Super Destiny High School Rumble!
(March 2019)
At our house, we're very excited for Super Destiny High School Rumble! I asked The Five Wits Press some questions about it!
1. What's your design team like? How do you divvy up the work?
Ruth: Our design team is three very different creative types in one house. Jessica is a writer, researcher and dancer. Birdy is an illustrator, creature designer, and game collector, and I sculpt, write, and try every art form I can get my hands on. We have a lot of creative projects, so in our house you hear things like, "Can you give me a line of dialogue for this character? I need some in world slang," or "What's wrong with the anatomy on this creature I'm sculpting?" or "What if a card game based on Great British Bake Off?" or "Why did I decide this page was a train station? I hate drawing trains. Help."
Jessica: For SDHSR, we all toss around ideas together. Then I'm usually the one who writes them down. Ruth does some of the first drafting, too, and Birdy organizes the documents.
Ruth: I think up funny names, wild plots, and cool moves, and go over the writing to spice it up.
Birdy: I read lots of RPGs and reviews of them and report back on how other games are handling different design problems. And I cry about anime a lot.
Jessica: I'm mostly the one who gets us to work to deadline. Also I'm doing the layout for the book.
Ruth: And our secret weapon is our illustrator, Amanda Williams, who's been blowing us away with her art.
2. The Powered by the Apocalypse game scene has grown far beyond my ability to keep up with it! Which PbtA game or games have been most inspiring to Super Destiny High School Rumble?
Birdy: Monsterhearts was the first PbtA game we ever played- thanks J.R. and Jadzia! It was a vital influence both for supernatural school drama and for homeroom mapping.
Ruth: And from there Monster of the Week got our attention, especially for the way its moves are structured. Birdy showed us Nahual, which she had backed, and that let us know how versatile the types of games using PbtA could be.
Jessica: Masks is also about teenagers saving the world. And I was inspired by the way Fellowship deals with villains and their connections to the heroes.
Birdy: Oh, yes, Fellowship. I have more to say about that.
3. What's, like, a key PbtA idea that you're building on and taking in your own direction?
Birdy: Bonds, aka SDHSR's version of Hx! The basic idea (and name) of bonds was derived from Fellowship, though our bonds work differently than theirs. In our version, bonds are formed through character interaction, and gaining them lets you mark experience. Then you can spend those bonds to get bonuses when you really need them.
Ruth: Playbooks! We love them so much we are using two per character, like Uncharted Worlds does but in a way more anime way. In SDHSR you get to pick your student type: class Rep, mysterious Transfer student, Delinquent, and so on, and then you pick a Destiny playbook like Mech Pilot, Alchemical Witch, or Science Experiment. So if you wanted you could have a group that are all Mech Pilots or Transformation Warriors but they would have different student playbooks and still be very diverse characters.
Jessica: And there's also the collective creation of the world that is at the heart of PbtA. I don't know that we're taking it in a new direction, but the shared nature of the storytelling is really why we wanted this to be a PbtA game.
4. I haven't watched anime in this genre since, like, Ranma 1/2? Does that even count? Where would I start?
Birdy: It does count, and you can play SDHSR without having seen much anime at all!
Ruth: In one playtest we ended up with a private school in Oregon, with cryptids and a pharmaceutical lab run by witches.
Birdy: We leaned more heavily on anime and manga tropes because they're the most fun to us, but plenty of western comics and shows also have students with superpowered alter egos.
Jessica: Teen Titans and Runaways were also influences on the sort of characters you can play. With the Otherworldly Royalty playbook you could be someone like Vegeta from Dragon Ball Z, but you could also be like Superman or Starfire.
Ruth: Our anime influences encompass both the vintage shows we watched long ago and fresh stuff coming out right now. If you are looking for recommendations...
Birdy: My Hero Academia is REALLY GOOD, both as a story and to get SDHSR inspiration.
Ruth: And Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood is a near perfect show.
5. In Super Destiny High School Rumble, what do you play to find out?
Jessica: You play to discover your character's true feelings and then act on them and declare them to the world. "Proclaim your Feelings" is a basic move, after all.
Ruth: I thought early on that SDHSR was about working out how your strange, diverse team saves the day. But really it's more about how your strange, diverse team play off each other, become friends or rivals, set each other up for wild moves, engage with the classmates and the setting they have created together, and create moments of mayhem and surprising sweetness.
Birdy: It's meant to be a low-stress game, the kind you play to unwind and to try out that slightly absurd concept you'd be afraid would 'break' a more serious game. And yes, you play to find out what over-the-top shenanigans you and your team can get up to.
Ruth: Usually the world does end up getting saved, but yeah, the friendships you made along the way and that one sick fight with a giant mutant kaiju are really the best part.
Thank you, Ruth, Birdy and Jessica!
Super Destiny High School Rumble! is live on Kickstarter RIGHT NOW. Check it out!
