Hi! I just picked this up and am about to run a game of it for my friends and I happen to notice in the pdf that the relationship questions for The Shadow and The Unruly are the same. Did I miss something?
Hi there, in case Kickstarter messages don't work for me! - I'm backer 163 and should have had a key for this game as well as All Stars, etc, it sadly never came through to me from itch.io, any chance of a new one please?
I replied on Kickstarter, but we haven't sent these out again. We sent them out last year however. We'll send out updates when we get the art done which should be soon.
Thanks for the reply! itch.io notifies me, in the same way that Kickstarter does not - and this way I could prove I was logged in and the fault wasn't on my end or my email's end at least! I appreciate that you've sent the codes out last year. At the time my husband was extremely unwell and we lost quite a bit of time before I realised around Feb-March we hadn't had them. I was wondering what to do when the newly updated Worst Generation pdf dropped and I'm so glad to finally have a copy after all! However any other codes that I should have, I sadly don't. I was hoping it might be possible given you can prove my backer ID now to get the smaller ones re-sent to me so I don't miss anything, but I'm more than happy to be patient and await the finalised art and finished copy first to avoid too much hassle and get as many as I can through the global means. I just didn't want to keep not messaging / informing you in case there are some I won't be able to access that way. eg. the single playbooks!
I'm sorry to hear about your husband, I hope he's doing better!
I sadly cannot re-send codes to individual people. They're not assigned to an account, they're assigned in the system to e-mails which then you have to claim. We, Five Points, don't know what e-mails those codes are assigned to. That's something Itch has on their end. We're looking for ways to avoid/work around this for our next Kickstarter because as you can imagine it's been a real, excuse the language but we're just as frustrated as you all are if not more, fucking pain in our ass. So at this time we just can't send you the missing codes for The Midnight Generation. We will be re-sending the WAR Book codes however probably next week some time so as not to spam everyone's inboxes.
As mentioned, we didn't hit All Stars during the campaign. We really wanted to, we got halfway there but the Kickstarter was always to pay for art and graphic design and that money has long been spent. Even if we could reallocate funds from other projects to finish it, we made it clear during and post-campaign that we didn't hit it and it wasn't something we'd be able to put out as part of the campaign. We realize there was some confusion with how it was listed in the Tier rewards and that led to some thinking it was coming out even though we didn't get it hit with the stretch goal.
The only individual Playbook you should have is the Liminal, we've not sent any of the individual ones to our Backers. We might do a collected Just the Playbooks for backers however. We're still in discussion.
Completely understandable what a pain it's been! I promise, I did try my best to find the codes, then and now - dredged every bit of my spam folder as well as the bin but either it literally never came or auto-deleted in the meanwhile back then.
I'm very glad to have had the Worst Generation code through given this, and am looking forward to the WAR Book. The All Stars I hadn't realised was a failed goal - don't worry about that then! Sorry, it HAS been a while, I only mentioned it because it's still listed in my rewards list on KS, which is probably a good part of the confusion on others' parts as well. I currently don't have the Midnight Generation or the Liminal, however, and am glad it's confirmed I should have. The Just the Playbooks idea is really grand and would solve the latter!
I would appreciate it if the Midnight Generation code could be re-sent when all the art is finished up, then. Is that what you mean by what's planned? If it updates in a standard way, I won't automatically get it without a code, but if you re-sent the codes to all the way your team just did for Worst Gen, it'd solve this completely for me :)
Otherwise if there were some way I could buy it with a one-off discount to effectively still have the reward that would be amazing. Of course I should have prodded much earlier too, and ultimately it's at least still buyable... Sorry for harping on, it's just the MG was the whole reason I pledged - I'm a huge Persona fan. But I'm down with waiting, just worried if it never comes at all.
After reading this expansion front to back I can now give my full review on this product.
This is definitely a SMT:Persona add-on! Several mechanics fit within for a world befitting a JRPG. The game mechanics do make it difficult to plan a game around Persona 3, or earlier titles and works best for Persona 4 or 5 type settings. The theming of this add on is really good, and definitely gets the creative juices flowing. The city of Hawthorne is a great start to making you're own modifications.(I've based mine as a Martha's Vineyard type city) The adventure is very bare bones, which allows the players to do what it is they please.
The adventure comes with a plentitude to get you started on your own world. How to get into the shadow world, characters, and main story beats. It doesn't include fine knit NPC's as it's main goal is to give you that power. The game does want you to include a few NPC's that marge into the character's backstory, and give them an arcana.
Character creation is a lot of fun. Choosing a playbook, an arcana, and several moves is great as it allows you to have greater expression in characters. The Arcana are numerous, and some double up on what I would consider powers or roles. The mechanics are nicely explained, until they're not(more on that later). The ability to include base game playbooks, and how to change these playbooks to use in the base game is incredible! And very welcome for players who look at the base game playbooks and have a favorite.
----------
I am however, not a fan of the Highschool being split in four houses, or that the school has dorm rooms. It might make more sense in a Japanese sense, but the school and city are all in America. The school system seems to be an attempt to meld American and Japanese school systems, which I think is done rather confusingly. Students are required to help with jobs around the school, live in the school in the dormitories, and are forced to participate in school festivals. As High schoolers are 'required' to stay in the schools dormitories what is the point of the entire city, if the students are trapped in the school?
There are just several very small issues that I have with this add on. The playbooks often mention something, that isn't mentioned at all anywhere else in the entirety of the book. The Shadow has a move that mentions having a 'Non-Human' form, but nowhere else in the book does it mention having one, what the requirements are, or even what it is. I can only assume that it means that the Shadow playbook is like Morgana or Teddy from the Persona franchise, having an animalistic form in the shadow world and having a human guise in the real world. The Laundry list feature for The Prisoner is a great nod to Persona 5, but lacks in explaining itself. As it has several contradicting verbiage uses. Missing a roll says not to clear a mark on the investigation track. What is the investigation track? When would I clear a mark? On a hit it says to mark off an investigation. Is that a clear? Do I lose a mark? If that's the case, how do I gain one?
There are several issues where the DM and the players have to infer as to what their base mechanic means, and what it does. And this could differ from different perspectives of the entire table. I think the weirdest thing I've noticed is the use of the word 'malus' in the Arcana Palace move 'No Place Like Home' where it says to apply any 'malus' like normal. Malus being, a banking term for profit loss. And it's the only time it's ever mentioned or used in the book.
-------
Overall, I give this add-on a glowing review. The few things I nitpicked in detail were only the few times I had a rough experience with trying to translate or explain to a player. There are rough edges that require a bit of sanding, but as it stands this is a great addition for those who love MASKS and the Persona series as a whole.
Hi! Thanks for the review and feedback! A few comments of our own, if you'd like
1. The Houses for the school, as is all of Chapter 2, are entirely optional. They're more modeled however after American Boarding Schools, where students are assigned dorms. Kyle, our writer, attended a Boarding School and wanted to more fully embody that within the setting. As the students live on campus during school, we felt that dorm assignment and such should be carried forward as well. Boarding Schools often do this to keep different grades into a single unit so inter-grade cliches and bullying can be better mitigated and addressed. The students are, likewise, not expected to be "trapt" in the school. They're most certainly free to go out with assumed supervision and of course, the weekends are free for students like anywhere else. This is also fairly typical of American Boarding Schools.
2. The Shadow's Move in question assumes the players know the source material and like PbtA games in general, lets players and GMs adjudicate exactly how Moves and the narrative work for them at the table.
3. The Investigation Track are the pips next to the names on your Laundry List. It appears we missed a header for those, we'll make sure to add that in when we update the art. The pips are also supposed to be filled in, not blank. They're a Clock like any other in PbtA, where you tick down instead of up like most Clocks in Masks. We'll make the graphic easier to understand. Thanks!
4. Malus is a term in tabletop games that is the opposite of Bonus. So any penalties to a roll.
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Just to clarify: This does require MASKS, right?
Yes, it does require the core Masks game to play. We are currently working on a stand alone version however.
Oh sweet!
Hi! I just picked this up and am about to run a game of it for my friends and I happen to notice in the pdf that the relationship questions for The Shadow and The Unruly are the same. Did I miss something?
You didn't, we missed that apparently as we added The Unruly at the last minute! We'll get that fixed but for now.
Relationships
I hurt __________ in the past, I hope they can forgive me.
__________ helps me when I fly off the handle.
Those are the Relationship questions for the Unruly.
Hi there, in case Kickstarter messages don't work for me! - I'm backer 163 and should have had a key for this game as well as All Stars, etc, it sadly never came through to me from itch.io, any chance of a new one please?
I replied on Kickstarter, but we haven't sent these out again. We sent them out last year however. We'll send out updates when we get the art done which should be soon.
Thanks for the reply! itch.io notifies me, in the same way that Kickstarter does not - and this way I could prove I was logged in and the fault wasn't on my end or my email's end at least! I appreciate that you've sent the codes out last year. At the time my husband was extremely unwell and we lost quite a bit of time before I realised around Feb-March we hadn't had them. I was wondering what to do when the newly updated Worst Generation pdf dropped and I'm so glad to finally have a copy after all! However any other codes that I should have, I sadly don't. I was hoping it might be possible given you can prove my backer ID now to get the smaller ones re-sent to me so I don't miss anything, but I'm more than happy to be patient and await the finalised art and finished copy first to avoid too much hassle and get as many as I can through the global means. I just didn't want to keep not messaging / informing you in case there are some I won't be able to access that way. eg. the single playbooks!
I'm sorry to hear about your husband, I hope he's doing better!
I sadly cannot re-send codes to individual people. They're not assigned to an account, they're assigned in the system to e-mails which then you have to claim. We, Five Points, don't know what e-mails those codes are assigned to. That's something Itch has on their end. We're looking for ways to avoid/work around this for our next Kickstarter because as you can imagine it's been a real, excuse the language but we're just as frustrated as you all are if not more, fucking pain in our ass. So at this time we just can't send you the missing codes for The Midnight Generation. We will be re-sending the WAR Book codes however probably next week some time so as not to spam everyone's inboxes.
As mentioned, we didn't hit All Stars during the campaign. We really wanted to, we got halfway there but the Kickstarter was always to pay for art and graphic design and that money has long been spent. Even if we could reallocate funds from other projects to finish it, we made it clear during and post-campaign that we didn't hit it and it wasn't something we'd be able to put out as part of the campaign. We realize there was some confusion with how it was listed in the Tier rewards and that led to some thinking it was coming out even though we didn't get it hit with the stretch goal.
The only individual Playbook you should have is the Liminal, we've not sent any of the individual ones to our Backers. We might do a collected Just the Playbooks for backers however. We're still in discussion.
Completely understandable what a pain it's been! I promise, I did try my best to find the codes, then and now - dredged every bit of my spam folder as well as the bin but either it literally never came or auto-deleted in the meanwhile back then.
I'm very glad to have had the Worst Generation code through given this, and am looking forward to the WAR Book. The All Stars I hadn't realised was a failed goal - don't worry about that then! Sorry, it HAS been a while, I only mentioned it because it's still listed in my rewards list on KS, which is probably a good part of the confusion on others' parts as well. I currently don't have the Midnight Generation or the Liminal, however, and am glad it's confirmed I should have. The Just the Playbooks idea is really grand and would solve the latter!
I would appreciate it if the Midnight Generation code could be re-sent when all the art is finished up, then. Is that what you mean by what's planned? If it updates in a standard way, I won't automatically get it without a code, but if you re-sent the codes to all the way your team just did for Worst Gen, it'd solve this completely for me :)
Otherwise if there were some way I could buy it with a one-off discount to effectively still have the reward that would be amazing. Of course I should have prodded much earlier too, and ultimately it's at least still buyable... Sorry for harping on, it's just the MG was the whole reason I pledged - I'm a huge Persona fan. But I'm down with waiting, just worried if it never comes at all.
You'll get your code resent when the art is done, yes. It'll be sent to the same e-mail Worst Generation was sent to.
After reading this expansion front to back I can now give my full review on this product.
This is definitely a SMT:Persona add-on! Several mechanics fit within for a world befitting a JRPG. The game mechanics do make it difficult to plan a game around Persona 3, or earlier titles and works best for Persona 4 or 5 type settings. The theming of this add on is really good, and definitely gets the creative juices flowing. The city of Hawthorne is a great start to making you're own modifications.(I've based mine as a Martha's Vineyard type city) The adventure is very bare bones, which allows the players to do what it is they please.
The adventure comes with a plentitude to get you started on your own world. How to get into the shadow world, characters, and main story beats. It doesn't include fine knit NPC's as it's main goal is to give you that power. The game does want you to include a few NPC's that marge into the character's backstory, and give them an arcana.
Character creation is a lot of fun. Choosing a playbook, an arcana, and several moves is great as it allows you to have greater expression in characters. The Arcana are numerous, and some double up on what I would consider powers or roles. The mechanics are nicely explained, until they're not(more on that later). The ability to include base game playbooks, and how to change these playbooks to use in the base game is incredible! And very welcome for players who look at the base game playbooks and have a favorite.
----------
I am however, not a fan of the Highschool being split in four houses, or that the school has dorm rooms. It might make more sense in a Japanese sense, but the school and city are all in America. The school system seems to be an attempt to meld American and Japanese school systems, which I think is done rather confusingly. Students are required to help with jobs around the school, live in the school in the dormitories, and are forced to participate in school festivals. As High schoolers are 'required' to stay in the schools dormitories what is the point of the entire city, if the students are trapped in the school?
There are just several very small issues that I have with this add on. The playbooks often mention something, that isn't mentioned at all anywhere else in the entirety of the book. The Shadow has a move that mentions having a 'Non-Human' form, but nowhere else in the book does it mention having one, what the requirements are, or even what it is. I can only assume that it means that the Shadow playbook is like Morgana or Teddy from the Persona franchise, having an animalistic form in the shadow world and having a human guise in the real world. The Laundry list feature for The Prisoner is a great nod to Persona 5, but lacks in explaining itself. As it has several contradicting verbiage uses. Missing a roll says not to clear a mark on the investigation track. What is the investigation track? When would I clear a mark? On a hit it says to mark off an investigation. Is that a clear? Do I lose a mark? If that's the case, how do I gain one?
There are several issues where the DM and the players have to infer as to what their base mechanic means, and what it does. And this could differ from different perspectives of the entire table. I think the weirdest thing I've noticed is the use of the word 'malus' in the Arcana Palace move 'No Place Like Home' where it says to apply any 'malus' like normal. Malus being, a banking term for profit loss. And it's the only time it's ever mentioned or used in the book.
-------
Overall, I give this add-on a glowing review. The few things I nitpicked in detail were only the few times I had a rough experience with trying to translate or explain to a player. There are rough edges that require a bit of sanding, but as it stands this is a great addition for those who love MASKS and the Persona series as a whole.
Hi! Thanks for the review and feedback! A few comments of our own, if you'd like
1. The Houses for the school, as is all of Chapter 2, are entirely optional. They're more modeled however after American Boarding Schools, where students are assigned dorms. Kyle, our writer, attended a Boarding School and wanted to more fully embody that within the setting. As the students live on campus during school, we felt that dorm assignment and such should be carried forward as well. Boarding Schools often do this to keep different grades into a single unit so inter-grade cliches and bullying can be better mitigated and addressed. The students are, likewise, not expected to be "trapt" in the school. They're most certainly free to go out with assumed supervision and of course, the weekends are free for students like anywhere else. This is also fairly typical of American Boarding Schools.
2. The Shadow's Move in question assumes the players know the source material and like PbtA games in general, lets players and GMs adjudicate exactly how Moves and the narrative work for them at the table.
3. The Investigation Track are the pips next to the names on your Laundry List. It appears we missed a header for those, we'll make sure to add that in when we update the art. The pips are also supposed to be filled in, not blank. They're a Clock like any other in PbtA, where you tick down instead of up like most Clocks in Masks. We'll make the graphic easier to understand. Thanks!
4. Malus is a term in tabletop games that is the opposite of Bonus. So any penalties to a roll.