 Howdy, how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy, and if there's one thing I like more than crashing a goblin house party and burning it to the ground, it's cracking open a hard-boiled case and eating my way to the gross yoke. That's why my favorite RPGs are games that involve a lot of mystery and investigation, like changeling, Call of Cthulhu, or even the odd D&D game that isn't based around Sonsless Violence. But recently I was presented with a game that blends all of my favorite aspects of neo-noir and fantasy and packaged them into a world where mysteries lie just beyond your vision. Today I'm going to be talking about City of Mist, what it is, how to make a character, and I'll even throw in a short story of my experiences running around the city. Full disclosure, Son of Oak, the developing team behind City of Mist, has slipped a dollar or two in my pocket to make this video, but just like the unboxing of the Ultimate Set that I did a few weeks ago, they have no control over what I say, and I could just use the money to buy some mist-cleaning solution when this is all over. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So City of Mist is a modern fantasy neo-noir game that runs on the Apocalypse World Engine, which is the same rule system that brought games like Monster of the Week and Thirsty Sword Lesbians. In it, you take the role of a rift, a person stuck between the normal world and the realm of myths created by humanity's subconscious, being manifested by the magical mist that permeates the city. As the simulacrum of mythicality, you spend your days locked between your logos, the human who now has to maintain their humanity against the temptation of power, and your mythos, the aspect of culture that is bound itself to you. Manifesting as anything from the gods of legend to concepts like love or life, to cultural zeitgeist like baby new year or the power of disco fever. Your awakening triggered special powers relating to your mythos, but also now allows you to perceive the world as it truly is. Other people, called sleepers, are blinded by the mist. Seeing a sorcerer manifesting a fireball as just a deranged man with a flamethrower, but you know the truth, and are now burdened with the glorious purpose of seeking out that truth by solving rift-based mysteries throughout the city. For one reason or another, you are also searching for answers about yourself, be they mysteries of your mythos or the solid truths of your personal identity. And you'll have to work to keep both sides in balance, because those rifts who go too far to one side will either go back to sleep as if their powers never manifested at all, or they will fully embrace the story and become an avatar, the full embodiment of their mythos, who will single-mindedly follow whatever purpose their story sought to fulfill, almost always resulting in their separation from the party, as solving mysteries will no longer concern them. These concepts are what make up the majority of city of mist, solving mysteries while keeping your superpowered second life in check, and the rest of the game revolves around supporting these two concepts via dice rolling and power usage. Your typical character sheet will look a lot like this, maybe less artistically drawn, but the main things here are the four theme sections. Each theme is based on either your mythos or your logos, and they give you both powers and role-play cues for your character to keep track of while you play. Your mythos themes will give you mysteries that your character is working to unravel, while your logos themes provide crucial aspects of your identity for you to maintain. Acting upon these mysteries and identities will make their respective themes stronger, providing you with new powers and improvements to make yourself stronger, but choosing not to act on them will cause them to slowly fade away, eventually being replaced by a new theme of the other type. If all of your themes are transformed into logos, you go back to sleep. And if all of your themes are turned into mythos, then you ascend into your avatar state and go play some other game. Unlike in most RPGs, the individual powers aren't mechanically different. In fact, they barely have any mechanics behind them at all. See, City of Miss uses 2D6 to solve almost all of its problems, just like how D&D uses a D20. Wanna dodge something? Roll 2D6. Wanna punch that dude in the face? 2D6. Wanna do a triple backflip off a car, throw your katana into a tree, and then land on the blade? That is also 2D6. If you roll below a 7, you fail. You'll slip on the blade and cut yourself on all the branches. If you roll a 7, 8, or 9, then you do succeed, but there's some minor complication, like landing on the blade, but realizing that somebody's been recording you acting like a weeb. And if you roll a 10 or higher, then you win with flying colors, and might even get more benefits, depending on the action that you take and how high you roll. All that your powers do is give you a plus 1 whenever they become applicable. For instance, if I'm playing Kitsune, then trying to do the aforementioned triple frontflip would reasonably involve my nimble as a fox power, as well as parkour expert giving me a plus 2 to my roll. If I wanted, I could try to argue for the makeshift katana power as well, since that's what I'm trying to land on, but it's ultimately up to the DN. I could also invoke one of the weaknesses that everything comes with, which gives me a minus 1 for that roll, but also makes the theme that it's tied to stronger. Other characters have other powers and weaknesses that all boil down to the generic taglines that you invoke at relevant intervals, and that is how the majority of the game is played. Because of this, making a character in City of Mist is both simple in concept, and also really creatively taxing. A normal TT RPG will usually give you archetypes to pick from, or at least they'll give you a massive 100-page laundry list of skills that you'll haphazardly pick from until you have an abomination of a character, but at least it only took 30 minutes to make. City of Mist does not have skills with mechanics, so you can't spend your time reading what everything does and then picking your favorites. Instead, you pick a myth, a legend, a concept, whatever, and then you come up with four major themes that embody either the legend or the actual person behind the legend. And then, for each theme, you create at least three powers and one weakness based around that theme, as well as either a mystery or an identity, depending on whether the theme is for your mythos or your locos. This leaves you with all of the freedom in the world to make the character that you want, but you'll quickly come to realize just how overwhelming everything is as you start to work through this nesting doll of requisite concepts. I, myself, have made two City of Mist characters based on the Wizard of Oz and the power of disco fever, and putting them together was sweat inducing. Luckily, the player handbook comes with categories for both mythos and logos themes, and there are two different lists for theme types that everything falls into, such as mobility, divination, or adaptation for the mythos, or personality, training, or mission for the logos. It also holds your hand through a questionnaire for each theme type to help you figure it all out. As for the stuff that you actually do with those powers, City of Mist wanted to be the eccentric game on the block by giving you eight possible actions to choose from whenever it's your turn to do something, but in lieu of making them easily recognizable to the average tabletop player, they decided to call them insane things that take way longer to translate. The eight moves are change the game, which means that you heal or debilitate something with a status, face danger, meaning a role to survive, hit with all you've got, effectively a reckless attack, sneak around, convince and investigate, which all need no explanation, go toe to toe, which is their fancy term for fight something, and take the risk, which is sort of their catch-all for when something doesn't fall into the other categories. The specific results of these abilities are different, but like I said before, it all boils down to rolling 2d6, adding powers or weaknesses, and then hoping that the dice gods favor you. That said, if you want to take God by the throat, then you can choose to burn one of your powers, losing it until your character gets some downtime, but the sacrifice will grant you an automatic success to your role, and if your back is against the wall and you have no other choice, then you can apologize to your master and go all out just this once, unlocking the ankle weights, burning an entire theme, and using its power for some ultimate move that'll leave you shaken and drained by the end of it. There is a lot of narrative power in A City of Mist. The entire mechanical system works to evoke a television show, and the downtime between sessions is spent progressing your storylines by fleshing out characters, improving bonds between specific characters, and generally treating the whole big game like one big season of television, as it's meant to be. Think of the missions as episodes that are all leading up to a season finale, and you'll get the idea. For instance, my first session of City of Mist saw the gang getting framed for robbing a museum. Security cameras saw us walking off with the goods, and the coppers were already en route to pick us up. Thinking fast, Salamander, a man with all the powers of a lizard that somebody lit on fire, created a distraction by setting off the fire alarm in the building that we were in, and disappearing through the crowd of people that didn't know what calm and orderly meant. Once we had a moment to catch our breath, we had a choice to make. We could either go to the museum and look for clues, or we could mess around with the bobbies and see if they had any leads of their own. Kitsune, the rift of a trickster god, elected to sneak into the police office by using their illusionary powers to seem as though they belonged there. Meanwhile, the rest of the group headed to the museum, where after a brief tussle with the guards, they found the CCTV and discovered that there could be only one culprit for a crime, a criminal. Specifically, a magic-based criminal that used hard-light constructs to steal exactly one item from the museum, Pandora's Box. Back at the police station, Kitsune had pinned a leaf to their sweater like a badge, and everyone seemed to be buying it. Once Kit got to the police computer, they managed to discover the location of said hard-light crime man, and when Kit returned to the party, we all had a hard choice to make. The crime guy had to know that we were on to him, so he wouldn't be around for long, but Pandora's box was getting sold tonight, and then we'd never catch it. So should we prevent a major catastrophe by intercepting the box before it's opened? Or do we clear our names and prevent even more artifacts from being stolen by taking down the big bad evil guy? Ultimately, the gang decided that, just like a Saturday morning cartoon, it was better to save lives now and let the villain get away. So we all rolled up to the house of the buyer to give them a stern talking to. Unfortunately for us, as we opened the door, we noticed a peculiar amount of swirling magic, chaotically throwing everything around the room in a vortex that originated with a woman and a recently opened box. Everyone took turns trying to get to the woman, as well as trying to fight off all the spooky monsters and debris that were eating our advance, but eventually, our bulldozer mitosis, rift of the theory of evolution, managed to charge into the eye of the storm and close the box, and with one quick defenstration, the day was saved. The box was eventually returned to the museum. The police, while still looking for the culprits, weren't as fervent in their investigation, and the gang went home until the next time that their powers were needed to solve another case. This is the world of City of Mist, and perhaps one day, you too will awaken and start following the mysteries that surround you. Buuuut that'll about do it! I hope you enjoyed this video. Once again, this is a sponsorship, so it would really help if you checked out all the linked in the pinned comment below, and don't forget to do all those like and subscribe things so that I can keep talking about tables and the people who top them. But yeah. Davi out.