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Coyote & Crow The Role Playing Game
Toy
Published April 20, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 30, 2022
Exactly what an RPG ought to be. This is the decolonized masterpiece we've all needed. The book itself is GORGEOUS. The d12 system takes some getting used-to, but what system doesn't?
June 28, 2024
Coyote & Crow - beautiful idea, poor execution.
Mechanics - very simple, bland, system - too simple for my tastes, but it is still a full realized game. Has as much crunch as pudding with some oreos mixed in - a little, not enough. I know oreo-pudding is delicious, it is a bad analogy.
World Design - left me wanting more - very utopia, more indulgent fantasy by author than introspective or interesting possibility. Lots of space for good adventures, a complaint I sometimes see levied against it, but still - I would have liked a more thoughtful approach.
Art is good, authorship is good, and I like the idea and have zero regrets about supporting the product or the team. Lots of potential left on the floor. A good example of solarpunk but without the period of suffering (called the Real World Now) that solarpunk needs to feel good.
Mechanics - very simple, bland, system - too simple for my tastes, but it is still a full realized game. Has as much crunch as pudding with some oreos mixed in - a little, not enough. I know oreo-pudding is delicious, it is a bad analogy.
World Design - left me wanting more - very utopia, more indulgent fantasy by author than introspective or interesting possibility. Lots of space for good adventures, a complaint I sometimes see levied against it, but still - I would have liked a more thoughtful approach.
Art is good, authorship is good, and I like the idea and have zero regrets about supporting the product or the team. Lots of potential left on the floor. A good example of solarpunk but without the period of suffering (called the Real World Now) that solarpunk needs to feel good.
Read
December 6, 2022A very interesting but also confusing game for me -- possibly because it's not pitched to me.
Coyote & Crow is a Native American production, featuring largely Indigenous writers and artists (with tribal affiliations noted in the credits, along with the note that this is all self-reported, which I appreciated given the legal and genealogical murkiness around tribal affiliation), with the premise that -- well, here's where I start to get confused a bit, but let me try to give the logline as I grok it:
In a world where European colonization never happened, the tribes of North America faced an ecological catastrophe, but found a magical plant that helped unlock powers, and now, several hundred years later (?), your characters live in a mystical cyberpunk-ish world (cybernetics, yes -- evil corporations, not as far as I could tell) and they do, well, just about anything they would want.
Here you might see some of my problem in wrapping my head around this game: what do the characters do? Is there a great evil to fight? A great unknown to discover? A great home to protect? Well, yes, there are (actually maybe there is no great evil), and the book later gives some frameworks for games (maybe your spies for your nation, maybe there's a war brewing, maybe you're trouble-shooters solving problems). The sample adventure is "go investigate this suddenly quiet research station, potentially tangle with some enemy scouts, face a monster," which is a pretty solid plot for an RPG adventure, and helps show what's important here. For one thing, you can fight, but almost all the sample rolls here are about gathering information so that you know what the right thing to do is. That feels to me like the closest thing to a core activity or focus: you may have to fight, but first you gotta learn.
Now on one hand, the wide scope of the game (trouble-shooters, spies, warriors?) might seem like an invitation to make the world your own, and yet, well, I don't feel that way: this is a game with a specific hook -- or maybe a few hooks: it's an uncolonized America written by an Indigenous gamer (and largely team), but it's also a cyberpunkish world, and it's also a somewhat mystical world (with all sort of fantasy/folklore monsters), and also maybe it's a superpower world (depending on how you think about the powers that PCs have. All of which feels like a lot to me.
Or let me put it a different way: it would be fascinating to think about what an uncolonized America looks like. Adding in the other issues (the ecological catastrophe that changes the world, the addition of the Gift that powers people) takes away focus from that issue. I'm struggling a bit to articulate why this feels overstuffed or unfocused, but maybe I should think of it another way: it would be worthwhile just to imagine what an uncolonized Americas would look like, even just as a way to rethink what we think of as normal. But playing in the real world is always a hard sell for gamers, who want things nerd-troped (add mecha, add vampires, add magic, add something); and here, I don't think the author wants to say "this is just what an Indigenous-only world would look like" -- I think the team wants the latitude to get away from history. And maybe that's the thing that's confusing me: this is a game about history featuring a historical change -- and on top of that, there's a bunch of other stuff. It's like "what if Napoleon won at Waterloo, but also the dead return and demand voting rights."
So, overall, I'm not into the world as given, but I really like living in a world where Indigenous gamers are writing their own games and bringing their own experiences to gaming.
(As a final aside, there's a bunch of sidebar notes here saying "if you have a specific Indigenous background, feel free to bring that into the game, but if you don't, don't." Which absolutely makes sense: if you aren't Indigenous or have some hefty experience, you're probably going to end up bringing in some other media representation of Indigenous people that was made without their input or experience at the forefront. So I get it and like it, and since this world is a future and different world, it doesn't mean you can't play Indigenous, it just means you can't play, say, the future-different version of Shoshone if you don't have that experience.
(Further, some of the description of this future-different world can't help but draw lines with our world, as in the section on comedians, which notes, "The people of this world, just like real-world Indigenous people, have a tremendous sense of humor.")
Coyote & Crow is a Native American production, featuring largely Indigenous writers and artists (with tribal affiliations noted in the credits, along with the note that this is all self-reported, which I appreciated given the legal and genealogical murkiness around tribal affiliation), with the premise that -- well, here's where I start to get confused a bit, but let me try to give the logline as I grok it:
In a world where European colonization never happened, the tribes of North America faced an ecological catastrophe, but found a magical plant that helped unlock powers, and now, several hundred years later (?), your characters live in a mystical cyberpunk-ish world (cybernetics, yes -- evil corporations, not as far as I could tell) and they do, well, just about anything they would want.
Here you might see some of my problem in wrapping my head around this game: what do the characters do? Is there a great evil to fight? A great unknown to discover? A great home to protect? Well, yes, there are (actually maybe there is no great evil), and the book later gives some frameworks for games (maybe your spies for your nation, maybe there's a war brewing, maybe you're trouble-shooters solving problems). The sample adventure is "go investigate this suddenly quiet research station, potentially tangle with some enemy scouts, face a monster," which is a pretty solid plot for an RPG adventure, and helps show what's important here. For one thing, you can fight, but almost all the sample rolls here are about gathering information so that you know what the right thing to do is. That feels to me like the closest thing to a core activity or focus: you may have to fight, but first you gotta learn.
Now on one hand, the wide scope of the game (trouble-shooters, spies, warriors?) might seem like an invitation to make the world your own, and yet, well, I don't feel that way: this is a game with a specific hook -- or maybe a few hooks: it's an uncolonized America written by an Indigenous gamer (and largely team), but it's also a cyberpunkish world, and it's also a somewhat mystical world (with all sort of fantasy/folklore monsters), and also maybe it's a superpower world (depending on how you think about the powers that PCs have. All of which feels like a lot to me.
Or let me put it a different way: it would be fascinating to think about what an uncolonized America looks like. Adding in the other issues (the ecological catastrophe that changes the world, the addition of the Gift that powers people) takes away focus from that issue. I'm struggling a bit to articulate why this feels overstuffed or unfocused, but maybe I should think of it another way: it would be worthwhile just to imagine what an uncolonized Americas would look like, even just as a way to rethink what we think of as normal. But playing in the real world is always a hard sell for gamers, who want things nerd-troped (add mecha, add vampires, add magic, add something); and here, I don't think the author wants to say "this is just what an Indigenous-only world would look like" -- I think the team wants the latitude to get away from history. And maybe that's the thing that's confusing me: this is a game about history featuring a historical change -- and on top of that, there's a bunch of other stuff. It's like "what if Napoleon won at Waterloo, but also the dead return and demand voting rights."
So, overall, I'm not into the world as given, but I really like living in a world where Indigenous gamers are writing their own games and bringing their own experiences to gaming.
(As a final aside, there's a bunch of sidebar notes here saying "if you have a specific Indigenous background, feel free to bring that into the game, but if you don't, don't." Which absolutely makes sense: if you aren't Indigenous or have some hefty experience, you're probably going to end up bringing in some other media representation of Indigenous people that was made without their input or experience at the forefront. So I get it and like it, and since this world is a future and different world, it doesn't mean you can't play Indigenous, it just means you can't play, say, the future-different version of Shoshone if you don't have that experience.
(Further, some of the description of this future-different world can't help but draw lines with our world, as in the section on comedians, which notes, "The people of this world, just like real-world Indigenous people, have a tremendous sense of humor.")
December 29, 2023
Coyote and Crow is a very neat entry into the RPG space because of it's dedication to highlighting the work of Native artists, writers, and game designers, and that is very cool. As a game though, it's a little bit of a mixed bag.
The book itself is high quality, although the font is also ginormous, probably easily adding a few dozen pages to this already hefty book.
The game system itself seems solid although I haven't played it. They use a lot of mechanics and/or mechanic philosophies from previous successful works, with the main innovation being the reliance on d12s instead of d6s or d20s, but on paper at least it works. The book does feel like it's written for a group that's less familiar with RPGs at all. They break down a lot of things into apparent subsystems that seem to use almost exactly the same mechanics. This makes it easy for a new group to look up the right mechanic, but it does make it harder for a more experienced Story Guide to easily piece together the underlying mechanical structure which would more easily allow for the improvisation the writers frequently encourage Story Guides to engage in.
The world itself is a really cool premise (a North America without any Europeans, but advanced far enough into the future that we're still dealing with technologies analogous to today's 3D printing, Internet, and drones) and it's well explained but I feel like the book struggles to pull it together into a cohesive feel. I found myself wondering, even after reading the starting adventure, what kind of stories should I really be telling in Coyote and Crow? They say you can choose from many different genres, but generally with distinct settings like this there are places where it really shines, and I was really struggling to find that. It's an interesting thought experiment, but I don't know what to do with it.
The writing is also heavily concerned with avoiding colonization, racism, and appropriation, both in its own writing (a success) and in its player base (less successful). They attempt this through numerous warnings and side bars calling out Native and non-Native players and encouraging different behaviors throughout - including heavily discouraging non-Native players from taking certain skills or abilities in character creation (you're allowed to, you just aren't allowed to fully roleplay the highly roleplay focused skill). The reasoning for these is well laid out, and fair (those elements draw highly on existing sensitive cultural practices, which are often misrepresented and appropriated). My complaint is largely that in the text being so careful, they have created an atmosphere where I feel like I'm not allowed to play the game at all, at least unless Native friends invite me and tell me exactly what I'm allowed to do and say. This of course gets into messy "not everything needs to be about white people" territory and that's true, but it does make this game difficult for white people. So, be aware I guess. It's not a bad thing in isolation, but it might make this not the right game for you.
Overall, I'm glad I finally got around to reading it, and I probably will go back to some of the world building sections to extend the thought experiment on my own, but I won't be pushing to play this game myself. I would play it if someone else was the driving force, but there are a lot of other systems and settings out there that I'd rather spend my campaigning on.
The book itself is high quality, although the font is also ginormous, probably easily adding a few dozen pages to this already hefty book.
The game system itself seems solid although I haven't played it. They use a lot of mechanics and/or mechanic philosophies from previous successful works, with the main innovation being the reliance on d12s instead of d6s or d20s, but on paper at least it works. The book does feel like it's written for a group that's less familiar with RPGs at all. They break down a lot of things into apparent subsystems that seem to use almost exactly the same mechanics. This makes it easy for a new group to look up the right mechanic, but it does make it harder for a more experienced Story Guide to easily piece together the underlying mechanical structure which would more easily allow for the improvisation the writers frequently encourage Story Guides to engage in.
The world itself is a really cool premise (a North America without any Europeans, but advanced far enough into the future that we're still dealing with technologies analogous to today's 3D printing, Internet, and drones) and it's well explained but I feel like the book struggles to pull it together into a cohesive feel. I found myself wondering, even after reading the starting adventure, what kind of stories should I really be telling in Coyote and Crow? They say you can choose from many different genres, but generally with distinct settings like this there are places where it really shines, and I was really struggling to find that. It's an interesting thought experiment, but I don't know what to do with it.
The writing is also heavily concerned with avoiding colonization, racism, and appropriation, both in its own writing (a success) and in its player base (less successful). They attempt this through numerous warnings and side bars calling out Native and non-Native players and encouraging different behaviors throughout - including heavily discouraging non-Native players from taking certain skills or abilities in character creation (you're allowed to, you just aren't allowed to fully roleplay the highly roleplay focused skill). The reasoning for these is well laid out, and fair (those elements draw highly on existing sensitive cultural practices, which are often misrepresented and appropriated). My complaint is largely that in the text being so careful, they have created an atmosphere where I feel like I'm not allowed to play the game at all, at least unless Native friends invite me and tell me exactly what I'm allowed to do and say. This of course gets into messy "not everything needs to be about white people" territory and that's true, but it does make this game difficult for white people. So, be aware I guess. It's not a bad thing in isolation, but it might make this not the right game for you.
Overall, I'm glad I finally got around to reading it, and I probably will go back to some of the world building sections to extend the thought experiment on my own, but I won't be pushing to play this game myself. I would play it if someone else was the driving force, but there are a lot of other systems and settings out there that I'd rather spend my campaigning on.
August 20, 2022
While I will likely continue to support this rpg in the future, I am not sure this is the game for me. Some interesting concepts, but I want a little more data about the world, because I came away from my read-through feeling that... I was not in a place to world-build with this system.
February 17, 2023
Would suggest it as a read and tabletop to native-americans mainly. Too condescending and quite illogical for me to suggest it to non-natives. Only played it, because our gamemaster was a fan of it for some weird reason..maybe the carebear plot at times.
October 15, 2022
I picked this up thinking it was a story. In the first part of the book is a interesting story. The next part of the book talks about how to play the game.
March 23, 2023
So excited to tell stories in this system!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews