What Is Mortal Coil?

Mortal Coil is a game about magic and passion.

Mortal Coil is about magic. When you play Mortal Coil, your group creates a magical world from the ground up, starting with the setting, all in about half an hour. Mortal Coil is not setting specific--it's wide open. You can create games about ancient gods, flying carpets, student wizards, or all of the above. Every player is able to add new magical facts to the world during play, and the setting evolves and grows as you are actually playing. The only rule is that magic always has a price.

Mortal Coil is about passion. When you play Mortal Coil, you will create a character defined by several passions. These passions tie your character to the situation, to the other characters, and to the supporting characters and antagonists. These passions drive the story, as your character acts on, denies, or changes these things that are important to him.

Mortal Coil uses no dice. Characters are defined by three sets of characteristics. Starting a game takes no preperation, and you get good stories out of it every time. Stories about magic and passion.

Mortal Coil: The 10-Minute Demo

Over on The Forge, there's some really good advice about convention demos, and some aimed at GenCon specifically. Since I am debuting Mortal Coil at the convention, I am putting together a 10-minute demo and walkthrough for the game.

A demo should be a scenario that gets right to the good stuff, and I am planning on using a scene from an actual game I ran with my group. The setting is Old Gods, where the deities of dead religions gather in a Philadelphia bar, and the situation is a love triangle rivalry between Pluto, Jupiter, and Proserpine. The nice thing about this scenario is that it will be easy for folks to drop into, if they know anything about Greek or Roman myth. Even if they don't, a love triangle is a concept just about everyone understands. Also, it can support up to three players (and in my experience, you don't really want more than this for a convention demo). Another benefit: I only need to write up three characters for the demo.

I am going to take a page from Timothy Kleinert's excellent Mountain Witch demo and do what he did: Write a complete script that anyone could pick up and use. This helps me, because then other people can run the demo easily.

I'll be posting the demo here when it's done.

Mortal Coil Character Sheet

Another preview:



To add some explication: A lot of the business of playing Mortal Coil focuses on moving your tokens around, and so the character sheet has a big graphical and layout emphasis on those things (with all the little circles to store your tokens in). The bottom of the sheet has all of the "written down" stuff, which you refer to when the tokens are moved and assigned.

I like what Jenn did with the sheet, it is attractive but not busy, and holds all of the important info.