Capes Storytelling Book

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Cap
es!
Su
perhero Storytell
ing
Power is fun...
Superheroes soar through the
sky and leap across city
landscapes. They reshape the
course of mighty rivers. They dance
untouched when the bullets fall like rain
and sift moon-dust through their bare
fingers.
It's the ultimate thrill ride. Don't let
anyone tell you differently.
But do you deserve it?
You've been given a gift the rest of the
world cannot share. No matter how often
you save the city, or the world, you still owe
a debt you can never repay.
Playing Capes you take on the role of a
superhero. You'll tell a story and pursue two
goals. First, enjoy your heros powers.
Second, show that your hero deserves them.
You will need a pad of small slips of paper, or a pack
of three-by-five index cards. These will be used to
track the various
Complications
that the heroes and
villains vie for control over. You'll need room to lay
out four or five of them at any one time.
What you'll need
To play Capes you'll need at least two
Players
. You
will all be cooperating to create a comic-book story.
One of the players must be the Editor. They are
responsible for everything in the story, especially the
many things over which they have no control.
Because of this, Editors are notoriously vindictive
and short-tempered.
You will need some small tokens to track how
endebted your heroes are for their spectacular
power. Pennies are good. Small candies are better, if
you can resist munching on them at inappropriate
times. These will hereafter be called
Debt Tokens
.
The other players will each take on the role of a
superhero. They will each need one copy of the
Hero Worksheet
included at the end of this
document, to help them track the various numbers
involved in playing a hero.
You'll need a comfortable place, free of distractions,
where you can lay all this gear out, along with your
players, and their sodas and other support
equipment.
The group will also need some physical props. You
will need a good handful of dice (of the sugar-cube
shaped, six-sided backgammon variety), in two
distinctive colors. At least twelve per color.
What you'll do
Capes is a storytelling game. You tell a story at the
same time you play a game. What you say in the
story limits what moves you can make in the game,
and the situation in the game limits what you can say
in the story.
The goal of the game is to help you tell better stories
than you could without any limits. The game-play
itself should help you to find ideas that wouldn't
normally occur to you... clever ways of combining
story and dice to make something better than either.
The example also switches from narrating the hero
created by the player ("Weather Witch") to narrating
the world itself ("the lightning strikes") to narrating
other characters ("Thanatos drops the jetpack").
This sort of switching is common in the game. In
fact, when your hero isn't in the scene you can help
out the Editor by figuring out what the villains do.
Because the storytelling and the game-play are so
closely intertwined this text will often talk about them
as if they were the same thing. Indeed, this pleasant
confusion may leech into your own thinking as well.
For instance, you might say "Weather Witch calls
down lightning from the dark storm clouds... that lets
me roll this die. I get control, so lightning strikes
Doctor Thanatos, causing him to drop the jetpack."
While you'll narrate for many people as you play,
you'll have special provenance over one hero. You
create that hero, and you're responsible for deciding
at every step of the story what they care about, and
what they will sacrifice for. You will put them into the
crucible of challenge and confusion time and again,
to give them a chance to show what they're made of.
That quick section starts with storytelling ("call down
lightning") then switches to game-play to see how
the storytelling effects the game ("roll dice", "I get
control") then switches back to storytelling ("lightning
strikes Doctor Thanatos") to narrate how the game-
play in turn effects the storytelling.
The story you tell is about more than victory and
defeat. It is a chance to make your own statement
about what it means to be a hero.
Sketching out your Hero
Okay, it's time to make a superhero. Grab a Hero
Worksheet. There are lots of empty spaces there.
You'll be filling them in.
First you assign numbers to the arenas in which the
hero proves herself. Distribute nine points between
the following five Drives, assigning at least one point
to each:
Justice
How much the hero's story
revolves around
laws, codes of
conduct and
rebellion
Truth
How much the hero's story
revolves around identity,
honesty and
secrets
Love
How much the hero's story
revolves around friends,
rivals, and
romance.
Hope
How much the hero's story
revolves around the safety,
needs and doubts
of the common
man
Duty
How much the hero's story
revolves around the
responsibilities that they
alone can and must fulfill
Example Character
Silverstar
(played by Joe) is an advanced
android, equipped with superhuman strength
and invulnerability. Her creator was killed by the
villain who commissioned her, before he could
finish teaching her who she is. She ended up
in the care of the Freedom Squad, who help
her to use her powers for good.
Looking over Silverstars history, Joe
concludes that she feels most strongly
about exploring her own identity,
making connections to salve the pain of
her freakish isolation, and learning how flesh
and blood people live.
Filling in the Details
The next thing you do is to put human faces on at
least three of your Drives. You do this by assigning
them an
Exemplar
. These are people with whom
the hero has tangled emotional issues centering
around a given Drive.
Any time an Exemplar is in a scene, it should be an
opportunity for the issues they embody to rise to the
surface. Conversely, any time your hero wants to
prove himself in a given Drive, the Editor could do
worse than to frame a scene that includes the
Exemplar.
If you are part of a two-hero team then at least one
of your Exemplars (bare minimum) must be shared
with another hero. If your team has more than two
heroes than you must share at least two Exemplars,
one each with two different heroes. Your Love
Exemplar could be a Duty Exemplar for someone
else (or perhaps you both harbor romantic feelings
for the same person… complicated, that).
Get together with the other players while they're
figuring this stuff out. You can adapt one of the
ideas they've already come up with, or work together
with them to create a shared Exemplar from scratch.
It's easy and fun to do at the beginning and terribly
difficult to shoe-horn in later.
Example Character
Joe feels Silverstar needs Exemplars for Truth, Love and Duty. The obvious
person to be tangled in her past is the villain who funded her construction.
Joe could invent a villain, but he guesses that other players will have villains as
Exemplars. After rejecting several candidates, Joe decides that Silverstar was
commissioned by Black Jack, evil brother and rival of Captain Liberty.
Joe starts writing up Supreme, a stylish, solo hero Silverstar has a crush on.
Alice asks around for a shared Exemplar. Joe offers Supreme. They decide
that her heroine, Night Maiden, is also fixated on the heroic beefcake.
Finally, Joe sketches in the character of Becky Tesla, the daughter of the
inventor who created Silverstar. Becky feels honor-bound to personally
avenge her fathers death. So much so, that she endangers herself while
refusing Silverstars help.
Powers
can be used at any time. Each power can be
used once a turn. But every time you use one you have
to take a Debt Token and place it on one of your Drives.
Abilities beyond those
of mortal men
Now you've figured out why your Hero does things.
It's time to start figuring out how they do things.
There are three types of
Abilities
that can be used
to change dice in the game.
Attitudes
are
Blocked
when they are used. That's why
they have a little box to pencil in a checkmark on your
Worksheet, to remind you that it cannot be used again
until unblocked (or next scene). Also, you may only use
one Attitude each turn. However they cost nothing to use.
Every type of ability allows you to do the same thing
when you use it: You can roll a die of that value or
less. So if you use any ability with a level of three
then you can roll a die that is a one, two or three.
The types of abilities differ in the costs and
restrictions on when you can use them.
Attitudes
are what they sound like too: Snotty, Kind,
Confused, etc.
Tropes
are used to react to any roll that has already been
made. For each Trope you choose whether it is a fun
superpower (and costs Debt when used) or Blocks when
used. Draw a filled-in circle over the checkbox of any
Trope that costs Debt
Tropes
are things your hero is so good at that he
rarely slips up when doing them. The Gray Ghost is
really quite good at slipping out of the shadows
quietly. Even when he blows a roll with his Second
Sight power, he can slip out of the shadows quietly to
get a better look. A Trope can rescue you from a bad
die roll, or (in the right circumstances) allow you to
quash a good roll of your enemy.
You choose which types you want the most abilities in.
Each type starts off with abilities at levels 1, 2 and 3. You
then add an ability of level 4 to one of the types, and
abilities of levels 4 and 5 to a different type.
3
2
1
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