW was published Cory Jones had changed nearly every name and written an entirely new art order. So the punch-drunk names and wild art by Nick Edwards in ESW, that add so much to the game, well, they weren’t how I’d handled it.

Likewise, in Wrestlenomicon, Shane Ivey and Dennis Detwiller came up with all the card names. They’d handled the art direction and Kurt Komoda handled the art before I joined the team. So instead of the ESW situation, where I actually had no idea what cards were going to accomplish by looking at the final art, since everything had gotten moved around, with Wrestlenomicon I got to design every element of the mechanics to match and live up to the art. I’d say it was inspirational but it went a couple steps past inspiration. I scrapped the first two attempts because I needed to create a game that was enough visceral fun to live up to Cassilda’s Thong and Tentacle Necktie!

I’d say that ESW and Wrestlenomicon end up as similar crazy-fighting fun. ESW is lighter, but as a two-player game, Wrestlenomicon is faster. You can usually play a full two player Wrestlenomicon game in between twenty and thirty-five minutes, sometimes even less. Longer games are possible, but rare.

Even so, the decisions you’ll make each Wrestlenomicon turn, and over the two or three turns you might be trying to look at least half-way ahead, are more decisive. Play skill matters more in Wrestlenomicon, despite the apparent randomness of the dice. It’s possible for one game to pivot mostly on the dice, but if you play two or three games, patterns emerge.

If you’re curious to see more of how Wrestlenomicon plays, click here for a how to play video from Bebo with bonus wrestling violence, and then check out the full rules and initial DIY card set that are available in the first update for Kickstarter backers. Any pledge will get you through the gate to see the DIY kit. If you’ve read this far, chances are that you’ll like it.

Hastur vs. Cthulhu: The Home Front!

The Wrestlenomicon Kickstarter is in full swing with rules and DIY printable PDFs available in the first update for backers!

The campaign is structured so that most pledges add to either Cthulhu's coterie or Hastur's entourage. You'll find that Cthulhu is accepting allegiance on Twitter at @TentacleNecktie, with Hastur slightly in the lead at the moment at @EatYellowSign!

This Cthulhu vs. Hastur grudgematch has been playing out in my house for a couple years now, because my wife Lisa . . .
a) loves the game
b) was therefore willing to playtest it again and again and again during time when we were having fun hanging out instead of working
c) loves the art on the Hastur cards so much that she has a hard time playing Cthulhu, even though the straightforward Cthulhu mechanics are more her personal style. She plays Red/Black in M:tG, and Hastur is a bit more Blue/Black if we're gonna break it down like that. Lisa's Sense-of-Hastur helped keep the design on track when things got a bit too convoluted.

So Kurt Komoda's amazing Hastur art easily claimed its first victim. Lisa had never heard of the Yellow Sign, but she's an artist and a writer and Hastur had her number from the first stroke of its giant paintbrush.

Me, I can't choose a side. I love all our children equally. If pressed, however, I'll admit that little Nyarly, waiting somewhere in the shadows, that kid has issues.

Cthulhu. Hastur. Who’s the Great Old One, and Who’s the GREATEST Old One?

Time to find out. It’s WRESTLENOMICON, the card game from veterans of Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, Epic Spell Wars, and Delta Green. Back it now! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arcdream/wrestlenomicon

Wrestlenomicon Launches in March!

[Sometimes Bad Things Happen to Bad Entities, by Kurt Komoda]

“Sometimes bad things happen to bad entities” is an apt slogan for Wrestlenomicon! The first two gods into the ring are Hastur (picture above, standing) and Cthulhu (picture above, splatted). We’re starting the Kickstarter on March 5^th with the decks for those two gods as the core game.

After initial design and playtesting, I was too excited about this game to let it lie fallow while the production details were being wrangled into place by Arc Dream Publishing. I went ahead and designed the Nyarlathotep deck and am working on Yog-Sothoth. If the Kickstarter community gets behind the game and stretches it into something powerful, we’ll end up with multiplayer rules and a full royal rumble of elder gods!

A few early links . . .

For a bit more of the game’s art by Kurt, as well as notes from Dennis and Shane, visit Wrestlenomicon.com

For some notes on mechanics that I wrote during an early playtest phase, see this blog.

Here’s Bebo’s GLOWing intro video.

And here’s a look at an early version of the layout for the Sometimes Bad Things . . . card. (Among other things, the symbols will be a bit different in the final.) Layout artist Simeon Cogswell has been wrassling with the Kurt’s art to fit it onto our tarot-sized cards.

Guesting at the Rose City Comic Con Sept 7-9!

Along with the fun people listed at the bottom of this blog, I'm a gaming guest at the upcoming Rose City Comic Con in Portland, Oregon. I lived in Portland for years during and after college, so it's going to be great to see old friends as well as new people.

Friday the 7th at 3 p.m. in Room 8, Paul Peterson and Tim Eisner and I are on a panel called Ask a Game Designer. Despite the ongoing example of the Onion, I'm pretty sure we won't be dispensing relationship advice.

Friday at 6 p.m., and again on Saturday at 5 p.m., I'll be at the Rainy Day Games booth signing things, talking about games, and running a demo or two for a couple hours.

The last time I was at Rose City Comic Con I ended up running a 7+ player demo of 13th Age for people who had never played rpgs before and who immediately turned the game into the only fully Player vs. Player deathmatch I've ever GMed! Speaking of deathmatches, this show I'll be demoing the Wrestlenomicon card game that I designed along with Shane Ivey and Dennis Detwiller for Arc Dream Publishing, coming to Kickstarter soon.

Here's the full gallery of wizards & rogues:

Keith Baker

Tim Eisner

Tyler Tinsley

Steve Ellis

TS Luikart

Paul Peterson

Rob Heinsoo

Ari Yarwood

Where I'll Be at GenCon

In pictures, my week looks like this...

Here's the text version!

Thursday, August 2

13^th Age Adventure Design Seminar.

11 a.m. to noon. . .

Lucas Oil Meeting Room 1

We run these as audience-participation workshops, so y’all will brainstorm a 13^th Age adventure with Jonathan Tweet and Wade Rockett and I functioning as multiclass ringleader/muses!

Pelgrane Booth, Signing & Talking

3:30 to 5:00 PM

Booth #1317

I’m likely to be around the Pelgrane booth other hours also, but if you want to be sure to catch me, these are the times.

Wrestlenomicon Playtest/Demos

5:30 to 8:00 PM

First Exposure Playtest Room,  convention room109 near the bottom of the Westin escalators

I’ll be running games of Wrestlenomicon in the First Exposure Playtest  Room. It’s a two or three-player card game of apocalyptic professional wrestling between elder gods, launching on Kickstarter later in August!! 

My co-designers Shane Ivey & Dennis Detwiller of Arc Dream will be running Wrestlenomicon in First Exposure starting at noon. The later shift goes to Fire Opal Games CEO Marie Poole and me, Marie will start at 4:00 while I’m in the Pelgrane booth.

Friday, August 3

13^th Age Monster Design Seminar.

11 a.m. to noon. . .

Lucas Oil Meeting Room 5

Another audience participation workshop with experienced 13^th Age monster designers at the mics . . . and one developer, if Paul Fanning can join us.  Two of the monsters created in previous seminars appeared in Lions & Tigers & Owlbears: 13^th Age Bestiary 2 last year!

Worldbuilding from Different Directions Seminar

12 noon to 1:00 PM

Lucas Oil Meeting Room 1

Here’s something you won’t see every year: at least three game designers involved with different games, all inspired by the same world, getting together to compare perspectives and approaches. Of course it’s Greg Stafford’s world of Glorantha, and Jeff Richard and Jason Durall and I will be talking about HeroQuest, RuneQuest, and 13^th Age Glorantha.

Pelgrane Booth, Signing & Talking

3:00 to 5:00 PM

Booth #1317

Wrestlenomicon Playtest/Demos

8:00 PM to midnight

First Exposure Playtest Room

Saturday, August 4

Swords, Spies, & Shoggoths: The Pelgrane Press Panel

2:00 to 3:00 PM

Lucas Oil Meeting Room 5

Pelgrane Booth, Signing & Talking

3:30 to 5:30 PM

Booth #1317

Sunday, August 5

13^th Age Glorantha Seminar

10:00 to 11:00 AM

Lucas Oil Meeting Room 7

Jonathan Tweet, Michael O’Brien (MOB) and I will take a jaunt through the many Gloranthas that helped create our 466-page labor of love and talk about the many possible campaigns it can help create, in and out of Glorantha. 

[[Also Sunday at 10:00 a.m until 2:00 p.m., Shane Ivey and Dennis Detwiller will be running more Wrestlenomicon demos in the First Exposure room.]] [

13^th Age Glorantha Demo: The Next Valley Over

Noon to 2:00 PM

Chaosium Gaming Room

I put this demo and its pregen characters together last week. It’s in the freeform style you may have experienced playing the 13^th Age convention demo I created a few years back. Other GMs will be running the demo throughout the convention. 

Pelgrane Booth, Signing & Talking

2:30 to 4:30 PM

Booth #1317

…And that’s the plan, aside from business meetings, design meetings, seeing friends, keeping contact with Fire Opal Games comrade Jay Schneider as he helps run Dragonfire and Shadowrun: Crossfire events, and touring the hall to surf the wave of thousands of happy gamers!

Heinsoo: Rainbow over the Wine-Zoo

How do you pronounce my last name? Yes, you, the reader, the comrade sharing this line.

If you pronounce the first syllable to rhyme with ‘wine’ and the second syllable to room with ‘zoo,’ you’re agreeing with nearly all English speakers. Well, American-speakers, at least.

If you pronounce the first syllable to rhyme with ‘rain’ and the second syllable to rhyme with ‘bow,’ you’re either Estonian (or maybe Finnish or Dutch), a member of my circle of family or friends with a good ear for language, or someone who has had me correct you two or three times already.

My wife Lisa (not a Heinsoo, by the way, she has a very cool name of her own that’s marginally easier to pronounce) advises me to give it up, and just let people pronounce my name the way they’re going to read it, because come on, who am I kidding? She’s probably right. When Shane Ivey of Arc Dream asked me last week about the pronunciation of my name for the upcoming Wrestlenomicon Kickstarter video, I could have let the original wine-zoo pronunciation roll. Because really, I don’t care if people say my name wrong. 

I just can’t bring myself to ignore our Estonian selves, not when I say my own name, or when someone asks. Who would I be if I’d grown up with a name that other people could pronounce properly? Maybe less of an unusual person, I say, being polite.. I suspect I wouldn’t be me, not in some odd ways that matter.

So it’s OK if you pronounce the name of my company to rhyme with Rob Wine-Zoo Games. I don’t mind, I expect it. But if you hear me talking, I’ll continue to rhyme my name with rainbow. And in honor of that pronunciation, here are four beautiful color treatments Lee Moyer (rhyme scheme starts with Wheee!) created of the logo for the new company, and two black and white versions like the one that appears on the cover of 13^th Age Glorantha.

New Wrestlenomicon Two-Player Cardgame Playtest Opens

art by Kurt Komoda

I've been super-busy finishing game design projects before a vacation.

One of the projects, a twisted little two-player card game from Arc Dream Publishing called Wrestlenomicon, is about to open a month-long playtest. The version of the game in this playtest has taken a turn toward the lighter side, away from a couple rules and abilities we decided were too esoteric.

If you're a fan of some of my other card games, or you enjoy two-player combat games, or if you have been aching for the chance to impale a fellow elder god with Cassilda's Thong or crush them under a Barrel Full of Byakhees, you can sign up for the playtest by visiting the Wrestlenomicon.com website!

I'm going to be traveling without much email for the next few weeks, so if you sign up and have any trouble getting the playtest kit, or have questions, contact Shane Ivey at shane@arcdream.com.

Wrestlenomicon!

[Hyades Head Slam, by Kurt Komoda]

Dennis Detwiller & Shane Ivey of Arc Dream Publishing came up with the idea of pitting Cthulhu vs. Hastur in a cosmic cage fight. They came up with dozens of funny card names and Kurt Komoda supplied wonderful illustrations. But the rules they started with didn’t live up to the concept and the art. Dennis & Shane decided they didn’t really have a viable game. And that’s when I got involved, meeting Dennis at a convention, hearing that they had a fully-illustrated game with no mechanics, and jumping at the chance to join the team.

I designed a couple systems that had interesting pieces but weren’t fun. Then I hit on the idea of presenting the fight as a battle between great slow-moving cosmic entities who launch attacks that unfold over time and space, arriving after the enemy has had a chance to see them coming and figure out what they might do in response. If it’s not actually a unique game mechanic, I don’t know other games that used the idea first. I’m sure I’ll hear whether the mechanics have unknown ancestors during this next piece of the process, a wide open-playtest.

If you’d like to be part of the playtest, you can sign up at Wrestlenomicon.com. This first (and perhaps only) playtest is going to run for something like five weeks. Assuming it goes well, the game’s developer, Sean McCarthy, and I will process the playtest feedback and get the game ready to roll. At some point thereafter, when they’ve recovered from other Kickstarter heroics, Arc Dream will run a KS for Wrestlenomicon . . . . since there’s definitely more that can be accomplished in this cosmic ring!

[[Fistful of Cultists, also by Kurt Komoda]]