TEXT: A
  
  B
  
  1
  The 
  Techno Player’s Guide
  for the Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine RPG
  Nobilis: Antithesis, Nobilis: the Essentials, and all included text, concepts, and game mechanics
   are copyright 2011-2015 by Jenna Katerin Moran.
  Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine and all included text, concepts, and game mechanics
   are copyright 2012-2015 by Jenna Katerin Moran.
  All art and presentation elements are copyright 2012-2015 by Jenna Katerin Moran
   or by the original artist or artists.
  Nobilis and Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine are the creations of Jenna Katerin Moran 
  (formerly known as R. Sean Borgstrom).
  Reproduction without the written permission of one of Jenna Katerin Moran
  or the appropriate artistic copyright holder is expressly forbidden, except for the purposes of reviews,
  blank character sheets, copying reasonable selections for personal use and reference only,
  and printing or copying handouts and playbooks for personal use or use in a game session that you are participating in only.
  The mention or reference to any company or product in these pages
  is not a challenge to the trademark or copyright concerned.
  This book uses fantastical and supernatural elements in its setting, for its characters, their abilities, and themes.
  All such elements are ﬁ ction and intended for entertainment purposes only.
  This book contains mature content and reader discretion is advised.
   Dedication 
  For Robin Michael Alexander Maginn, who wanted to visit me in China;
  for Lillian Elanor Tewson Heino, just in case you get into gaming someday;
  and for Killian James Sebastian Maginn, whom I haven’t had the chance to meet yet.
  Also for Cync Brantley, Rand Brittain, Cheryl & Joseph Couvillion, Anthony Damiani,
  Chrysoula Tzavelas, Kevin Maginn, Raymond Wood, James Wallis,
  Dara & Anna Korra’ti, Jesse Covner, Hsin Chen, Karen Hermann,
  Sonja Britt Borgstrom, and Gayle Margolis.
   Special Thanks 
  To Karen Hermann, for helping out in a particularly rough time.
  
  2
   Credits 
  Written and Conceived by:
  Jenna Katerin Moran
  Visual Elements and Design Elements by:
  Paolo Bosi and Claudia Cangini for Studio Shadow
  with Design and Development Assistance from:
  Rand Brittain, Jon Rosebaugh
  Special Thanks to:
  Jon Rosebaugh
  Art Credits:
  graphic elements, icons, and signs - Claudia Cangini
  cover - Carlos Sneak
  pg. 3, 8, 10, 13, 16 (image), 19, 21, 23, 42 - Kam Moody
  pg. 14 - Filippo Vanzo
  16 (footnote girl), 49, 59 - Miranda Harrell
  pg. 33 - Claudia Cangini
  
  3
  INTRODUCTION ............................................6
  Techno ...................................................8
  XP ACTIONS ...............................................9
  Foreshadowing ....................................12
  Shock (Take 1) .....................................13
  Shock (Take 2) .....................................14
  Sympathetic Action .............................15
  Shock (Take 3) .....................................17
  Discovery.............................................18
  Pacing and Fading ...............................19
  Hollow .................................................22
  Miscellaneous XP Actions ...................24
  REACTION XP ..........................................25
  QUESTS .....................................................29
  Example Storyline Quests ...................37
  Arcs .....................................................40
  ABILITIES .................................................43
  Mundane Abilities ...............................44
  MP .......................................................49
  Miraculous Abilities ............................50
  Health Levels .......................................54
  TRANSITIONS AND RITUALS .......................55
  Transitions ...........................................56
  Rituals (Invoking)................................58
  Rituals (Acting in) ...............................60
   Contents 
  
  4
  
  5
  By the year 2035, there will be one million global television networks.
  By the year 2064, cows will outnumber people 50:1.
  By the year 2108, 82% of America’s youth will worship one or more mass
  murderers.
  —from If This Goes On, 
  by Jackie Robinson
  
  6
  The Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting 
  Engine RPG is a game of pretend.
  If you’re familiar with role-playing games 
  in general, you’ll know that an RPG is like a 
  story played out during a conversation between 
  friends, wherein each player takes on the role 
  of one of the characters in the story (their PC or 
  Avatar) and narrates their actions and feelings. 
  Another player (the GM or HG [the Hollyhock 
  God]) handles everything else: the other charac-
  ters, the world itself, the obstacles in their path, 
  and sometimes even the “plot.” If you weren’t 
  familiar with that, well, congratulations! You 
  are now!
  Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting En-
  gine has eight different genre variants that 
  have slightly different rules for slightly differ-
  ent types of story. This rulebook is a guide for 
  playing in the Techno genre. This book, and 
  possibly a character lifepath and/or playbook, 
  should be all you need to participate in the game 
  as a player. (The HG will want to have the full 
  Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine 
  rulebook.)
  The rules for the Techno genre/mode focus 
  both on the things that you do and on the way 
  you react to the rest of the game. You’ll be able 
  to take ordinary actions like “I walk down the 
  street,” and you’ll also be able to take XP Ac-
  tions that denote your OOC interest in things: 
  how you’re getting caught up in another PC’s 
  backstory or the HG’s description of the sights 
  and sounds of the city; how you’re excited by 
  or concerned about some new discovery; how 
  some revelation has frozen you up in shock. 
  Your ordinary actions describe what you do, and 
  your XP Actions display your interest in what 
  everybody else is doing.
  Why are they called XP Actions? It’s because 
  taking those actions is what gives you eXpe-
  rience Points, which are the fuel behind the 
  game’s advancement mechanisms. Every XP 
  Action you take—which is to say, every time 
  you formally notice something as catching your 
  player-level interest—moves you another step 
  forward in your progress through life. You’ll 
  measure that progress through both Quests (in 
  the short term) and Arcs (in the long term). A 
  quest is a speciﬁ c project or stage in your life 
  that you’ll complete after achieving somewhere 
  between 15-60 XP. Once you complete it, you’ll 
  receive a semi-permanent reward called a Perk. 
  An Arc is a set of ~3-5 quests that form a com-
  plete story when taken together. Completing an 
  Gaming Terminology
   
  ✿ PC or Avatar—Player Character. Your 
  Avatar in the world of the game.
   
  ✿ NPC—Non-Player Character.
   
  ✿ Main Character—this term isn’t actual-
  ly standard. A Main Character is someone 
  at the heart of the story, including all PCs 
  but some NPCs as well.
   
  ✿ IC—“IC” actions are taken by your char-
  acter, “in character.”
   
  ✿ OOC—“OOC” actions are things you do 
  as a player, “out of character.”
   
  ✿ HG—this term isn’t actually standard. 
  The HG is the “Hollyhock God,” this 
  game’s equivalent of the Game Master.
   
  ✿ Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting 
  Engine—this term isn’t actually standard. 
  This is the general term for the game rules 
  we’re using, e.g. “In a Chuubo’s Marvel-
  ous Wish-Granting Engine game, you’ll 
  have 8 points of Skills....”
   Introduction
  by Rand Brittain
  
  7
  Arc will give your Avatar a signiﬁ cant perma-
  nent upgrade.
  The rest of your actions, the ones that aren’t 
  XP Actions, are expressed as Intentions. You 
  form an Intention by investing a certain amount 
  of your Will (a limited resource, renewing each 
  day) and adding that to your relevant Skill. The 
  resulting number will indicate just how effec-
  tive, productive, or technically correct you can 
  expect your action to be. This is slightly differ-
  ent from the model used in other RPGs, since 
  you’ll measure an action by its claim to effec-
  tiveness or productivity instead of “success” or 
  “failure,” or even “incredible success,” but you 
  can pretty much use these actions just like you 
  would in any of those other games.
  How often will you take XP actions as op-
  posed to ordinary actions? That’s going to vary 
  from group to group. A Techno game explicitly 
  rewards playing along with others’ ideas and let-
  ting time go by, so if the players in your group 
  are focused on taking self-directed actions, 
  pushing forward on their immediate objectives, 
  and spending a lot of time in IC conversation... 
  you’ll probably gain XP at a fairly sedate pace. 
  If players in your group are more interested in 
  being caught up in the story and letting things 
  happen, you’ll probably make much faster prog-
  ress. 
  These are both completely okay.
  The rate at which XP Actions happen will 
  serve as a general indicator of your group’s 
  pace. Each member of your group will gener-
  ally take two XP Actions in every chapter. How 
  long a chapter lasts depends on which genre 
  you’re playing in. For example, in a Pastoral 
  game, each chapter lasts a week; so, once ev-
  ery player has taken two XP Actions, it’s time to 
  move on to the next week. This helps keep you 
  from getting “stuck” doing the same thing, since 
  every piece of XP you pick up will be moving 
  you forward.
  In a Techno game, a typical chapter will be a 
  day long (but you’ll skip the “boring” days, so 
  only things like weekends, holidays, and adven-
  ture days count). Each time you take an XP Ac-
  tion, that will set the tone for a couple of hours 
  of in-character time; once everybody has taken 
  two Actions, it’s probably time for a timeskip to 
  the next day when something cool happens.
  So, in summary:
   
  ✿ You play one character;
   
  ✿ The HG plays the world;
   
  ✿ In response to the HG’s descriptions and the 
  other players’ actions, you’ll:
   ✶ do things using actions and Intentions.
   ✶ highlight your OOC interest with XP Ac-
  tions.
   
  ✿ Once everybody has encountered a couple 
  of interesting things in the chapter, it’s likely 
  time to move on to another day.
  
  8
  Techno is one of eight ways to play the Chuu-
  bo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine RPG.
  It’s not electronic dance music. It doesn’t 
  even come with electronic dance music. You 
  could hum some electronic-reminiscent dance 
  music, but that really isn’t the same.
  But it’s a game from the heart of the machine.
  It’s a game that knows it’s a game, and 
  wants you to get lost in it anyway. It’s a game 
  that wants to take some stuff that really ought 
  to be alienating—that stands between you and 
  your character, like the rules of the game—and 
  use that to hook you into the ﬂ ow of things in-
  stead. It’s a game that wants to break a lot of 
  walls down, bringing the player’s moods into 
  the game, taking meta-stuff and ironic stuff and 
  silly stuff and piling it right next to the serious 
  and meaningful stuff that happens during play; 
  and yet, it’s going to try to make that a thing that 
  immerses you, that drowns you in it, instead of 
  shoving you away.
  It’s a game that doesn’t really care about the 
  why or how of something being a good hook for 
  you, it just wants you to fall into its groove.
  And the ﬁ rst three pieces of this are:
   
  ✿ The XP Actions
   
  ✿ The Emotion XP and
   
  ✿ Quests
  Techno
  
  9
  XP Actions
  
  10
  XP Actions
  There are four basic Actions at the core of a 
  Techno game. 
   
  ✿ Foreshadowing
   
  ✿ Discovery
   
  ✿ Shock and
   
  ✿ ??? (yet to be revealed)
  Not even roleplaying is as important, not even 
  comparing numbers on your character sheet 
  compares: 
  Those are the core things that you’ll be doing 
  during play.
  Each of them is about an emotional reaction 
  to events:
   
  ✿ Foreshadowing is about getting swept up in 
  something.
   
  ✿ Discovery is about surprise/discovery—
  you’ve found something.
   
  ✿ Shock is about being stunned, overwhelmed.
   
  ✿ ??? is about, ah... ???
  Each of them tells a story about your attention 
  and interest, as a player:
   
  ✿ Foreshadowing is like saying, “I’m inter-
  ested. Go on?”
   
  ✿ Discovery is like saying
   ✶ “Ooh, neat!”
   ✶ “Ooh, scary!” or
   ✶ “Mysterious...” and
   
  ✿ Shock is like saying “...!”
  And then there’s the fourth action, which isn’t 
  really an emotion per se:
   
  ✿ Sympathetic Action (formerly known as 
  ???) is about feeling someone else’s shock—
  your basic empathy tells you, “That person 
  isn’t just being quiet. They’re saying ‘...!’”
  
  11
  You’ll take these actions when you actually feel 
  those things—not deeply or anything, but when 
  stuff is at least a little interesting, neat, scary, 
  mysterious, or overwhelming. When you think 
  there’s something worth reacting to.
  ...what if you decide that there isn’t anything 
  there, but you want to take an action anyway?
  Like, some old lady is telling some story from 
  the golden days and you know it’s supposed to 
  be Foreshadowing; or someone’s in shock be-
  cause they’ve dropped their sandwich on a dirty 
  ﬂ oor, and you know you’re supposed to feel 
  Sympathetic—but you just can’t make yourself 
  care?
  You can still take Action, but it will be Hol-
  low.
  There’s some rules for that, later on. 
  “XP” Actions
  These are called XP Actions because they earn 
  the group XP. Each time you do them—up to 
  twice per in-game “chapter”—you can add an 
  XP to a group XP pot.
  It’s speciﬁ cally group XP because I don’t 
  consider you personally responsible for any of 
  these:
   
  ✿ Foreshadowing means someone else is be-
  ing interesting;
   
  ✿ Discovery, too;
   
  ✿ Sympathetic Action needs someone else to 
  be frozen up; and
   
  ✿ Shock needs someone to help.
  They create interest and attention; you feel it—
  it’s cooperative gameplay. So it goes in a coop-
  erative XP pot. 
  Later on, when you’re not busy with play, you 
  can divide the group XP up. If there’s XP left 
  over after a division, it stays in the pot; at the 
  end of the session, the HG should add enough 
  XP to the pot to make the ﬁ nal division even 
  out.
  You can earn your own XP, personal XP, stuff 
  that’s all about you—
  This just isn’t that.
  Gaming Terminology
  XP—stands for “Experience Points.” It’s 
  stuff you use to improve your character. You 
  want it.
  Quest—In Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-
  Granting Engine you’ll have a set of 
  “quests” that your character is working on—
  e.g., caretaking a park or practicing your 
  ﬂ ute. You’ll spend XP to advance or ﬁ nish 
  quests, earning you various rewards. 
  So you care about XP because whatever 
  you’re doing—trying to learn a skill, or get 
  new powers, or have people acknowledge 
  you as cool—it’ll help you get it done.
  
  12
   
   Foreshadowing 
  So here’s what this is:
  Something’s happening in game. Stories. 
  Fireworks. Neat descriptions of things. Whatev-
  er. It’s not a thing you’re doing. It’s something 
  someone else is doing, or that’s happening in 
  the world around you. It’s kind of cool.
  And you want to say: Yes. This. This is cool. 
  Go on.
  That’s a Foreshadowing Action.
  It’s usually interrupting to say, “I’m taking a 
  Foreshadowing Action,” so you don’t. Instead, 
  it’s an XP Action. You pick up an XP token, and 
  you toss it in the group XP pot, and bam. And if 
  anyone gets confused and wonders why you’re 
  doing that, you’ll say:
  “Go on.”
  Or “Foreshadowing.”
  Or “Red XP.” (Like that icon: red.)
  If you’re not playing with a physical XP pot 
  and physical tokens, you can just say “[Red 
  XP]” or “[Foreshadowing.]”  You might even 
  work out a hand-signal, like one-handed air-
  quotes, to indicate that Foreshadowing is going 
  on.
  When you do this, your character also gets 
  interested. They get caught up in whatever’s 
  going on.
  Bonus XP
  As an optional rule, you can get a second group 
  XP here if you watch/listen for a while longer—
  enough for one or two more things to happen—
  and then react. 
  ...but foreshadowing 
  what?
  I don’t know! Stuff that happens later, proba-
  bly. Maybe it won’t ever happen, but wouldn’t 
  it be cool if this came up again?
  Foreshadowing
  Condition: You notice that you’re paying a lot of attention 
  to something.
  Action: 
   
   Get caught up in it!
  
  13
   
   Shock (take 1) 
  ...
  Shock
  Condition: 
  Action: 
   
   ...
  
  14
   
   Shock (take 2) 
  So, Shock is a bit tricky.
  It’s an Action that you take when you don’t 
  know what to do—when you literally don’t 
  know what to do, when you’re stunned, frozen, 
  when you’re gaping like a ﬁ sh. When you’re 
  caught, on the spot, and you don’t know what 
  to do.
  ...but that means you don’t know that you 
  should take the Shock Action, either.
  How do we ﬁ x this?
  I’m going to tackle this by introducing a new 
  Action. It’s called Sympathetic Action, and 
  it’s an Action you take when someone else is 
  Shocked...
  Shock
  Condition: 
  Action: 
   
   ...
  
  15
  So, this doesn’t work quite the same as the other 
  actions I’ve mentioned. It’s not quite an emo-
  tional reaction that you’re having—
  It’s something conﬁ ned to the mirror neurons. 
  It’s an emotional reaction you feel on behalf of 
  somebody else. 
  You get the sense that they can’t move for-
  ward. That they’re frozen up. That they’re stuck.
  So you help them out.
  You take in-game action to help—touch their 
  shoulder, offer to help, listen, or whatever—and 
  declare that you’re taking a Sympathetic Ac-
  tion. Then you put an XP in the group XP pot. 
   
   Sympathetic Action 
  Sympathetic Action
  Condition: You notice that someone’s frozen up from, e.g., 
  overpowering emotion, a sudden change of context, a sudden 
  spotlighting, or shock.
  Action: 
   
   Try to comfort/reassure them, offer them sympathy, or 
  physically help.
  “Frozen Up”
  You could take a Sympathetic Action action 
  to help, e.g.,
   
  ✿ someone kind of locked up from shock or 
  stress
   
  ✿ someone in a crying ﬁ t
   
  ✿ someone who’s just been called upon in 
  class and can’t think of anything to say
   
  ✿ someone doing OCD stuff like moving 
  stuff back and forth between two shelves 
  over and over
   
  ✿ someone lying in the road with both legs 
  broken. Be more honest, broken-legged 
  person!
   
  ✿ a child caught in a car-seat
   
  ✿ a PC who’s just learned that their mom is 
  the big bad of the campaign, who isn’t so 
  much reacting as gaping like a thunder-
  struck ﬁ sh...
  What If They’re Just, Like, 
  Tragic? Not “Stuck?”
  Don’t read too much into the name here. 
  Sympathetic Action is just Shock, seen 
  from the other side—
  So if they’re not stuck, no matter how 
  much sympathy you feel, you can’t take a 
  Sympathetic Action!
  struck ﬁ sh...
  struck ﬁ sh...
  a PC who’s just learned that their mom is 
  the big bad of the campaign, who isn’t so 
  as gaping like a thunder-
  
  16
  Bonus XP
  As an optional rule, you can get a second group 
  XP for this if you really unstick them—
  If after you take this Action, they explode 
  with emotion. If they shift gears all the way 
  from “frozen up” to “demonstrative:” 
  When you went to comfort them they were 
  all deer-in-the-headlights; but now that you’re 
  sympathetic—
   
  ✿ they collapse into cathartic tears*;
   
  ✿ they melt in adoration;
   
  ✿ they start telling their story;
   
  ✿ they get angry at you;
   
  ✿ they run away;
   
  ✿ they vent loudly; or
   
  ✿ they step up to the plate and do something 
  completely awesome. Hooray!
  Stuff like that can give you a second group XP.
  Tying It Back to Shock
  As a special case, if the person you’re helping is 
  a PC, you can offer them the XP Action instead. 
  Say something like, “Shock?” and hold out the 
  XP token instead of just dropping it in the pot.
  If they take it and toss it in the XP pot them-
  selves, or even just nod and agree—it’s their 
  Action. Not yours.
  This matters mostly because you might be out 
  of XP Actions for the chapter, or, the HG might 
  be the one offering the XP to you!
  As opposed to moping-
  around-pointlessly tears, which 
  would make them still “stuck”
  around-pointlessly tears, which 
  
  17
   
   Shock (take 3) 
  This is an Action that you take when someone 
  else could take a Sympathetic Action—
  They’ve noticed that you’re frozen up. 
  They’ve stepped forward to help or comfort 
  you. But instead of making it about them, they 
  offered you the XP Action. They said, “Shock?”
  Or “Would you like to take a Shock Action?”
  The act of having someone reach out to you 
  changes things. It clariﬁ es things. It gives you 
  the right to actually accept—to take a Shock Ac-
  tion.
  Sometimes it’s even a little retroactive—
  In the moment they did that, you recovered, 
  and now you do something big and cool. If 
  you’re using the optional bonus XP rules, that 
  might even earn a second group XP!
  Shock
  Condition: 
  Action: 
   
   ...
  
  18
  Discovery
  Condition: You’re doing something you’ve never done, ex-
  ploring somewhere new, or investigating an anomaly. And 
  you notice that you’ve just found or discovered or learned 
  something unexpected!
  Action: 
   
   Declare that it’s neat, mysterious, or scary enough to 
  have an impact on you.
   
   Discovery 
  Discovery is the last XP Action. 
  It’s for unknown territory—you’re some-
  where where you don’t know what’ll happen 
  next. 
  You’re exploring a haunted house or a new 
  street. You’re trying something new or some-
  thing dumb. You’ve found something weird go-
  ing on and you don’t know why, so you’re try-
  ing to ﬁ gure that out.
  And because of that, because you don’t know 
  what’ll happen next, you’re listening to each 
  new thing that the HG says for evidence of... 
  well, something surprising. 
  Something scary, or mysterious, or neat.
  You’ll take the Discovery Action when you 
  ﬁ nd that.
  Or, another way to put it: taking the Discov-
  ery Action decides that something is neat, scary, 
  or mysterious. Taking the Discovery Action 
  gives what you ﬁ nd the meaningfulness-na-
  ture in play.
  Bonus XP
  As an optional rule, you can get a second bonus 
  XP from Discovery if someone—which can and 
  often should be you—emotes a reaction to what 
  you ﬁ nd. Something at least a little more than 
  just “I’m taking a Discovery Action: that’s neat/
  mysterious/scary.”
  Like: ooh.
  Or: wow.
  Or: I don’t like that at all!
  
  19
  So here’s how a Techno game is paced. First, 
  we’ll ignore all the dumb days—all the days 
  when nothing is happening. 
  We only care about weekends, holidays, and 
  adventures.
  On each day like that, you’ll have the chance 
  to take two XP Actions. For instance, you might 
  wind up doing something like this:
   
  ✿ Saturday: 
   ✶ Discovery as you try out a new clothing 
  style;
   ✶ Foreshadowing as you watch a ghost pa-
  rade.
   
  ✿ Sunday:
   ✶ Shock because you wake up at 3am with 
  a ghost on your chest. (It turns out to just 
  want fashion tips.)
   ✶ Foreshadowing when your friend Suzy 
  tells you about her past....
  Events
  Your game will also have big events—like boss 
  ﬁ ghts in a ﬁ ghting game, bonus rounds on a 
  game show, or major gigs for a band. Basically, 
  stuff that’s what the game is about, only more 
  so. On rare occasions you’ll have a big event 
  that’s completely unrelated to the central focus 
  of the game—
  Like, being trapped on a runaway train—
  And you’ll play it out as if it were something 
  that ﬁ t the game’s focus. Like, if your usual big 
  event is a boss ﬁ ght, the train will be a boss ﬁ ght. 
  If your characters are masters of trivia who play 
  a lot of game shows, you’ll handle the runaway 
  train like a gameshow. If they’re musicians, the 
  only way to stop the runaway train might just 
  be... the power of music.
  A big event like this starts a new chapter in 
  the middle of a day—and then, if it ﬁ nishes with 
  more than an hour or two of daytime left, it’ll 
  start another after. So, in a game about danger 
  chefs, your Actions might look like:
  Pacing
  DANGER... CHEF
   
  ✿ Saturday: 
   ✶ Discovery as you try out a new cloth-
  ing style.
   ✶ ...no second action, because before you 
  took it, there was a
   
  ✿ Runaway Train!
   ✶ Shock... until someone shakes you out 
  of it. To the ovens, sous-chefs! It’s time 
  for some dangerous cuisine!
   ✶ Shock, when the train’s shaking col-
  lapses your danger soufﬂ é!
   
  ✿ Saturday Evening: 
   ✶ Discovery, as you try out the dishes 
  your fellow danger chefs put together 
  and ﬁ nd something scary. “You can’t 
  make fugu on a runaway train!”
   ✶ Foreshadowing as you realize that 
  you’re feeling a little bit numb...
  To be continued, next time, 
  on DANGER... CHEF!
  
  20
  Fading
  Taking an XP Action occupies your attention for 
  a while—sometimes with the XP Action itself 
  and sometimes with the other stuff that happens 
  that scene. For instance, if someone helps you 
  out of your Shock, you may remain frozen-up 
  and that’ll occupy you for a bit... or you may 
  snap out of it and do something cool, and that’ll 
  occupy you for a bit.
  And after that there’ll be a sort of... boring... 
  time:
  A cool-down time, you know?
  So I want to kind of... partly... skip the boring 
  parts of your character’s story. After each XP 
  Action, once the scene it’s in ends, you’ll kind 
  of “fade into the background” for a while—
  you’re still doing stuff, maybe even cool stuff, 
  but the story turns its attention away from you 
  for a bit.
  So the pattern for a day is:
   
  ✿ you start the day.
   
  ✿ you do other stuff.
   
  ✿ you take an XP Action
   
  ✿ you fade
   
  ✿ you unfade
   
  ✿ you do other stuff
   
  ✿ you take an XP Action
   
  ✿ you fade for the rest of the day
   
  ✿ ... or maybe unfade towards the evening and 
  do a little bit more
  The Marginally Deep Theory of Fading
  So, fading does have some good effects. It helps 
  with spotlight management, right? It keeps one 
  player from taking up all the time in the game 
  unless they don’t want XP. 
  And it gives the HG a convenient opportunity 
  to kind of slyly skip time forward a bit—
  Maybe someone else will object, but you 
  can’t really object! You’re faded!
  ...only, none of that is the reason for the fad-
  ing rules. The reason for fading is that the scene 
  right after an XP Action scene is usually kind 
  of a disappointment. It’s hard to live up to the 
  promise that the XP Action created without 
  pausing to re-gear the story.
  Like, you’re visiting a new restaurant that 
  you’ve never been to before. And you ﬁ nd 
  something neat—they make something neat! 
  That’s Discovery!
  Only... the next scene is just, like, you eating. 
  Or discovering more neat things. Or paying and 
  leaving. It’s kind of dull. 
  Or worse:
  You try out a new restaurant. Then an alli-
  gator bursts out of the kitchen and attacks you. 
  Discovery! That’s unexpectedly scary. You 
  wrestle it, unsuccessfully, and the scene ends as 
  it’s about to bite off your face.
  ...only, that cliffhanger probably means that 
  nobody knows how to move forward from there 
  and make it cool. At minimum, the dramatic im-
  petus that led you to that moment is expended; 
  something new will have to happen, or you’ll 
  need to change perspective on the scene a bit, 
  before the railroad of excitement can pick back 
  up again.
  So we fade you for a while.
  The Crunchy Rules of Fading
  You get to take action while faded. You exist. 
  Stuff happens. It just... we don’t pay as much 
  attention to it in play. We skim over it. We don’t 
  put focus on it. In fact, here’s the formal rules, 
  and this is all that really happens while faded:
   
  ✿ Your character can miss opportunities to do 
  things, and it’s not your fault.
   
  ✿ Important stuff can happen to you, but then 
  it stops moving forward until you unfade—
  e.g., if you’re kidnapped while faded, you 
  can’t be interrogated, rescued, or escape un-
  til you unfade.
  
  21
  You can stay faded until the next chapter. You 
  should stay faded for somewhere between 
  “a few in-game minutes” and “four in-game 
  hours.”
  How long exactly?
  It’ll be up to you.
  After that restaurant thing, with the neat dish, 
  you might be done for the day. If an alligator at-
  tacked, though, we might pick up a few minutes 
  later when you’re on top of a table and the al-
  ligator is down below; or, maybe, when the alli-
  gator is sitting down next to you at the table and 
  you’re discussing what the two of you should 
  order—it’s its ﬁ rst time, too!
  Gaming Terminology
  Book—a collection of 8-20 chapters themati-
  cally tied together; a story.
  Chapter—this term isn’t completely stan-
  dard. This refers to a short unit of play with 
  a relatively coherent beginning and ending, 
  usually taking 15-90 minutes of tabletop play 
  or a week or two on a forum. 
  In a Techno game, a chapter covers an IC 
  day or a big event in the game.
  Scene—uh... 
  OK, look. A dramatic scene is a little hard 
  to deﬁ ne in general, and even more so when 
  it comes to roleplaying. So mostly I just want 
  to be clear now that I’m using the term more 
  often that you haven’t missed a deﬁ nition for 
  scene. A “scene” is just... a scene. One scene 
  of the story. If I were pressed, I’d say “a unit 
  of stuff happening from the time a situation 
  is established, until the time the situation 
  changes in a way that resolves some narra-
  tive event.” But that’s not a rule for you to 
  memorize. It’s the deﬁ nition that I’d give you 
  if I were pressed.
  You can use your own theory here for what 
  a scene is!
  Whatever a scene is, a “scene” in this game 
  is one of those.
  Session—it’s a “session” when the players get 
  together for the game. I’m targeting 4-hour 
  sessions. Online games might or might not 
  have speciﬁ c sessions.
  Reactive vs. Active Play
  You’ll notice that the XP Actions for the 
  Techno genre are mostly reactive. This 
  means that players won’t be able to drive the 
  game through XP Actions alone:
  For the best possible experience you’ll 
  want the HG to come up with a constant 
  stream of interesting events to witness and 
  maybe even a “plot.” This is a pretty tradi-
  tional mode of play for an RPG. 
  If you’re here because you’ve heard that 
  the Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting 
  Engine RPG is non-traditional... the kind 
  of game where the players can drive things 
  and the HG can just sit back and enjoy the 
  show? You’re not wrong, but you don’t want 
  the Techno genre—you’re looking for a 
  Pastoral, Gothic, Epic, Adventure, or 
  Fairy Tale game, instead!
  
  22
  Here’s the last piece of the core XP Actions.
  Sometimes you don’t want to cop to feeling 
  anything OOC just because you take an Action. 
  You want to treat it more like pushing a but-
  ton in a game: “Foreshadowing,” you push the 
  Foreshadowing button. “Discovery.” “Sympa-
  thetic Action.” “Shock...!”
  You’re not interested in saying that some-
  thing’s meaningful. Interesting. Compelling.
  In fact, on second thought?
  You’ll deny it.
  Your Discovery doesn’t have meaning. You 
  just saw a napkin and you went, “Oh! Discov-
  ery!”
  Or, you’re taking the Shock Action because 
  someone offered. You weren’t in Shock. You 
  were thinking about how to tie slip knots. But 
  someone held out the XP, so you’re darn well 
  taking it now.
  Or, you’re “Sympathetic,” but you don’t re-
  ally think that somebody’s stuck.
  And Foreshadowing?
  You “want to see more of this,” sure, but not 
  because you want to see more of this. You want 
  to see more of it because—I don’t know. Be-
  cause you’re faking emotion. Faking immer-
  sion. Or because of some meta thing. Or be-
  cause you’re ironically appreciating it. Or you 
  think there should be more of it. Or you think 
  it’s dull but is about to be cool.
  Something like that.
  You take the Action. You get to take the Ac-
  tion, anyway. But because you don’t feel the 
  key feeling, that “go on” or “this means some-
  thing” or “you’re stuck” or “...!”, that Action is 
  Hollow.
  If you’re willing to say that—to say this 
  means nothing to you; in fact, that it’s not even 
  “kind of cool—”
  The Action is Hollow. 
  Most of the good reasons for this are kind 
  of meta. Like, the HG describes a scene, and 
  there’s a napkin, and you declare a Discovery—
  because you want to see what will happen if that 
  napkin is suddenly meaningful. Or, you’re tak-
  ing a Foreshadowing Action, not because the 
  story another player is telling is interesting, 
  not because you can get really caught up in it, 
  but because it’s ridiculous, and they’re having 
  trouble telling it with a straight face, and they’re 
  trying to pause and recover, and you want them 
  Hollow
  Why is This Here?
  Hollow exists so that you’re never unable 
  to take the genre’s core XP Actions. I don’t 
  want you to be blocked from engaging with 
  the system because of something OOC, even 
  something as minor and reasonable as “you 
  have to think something’s cool before you 
  ask for more of it.” 
  I think there’s coolness here. I think you 
  can do neat stuff with Hollow.
  But that’s not why it’s here. It’s here so 
  that, if for some reason OOC stuff means you 
  can’t take an action the regular way, well, 
  you can still take it Hollow.
  
  23
  to go on instead, because watching them try is 
  hilarious.
  Or, you’re taking that Shock Action because 
  you think being in Shock is neater than being 
  distracted remembering knot-rhymes about rab-
  bits ducking into holes or whatever. 
  Or, you’re offering Sympathy because you 
  want to understand how Sympathetic Action 
  works.
  Or, you’re genuinely Sympathetic, but you’re 
  calling it Hollow because you want to try Hol-
  low stuff out.
  Ultimately what a Hollow Action boils down 
  to is that you want to see the game effects of 
  an Action—but you don’t buy my description 
  of why.
  So if you take an Action as a Hollow Ac-
  tion—basically, if you ignore all the stuff I said 
  about what it means to you as a player, and just 
  pay attention to the game rules, to the Condi-
  tions and Actions, and most importantly of all 
  declare that you’re taking it Hollow? You 
  normally pick up a point of the Hollow “Issue.” 
  This is a Trait, ranging from 0 to 5, that tracks 
  how alienated you are from the world of the 
  game—ultimately “resolving” and resetting to 
  zero when something shocks your character 
  back to their senses.
  Gaming Terminology
  Issue—a game trait that tracks part of your 
  character’s life situation.
  Site Issue—a game trait that tracks part of 
  the group’s situation as a whole—usually the 
  status of a particular place or site in game.
  “Resolving” an Issue—taking an action 
  at Issue level 4-5 that brings an Issue to its 
  close.  Afterwards you’ll generally have 
  trouble picking up the Issue again for a little 
  while—e.g., your next few Hollow Actions 
  might not grant the Issue at all.
  close.  Afterwards you’ll generally have 
  close.  Afterwards you’ll generally have 
  trouble picking up the Issue again for a little 
  while—e.g., your next few Hollow Actions 
  might not grant the Issue at all.
  trouble picking up the Issue again for a little 
  while—e.g., your next few Hollow Actions 
  while—e.g., your next few Hollow Actions 
  might not grant the Issue at all.
  while—e.g., your next few Hollow Actions 
  might not grant the Issue at all.
  might not grant the Issue at all.
  might not grant the Issue at all.
  —taking an action 
  at Issue level 4-5 that brings an Issue to its 
  close.  Afterwards you’ll generally have 
  trouble picking up the Issue again for a little 
  while—e.g., your next few Hollow Actions 
  trouble picking up the Issue again for a little 
  while—e.g., your next few Hollow Actions 
  might not grant the Issue at all.
  
  24
  There are a bunch of other Actions available 
  in the Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting 
  Engine RPG. 
  I don’t want you to have to memorize them, 
  though, so they have a special rule: 
  You can only use them when they’re cool. 
  You don’t have to memorize the list. You 
  don’t have to know how all of them work. All 
  you have to know is that you can look one up 
  and take it if you and the HG agree, or you 
  and the whole group agree, that it’s what you 
  should be doing right now. If you hear “yeah, 
  yeah, this is totally an (Action Type X)” or 
  “you should try an (Action Type Y.)” 
  This is meant to discourage you from 
  worrying about these, while still allowing 
  you to use them when they seem like they’d 
  ﬁ t.
  Anyway, the list of these XP Actions is:
  Decisive Action (pg. 38, CMWGE). 
  Monologue or talk about your dreams/hopes, 
  then take a decisive action.
  Science, Faith, and Sorcery (pg. 37, 
  CMWGE). Explain or wonder about some-
  thing, propose a theory, and then risk yourself 
  testing it.
  (Be in) Trouble (pg. 40, CMWGE). A 
  threat approaches—declare yourself over-
  whelmed and outmatched!
  Never Say Die! (pg. 33, CMWGE). 
  You’re overwhelmed and outmatched—but 
  you’ll ﬁ ght to your last drop of strength!
  (Suffer) Corruption, Trauma, or Trans-
  formation/Metamorphosis (pg. 32, 33, or 
  36, CMWGE). You’ve failed to completely 
  defend against something corrupting, trau-
  matic, or transformative. Experience surreal 
  effects; then the corruption or whatever gets 
  worse!
  Wicked Action (pg. 39, CMWGE). 
  You’re doing something you think is wrong. 
  Fall into a delirious abyss of self-indulgence!
  (Suffer) Adversity (pg. 32, CMWGE).
  This situation sucks. It builds up until you get 
  delirious or shut down.
  Obsessive Action (pg. 24, CMWGE). 
  You’re really worried or excited about some-
  thing. It builds up until you get gooﬁ ly obses-
  sive... or just kind of short out mentally and 
  shut down.
  Shared Action (pg. 21, CMWGE). You 
  connect to someone while doing simple, hon-
  est stuff.
  Shared Reactions (pg. 21, CMWGE). 
  You connect to someone while talking about 
  what’s going on.
  Slice of Life (pg. 22, CMWGE). You have 
  an intense experience, good or bad, and the 
  moment haunts you for a while.
  Actions from Other Genres
  
  25
  Reaction XP
  
  26
  Reaction XP
  You have, and each other player has, a particular reaction you’re looking to 
  get out of the rest. This is usually called “emotion XP” or your “bonus XP 
  emotion.” In a Techno game, I’m going to rebrand it “reaction XP.”
  What reaction are you trying to get? 
  Well, maybe you’re a hapless character, so you want to get “head-desks” 
  from the players. If you can’t do that, you can’t really be all that hapless! 
  Or maybe you’re a weirdo. Your thought processes are so strange that you 
  regularly get “(overacted) speechlessness” from others.
  You’ll ﬁ nd some thoughts on how to choose your XP reaction on pg. 60 
  of CMWGE; the standard options are
   
  ✿ Aww!  XP—your PC’s hard life makes people go aww!
   
  ✿ Head-Desk XP—your PC makes people head-desk or face-palm.
   
  ✿ Fist-Shaking XP—people shake their ﬁ sts, shouting your PC’s name
   
  ✿ “Oh no! (Name) is in Trouble!” XP—your PC is highly kidnappable
   
  ✿ (Overacted) Speechlessness XP—your PC rants nonsense well
   
  ✿ (Overacted) Shiver of Wonder/Terror XP—your PC is creepy or holy
   
  ✿ Putting my Faith in You 
  (with this XP token) XP—your PC is a big brother/sister archetype
   
  ✿ Offering you Comfort (with this XP) XP—your PC: rather neurotic
   
  ✿ Finger-snap and beckon over XP—your PC is a natural minion
   
  ✿ ???—???
   
  ✿ Thumbs-Up XP—your PC is kind of quiet and sweet.
  ...and you want to get that reaction from the other players through your 
  character’s actions. That is, if you have thumbs-up XP, it’s not about get-
  ting other characters to give you a thumbs-up. They could do that all day, 
  but if the players aren’t feeling it, it won’t count! And it’s not quite about 
  getting the other players to give you a thumbs-up, either, although I’ll tell 
  you the truth—that’s murky enough that I’ll count it. 
  ...but mostly it’s about your PC doing things that are quiet and sweet, 
  and probably having a pretty hard life, so that later, when something good 
  happens to them, when there’s a moment of happiness, you get the other 
  players to feel a bit of quiet warmth and give your PC a thumbs-up.
  It’s a storytelling reward, in short: a reward for getting a real-life reaction.
  You can get reaction XP once per 15 minutes of play. (Why that?  The limit 
  is mostly to keep it from mattering who gives you XP, or how many people 
  give you XP. It also draws a clearer line between one reaction and two.)
  
  27
  Meta XP
  I want to introduce two new XP conditions too. They’re not on the core list 
  because they’re kind of meta—the kind of thing that works well in Techno 
  but might not do in every genre of play:
   
  ✿ Indulgent XP and
   
  ✿ But Thou Must XP
  There are two tricks to But Thou Must XP—
  The ﬁ rst is that you’ll only get the XP if people know what you’re being 
  faced with. That is, you can’t just hesitate in general: that’s not going to 
  look like a plea for reaction, just maybe a Shock. You need someone else 
  to have said “Come on, let’s go punch some holes in some waterbeds” or 
  “It’s a gateway to a magical land of adventure! Don’t pack! Let’s just go!”
  Or you have to have pre-committed: “I’ll ask that person out today! No 
  matter what! Even if I get a toad stuck to my head!” And then you get a 
  toad stuck to your head, and you want to back out, you know, not ask them 
  out, But Thou Must!
  The second trick is that you don’t technically have to do it just because 
  you get XP. That is, maybe the other players are rooting you on. They want 
  to see you ask that person out. They give you XP! But that doesn’t mean 
  you have to. You’re in control of your character’s actions! It’s just, unless 
  you’re a master at scamming people into giving you XP for nothing, you 
  need to do what thou must sometimes... otherwise, why would they bother 
  giving XP?
  But Thou Must XP
  But Thou Must XP is XP given to the pro-
  tagonist for playing along with unusual or 
  dumb requirements—it’s basically some-
  thing that you’ll offer when someone seems 
  to be hesitating before going forward with a 
  dumb idea, accepting a ridiculous offer, or 
  otherwise doing something that’s unwise and 
  unrealistic. It’s a do it! Do it! kind of thing. 
  Plus a bit of a just go with it and don’t block 
  me XP.
  Indulgent XP
  Indulgent XP, aka Kid in a Candy Store 
  XP, is XP you give someone because they 
  ask for it, or as a reward for playing the way 
  you explicitly asked them to. You shouldn’t 
  give them too much! It’s bad for them! But 
  it’s OK to just give them a little XP now and 
  then.
  
  28
  Salute!
  So the ??? above is Salute/Fist-Pump XP—XP you get for being stylized 
  and larger-than-life. It’s actually a standard reaction, but there’s more to it 
  than I showed off in the corebook, and I’ll tell you it here. 
  The key to Salute! XP—particularly if the But Thou Must PC winds 
  up kind of stealing your ﬁ st-pumping physical gesture—is that it’s not just 
  saluting you. It’s also saluting/cheering your catchphrases—all the things 
  you say and do so often that they become associated with you and your... 
  you-ness. You’ll want to make them so catchy and so thematic that people 
  celebrate their appearance or steal them and use them themselves.
  Like, say you’re the Ideologue, Jasmine Apocynum. You might start with:
   
  ✿ “Salute! Apocynum!”
  when striding into a crowd of minions or associates.
   
  ✿ “Logical. Sensible. Sane.”
  something you throw in somewhere after saying something really 
  heartless or crazy.
   
  ✿ “The world is a shell of lies and everyone’s held into it by their own 
  misconceptions.”
  a generic justiﬁ cation for anything otherwise too hard to explain.
  Once you have your catchphrases you try to use them memorably enough, 
  often enough, and with a sufﬁ ciently catchy gesture or intonation that peo-
  ple cheer them on/salute them by/with: 
   
  ✿ a salute;
   
  ✿ a ﬁ st-pump;
   
  ✿ rolling their hand to get you to get on with it before you say it;
   
  ✿ a cheer;
   
  ✿ saying them just before you would; or
   
  ✿ saying, “Yeah!”
  or by just tossing an XP across the table when you say a well-established 
  or starting catchphrase. Don’t be shy about stealing catchphrases from 
  media, by the way—if they’re good, they’ll work just as well as your own! 
  Having Trouble?
  You can change your XP reaction if you like. Or, if you don’t want to 
  change it, but want to bring in a bit more XP for a while, you could try this:
  As an optional rule, when you’re disguised, even poorly, as another 
  Main Character, you can use their XP reaction instead.
  
  29
  Quests
  
  30
  Quests
  You have some quests. They’re what you spend your XP on, and they also 
  have some XP-earning stuff inside them. 
  They look sort of like this:
  Sometimes there’s a handout, too, that talks about stuff like “how you act 
  when you’re on this quest” and “what being on this quest teaches you.”
  What are quests about? Quests are about anything in your life that can 
  change. They’re about projects you can ﬁ nish. They’re about tasks you 
  can do. They’re about life stages you can move through. They can even be 
  about loving a particular band!
  You can be on up to four quests at once.
  This is what you spend your group XP and reaction XP on. You spend 
  it on your quests, either writing down how much you’ve spent or marking it 
  off on the quest card. And you take the XP that comes in for quest-speciﬁ c 
  bonuses and you write that down/mark it off too. And eventually you’ll 
  reach the quest’s target number—here, 35. When you do that, you ﬁ nish 
  the quest. At that point, something happens. Your life—it moves forward. 
  You get a reward.
  Major Goals
  The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
   
  ☐ A dog you coached into being your dog’s friend betrays them and vanishes, and 
  their broken heart redoubles their dedication to martial arts;
   
  ☐ The dog accidentally defeats you;
   
  ☐ The dog stumbles into the seamy underworld of (canine?) martial arts;
   
  ☐ You’re betrayed and wounded by someone you brought in to help train your dog.
  You can earn up to three of these bonuses, once each, for a total of 15 XP.
  Quest Flavor
  1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP towards this quest when you:
   stake out the dog to gather blackmail material
   train the dog with squeaky stuffed ninja puppets
   wrestle the dog, leaving “unintentional” openings in your defense
   build elaborate treat-dispensaries that require increasing levels of martial
        
   arts skill to access
   and your dog do clicker training
   subtly mourn that “other” dog that “couldn’t master the No Shadow Paw”
   covertly interact with, e.g., sleazy “martial arts dog shelter” salesgoons     
    
   while your dog watches in alarm
  You can combine this with an XP Action, but you’re not required to.
  XP
  35
  Blackmailing your Dog 
  into Learning Martial Arts
  
  31
  Quest cards like this, with a few blanks for designing, are your generic “go-
  to” quests when you’re making your own. You don’t even really need one 
  of my quest cards—an index card will probably do. 
  In terms of which template to go with, if your quest is...
   
  ✿ ...about loving or hating something, you want to start with a red card.
   
  ✿ ...about something challenging your identity: with a green card.
   
  ✿ ...something mystical, almost indescribable: with a black card.
   
  ✿ ...a paradigm or worldview you’ve adopted: with a blue card.
   
  ✿ ...a passion or fear, something you get overwrought about: you want to 
  start with a gold card.
   
  ✿ ...a personal/emotional struggle: with an orange card.
   
  ✿ ...something in the background of your life, like living through grief? 
  You want to start with a silver card.
   
  ✿ ...something you do that’s part of a simple and honest life? ...purple is 
  best.
  You can take an action to earn an XP for one quest like this every 15 
  minutes, up to once per fun scene. 
  Or you could build a “storyline” quest, like Blackmailing your Dog into 
  Learning Martial Arts. For each storyline quest you are on, you can take 
  one 1-XP-earning action per chapter. Quests like those also give you the 
  chance to get a good chunk of XP through the 5-XP storyline bonuses that 
  you don’t control.
  XP
  Bonus XP
  There’s something that just rivets your attention when it happens; or when you think 
  about it; or when something ﬁ ts your thoughts about it.
  Something you love. Something you fear. Something like...
  ______
  Pick a catchphrase for this. You don’t have to use the exact same catchphrase every 
  time, but it’s the core of your experience here. It’s what you say to show that your atten-
  tion has been totally caught.
  ______
  You can earn a bonus XP towards this quest at any time (but only once per scene/15 
  minutes) with an emote or a statement that goes basically like that!
   This can be a 15 XP, 20-25 XP, or 35-60 XP Quest
  25
  20
  15
  35
  60
  Generic Quest
  (Melodramatic)
  
  32
  Side A
  Side B
  XP
  Bonus XP
  You’re torn between two worlds or two selves; between:
  ______
  and
  ______
  Ideally, you’ll make a sign for this—a reversible card, which you could in theory have 
  on the table in front of you in play to show which state you’re in. You can earn a bonus 
  XP at any time (though only once per scene/15 minutes) by ﬂ ipping the card, showing 
  that you’re moving between the two states.
   If you can’t actually keep the card in front of you, holding up the card with the rel-
  evant side facing people or just saying or emoting something appropriate can earn you 
  the XP instead.
  Generic Quest
  (Lurid)
   This can be a 15 XP, 20-25 XP, or 35-60 XP Quest
  25
  20
  15
  35
  60
  
  33
  What’s the point of a quest?
  Mostly, quests are here to replace all that boring stuff that actually goes 
  into your life—particularly the stuff that doesn’t translate well into games, 
  like carefully reading up on the literature before reviving the dead or the 
  endless hours of practice that go into having a band—with the in-story ac-
  tions or scenes that show that that stuff’s going on.
  When you ﬁ nish a really short quest (15 XP), you’ll usually get a tem-
  porary reward: something happens, or you get a power as long as you “stay 
  on” the quest. (You can be on up to four quests.) A longer quest has a more 
  tangible reward: a “Perk” plus, well, something happens. Maybe the proj-
  ect you’re working on ﬁ nishes. Maybe you ﬁ nd an answer to something in 
  life.
  So the point of a quest is: You want to use XP to ﬁ ll them out. Then 
  your life progresses.
  
  34
  XP
  Bonus XP
  There’s something going on. You think it means... you think it... it relates to... 
  ______
  You can earn a bonus XP towards this quest at any time (though only once per scene/15 
  minutes) by declaring that you can feel the touch of it, the thing, the it, the miracle, the 
  strangeness, the dissociation, the unnameable, the it, the thing 
  —you can phrase it another way; just give some indication that you’re triggering this 
  quest condition—
  and then free-associating for a few moments about what your character is experienc-
  ing, feeling, thinking.
  Talk about being cold, or warm; talk about visions; whatever. Clenching muscles in 
  your arms. Hunger in the sky. Whatever. Random rambles and chill sensations across 
  your back, gnashing stars in the glory beyond the world. That kind of experience, the 
  taste of bugs chattering in the summer, and that brings you in a bonus XP for this quest.
  Generic Quest
  (Symbolic)
   This can be a 15 XP, 20-25 XP, or 35-60 XP Quest
  25
  20
  15
  35
  60
  XP
  Bonus XP
  There’s something you’re always thinking about. It’s a lens that you see everything else 
  through.
  ______
  You can earn a bonus XP towards this quest at any time (but only once per scene/15 
  minutes) by proposing a new theory about that thing you’re always thinking about.
  Make sure to actually stop and consider the theory—I mean, it’s OK if someone 
  stops you, but the point isn’t to come up with something goofy to say, the point is to 
  come up with new thoughts to genuinely consider.
   This can be a 15 XP, 20-25 XP, or 35-60 XP Quest
  25
  20
  15
  35
  60
  Generic Quest
  (Paradigmatic)
  
  35
  O
  V
  E
  R
   
  T
  H
  E
   
  T
  O
  P
  Bonus XP
  There’s something you’re doing:
  ______
  ...and you get really worked up over it. Well, you do, or the world does. Ridiculous, 
  absurd things happen. Things get hectic.
  So, look. Arrange for a sign. 
  It should say “Over the Top.”
  You can earn a bonus XP towards this quest at any time (but only once per scene/15 
  minutes) when your quest, or its consequences, or what you do about it, gets a little 
  over the top.
  Or, for that matter, when you decide to make them a little over the top.
  When that happens, hold up the sign or otherwise declare/observe that things have 
  gotten over the top and you can claim the XP.
  You don’t even have to say anything in character! You just have to be willing to hold 
  up a sign. It’s even OK if sometimes you’re being ironic or making a suggestion instead 
  of an observation, as long as an observation is more typical.
   This can be a 15 XP, 20-25 XP, or 35-60 XP Quest
  XP
  25
  20
  15
  35
  60
  Generic Quest
  (Exciting)
  
  36
  XP
  Bonus XP
  There’s something you just have to live through, day by day.
  ______
  And there’s something—some experience or memory—that helps mark out those days. 
  There is something that draws your attention when this quest casts its shadow or its light 
  upon your life.
  You can earn a bonus XP towards this quest at any time (but only once per scene/15 
  minutes) by directing attention to this experience. This usually relies on a speciﬁ c catch 
  phrase—e.g., your attention drifts to the birds ﬂ ying out over Big Lake, and you say, 
  “Listen to those birds.”
  ...or whatever.
  What catch phrase do you use?
  ______
   This can be a 15 XP, 20-25 XP, or 35-60 XP Quest
  25
  20
  15
  35
  60
  Generic Quest
  (Background)
  XP
  Bonus XP
  There’s something you’re working on:
  ______
  You can earn a bonus XP towards this quest at any time (but only once per scene/15 
  minutes) by explaining away what you’ve been doing or trying for in the current scene 
  as part of that thing you’re doing.
  Pick a standard phrase to indicate this, and then just say that phrase or some close 
  variant when you want to claim the bonus.
  What’s your phrase?
  ______
  The idea is that by saying that, you either conﬁ rm that something is about the thing 
  you’re working on, or you make yourself a little goofy and perhaps overly earnest.
  This can be a 15 XP, 20-25 XP, or 35-60 XP Quest
  25
  20
  15
  35
  60
  Generic Quest
  (Work and Study)
  
  37
  Example Storyline Quests
  Storyline quests give you a bit more nuance: instead of boiling everything 
  down to a single catchphrase or sign, you’ll come up with 5-15 things that 
  can happen over the course of the quest. If it’s reasonable for you to make 
  a quest option happen whenever you feel like it, then it earns 1 XP; if you 
  have to work for it, or if it can only happen once, or if it’s a little unpleasant 
  for you, it earns 5 XP. 
  The absolute bog-standard storyline quest is a 35-XP quest with seven 
  1-XP options and three 5-XP bonuses, such as:
  XP
  Major Goals
  The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
   
  ☐ You have to keep your SO in the dark on something “for their own good.”
   
  ☐ You save them from some sort of danger.
   
  ☐ You trust them, and that trust is broken. 
  You can earn each bonus once, for a total of 15 XP.
  Quest Flavor
  1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP towards this quest when you:
   rationalize some inﬁ delity or broken promise to your SO
   get in a big ﬁ ght with them
   push them away from one of your activities
   have a passionate moment, to the extent they’re OK with that
   talk about being together forever
   shop for a gift for them
   complain to someone about your SO’s family/friends
  You can combine this with an XP Action, but you’re not required to.
  35
  On the Path to a Breakup
  P.S.
  The icons on the quest cards don’t mean 
  anything in particular—they just tie similar 
  things together. The purple icon is for pasto-
  ral stuff, interpersonal connections, and stuff 
  like that; the blue is for monologues and de-
  cisive, player-agency action; the gold’s for 
  passion, frantic worry, obsession...
  Stuff like that!
  like that; the blue is for monologues and de-
  cisive, player-agency action; the gold’s for 
  cisive, player-agency action; the gold’s for 
  passion, frantic worry, obsession...
  Stuff like that!
  passion, frantic worry, obsession...
  Stuff like that!
  Stuff like that!
  Stuff like that!
  things together. The purple icon is for pasto-
  ral stuff, interpersonal connections, and stuff 
  like that; the blue is for monologues and de-
  cisive, player-agency action; the gold’s for 
  passion, frantic worry, obsession...
  Stuff like that!
  P.P.S.
  Sometimes 
  there 
  are 
  “group” 
  quests, 
  where 
  everybody works together 
  to tackle the quest. The 
  HG will explain how that 
  works if they give you one 
  to complete.
  works if they give you one 
  works if they give you one 
  to complete.
  to complete.
  
  38
  XP
  Major Goals
  The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
   
  ☐ You challenge an old rival in a cooking tournament.
   
  ☐ You reject a wicked enemy’s deal.
   
  ☐ All hope seems lost, but the game cuts away from you to another 
  scene somewhere else.
  You can earn each bonus once, for a total of 15 XP.
  Quest Flavor
  1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP towards this quest when:
   You explain how it happened—possibly with a completely new 
  story—that you became a danger chef to win back your soul.
   You’re on/in an out-of-control horse or vehicle.
   Bad luck ruins something you’re working on at a critical 
   
     moment.
   Something poisons you. Again.
   You try out a new, ridiculous outﬁ t.
   You select an ingredient.
   You’re dragged into a cooking tournament despite yourself. 
  You can combine this with an XP Action, but you’re not required to. 
   
  40
  35
  Winning Back your Soul
  with Danger Cuisine
  XP
  Major Goals
  The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when...
   
  ☐ You uncover a secret ﬁ ghting tournament (possibly actually just a bridge/dice 
  tournament or something) related to the job;
   
  ☐ You make a new friend, often a troubled kid, overburdened and meek person your 
  own age, or kitten;
   
  ☐ You use the ﬁ rst (or other long-awaited) money from the job on an unexpected 
  expense for someone else.
  You can earn each bonus once, for a total of up to 15 XP.
  Quest Flavor
  1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP towards this quest when:
  the business struggles with money
  the authorities fail to understand your problems
   
  an enemy appears!
  a new client shows up
  an older mentor explains the dizzying scope of the work
  you’re transﬁ xed with interest in something seemingly completely 
  unimportant, but related to the job
   
    that unimportant thing comes into play sometime later on
  You can combine this with an XP Action, but you’re not required to.
  A New Job
  (Comedic/Stylized Version)
  35
  
  39
  Major Goals
  The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
   
  ☐ You come up with a 5-XP quest goal that’s unfavorable, or out of the 
  player’s control, or only interesting a few times over the course of the 
  quest.
   
  ☐ Your ﬁ ngers are too cold to type.
  You can earn one of these bonuses, for a total of 5 XP.
  Quest Flavor
  1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP towards this quest when you:
   design a new 1-XP bullet point for the quest options.
   pause in the quest design to play some sort of ﬂ ute.
   realize sadly that you probably didn’t earn XP for both of those 
  things because you did them in the same chapter.
   try to keep the 1-XP options to about 1 per 5 total XP in the quest. 
  You can combine this with an XP Action, but you’re not required to.
   15
   15
   15
   15
  XP
  Writing Example Quests for
  the Chuubo’s Marvelous
  Wish-Granting Engine RPG
  XP
  Major Goals
  The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:
   
  ☐ Someone shows you a mystical secret.
   
  ☐ A demonic ﬁ gure mocks and belittles you.
   
  ☐ A peer turns to evil, vice, or wickedness.
   
  ☐ You accidentally hurt someone with magic. 
  You can earn each bonus once, for a total of 20 XP.
  Quest Flavor
  1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP towards this quest by:
   relying on someone else’s strength while you focus on your magic
  repeated practice of your arcane abilities
   shouting the names of spells as you use them
   lecturing others on the superiority of magic
   failing to ﬁ t in
   dealing poorly with uncomfortable physical conditions
  having prophetic or potentially prophetic dreams
  getting lost in the sensation of magic roaring through you
  You can combine this with an XP Action, but you’re not required to.
  40
  Magical Training
  
  40
  As you complete quests, they form into Arcs—
  storylines that look a little like this:
  Aspect Arc
  Part 1
  You struggle against a road-block 
  on your training.
  Part 2 
  You’re presented with the option of 
  another way of life/thinking.
  Part 3 
  You deal with stressful, bizarre, 
  and confusing social situations.
  Part 4
  You have an epic struggle against 
  something supernatural.
  Part 5
  You’re lost in the dark.
  I’ve chosen “endings” for each quest that bring 
  a certain level of closure to that stage of your 
  life. For instance, the closure for that ﬁ rst 
  quest—an “Aspect 1” or “
  : 1” quest—is to 
  push past that road-block. The closure for the 
  second quest is an insight: 
  Something that sorta concludes the story of 
  that time you were presented with another way 
  of life or thinking... by saying, “and because of 
  that, [you] realized: X.”
  The closure for the third quest is shatter-
  ing news—basically, I’ve noticed that periods 
  of goofy social stress don’t end naturally, but 
  rather get “cut off” when something disastrous 
  happens to put them into context. 
  And then the last two quests in that Arc have 
  outcomes that are fairly predictable: the clo-
  sure for an epic struggle is a victory, and the 
  closure for time spent lost in the dark is mak-
  ing it home... though the experience most likely 
  changed you!
  Anyway, the idea is that each character is on 
  an Arc like that, and you’ll be looking for ways 
  to interpret the quests you’re on as ﬁ tting that 
  general Arc. Each quest has the potential to ﬁ t 
  into a number of Arcs in a number of ways—
  Blackmailing your Dog into Learning Mar-
  tial Arts, for instance, might be an Aspect 1 or 
  Aspect 3 quest, but it could also be Shepherd 
  3 or Storyteller 2. A New Job? Storyteller 1, 
  Shepherd 2, or Mystic 2.
  So you’ll either build or look for quests that 
  ﬁ t the stage of the Arc that you’re on.
  Let’s talk about how this might work in prac-
  tice.
  Magical Training could be the ﬁ rst quest of 
  your Aspect Arc. Doing that quest means that 
  you’re studying magic. Doing it as the ﬁ rst 
  quest of an Aspect Arc means that  “you strug-
  gle against a road-block on your training,” and 
  then at the end of the quest you push past it. So 
  the quest is now the story of how you’ve hit a 
  block in your studies of magic. 40 XP later, you 
  push past it!
  Let’s say you’ve done that, and you need a 
  new Aspect 2 quest. You don’t want to bother 
  making up quests or ﬁ lling them in or even go-
  ing looking for new ones, so you just do Magi-
  cal Training again. This time, though, it’s an 
  Aspect 2 quest—”you’re presented with the 
  option of another way of life/thinking.” Com-
  Arcs
  
  41
  bine that with a quest to study magic, and that 
  probably means that you’re learning from 
  someone who thinks about magic differently. 
  You’re exposed to a new way of thinking or liv-
  ing.
  I can’t say that Magical Training is a good 
  quest for your third Aspect quest, but may-
  be you’re wanting to stick to the cards I just 
  gave you—so you take a break from mystical 
  training to blackmail your dog. That’s Aspect 3: 
  a quest where you wind up in a series of 
  progressively gooﬁ er social situations and 
  contexts—ranging from the stuff on the card to 
  stuff that comes up in the game—until something 
  shattering happens to break you out of the 
  rut. What is that  shattering thing? Maybe 
  it’s a death, or a loss, or a war—or maybe 
  you just discover that magic and Chi are 
  incompatible and all this thinking about 
  martial arts is hurting your skills! That’s a good 
  excuse to rush back into Magical Training, this 
  time as an Aspect 4 quest. In an Aspect 4 quest, 
  you have to contend against a terrifying 
  supernatural opponent. Is it a rival martial arts 
  dog-sensei? A horrible demonic ﬁ gure trying to 
  exploit your magic or stop you from training 
  your skills?
  You make it through in the end. You will win.
  Not every quest ﬁ ts your Arc so neatly, 
  though. You could ﬁ nish a quest—
  Let’s say that after defeating the demonic 
  force or the rival sensei, you’re spiritually 
  damaged. And you plan to try winning your 
  soul back with danger cuisine, but get distracted 
  and pick up the wrong quest card and take on A 
  New Job as a fry cook instead. You know. The 
  non -dangerous kind. And then it’s a cool quest 
  and you have fun with it, but when it’s done 
  you realize: that wasn’t being lost in the dark 
  and then ﬁ nding your way home. That wasn’t 
  an Aspect 5 quest! That was being a fry cook. In 
  that case, you’ll have to look through the eight 
  Arcs of ﬁ ve quests (for a homemade quest) 
  or the options I’ve tagged in the corebook or 
  supplement (for a canon quest) to see what kind 
  of quest that actually was or what its outcome 
  should be.
  Ultimately you conclude that it was a “Shep-
  herd 2” quest—
   
  ✿ You’re having a little trouble keeping your 
  life on an even keel.
  —with the “result” that you’re doing OK, but 
  there’s a big challenge coming up. Is it danger 
  cuisine?
  Most of the results are good or at least neutral, 
  but you’ll beneﬁ t even from the negative results. 
  Even for a quest like an Aspect 3 quest, which 
  ends in disaster—you’ll still get a reward.
  A 15-XP quest gives you a temporary ben-
  eﬁ t—you have to stay “on” the quest, keeping 
  the quest card around but not adding more XP to 
  it, to keep it, and it’ll go away anyway at the end 
  of the book. Completing a 20+-XP quest usually 
  gives you a “Perk,” instead—a little beneﬁ t for 
  a little quest, like a new trick for a known abil-
  ity, or potentially a huge power-up for a late-
  game high-XP quest. You can have up to eight 
  Perks, so the gains here are ﬁ nite—but around 
  the time you start running out of room, you’ll 
  pick up the option to improve existing Perks as 
  an alternate reward for a quest.
  After you earn “enough” XP (120 XP for the 
  ﬁ rst Arc in the game, after which it varies based 
  on HG discretion) in ﬁ nished quests, you’ll ba-
  sically “level up”—you get a large general up-
  grade to your power-set, and even at 2-3 quests 
  the Arc usually ends.
  You’ll ﬁ gure out which Arc you’re on dur-
  ing character creation, and most of the quests 
  you do will be a linear progression through 
  that Arc. A typical Arc quest is 35 XP, so it’s 
  common for your ﬁ rst Arc to take you through 
  three of those quests (e.g., Aspect 1, Aspect 
  2, Aspect 3), plus one other quest. After that, 
  you’ll start on a new Arc. Maybe it’ll be 120 XP 
  again, or maybe it’ll be longer—a really long 
  Arc might be 250 XP, in which case you might 
  do all ﬁ ve Arc quests, three small (15-XP) 
  quests for minor rewards, and a random quest 
  that you found on the side.
  
  42
  
  43
  Abilities
  
  44
  In between XP Actions, you’ll be active, doing 
  stuff in the world of the game. Here’re the Abil-
  ities you’ll use to do this.
  Your core abilities are Skills.
  Skills are this game’s description of “The 
  things your character knows how to do.” For 
  instance, you might have a Skill like “Naviga-
  tion,” “Handle Yourself in a Crisis,” or “Sneeze 
  Dramatically.”
  Each Skill is rated from 0 to 5, or sometimes 
  a little lower—for instance, an amnesiac super-
  spy might have something like:
   
  ✿ Tradecraft 3. 
   
   
  You’re an excellent spy.
   
  ✿ Athletics 3.  
   
   
  You’re a top athlete.
   
  ✿ Amnesia 2.  
   
   
  You’re good at many things and you just 
  don’t know why.
   
  ✿ Emotionally Commit -1. 
   
  This never works out for you.
  In general, the boundaries of these Skills are not 
  well-deﬁ ned—instead, if you try to use them in 
  ways that you haven’t used them before, you’ll 
  have a little more trouble, but at the same time, 
  if you make a neat, scary, or mysterious discov-
  ery about your talents or lack thereof, that’s a 
  free shot at a 
  Discovery Action. 
  So for instance, if you want to use your Am-
  nesia to ski down a mountain ﬁ ghting off at-
  tackers, because as an amnesiac you don’t know 
  that you can’t do that, you might face what’s 
  called an Obstacle—a penalty to your Skill—
  because you don’t know that you can do that 
  either. But on the other hand, whatever you ﬁ nd 
  out is likely to be a Discovery and that’ll earn 
  your whole group XP.
  You have 8 points of Skills to start out 
  with. If you’re particularly awesome, some of 
  them might be “magical Skills” that can do the 
  impossible, “Superior Skills” that make you 
  inhumanly competent, the special Skill “Cool” 
  that helps you come out on top in a conﬂ ict with 
  others, or the special Skill “Shine” that makes 
  you more motivational and inspirational.
  There’s no real rules on what Skills you can 
  have. If you want to be a world-devouring in-
  ﬁ nite super-God, then Superior World-De-
  vouring Inﬁ nite Super-God 5 is a good Skill 
  to pick; you can use your remaining three Skill 
  points to pump up your athletic, intellectual, 
  or macramé cred. Conversely, even if you pick 
  up an apparently useless Skill like Underwater 
  Basket-Weaving, you’re always allowed to im-
  provise new uses for it in play, eventually—per-
  haps—making it a thing to frighten off armies 
  and monsters with.
  (“I am she who weaves in the water; the cur-
  rents are mine, the reeds are mine: the world is 
  mine for the shaping. I open my hands: there is a 
  basket between them. I turn it. It opens. Its maw 
  points towards you. Come, then, and face me, 
  thou weak world-devouring god: you shall see 
  what a basket-weaver may do!”)
  Will
  You have 8 points of Will.
  To do stuff, form an Intention by spending 0, 
  1, 2, 4, or 8 Will and adding that number to the 
  rank of the most appropriate Skill. You can have 
  up to two Intentions running at a time, but you 
  have to stick to the Intention’s basic game plan 
  while it’s up—so feel free to choose big-picture/
  long-term Intentions, but remember you might 
  have to drop them if you change your mind!
  After subtracting any “Obstacle” that gets in 
  your way, your Intention gives you results like:
  Abilities
  
  45
  Once you’re done, if you spent Will on an In-
  tention and succeeded or failed, you get 1 Will 
  back. If the Intention just kind of petered out, 
  you don’t get that back at all. This isn’t meant to 
  be a real penalty or major tactical thing. It’s just 
  something I’ve noticed, in life.
  Your Intentions go away, and you get all 8 
  Will back, at the beginning of a new chapter of 
  play.
  Conﬂ ict
  The basic rule for conﬂ ict is that higher-level 
  Intentions resolve ﬁ rst.
  For instance, someone has the level 4 Inten-
  tion to burn down my building. They set a ﬁ re, 
  and I notice. I form a level 5 Intention to survive. 
  Even though technically the arsonist’s Intention 
  already started, my action resolves ﬁ rst—
  The HG takes the arsonist’s action off the 
  table until they’ve thought about how I survive.
  They could rule that I get out in time. Or, they 
  could rule that I manage to stop the ﬁ re and the 
  building doesn’t burn down. Whichever makes 
  the most sense, really. Then after that the HG 
  returns to resolving the arsonist’s Intention. If I 
  put out the ﬁ re, the arsonist has lost their chance 
  to be effective at their action’s primary purpose. 
  Their life, as so often happens with arsonists, 
  sucks.
  ...at least in the short term.
  In the long term, if they stick by their guns, 
  the truth is, our Intentions aren’t ﬁ rmly in con-
  ﬂ ict. They could go and set another ﬁ re. And 
  another. And another. All under that same ﬁ rst 
  Intention. And if I keep my own Intention going 
  too, then the outcomes open up in the long term. 
  Maybe I do just keep putting out ﬁ res. Or maybe 
  I stop the arsonist. Or maybe the police arrive 
  before this goes on for very long. 
  ...but it might make more sense, eventually, if 
  “survive” starts to mean just “get out.”
  What if my Intention is level 3, instead? Then 
  the scenario plays out a little differently. The 
  assumption here from the beginning is that the 
  building will burn down. My survival is going 
  to have to be by getting out, and it’s even pos-
  sible that I’ll face an Obstacle that lowers my 
  Intention further, because surviving in a burning 
  building is hard.
  Result
  0 or 
  less
  it doesn’t really help anything
  1 
  at least you made yourself feel 
  happy/competent/at 
  peace/
  whatever.
  2 
  something actually deﬁ nitely 
  happens.
  3
  you performed the task properly.
  4
  you were effective, and made pro-
  gress towards your current goals.
  5
  you were productive: this improved 
  your life, at least the tiniest bit.
  6
  you were pretty awesome. Impres-
  sive.
  7
  it was super-effective.
  8
  it was extremely productive.
  9
  this was the right Intention, for some 
  nebulous meaning of “right.”
  
  46
  Obstacles
  Obstacles are a penalty to your effective Inten-
  tion. Sometimes they reduce it across the board; 
  other times, they just limit your options. (For 
  instance, if your Intention is to “run up and greet 
  someone,” and you have a broken leg, there’s 
  an Obstacle to the running-up part but not to the 
  greeting.)
  Roughly speaking, Obstacles are deﬁ ned as:
   
  ✿ Obstacle 1. You don’t have the appropriate 
  resources. This is going to be rough.
   
  ✿ Obstacle 2. Success would be pretty epic.
   
  ✿ Obstacle 3. Success is practically impos-
  sible.
   
  ✿ Obstacle 4. Success would be just plain 
  goofy.
   
  ✿ Obstacle 5. Success is outrageously impos-
  sible—paradoxical, causality-violating, lit-
  erally impossible and inappropriate too, or 
  whatever.
  If you’re using a mundane Skill, you can think 
  of higher-end Obstacles as errors in the deﬁ ni-
  tion of what you’re actually doing. If you “build 
  a perpetual motion machine,” then the -5 Ob-
  stacle isn’t there to make it harder to build a 
  perpetual motion machine—that’s not “hard.” 
  That’s “thermodynamically impossible.” The 
  Obstacle is there to say:
  There’s a fundamental misconception or 
  problem in your project plan, so it’s harder for 
  your efforts to be effective or productive. You 
  don’t know what you’re actually building. You 
  might still build it properly, inasmuch as anyone 
  can build an engine like that properly. It might 
  even be effective, in the sense that it gets you 
  closer to your goals, or productive, in the sense 
  that it makes your life better. But it won’t be 
  a perpetual motion machine in a serious game. 
  Not with a mundane Skill.
  If you’re using magic, then it might actually 
  go on forever; magic does stuff like that. For 
  a magical Skill, big Obstacles mean something 
  closer to:
  “This is the size of the hole in the world that 
  your magic will have to patch up.”
  Bonds and Mundane Actions
  A Bond is something you must do, or can’t 
  do, or are driven to do.
  It’s rated between 0 and 5—often, 2.
  Bonds help you win conﬂ icts and over-
  come Obstacles. When your Intention goes 
  up against a conﬂ ict or Obstacle, and you 
  have a relevant Bond, you can bring in the 
  Bond to add the Bond level to your Intention. 
  Bonds can get you into trouble, but if 
  they do, you can gain Will—anywhere from 
  0 to the rating of the Bond. 
  It is always notionally possible to do 
  without food, water, sleep, or even air 
  while actively fulﬁ lling the Bond. If you’re 
  a shark god, and you have to keep moving, 
  and you’re marooned in orbit around a dead 
  star—keep moving. Keep thrashing blindly in 
  the dark, like a shark god should, and you’ll 
  potentially stay alive while you do. For days. 
  Weeks. Years. Forever.
  Bonds are rare in the game world, but 
  many PCs will have one—it’s my favorite 
  gift to hand out to a mundane PC.  You can 
  even have multiple Bonds, although you only 
  get the beneﬁ ts from one Bond at a time.
  gift to hand out to a mundane PC.  You can 
  even have multiple Bonds, although you only 
  even have multiple Bonds, although you only 
  get the beneﬁ ts from one Bond at a time.
  even have multiple Bonds, although you only 
  get the beneﬁ ts from one Bond at a time.
  many PCs will have one—it’s my favorite 
  gift to hand out to a mundane PC.  You can 
  even have multiple Bonds, although you only 
  get the beneﬁ ts from one Bond at a time.
  get the beneﬁ ts from one Bond at a time.
  Gaming Terminology
  Sustained Action—something you are cur-
  rently doing. You can be doing two things at 
  any given time.
  Tool—a bonus to a mundane Intention. Re-
  ally good equipment is often a +1 Tool.
  Trait—an OOC, rules-based representation 
  of some ability or quality your character pos-
  sesses. Skills are one example of a Trait.
  of some ability or quality your character pos-
  of some ability or quality your character pos-
  sesses. Skills are one example of a Trait.
  sesses. Skills are one example of a Trait.
  —an OOC, rules-based representation 
  of some ability or quality your character pos-
  sesses. Skills are one example of a Trait.
  sesses. Skills are one example of a Trait.
  
  47
  Magic
  Speaking of magic, magical Skills typically 
  work something like this:
  A magical Skill has a very small or nonexis-
  tent palette of mundane options. You might be 
  able to use ghost magic in an Intention to read 
  books about ghosts, or to apply makeup to look 
  ghostly, but for the most part, everything you do 
  with that Skill is a magic technique.
  You’ll typically have a ﬁ xed library of these 
  techniques: a few at Obstacle 1, a few at Ob-
  stacle 2, and a few at Obstacle 3. You’ll also be 
  able to borrow techniques from other magical 
  schools by adding +2 to their Obstacle. You 
  don’t actually have to know that that school of 
  magic exists, so what this really means is “you 
  can do almost anything at Obstacle 3-5.”
  For instance, there’s a school of necromancy 
  that allows you to:
   
  ✿ [Obstacle 1] Sniff out corpses, graves, and 
  places of death at unnatural range. 
   
  ✿ [Obstacle 1] Speak in voices not your own.
   
  ✿ [Obstacle 2] Summon something within a 
  mile, twisting its path so its travels lead to 
  you
   
  ✿ [Obstacle 2] Make a speciﬁ c person unable 
  to recognize something.
   
  ✿ [Obstacle 2] Make something unrecogniz-
  able in general.
   
  ✿ [Obstacle 3] Wake or bind a corpse or ghost 
  into your service.
  So even “Kite Magic,” built around, well, magi-
  cal kites, can be used to dredge up and animate 
  a corpse at Obstacle 5—and conversely, at Ob-
  stacle 5, a necromancer can build a supreme 
  magical kite.
  Edge and Superior Skills
  Advantages in a conﬂ ict are described as Edge. 
  If someone has wings in an outdoors brawl, for 
  instance—that’s not a clear win for them, but 
  it gives them a lot of mobility. How can you 
  pin them down and beat them? It gives them an 
  Surface Wounds
  When something messes you up, you may 
  take a Surface Wound. 
  In order to help you play them up, these 
  are handled as powers. If someone stabs your 
  arm, maybe you now have +1 to bleeding and 
  whimpering. If someone punches you really 
  hard, maybe you now have a Bond: “I must 
  keep complaining of stomach pain.”
  You’ll also get to take an action to react, 
  even if you’re already doing two different 
  things at once.
  These may not sound like they’re really 
  great beneﬁ ts, and that’s because they’re 
  not. ...because, honestly, people should be 
  motivated not to get stabbed in the arm or 
  punched really hard.  
  But your wounds function purely as advan-
  tages, because that’s how I want them to play.
  Speciﬁ cally, for a Surface Wound, you’ll get:
   
  ✿ A +1 “Tool bonus” to Intentions where 
  you’re playing up the wound.
   
  ✿ A level 1 Bond related to the wound
   
  ✿ Or, if you and the HG can quickly ﬁ gure 
  out how it works, a level 2 magical or Su-
  perior Skill related to the wound.
  You can play these as real advantages, if you 
  can justify it. Maybe that punch aligned your 
  seven chakra points temporarily? Maybe get-
  ting stabbed in the arm awakens your invin-
  cible rage? But don’t go out of your way to 
  do this: instead, go for it when you can.
  Surface Wounds tend to heal in 0-2 chap-
  ters, at the end of a chapter.
  Protip! Sometimes you can prevent/change 
  game-speciﬁ c events (like opponent touch-
  downs in a football game) by taking a Sur-
  face Wound instead. This is optional and var-
  ies by game.
  game-speciﬁ c events (like opponent touch-
  game-speciﬁ c events (like opponent touch-
  downs in a football game) by taking a Sur-
  face Wound instead. This is optional and var-
  ies by game.
  downs in a football game) by taking a Sur-
  face Wound instead. This is optional and var-
  face Wound instead. This is optional and var-
  face Wound instead. This is optional and var-
  face Wound instead. This is optional and var-
  ies by game.
  ies by game.
   Sometimes you can prevent/change 
  game-speciﬁ c events (like opponent touch-
  downs in a football game) by taking a Sur-
  face Wound instead. This is optional and var-
  downs in a football game) by taking a Sur-
  face Wound instead. This is optional and var-
  
  48
  Edge. If someone has a better tennis racket in 
  a tennis game, that’s an Edge. If someone has 
  nukes and someone else doesn’t, in a game of 
  global thermonuclear politics—the nukes are an 
  Edge.
  Edge is rated from 0 to 5, and it basically acts 
  as a penalty to your opponent’s Intention for 
  the sake of evaluating conﬂ icts with you. This 
  doesn’t stack with Obstacles—if an opponent is 
  facing 2 Edge and a level 3 Obstacle, the Edge 
  is irrelevant. If they’re facing 4 Edge and a level 
  3 Obstacle, the Obstacle won’t count—just the 
  Edge.
  Superior Skills are distinguished from regu-
  lar Skills in three respects:
   
  ✿ If you have them, you’re a little less human;
   
  ✿ They allow you to do things humans can’t; 
  and
   
  ✿ In a Superior Skill’s core competence—that 
  is, if you can leverage it directly and to its 
  best effect—it gives Edge in an otherwise 
  fair contest equal to the level of the Skill. 
  You don’t have to be using the Superior Skill 
  to get this effect, and you may get lesser 
  Edge for oblique applications of the Supe-
  rior Skill.
  The higher the rating of the Superior Skill, the 
  more overtly supernatural it is—something like:
   0► You’re within human norms.
   1► You’re unrealistically good.
   2► You’re like a video game character (Supe-
  rior Double Jump 2) or an action-movie mar-
  tial artist (Superior Martial Arts 2).
   3► You’re like a beast—bears have Superior 
  Strength 3, great cats Superior Reﬂ exes 3.
    4► You’re far beyond human—mountains, for 
  instance, have Superior Endurance 4.
   5► Nothing mortal can stand against you—
  light, for instance, has Superior Speed 5.
  There’s no extra cost to have a Superior Skill—
  but it does require that you be not quite human, so 
  you should only take them to represent superhu-
  man or inhuman parts of your character design.
  Perks
  At the completion of each quest*, you’ll earn 
  a Perk—a minor ability outside the context of 
  your mortal Skills. Depending on the quest and 
  how far into the game you are, you could earn 
  anything from a new television to a permanent 
  increase to a Skill. You’re allowed to have up to 
  eight Perks at once, which means you’ll run out 
  pretty fast, but by the time you’ve ﬁ nished an 
  Arc or two you’ll start being able to take better 
  Perks or to improve the ones that you have.
  The core book has extensive lists of options 
  and suggestions, but in the end, the criterion for 
  a Perk is “something that makes sense to you, 
  that the HG agrees is fair”—if it ﬁ ts that crite-
  rion, any Perk will be ﬁ ne.
  
  49
  As a character in a Techno game, you’ll prob-
  ably start with either 1 or 5 MP—Miracle 
  Points. These represent the “wishing power 
  of the heart, that can make the impossible pos-
  sible,” “the bleak power of despair,” or some 
  combination thereof.
   You’ll use these to fuel miraculous powers 
  (pg. 50)—there are notes on how much such 
  things cost in the powers themselves. Even if 
  you don’t have powers like that, though, you 
  can use MP to buy cool stuff in play.
  Here’s how that works.
  The wishing power of the heart can en-glam-
  our a mundane item or an abstract state and 
  make it into something magical, powerful, or 
  outright miraculous. Thus, if you have the MP, 
  a light-up wand bought at a tschotske store can 
  work wonders; vague acceptance into a group 
  of sailors can grant sailing powers; and a store 
  that normally sells magic-less modern body ar-
  mor will stock magical chainmail just for you.
  Stores and social groups that sell this kind of 
  thing are called MP Shops. They aren’t guaran-
  teed to exist, but if they do, a typical roster of 
  items might look like:
   
  ✿ 1 MP—an enchanted axe that works once 
  to cut through anything, even without your 
  holding it, with the words “hop, hop, chop!”
   
  ✿ 2 MP—an enchanted tablecloth that can roll 
  itself out to feed any number of people a rich 
  feast, once, with the words “Tablecloth, turn 
  inside out!” and roll itself back in to clean 
  the dishes, once, with the words “Tablecloth, 
  turn outside in!”
   
  ✿ 4 MP—a wristwatch that lets you say 
  “Watch, roll forward,” and skip forward in 
  time by a variable number of days; spend up 
  to a day traveling or studying, and then say, 
  once, “Watch, roll back!” to return to when 
  you were.
  A store like this can re-enchant used items, but 
  only while it still offers them—it can have lim-
  ited or variable stocks. A more abstract store 
  might be a necromantic faction that you become 
  part of, which might offer:
   
  ✿ 1 MP—a one-use token that’ll get you in to 
  a meeting of the faction
   
  ✿ 2 MP—you learn a magical technique used 
  by the faction—for the rest of the story, you 
  can spend 1-3 MP to ask 1-3 questions from 
  a speciﬁ c corpse, after which it’s forever si-
  lent.
   
  ✿ 4 MP—hire a tireless servant made of bone. 
  It’ll serve you faithfully for one full week 
  and then fall apart into dust.
  In general you’ll recover 1 MP (up to your nor-
  mal maximum) at the beginning of each chapter. 
  If you want to go past that, you can get more MP 
  from Bonds (pg. 51)—up to the Bond’s rating 
  in MP either when a Bond gets you into trouble 
  or when you spend a whole chapter assiduously 
  “serving” a Bond—or from Issues, which the 
  HG will hand out.
  Your MP resets to its normal maximum at the 
  beginning of a new “book” of play, though, so 
  don’t build it up for too long!
  MP
  With a few rare 
  exceptions.
  
  50
  Mundane Abilities come from practice and tal-
  ent. You’re born with some of them, or pick 
  them up due to circumstance; you develop them 
  with hard work and time. They’re the causal 
  outcome of a process.
  Miraculous Abilities aren’t.
  Miraculous Abilities operate on a metaphori-
  cal level. They’re abilities that you develop 
  because you should have them, because they 
  ﬁ t who you are and what you stand for—be-
  cause they’re the physical manifestation of your 
  wishes, and connections, and morality, and your 
  dreams. They arise, not from the mind or body, 
  but from the heart.
  Aﬀ lictions
  The most common miraculous Trait is an “Af-
  ﬂ iction”—it’s the kind that even mortals have 
  sometimes. An Afﬂ iction is just a rule—some-
  thing you must do, can’t do, or are driven to 
  do. Just like a Bond! 
  The difference is that instead of just giving 
  bonuses to stuff you were doing anyway, an Af-
  ﬂ iction can make new stuff happen. The details 
  are 100% in the HG’s hands, but if it ﬁ ts, you 
  can prompt them, e.g., saying, “I must be un-
  trackable—that’s my Afﬂ iction—so get this guy 
  off my tail!” Then, possibly, you lose the tail 
  miraculously, slipping off between two build-
  ings that were actually abutting before and after 
  you pass.
  It’s common to write an Afﬂ iction casually, 
  like “Afﬂ iction: I can point at things and make 
  them explode,” instead of “Afﬂ iction: I must, 
  when I concentrate on blowing things up, kindle 
  an explosive force inside the things I point at, 
  which then releases. Bang!” I still cling to the 
  can’t/must/driven to deﬁ nition, though, because 
  it means that every Afﬂ iction does something, 
  as opposed to some being vague.
  Miraculous Abilities
  Gaming Terminology
  Arc Trait—a Trait you pick up from pursu-
  ing a given Arc, e.g. Knight (Idol Singer) or 
  Aspect (perfect, unconquerable Ace).
  Miracle—the kinds of things warring gods 
  and demons do. A ﬂ are of power rises from 
  the heart and burns its truth into the world. 
  Imperial Miracle—the kind of thing that 
  world-dreamers, subtle deities, and cosmic 
  principles do. A wish whispers out from the 
  heart to shape the world.
  Quest Miracle—a miracle created with a 
  quest instead of MP. Once you get enough 
  XP to activate it, you can keep it running 
  until the “book” ends or until you need that 
  quest slot for something else.
  MP—the power source for miracles and Im-
  perial miracles. Sometimes I will speak of 
  this as wish power, “the wishing power of 
  the heart,” or “the power of the wishing heart 
  to change what’s possible.” However for the 
  miracles of the Bleak Academy I suspect it is 
  not something so glad. 
  Bleak power—a miraculous ability drawing 
  on a bleak, unmaking power. These powers 
  usually make it easy to destroy, cripple, in-
  voke despair, and curbstomp your opponents, 
  but there are special rules for resisting them 
  on pg. 52-53 and on pg. 476-481, CMWGE.
  Major power—a miraculous ability capable 
  of doing epic things, extremely complicated 
  things, and/or affecting large areas.
  Ritual power—a miraculous ability that trig-
  gers/requires a Ritual (pg. 60) when invoked, 
  unless the HG waives that for OOC reasons.
  Ritual power
  Ritual power
  gers/requires a Ritual (pg. 60) when invoked, 
  unless the HG waives that for OOC reasons.
  gers/requires a Ritual (pg. 60) when invoked, 
  unless the HG waives that for OOC reasons.
  —a miraculous ability that trig-
  gers/requires a Ritual (pg. 60) when invoked, 
  unless the HG waives that for OOC reasons.
  unless the HG waives that for OOC reasons.
  
  51
  Auctorita
  The miraculous equivalent of an Obstacle is an 
  “Auctoritas”—a barrier rated from 0 to 5. Each 
  Auctoritas says that something doesn’t happen, 
  even when miracles are involved. When a mira-
  cle tries to violate an Auctoritas...
  Unless it has “Strike” equal to the rating of 
  the Auctoritas, that part of the miracle simply 
  fails.
  Afﬂ ictions almost always have an Auctori-
  tas equal to their rating, and they almost never 
  have Strike, so when two Afﬂ ictions clash, the 
  default state is “nothing happens.”
  Strike
  You can usually spend MP to buy “Strike” for 
  your miracles—one MP per point of Strike 
  gained. You can even do this to enhance the mi-
  raculous effects of your Afﬂ ictions, if you know 
  the HG is doing something with an Afﬂ iction 
  and an Auctoritas is blocking it out.
   This not only allows a miracle to bypass an 
  Auctoritas—
  It reduces the rating of an opponent’s miracle, 
  down to a minimum of 0, for the purposes of 
  winning a conﬂ ict between two miracles. (And, 
  much like in a mundane conﬂ ict, the higher-lev-
  el miracle gets resolved ﬁ rst.)
  Bonds and 
  Miraculous Abilities
  A Bond is something you must do, or can’t do, or are driven to do.
  It’s rated between 0 and 5—often, 2.
  Bonds help you win conﬂ icts and overcome Auctorita. A relevant bond can add Strike equal 
  to its rating to a miracle—though, you only get the Strike from the largest appropriate Bond.
  Bonds can get you into trouble, but if they do, you can gain MP—anywhere from 0 to the 
  rating of the Bond. You can also get this MP for spending a whole chapter “honoring” a Bond—if 
  you’re driven to plant trees, for instance, a whole chapter dedicated to planting trees might earn 
  you MP.
  You can also use a Bond for its mundane beneﬁ ts—reduced need for sleep/food, improved 
  Intentions, or to gain Will—even if you’re a miraculous character.
  do, or can’t do, or 
  
  52
  Other Miraculous Traits
  The second-most-common kind of miraculous 
  power is an “Arc Trait”—a miraculous charac-
  ter generally starts with 0-3. These things are 
  pretty idiosyncratic—for instance:
  Wounded Angel (pg. 490, CMWGE) 
  abilities turn your pain into powers.
  Become Somebody (pg. 494, CMWGE) 
  helps you live up to a role or, more generally, 
  ﬁ t in.
  Reality Syndrome (pg. 500, CMWGE) 
  gives you great cosmic power, but it’s a bit 
  tricky to use it.
  Child of the Ash (pg. 508, CMWGE) 
  gives you a giant monster form and ties you to 
  a distant land.
  Spiritual (pg. 515, CMWGE) connects 
  you to an elemental force.
  Creature of the Light (pg. 520, 
  CMWGE) makes you a compelling dramatic 
  ﬁ gure—the world is your stage.
  Creature of Fable (pg. 525, CMWGE) 
  develops you into a story—an urban legend, a 
  myth.
  The Ace (pg. 530, CMWGE) makes you 
  omni-competent—more or less perfect at every-
  thing.
  Sentimental (pg. 533, CMWGE) gives 
  you powers relating to a collection of magical/
  personal treasures. 
  A Keeper of Gardens (pg. 537, CMW-
  GE) lets you shape part of the world with your 
  hands.
  Accursed (pg. 543, CMWGE) curses you, 
  but in recompense, grants a terrifying power of 
  destruction.
  Primordial (pg. 547, CMWGE) makes 
  you an incarnate natural force.
  You’ll ﬁ nd more details on all of these on the 
  relevant pages of the Chuubo’s Marvelous 
  Wish-Granting Engine RPG. 
  Miraculous Abilities of 
  Other Sorts
  There are also a few ways to wind up with a 
  small and speciﬁ c miraculous ability—the po-
  wer to lure octopi out from the lake with your 
  singing, limited immunity to damage, the ability 
  to ﬁ nd a magical path once a season, or whate-
  ver—as a Perk for a miraculous character or, for 
  a mundane character, as the reward for comple-
  ting an Arc.
  Bleak Powers
  There is a bleak power of despair that yearns for 
  everything’s unmaking. There is something out 
  there beyond the world that looks upon reality 
  and ﬁ nds therein no good.
  Miracles with this power source are terri-
  fying and often extremely good at destroying 
  and curb-stomping your opponents—but there’s 
  a special option to resist them, as well. 
  Here’s how that works:
  To see a thing is to enter a dialogue with it. 
  It is a common special effect of a Bleak po-
  wer that it unmakes things—makes them never-
  have-been. But if you are a witness as something 
  is destroyed, as it is made never-have-been, then 
  you are watching a destruction that does not 
  make sense on its own terms. And if you talk 
  about it as it happens, if you say that it’s happe-
  ning, then the lie of the “unmaking” cannot as 
  readily hold.
  It is another common special effect of a Bleak 
  power that it is a judgment—
  And unwitnessed, it may arrogantly claim its 
  judgment unquestionable; but again, if you pay 
  careful attention, if you describe what you see 
  
  53
  as you are seeing it, you can put pressure on that 
  judgment’s righteousness.
  What I mean here is that this is the special me-
  thod of resistance: 
  Watch. Pay attention. Give an emotionally 
  honest and humble account of the effects of a 
  Bleak miracle as it happens:
  That can reverse it, sometimes. 
  The very attention and interest that’s at the 
  heart of a Techno game’s in-genre actions is, it 
  turns out, poison to Bleak abilities. 
  Taking advantage of this... it’s hard! It’s sca-
  ry! But if you stand there and you recite what 
  you see, if you watch as the World-Breaker’s 
  Hand or whatever unmakes the world, as it 
  devours you, as it kills you, as it destroys the 
  world around you or before you or whatever—
  There is a chance. It’s not a guarantee. But 
  there is a chance. 
  The eyes that see, the ears that hear, even 
  the hand that touches—against the power in 
  those things the Bleak power will sometimes 
  fail. And here is how it plays out: that the Ble-
  ak power wins, at least, if it would have won; 
  but afterwards, when the metaphorical or literal 
  waters have settled, the HG must consider whe-
  ther your truth and your witness have poisoned 
  the unmaking and the judgment of the Bleak. 
  Whether your compassion for what you wit-
  ness has poisoned its malice and its uncharity. 
  If by watching and saying what you saw, you 
  might have unmade and unwoven the unmaking 
  and the unweaving and turned back the tides of 
  death.
  There’s a chance—not a guarantee—that the 
  core Actions of a Techno game, or the resolution 
  of a red or gray colored Issue, will revert the ef-
  fect and make things OK. That Foreshadowing 
  as you watch the end will. That Discovery will. 
  Sympathetic Action to what’s being destroyed. 
  Maybe even Shock. The end of—and I know 
  I haven’t talked about this—the Issue Myste-
  ry, or the resolution of the Issue Something to 
  Deal With. 
  Sometimes that stuff will revert the effect 
  and leave things OK. Sometimes even better 
  than OK. Sometimes the power of the Bleak 
  rolls back and the world is left fresher, newer, 
  cleaner  than it had been, or scattered with the 
  treasures of the void, because you watched; and 
  paid attention; and told the world what it was 
  that you saw.
  Issues
  After each chapter, the HG may hand out an 
  Issue to one or more PCs—
  Progressing them along some personal 
  story like:
   
  ✿ a calling—something they’re going to 
  need to do
   
  ✿ being a hero
   
  ✿ having something psychological or per-
  sonal they have to deal with
   
  ✿ indulging in a vice
  These are a big deal, and I hope you’ll 
  prompt the HG to include them if they get 
  left out, but there’s no content you have to 
  know about in advance—
  It’s all on handouts and cards, which you’ll 
  either receive in that format or can look up in 
  the main CMWGE book.
  
  54
  As a character in the Chuubo’s Marvelous 
  Wish-Granting Engine RPG, you’ll typically 
  have 3-6 Health Levels to absorb bad things that 
  happen, divided into:
   
  ✿ Normal Health Levels, which you can lose 
  to any kind of wound;
   
  ✿ Tough Health Levels, which you can only 
  lose to Serious or Deadly Wounds; and
   
  ✿ Divine Health Levels, which you can only 
  lose to Deadly Wounds.
  When you lose your last Tough Health Level, 
  you’ll also recover all your Normal Health Lev-
  els—the wounds in them immediately heal. The 
  same applies to your Divine Health Levels—
  when you lose your last Divine Health Level, 
  you’ll get your Tough Health Levels back.
  A typical loadout for a PC is 2 Normal Health 
  Levels, 1 Tough Health Level, and 0-2 Divine 
  Health Levels depending on the game concept. 
  When you run out of Health Levels, you’re 
  no longer a PC; instead, you’re dead, or trans-
  formed, or in someone else’s power. Sometimes 
  that means you need a new PC; other times, 
  you’ll get them back in a bit, fully healed!
  Surface Wounds
  The HG hands these out for minor injuries. 
  They come with a small power, as described on 
  pg. 47. They heal in 0-2 chapters, usually at a 
  chapter’s end.
  Serious Wounds
  When something happens that you just can’t ac-
  cept, you may take a Serious Wound. 
  The ﬁ rst thing that happens here is that you 
  get to change what the wound is. It was unac-
  ceptable! So you won’t let it happen that way.
  You don’t get to change the actions that led 
  you there, not yours, not your enemy’s, but you 
  do get to change how what happens to you gets 
  resolved. If you take a Serious Wound, you’re 
  still hurt or changed in some fashion, but you 
  can do things like decide that a bullet hits your 
  arm instead of your heart; that, instead of be-
  ing turned to stone, you slowed down and got 
  tougher; that that love spell worked on you, but 
  you’re the most annoying in-love person that 
  they’ve ever seen! And to ﬁ t this, as with a Sur-
  face Wound, you can get a temporary power—
   
  ✿ A +1 to Intentions where you’re playing up 
  the wound.
   
  ✿ A level 1 Bond related to the wound
   
  ✿ A level 1 Afﬂ iction related to the wound
   
  ✿ Or, if you and the HG can quickly ﬁ gure out 
  how it works, a level 2-3 magical or Superior 
  Skill that relates to the wound.
  Serious Wounds heal in 0-2 books, usually at the 
  end of the book; you can, however, use a quest 
  to speed up that healing (pg. 450, CMWGE).
  Deadly Wounds
  If a wound comes from a particularly epic 
  source, it might be a Deadly Wound instead. 
  The powers you get from a Deadly Wound 
  are a bit stronger—
   
  ✿ A +2 to Intentions where you’re playing up 
  the wound.
   
  ✿ A level 2 Bond related to the wound
   
  ✿ A higher-level Afﬂ iction related to the 
  wound, possibly scaling with your current 
  rank in some Issue.
   
  ✿ A level 3+ Magical or Superior Skill, or
   
  ✿ A miraculous ability
  Deadly wounds do not heal without a quest or 
  power; see pg. 128 and pg. 450, CMWGE.
  Health Levels
  
  55
  Transitions and Rituals
  
  56
  Transition
  Condition: You’ve just ﬁ nished a transition.
  Action: 
   
   Become Thoughtful and Distant.
  Sometimes the game’ll touch on something in-
  expressible in ordinary play—something about 
  the game or game world that can’t be experi-
  enced just by hearing descriptions of the world 
  around the PCs and then playing out your ac-
  tions. 
  Maybe it’s because it’s spiritual, or highly 
  emotional, or abstract. Maybe it’s because the 
  PCs have no real chance to witness it. It’s some-
  thing where in a video game you’d cut away 
  from the protagonists to show a moment of 
  beauty or a bit of poetry between chapters. It’s 
  something where in a movie you’d have music 
  and landscape but not action or dialogue. It’s 
  something where in a book you’d switch to tell-
  ing the reader a bit of ancient history, or a story, 
  or an aphorism, or quoting from song lyrics.
  It breaks the process, in short, with something 
  that’s meant to inform your emotions and your 
  perspective on the game world without actually 
  talking to your planning, reasoning mind.
  In the Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting 
  Engine RPG, that’s handled as a Transition.
  The ordinary process of play stops.
  Instead, the HG will quote a bit of poetry—
  usually just a section of a longer poem, return-
  ing to the rest in later transitions—or have the 
  players read from a short script, usually in the 
  roles of mysterious entities (“the Falling Man,” 
  “the Star Woman,” “the Sufferer,” and the like.)
   Or there’ll be a cut-scene, not to tell the play-
  ers about cool stuff happening elsewhere (you 
  can do that, but it’s not a Transition) but rather 
  to change their beliefs about things. Like, you 
  might show their employer making a phone call 
  to betray them. Or show a treasure that they 
  left behind as valueless getting appraised as 
  worth millions after someone else found it and 
  brought it in.
  Anyway, a Transition happens when an HG 
  invokes one, although there are often speciﬁ c 
  things that PCs can do in-world—e.g.,
   
  ✿ traveling on certain trains
   
  ✿ or to certain places
   
  ✿ or preparing themselves to enter a sacred 
  space
   
  ✿ or armoring themselves for war
  —that’ll automatically bring a Transition on.
   
  Transition
  
  57
  There’s an XP Action that you can take 
  whenever there’s a Transition. It’s effectively 
  in-genre: the HG pre-approves it just by having 
  a Transition. It means basically that when the 
  Transition ends, your PC returns to play already 
  faded: thoughtful, distant, emotionally or spiri-
  tually affected even if they do not know why.
  Example Poetic Transition
  This is a piece by Blake. I’ve adapted it a little 
  for use in play, but you’re free to use the origi-
  nal! You might use this:
   
  ✿ if the PCs have been dared to sleep for seven 
  nights in a graveyard, when they do so sleep
   
  ✿ now and then in the story of a slower-than-
  light starship where the PCs wake up from 
  cryogenic freeze centuries before the end
   
  ✿ preceding visits to an angel that the PCs 
  work for in a story of Armageddon—perhaps 
  as a hint that not all is right under Heaven.
  Reading 1
  And so he was quiet, and that very night,
  As Tom was a-sleeping, he’d had such a 
  sight!—that thousands of sleepers, Dick, Jane, 
  Maude, and Jack, were all of them lock’d up in 
  cofﬁ ns of black.
  Reading 2
  That thousands of sleepers, Dick, Jane, Maude, 
  and Jack, were all of them lock’d up in cofﬁ ns 
  of black. And by came an Angel, and he’d had 
  a bright key, and he’d open’d the cofﬁ ns & 
  he’d set them all free.
  Reading 3
  Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, 
  they’d ran and wash’d in a river, and shone 
  in the sand and naked & white, all their bags 
  left behind, they rose upon clouds, and they 
  sported in wind;
  Reading 4
  And the Angel told Tom if he’d be a good boy,
  He’d have God for his father, & he’d never 
  want joy.
  Reading 5
  And they washed in a river, and they shone in 
  the sand, and back down the plains, leaping, 
  laughing, they’d ran
  Reading 6
  And they’d opened their cofﬁ ns and they’d 
  climbed them back in and the Angel, he’d 
  locked them with a bright key and grin... until
  Reading 7
  And they’d opened their cofﬁ ns and they’d 
  climbed them back in and the Angel, he’d 
  locked them with a bright key and grin... until 
  all of those sleepers: Bea, Peg, Graham, and 
  Mack were seal’d back up tight in their cofﬁ ns 
  of black
  Reading 8
  As Tom was a-sleeping, he’d had such a 
  sight!—he was still, cold, and quiet for the rest 
  of the night. 
  You can ﬁ nd an example of a script Transition 
  on pg. 269, CMWGE.
  
  58
  So sometimes, particularly in a Techno game, 
  the world’ll get weird. Things won’t work well 
  with the normal process of play. Instead there’s 
  something like... a mini-game in a video game, 
  or a montage in a movie, or an experimental in-
  terlude in a longer book.
  Things get stylized.
  This is normally an indication that the psy-
  chic content of the moment—its effects on the 
  mind and heart and soul of the participants—is 
  a bigger deal than the outcome. It can also mean 
  that something is socially fraught and people 
  are behaving in alien ways because of it.
  So we’re talking...
   
  ✿ battles where the PCs don’t control the out-
  come
   
  ✿ montages—
   ✶ training montages
   ✶ shopping montages
   ✶ preparation for battle montages
   ✶ clips from a play the PCs are putting on
   ✶ or a movie they’re watching
   ✶ gathering votes for a bill they’re trying to 
  pass
   
  ✿ magical girl transformations
   
  ✿ creating art
   
  ✿ spiritual experiences
   
  ✿ giant robot summoning and transformation 
  sequences
   
  ✿ experiences on hallucinogens
   
  ✿ telepathic dives into a hostile or alien tar-
  get’s mind
   
  ✿ reality television, where people “talk to the 
  camera” after events and the game is a post-
  editing reality
  ...stuff like that.
  These tend to play out in strange and disjoint-
  ed moments—bits of on-topic description from 
  the players about what happens, comments on 
  the ritual and recent events, and people posing 
  dramatically.
  There are two XP Actions associated with 
  Rituals.
  The ﬁ rst is Invoking a Ritual.
  There are usually key phrases or actions that 
  can trigger a Ritual. 
   
  Rituals
  Ritual Actions
  The Invocation
  Condition: You have the OOC attention of all of the players, 
  and there is an applicable ritual.
  Action: 
   
   Invoke a Ritual!
  
  59
  For instance, 
   
  ✿ if there’s a ritual for sailing a long distance, 
  you might invoke it with “Sail Away!” 
   
  ✿ if there’s a Ritual for powering up a Mar-
  velous Wish-Granting Engine, you might 
  invoke it with “I’m invoking the Ritual of 
  the Engine.”
  Usually this is in the HG’s hands—the HG can 
  veto a Ritual, or make it obligatory (“the boat 
  isn’t going anywhere without a Ritual!”), or 
  leave it optional. Usually this is handled on a 
  case-by-case basis—but whatever the HG de-
  cides, someone has to take the Invoke a Ritual 
  Action and kick in the XP.* There’s also a sec-
  ondary requirement:
  You need the OOC attention of everyone in 
  the group.
  This isn’t meant to be burdensome, just: a 
  Ritual can’t coexist with normal play. You can’t 
  have two people over in a corner ﬁ nishing up a 
  conversation, or someone so distracted by tex-
  ting that when they ﬁ nish they start doing nor-
  mal play in the middle of a Ritual. The Ritual 
  takes the place of the ordinary game—
  The normal process of time moving forward 
  in the game stops and something else begins.
  At the very least, there’s a level 2-5 Obstacle 
  or Auctoritas in the way of continuing with or-
  dinary actions and ordinary play.
  Because Rituals and Transitions require 
  HG involvement to initiate, you’re automati-
  cally allowed to take the relevant XP Actions.
  This can be the HG, but 
  it’s usually not!
  
  60
  Once a Ritual starts, there are an inﬁ nite num-
  ber of ways it could play out—each Ritual could 
  have unique rules. That said, though, there’s a 
  pretty standard pattern.
  The HG points out people, one by one—
  They’re in the spotlight, as is anyone else in 
  physical contact with their PC.
  At that time, they can take a Ritual Action, 
  after which the HG will prompt somebody else. 
  If you think your Ritual Action is going to be 
  cool, or mean something, you can treat it as 
  an XP Action.
  The standard Ritual Actions are:
   
  ✿ stating or emoting your reaction to some re-
  cent event;
   
  ✿ emoting your reaction to the ritual;
   
  ✿ “posing” or otherwise showing off in some 
  iconic fashion suited to the spirit of the spe-
  cial effects or the ritual’s mood;
   
  ✿ taking actions that are speciﬁ cally called out 
  by a rules book or the HG as part of the ritu-
  al—most often,
   ✶ describing a feature of a montage
   ✶ responding to a speciﬁ c prompt, like “you 
  come across a dying soldier. It’s too late to 
  save her. What do you do?”
   ✶ taking special actions with special rules 
  that the Ritual allows, like special attack 
  moves in a dueling Ritual or having an in-
  sight into some truth of the game in a medi-
  tation Ritual
   
  ✿ invoking a different Ritual with a Ritual 
  prompt, combining the two Rituals thereby.
  If two characters are in physical contact, they 
  share a spotlight and can interrupt one another 
  here; otherwise, they should not.
  A Sailing Ritual
  Here’s an example of how a Ritual might play 
  out:
  Madeline (HG): You’re on a boat! And you’ve 
  just discovered a new Ritual: while on this boat, 
  you can sail to available distant lands by calling 
  out ‘Sail away!’ 
  Diane: Sail away!
   
  Ritual Actions
  Ritual Actions
  Condition: You’re in a ritual. The spotlight’s on you, or on 
  someone in physical contact with you.
  Action: 
   
   Add a group XP to the pot and declare that your im-
  pending action is meaningful.
  
  61
  Madeline (HG): ...already?
  Diane: I confess! It is in fact for no other reason 
  than to sail to distant lands that we have crowd-
  ed onto this boat at all.
  Madeline (HG): Okay! Toss me an XP.
  Edward: It’s really our XP.
  Madeline (HG): I’m a player too!
  Edward: It goes in the real players’ group XP 
  pot. You are not to touch it.
  Madeline (HG): Just do it so I can shut Edward 
  up.
  Diane: Done!
  Madeline: You there, Heather?
  Heather: Mm. What?
  Diane: I’m invoking a Ritual! Sail away!
  Heather: Oh. OK!
  Madeline: All right. You can describe things 
  you do around the boat, “pose” or show off in-
  teractions with nautical life, talk about what you 
  hope to ﬁ nd at the end of the journey, or sum-
  marize weird things that you see or ﬁ nd on the 
  journey. 
  [Madeline drops a handout on the table with 
  some notes on the Ritual.]
  Madeline: Heather.
  Heather: What,  me?
  Madeline: Is that ... posing?
  Heather: Haha. Um, I hadn’t meant it to be. 
  But, sure! My character, Julianna, is complete-
  ly bafﬂ ed as to why the spotlight turns to her. 
  “What, me?... I’m... on a boat.”
  Madeline: Edward.
  Edward: We sail through lashing waves and 
  terrifying storms.
  Madeline: Diane?
  Diane: There’s a giant goldﬁ sh!
  Madeline: A goldﬁ sh?
  Diane: It has a yin-yang symbol on its head. 
  It’s very mysterious. But I won’t Discover it be-
  cause I’m in the middle of another XP Action al-
  ready. It rises almost to the surface, then it darts 
  by under the boat, making it wobble and shake.
  Madeline: OK. Heather again?
  Heather: Round-robin?
  Madeline: I ... guess?
  Heather: There’s a near brush with a pirate 
  ship on the horizon. Luckily it turned out that it 
  wasn’t a pirate ship on the distant horizon after 
  all but rather this really small ship piloted by ant 
  pirates that we did not fear much at all.
  Edward: Until they got at our supplies!
  Madeline: You can’t say that, Ed. Your charac-
  ters aren’t in physical contact.
  Edward: I am willing to spend MP to overcome 
  the stillness of the world and interject it!
  Madeline: Fine.
  Heather: Traitor.
  Edward: Heeheehee.
  Madeline: Diane?
  Diane: I’m getting used to the rhythm of nauti-
  cal life. Adjust the ropes. Holystone the deck. 
  Fire the cannon at random islands. I pause, ex-
  hausted, in the middle of scrubbing the deck, 
  and pose.
  Madeline: Cool! It’s around then that your des-
  tination, “Distant Lands,” comes into sight.
  Diane: Wait! Somebody should take an actual 
  XP Action.
  Madeline: ...why?
  
  62
  Diane: Because this is an example. You ﬁ nished 
  too fast! It’s not pedagogical at all!
  [Heather raises her hand.]
  Madeline: Heather.
  Heather chucks an XP in the group pot:  I 
  hope we’ll ﬁ nd something to cure our sick 
  teacher, there, at the end of the journey.
  Madeline: And done.
  Battle Mode
  Here’s a more esoteric example of a Ritual—
  “Battle Mode.” 
  This Ritual is designed to emulate the kind of 
  turn-by-turn conﬂ icts you’ll see in traditional 
  RPGs, complete with the accompanying sense 
  of tension, while also staying true to the basic 
  principles of the game.
  Cooperative
  Battle Mode is inherently cooperative—it can 
  resolve a ﬁ ght where PCs are on “opposite 
  sides,” but not one where they confront one an-
  other directly. Handle direct PC-PC combat us-
  ing the regular system or the Bluebell Park duel-
  ing rules from pg. 249 of  Chuubo’s Marvelous 
  Wish-Granting Engine.
  Round-Robin Play
  By default, a Battle Mode Ritual plays out in 
  round-robin order. Unless the HG actively med-
  dles with the action order: 
   
  ✿ each player gets a turn, in which
   ✶ they take an action
   ✶ followed by an HG response.
   
  ✿ the spotlight moves to the next player in a 
  pre-determined order.
  The “action” each player takes is not necessarily 
  an Intention—it’s just “the thing they’re doing,” 
  or, “the thing you describe your PC as doing,” 
  which could fall under an existing Intention, or 
  a new Intention, or a miracle, or some other in-
  system thing. It’s generally meant to play out 
  over a few seconds IC.
  The Fog of War
  A key feature of the Battle Mode Ritual is that 
  questions count as actions.
  I don’t think this applies to purely OOC ques-
  tions—trying to clarify something already said, 
  or asking about rules. But if you’re asking about 
  the world, that’s basically a Ritual Action to ﬁ nd 
  something out.
  Further, it’s an action that uses your turn—
  you’d do this instead of taking another action.
  So in any given turn
   
  ✿ You can explicitly watch the enemy or the 
  scene, and if you do that, you’ll see what 
  happens but won’t be able to fully prevent 
  it—at best, you can mitigate it. 
   
  ✿ Or, you’ll take another kind of action, in 
  which case your information on what’s go-
  ing on is going to be pretty limited—you 
  might not even know if you succeeded or 
  you failed. 
   
  ✿ Actions like “look for better ground” fall 
  somewhere in between. 
  Overcoming these Restrictions
  These constraints on the players aren’t natural 
  to the system:
  Normally, anyone can act at any time and can 
  pair up observation and action Intentions—or 
  take a single Intention that covers both. 
  ...but here, that kind of thing is forbidden by 
  the Ritual.
  To overcome the rules of a Ritual and act out 
  of turn, or to break the fog of war paradigm, 
  a PC has to overcome a level 2-5 Obstacle or 
  Auctoritas. The HG can set the number here: 
  aim high to make a conﬂ ict scarier and more 
  Ritualized, aim low if the Ritual is more of a 
  suggestion than a rule.
  Enemy Scripts
  A ﬁ nal feature of a battle Ritual is that enemies 
  
  63
  have scripted patterns of behavior: developed 
  on the spot, decided on in advance, or recorded 
  in the early rounds of the ﬁ ght and then used 
  again later on. Speciﬁ cally, in between the PC 
  actions, enemies will engage in:
   
  ✿ attack patterns—1-4 sequences of moves 
  that you can theoretically learn to anticipate 
  either IC or OOC;
   
  ✿ special attacks—big attacks with big F/X, 
  usually charging up for 1-2 turns (that is, 1-2 
  players get to act while it’s charging up) be-
  fore the attack happens; 
   
  ✿ attacks on NPCs—when an attack pattern 
  can’t target a PC (“attack a distant enemy” 
  when surrounded by PCs) or between attack 
  patterns, enemies often attack NPCs. If there 
  aren’t any NPCs to attack, they’ll attack the 
  environment. 
  The Ritual Itself
  The three special features of a ﬁ ght Ritual are 
  round-robin actions, fog of war, and scripted 
  enemies.
  On their turn, players choose between the fol-
  lowing Ritual Actions: 
   
  ✿ asking a question about their enemies or the 
  state of the scene as a whole,
   
  ✿ asking a question about something more 
  speciﬁ c,
   
  ✿ observing something, to much the same ef-
  fect as asking about it, or
   
  ✿ taking an action, in a somewhat blind fash-
  ion.
  “Taking an action” includes both combat-rele-
  vant Intentions and the following Ritual moves,
   
  ✿ stating or emoting their reaction to some re-
  cent event,
   
  ✿ emoting their reaction to the ﬁ ght or some-
  thing in it,
   
  ✿ invoking another Ritual to somehow com-
  bine them, or
   
  ✿ “posing” or showing off their moves.
  In general, emoted reactions are just indications 
  of IC distraction: emoting counts as your turn, 
  and you don’t take another action, and you’ll 
  only pick up new information if it’s directly rel-
  evant to what you’re emoting about. Posing, on 
  the other hand, can be combat-effective:
  Instead of interacting directly with the Inten-
  tion or miracle system, you describe what your 
  combat action looks like, and the HG rules from 
  there. It’ll depend on the group’s general attitude 
  whether a typical pose is more like “I backﬂ ip 
  over the enemy, carving verses of poetry into 
  his chest and head,” “I’m all wary and cautious, 
  but still stabbing ’em,” or “17 damage! 32 dam-
  age! You’re Blind!” 
  Fading and Battle
  It’s common for the HG to announce a battle. In 
  this case, they are the one to invoke the Ritual 
  and the one to put an XP in the pot. They’re also 
  the ones to fade, which means two things:
   
  ✿ The fog of war intensiﬁ es. When the world 
  itself is faded, the HG is less likely to de-
  scribe things that happen unless a player 
  asks a question. But asking a question falls 
  under the fog of war rules.
   
  ✿ The HG is even less likely than usual to futz 
  with the round-robin turn order. 
  That said, ultimately, it’s up to the HG how ac-
  tive to be while faded, just like it is up to a faded 
  player.
  Speaking of faded players:
  If you’re faded in Battle Mode, you still par-
  ticipate and you still take your turns—although 
  the HG may skip you now and then. In particu-
  lar, while you’re faded, you can be wounded or 
  buried under attackers or whatever, but further 
  resolution on that has to wait until you unfade, 
  which probably means you stop having turns of 
  action at that time. 
  If everyone stops having turns, the Ritual 
  ends and the HG skips forward to what happens 
  next.
  
  64
  Example 1: The Faded HG
  The players are playing themselves, lost in an 
  alien land.
  Madeline (the HG): The ice-wolves sweep 
  down the hillside towards you. I’m going to put 
  in the XP and fade for this, so we’ll be going 
  round robin, starting with Diane:
  BATTLE MODE!
  Diane: What are they doing?
  [This is Diane’s action.]
  Madeline: They’ve closed with you in an in-
  stant; you have your eyes on one of them as it 
  bounds towards you, but it can’t quite work its 
  way around your guard. It’s kind of dancing in 
  place there, feinting and pulling back.
  Edward: Are all of them doing that?
  [This is Edward’s action.]
  Madeline: The tide washes over your group; 
  some are trying to circle around behind. But 
  yeah, the ones you’re directly focused on—
  they’re a little combat-shy about attacking from 
  the front.
  Heather: Is there any safe place? Somewhere 
  we can put our backs to a wall?
  [This is Heather’s action.]
  Madeline: Not really; give me an Intention, 
  though.
  Heather: 3?
  Madeline: You take a proper look but you’re 
  kind of exposed. At best you can move a bit in 
  on the hill so that attacking you is awkward. As 
  you’re looking, one of the wolves surges out of 
  the pack: it is right in your face, its teeth are 
  snapping, its claws are raking, I think it prob-
  ably gets you.
  Heather: Ack! Dragging out Weathered to re-
  duce the damage?
  Madeline: OK.
  [She could probably stop and resolve the wound, 
  or describe it, but she’s faded, and there’s fog-
  of-war, and she’s decided to play both factors 
  up.]
  Diane: Heather! I’m going to get to her side, see 
  about ﬁ ghting back to back.
  Madeline: One of them tears at your leg on the 
  way there. Everything is gray fur and snow and 
  pain.
  Diane: Dang. Right, Intention to side kick that 
  one as I go.
  Madeline: OK.
  [These things explode when hurt badly enough, 
  and Madeline’s decided that just happened—but 
  she’s faded, so she just says “OK.”]
  Edward: I’m huddling down behind my shield. 
  I think we can make this.
  Madeline: A tree shatters behind you.
  [The wolves have an attack pattern that in-
  cludes lunging out of melee to attack a distant 
  enemy. In this case, with everyone in melee and 
  no NPCs around, that means “a tree.”]
  Edward: What?
  Madeline: It’s all a blur.
  [Edward doesn’t get a useful answer because 
  it’s not his turn any more.]
  Diane: Ow, ow, ow. What happened with the 
  wolf I kicked?
  [It’s not Diane’s turn either but Madeline, 
  Heather, and Diane have lost track of this for 
  a moment.]
  
  65
  Madeline: Exploded, you think. You’ve made it 
  to Heather’s side. The wolves are actually slow-
  ing down a little—like they expended a lot of 
  energy on something. You didn’t see what.
  Edward: I saw what!
  Madeline: Maaaybe. Heather?
  Heather: If they’re slowed down, I’m going to 
  unleash my Seven Stars Form.
  Madeline: Got it.
  [Madeline isn’t actually trying to end Heather’s 
  turn here—she’s expecting more detail. But she’s 
  fallen into a speech habit of not giving much in-
  formation.]
  Heather: What happens?
  Madeline: You tell me! At least tell me what 
  you’re doing.
  Heather: I’m charging up with a brilliant white 
  light, then appearing in seven places around 
  three of the wolves to stab them.
  [While the players are playing themselves, 
  they’ve gotten some power ups.]
  Madeline: The blades sink in. Ed?
  Edward: I’m pushing forward, uncertainly.
  Madeline: There’s no real resistance. Going 
  anywhere in particular?
  Edward: Towards the others, I guess.
  Madeline: You catch a brief glimpse of the pil-
  lar of light of the Seven Stars Form. Diane?
  Diane: My back-to-back partner! I’m going to 
  check on what’s going on here.
  Madeline: Heather’s managed to blow up an-
  other three of them, so there’s three left; one 
  of them is surrounded by this swirl of ice and 
  snow, like it’s building up to a Stars form of its 
  own. 
  Heather: I’m going to... can I try to interrupt it?
  Madeline: You can.
  Heather: I’m going to do that. Intention 5.
  Madeline: It hurts. It hurts a lot. You’re tearing 
  in through a hurricane full of snow and metal. 
  But you’re just good enough to catch sight of 
  the worst of it, duck through, dodge, and shatter 
  the wolf’s skull.
  [At this point, Madeline decides that the wolves 
  retreat, but the PCs don’t realize that yet.]
  Edward: I’m lashing out at one of the remain-
  ing ones.
  Madeline: Your sword hits only air; it pulls 
  back just in time.
  Diane: I’m going to try to take it on from the 
  other side.
  Madeline: You corner one of the last two 
  wolves, spear it, and it goes down.
  Heather: And the last one?
  Madeline: Dashing away into the hills.
  Example 2: Fog-of-War with an Unfad-
  ed HG
  Madeline: The wolves sweep down the hillside 
  towards you. We’ll be going round robin for 
  this, starting with Diane—
  Diane: BATTLE MODE!
  [Diane tosses an XP into the pot.]
  Madeline: Hahaha, you’re quick! OK. They’ve 
  closed with you in an instant; you have your eyes 
  on one of them as it bounds towards you, but it 
  can’t quite work its way around your guard. It’s 
  kind of dancing in place there, feinting and pull-
  ing back. Skipping your round robin, though, 
  ’cause your action was to trigger heightened 
  
  66
  battleﬁ eld awareness. Ed?
  [This isn’t a rule, but I think it makes sense.]
  Edward: Are all of them doing that?
  [This is still Edward’s action—Madeline is be-
  ing more forthcoming, but the fog of war con-
  tinues to exist.]
  Madeline: The tide washes over your group; 
  some are trying to circle around behind. But 
  yeah, the ones you’re directly focused on—
  they’re a little combat-shy about attacking from 
  the front.
  Heather: Is there any safe place? Somewhere 
  we can put our backs to a wall?
  Madeline: Not really; give me an Intention, 
  though.
  Heather: 3?
  Madeline: You take a proper look but you’re 
  kind of exposed. At best you can move a bit in 
  on the hill so that attacking you is awkward. As 
  you’re looking, one of the wolves surges out of 
  the pack: it is right in your face, its teeth are 
  snapping, its claws are raking, I think it prob-
  ably gets you.
  Heather: Ack! Dragging out Weathered to re-
  duce the damage?
  Madeline: OK. Quick Surface Wound?
  Heather: Bond 1—adrenaline surge. [Heather 
  is an old hand at picking wound effects that help 
  her strike back harder.] And I howl!
  Diane: Heather! I’m going to get to her side, see 
  about ﬁ ghting back to back.
  Madeline: One of them tears at your leg on the 
  way there. Everything is gray fur and snow and 
  pain.
  Diane: Dang. Right, Intention to side kick that 
  one as I go.
  Madeline: It explodes in a ﬂ urry of ice and 
  metal. [They’re not just ice-wolves. They’re 
  snow, ice, and metal wolves!] You’ve reached 
  Heather’s side.
  Edward: I’m huddling down behind my shield. 
  I think we can make this.
  Madeline: They batter against your shield like 
  rain. One of the wolves lunges past you, shatter-
  ing a tree behind you. 
  Edward: What?
  Madeline: It was a bad tree. It was looking at 
  the wolf in a bad way. I guess? Diane.
  Diane: Ow, ow, ow. What’s going on with the 
  wolves?
  Madeline: The wolves are actually slowing 
  down a little—it’s like they exhausted them-
  selves with that ﬁ rst push and are needing to 
  regroup. You think it’s a good time to take them 
  out.
  Madeline: Heather?
  Heather: If they’re slowed down, I’m going to 
  unleash my Seven Stars Form.
  Madeline: Got it.
  Heather: What happens?
  Madeline: You tell me! At least tell me what 
  you’re doing.
  Heather: I’m charging up with a brilliant white 
  light, then appearing in seven places around 
  three of the wolves to stab them.
  Madeline: Two of them just explode. The other 
  is covered in red damage numbers ﬂ oating in 
  the air like some kind of weird runic shell. Ed?
  Edward: I’m going to try to take another one 
  out, pushing closer to Heather, if they’re still 
  exhausted.
  Madeline: Sure. Your sword rips through the 
  ice-wind part of a wolf’s head and it explodes 
  in a ﬂ urry of ice and snow and is gone. Diane?
  
  67
  Diane: I’m game if they’re just going to let us 
  kill them.
  Madeline: They’re not; they’ve shaken off the 
  immediate exhaustion. Still going for it?
  Diane: I’m more interested in staying where I 
  can guard Heather’s back.
  Madeline: Fair enough. There’s three left; one 
  is seriously wounded (going by the damage 
  numbers) and one is surrounded by this grow-
  ing swirl of ice and snow, like it’s building up to 
  a stars form of its own. 
  Heather: I’m going to... can I try to interrupt it?
  Madeline: You can.
  Heather: I’m going to do that. Intention 5.
  Madeline: It hurts. It hurts a lot. You’re tearing 
  in through a hurricane full of snow and metal. 
  But you’re just good enough to catch sight of 
  the worst of it, duck through, dodge, and shatter 
  the wolf’s skull.
  Edward: I’m lashing out at one of the remain-
  ing ones.
  Madeline: Your sword hits only air; they’re re-
  treating, rushing away towards the hills.
  Diane: I’m going to get in its way, block its re-
  treat, pin it ‘tween me and Ed.
  Madeline: ... sure, that’s fair. You corner that 
  wolf, spear it, and it goes down.
  Heather: And the last one?
  Madeline: Dashing away into the hills, leaving 
  bits of fur and damage numbers scattered on the 
  stones behind.
  
  68
  You are now prepared to play the Chuubo’s 
  Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine in the Tech-
  no genre. I recommend you ﬁ nd someone run-
  ning a game and play through the character-cre-
  ation lifepath on pg. 49-62 of the core!
  And That’s All She Wrote!
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Chuubos Marvelous Wish Granting Engine/CMWGE - Techno Player's Guide.pdf