# Character Creation Challenge 2024: Day 28 - Umlaut :: Animal Wifery tags: #thoughts/CharacterCreationChallenge/2024 #game/rpg/umlaut > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2024]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] Let's talk about one of the greatest games ever created. No, not that one. No, not that one either. You know what? You've probably never heard of it. It's big in Japan. We are talking about one of my top three favorite games of all time, the source of several of my favorite play experiences in my life – bar none. It's a game that's GMless, diceless (but not without a randomizer)^[One day we will have to have a long, constructive rant about how abused the term "diceless" is in tabletop RPGs. Personally, I think it's an abomination to use it just to mean "the absence of dice," and it's more properly applied as "the absence of a source of random numbers or images," so systems which use a deck of poker cards or the Tarot should not be referred to as "diceless, "even though they have no dice. This is my hill and I will die on it.], and it violates one of those central unspoken tenets of RPG design that each player controls one character. I'm talking about **[[Umlaut|Umlaut: Game of Metal]]**. ![[Umlaut (cover).png]] Prepare to rock out. We've already talked about **[[Eternal Contenders]]**, which itself is a mainline descendent of **[[Contenders]]**. **Umlaut** is ECs brother by another mother but exactly the same father, slightly retooled and streamlined to do something different. In **Contenders**, you play a down on your luck boxer trying to fight his way to the top or fall in the gutter. In **Umlaut**, you play an up-and-coming metal (or metal-adjacent) band trying to claw your way to the top or fall in the gutter. Strangely enough, it's very different. Conceptually. Mechanically there's actually quite a lot in common. Let's plug in our amp and start jamming because these groupies aren't going to skin themselves! ## Chargen I tend to run **Umlaut** in a very loose, ridiculous style as befits the content of the game. I love metal. It is my favorite form of music but I recognize how inherently ridiculous it has to be to succeed. Capturing a tiny shard of that at the table is lightning in a bottle. I tend to be pretty casual about how adjacent "metal-adjacent" really is, and that's okay because we are talking about pure style. Where do we hit the ground if we want to start running? The same place that you would if you were really putting together your first metal band. ### Concept Who are these guys? (Or gals, but let's be honest – it's probably guys.) What kind of metal do they play? What is it they do? They are: **Animal Wifery**, a hybrid thrash metal/country/punk band from the Panhandle of Oklahoma. Every single member of the band worked at a cattle ranch their whole lives and wants nothing more than to get the Hell out of doing filthy manual labor. In order to do that, they've decided to carry their own gear, lug heavy amplifiers up and down stairs, and spend a whole lot of nights in a band van they can barely keep running. The onstage experience is probably best likened to something like early [Misfits](https://www.misfits.com) except dressed up like [Ghoultown](https://www.ghoultown.com),[^ghoul] but with far less fashion sense. There's a whole lot of energy and maybe one day there could be a lucky break in the discovery of some extra talent. Maybe. [^ghoul]: Why, yes, Ghoultown is one of my favorite bands of all time, which just means I get to talk about a lot of my favorite things all at once together. Welcome to one of the primary motivations for getting to write my own site.  ### Band Members We don't actually *have* to come up with the whole band right now; we could get away with just naming the lead singer. But where's the fun in that? Besides, how can you have a messy breakup and a replacement of one of your most important founding members if you don't know who they are? Sure, you could name them in the actual scene where ego gets the best of everyone and in a whirlwind of cocaine and hookers the band kicks out the lead singer with a mighty screaming match… Actually, that sounds like fun, too. | Band Members | | | | ---- | ---- | ---- | | Torrence "Murder Hobo" Kinkaid | Lead Singer | He looks like the kind of guy that you would cross the street to avoid just on general principles. Big burly white dude with a backwards dirty trucker cap, full tattoo sleeves from shoulder to the back of his hands with a mix of Christian iconography and images from slaughterhouses, and a selection of big belt buckles that depict the state capitals of all the members of the Confederacy.<br><br>Of course, the general impression you would get of him is wrong. He likes kittens, crochet, and plays canasta with his aunt every Thursday night he's in his hometown. Give him shit about it and he'll get in your face. | | Rick "Lowball" Lowenthal | Bassist | Like every bassist, he's hard of hearing in his right ear. But he's a bassist – hearing is barely a qualifier. Tall, skinny, just a little bit unkempt, enough to maintain his bad boy image, he actually does most of the heavy lifting of the band's gear.<br><br>When not on the road, he's an elementary school substitute teacher, and a damn fine one. His particular field of expertise is the early Roman Republic and of the military exploits thereof. He's the reason that so many of the bands songs involve references to ancient cultures with properly translated linguistics. | | Johnny Blazer | Pedal-Steel Guitar | Johnny Blazer dresses like a Civil War-era undertaker… And that's when he's not performing. In fact, even his bandmates don't really know where the border between his onstage persona and offstage persona exists, or if it does at all. He's grim, taciturn, almost always the voice of reason when he speaks at all.<br><br>He's also, technically, the lead guitar, which is absolutely bizarre for a metal band. Pedal steel is not exactly known to be part of the metal scene. Johnny gives no fucks. If he had a bow, he would rosin it up, and play that pedal-steel guitar hard.[^pedal] | | Jim "Loosehead" Neighbors | Drummer | There are stories about drummers. They're insane, they like to bang things, they're completely out of control. None of these things apply to Jim Neighbors. On stage, he plays an absolute wild man slightly too small cowboy hat hanging behind his neck, unbuttoned black silk shirt under ostrich skin vest whipping wildly as he bangs on the drums. He dresses like a dandy in a bordello.<br><br>When not on stage, he's the band's accountant, booking agent, and occasional jailhouse lawyer – and of the five of them, he is the most brutal, most vicious, and the most likely to say "well, we could kill them in their sleep" about any given problem. As far as the rest of the band knows, he hasn't done that but… They're comforted to know that he could. | | Bill "Just Bill" Hitchens | Rhythm Guitar | Just Bill is the wildcard of the group. He shows up to every practice. He puts in the work. He shows up at every show. He puts in the work. He shows up at his day job at the warehouse. He puts in the work. At 6'2", 350 pounds of lean weightlifting muscle, he just looks like a good old boy.<br><br>He's also the most enthusiastic about the future of the band, eclipsing the other members entirely when it comes to gushing about where things could go and what they could do. He's the one that designs the album covers (that they don't have yet outside of the drawings and sketches which cover every single one of their refrigerators and one of the walls in Bill's bedroom). | [^pedal]: It's all _real._  And more!  That looks like a fun five piece country/metal/punk band, with all the right seeds for drama, egos, and musical talent – or the lack thereof. Any band that looks like it might be on the very verge of detonating at any given moment is perfect for this game. A reminder: You don't have to come up with a fully formed five piece with names, positions, and long descriptions. Your band could just be one guy who gets named at the beginning and literally a rotating collection of gig players who come and go, or you can pick up people as you go, as the scenes unfold, and you get attached to someone. It's beautiful, it's wonderful, and everyone who is into music already has a band in their head that they would love to see. ### Beginning Statistics We get four stats, as appropriate to this kind of game, but they may have the most fun names to date: _Hope, Ego, Cash,_ and _Fanbase_. You probably don't need a lot of description of what those mean but… - _Hope_ is how happy the band is - _Ego_ is how angry they are - _Fanbase_ is how popular they are - _Cash_ is how much money and free time they have Everybody starts with the same stats, with one in everything except for cash – of which you have none. You are a new metal band. Of course you have no money! You probably sold your Star Wars action figure collection to buy your amps!  | Stats | | | ---- | ---- | | Hope | o | | Ego | o | | Cash | | | Fanbase | o | ### Performance Traits It's not enough just to have stats – we need to describe what we do on stage. Mechanically. In a very minimalist way. To that end, there are three performance traits: - _Technique_, which is how good you are at singing, playing guitar, beating the drums, or any other instruments that come up. - _Power_, the impact you make on stage because of your intensity and passion. It could be your awesome front man, it might be Maybelline, or you could just own a really loud PA system. - _Stagecraft_, your ability to get the attention of the crowd and hold it. This is different from Power because you can have a really loud, high-power, in-your-face band that's all about intensity and passion – and they stand around on stage in their normal work clothes and do nothing. The crowd gets hyped despite them. With stagecraft, your lead singer might not be able to sing, but he can drop down through the rafters on a fake hangman's noose and start belting out the first lines of your song while dangling and flailing! We get seven points to allocate but nothing can be lower than 1. | Performance Traits | | | ---- | ---- | | Technique | oo | | Power | o | | Stagecraft | oooo | Frankly, the guys are decent with their instruments but sometimes it's a little hard to figure out how to work the pedal steel into the mix. That's all right, it's unusual enough that people are into it, regardless. It does undercut the sound as a whole, however. What they do wonderfully is put on a show. They lean hard on the whole cow-punk metal thing; leaning towards the Grand Old Opry but coming in through the alley in the back by the homeless guys shooting up. It's a thing. And that's it! That's character creation, or in this case band creation! Let me grab that sheet. ## Character Sheet ![[Animal Wifery (sheet).jpg]] ![[Animal Wifery (album cover).jpg]] ## Exunt Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. How does this thing work in play? Pretty straightforwardly; in fact, very much like **Contenders**. You choose a Scene type, describe it, mechanically resolve any conflicts, figure out who has the right to narrate the results, do so, and then adjust your stats to match. There's a pile of scenes that you can do, all with different potential outcomes and risks. For example, nobody starts with much money. Or any money. It's probably a good idea to start up by working the day job. You can use that cash to buy gear, influence things; you know what cash is good for. You figure out how much cash you want to try and earn because the more you try to grab, the further the fall if you don't quite make it. (The most you can go for is Ego +1.) Then you draw a number of cards equal to your Ego, your Roadie (the person on your left) draws cards in number equal to the amount of cash you want – and if you draw more black cards (Clubs or Spades), you win the scene. If your roadie does, you lose the scene. If you have the same number of black cards, whoever has the highest black card wins. But winning the scene is very different from having *narration rights* in the scene. Whoever has the highest card – gets to narrate the outcome. (Of course, it's Aces High.) If there's a tie, highest Spade/Heart/Diamond/Club in descending order decides who gets it. Whoever has narration rights, they get to describe how things play out while keeping in mind the results of the conflict. That means you might not get to narrate how you succeed in a scene – but that's just part of the fun. In the case of the work scene, if you win you get the cash and your Cash stat goes up. If you lose – you get the Cash and also a point of Ego. I think you can imagine how this is going. Work scenes, publicity stunt scenes, rehearsal scenes, band members scenes, split scenes, clash scenes, promotion scenes, open scenes, and gig scenes… Each of which affects a different stat or several stats, puts out various challenges, and some of them are actually head to head playoffs with the other bands at the table. Oh yeah, you didn't think that we would be ending all of this without a big time *Battle of the Bands*, did you? Somebody has to take home the groupies at the end of the night and it might as well be you! Of additional note, along the way you'll be writing down names of songs that you're practicing – and at the end of the game you have a _tracklist_ for your first album, which is surprisingly fun as RPG artifacts go. I once ran a game of **Umlaut** at a local RPG shop, and for some reason everyone trusts me with their children. I don't get it, it's insane, but that's the way the world works. So I had a table of four kids between eight and 12, me, and one other adult. And we were going to run metal bands. I learned that eight-year-old girls are the most terrifying creatures on Earth that day. Her band, _Flaming Bunnies_, literally threw rabbits which had been set on fire into the audience at a show as a promotional scene – and it was successful. I couldn't argue with the cards! She was so stoked! That was a good day. Does this sound fun? Are you intrigued? Do you love rock 'n' roll? This could be a great filler game between your big sessions or just something you break out once in a while because it's a lot of fun. Possibly it's an inspiration for a game like **[[FU RPG|Free Universal RPG]]** to start with a party that already has an excuse to hang out together. Whatever you do, have fun. [I've got to go sign this contract with a guy named Swan](https://youtu.be/O2JARLdVv5A) so… I got to go. Out!