Hi All! Today I have an interview with Justin Alexander from Atlas Games on Magical Kitties Save the Day, which launches today on Kickstarter! It seems like a fun game for players of all ages, so check out Justin’s responses below!
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Tell me about Magical Kitties Saves the Day. What excites you about it?
What has me truly excited about Magical Kitties Save the Day is how much fun everyone has during our playtests. People are enthusiastic
about trying the game. People are even more enthusiastic to try it again. As a
game master, that kind of enthusiasm is infectious. And the world of Magical
Kitties, based around just a few core principles, so endlessly varied and
effortlessly rewarding to create in: Your magical kitties can be in your
hometown. Or in the Old West. Or fighting aliens. Or living in a Martian
colony. Or, really, anywhere.
Let me back up. In Magical Kitties everybody plays a kitty with a unique supernatural power. Every kitty has human. (Some humans believe that they own the kitties, but that’s clearly ridiculous.) Every human has a Problem. The kitties need to use their powers to solve their humans’ problems and save the day! On top of that, every hometown has Troubles. Troubles can be almost anything: Witches. Aliens. Hyper-intelligent raccoons. To run an adventure, all the GM has to do is take a Trouble and point it at a Problem. As the Trouble makes the Problem worse, the kitties have to fly into action! (Often literally.)
How do players create their human
characters and kitties?
You can either very deliberately craft your
kitty or you can use the random character generators to discover your kitty.
Either way, character creation is very fast, so it’s more about whether you
have a specific vision or if you want to be surprised and challenged. You can
also mix-and-match the approaches: Maybe you care a lot about what your kitty’s
Magical Power is, but want to randomly generate your kitty’s Talent and Flaw
and then figure out what your kitty’s personality is from that. You can do
that!
Kitty’s attributes: They are Cute, Cunning, and Fierce. They also have
Talents and Flaws, describing what they are particularly good at (being a
talented actor or a keen sense of hearing) and also what gets them into trouble
(like having a big mouth or being a scaredy cat). And, of course, they also
each have a cool Magical Power — invisibility, telekinesis, technopathy, frost
breath.
When it comes to humans, the most important thing is their Problem. Again,
players are empowered to customize their own Problems. But we also include a generator
that combines an emotion — like sad, angry, scared — with a source, things
like money, illness, family, friends, work/school, and so forth. This is
ultimately a creative seed, and so you need to make it specific to your human
(and your kitty).
So if a human is scared about money, for example, that might mean they’ve
fallen behind on their mortgage payments and they don’t know what to do. Or
maybe they owe money to dangerous monsters. If they’re angry about money, on
the other hand, then maybe someone has stolen something from them and they’re
furious about it.
What’s the mechanical structure of Magical Kitties Save the
Day, especially in regards to dealing with Troubles and Problems?
The core mechanic of Magical Kitties is a streamlined dice pool system that effortlessly creates degrees of success:
- Failure
- Success, but…
- Success
- Success, and…
- Super success!
Each degree has some generic structure to outcomes. For example, on a Success,
but… the kitty will succeed, but also:
- A foe uses its reaction.
- You suffer an Owie.
- You get into a sticky situation.
- You are unable to act for some time.
- You have one fewer die in your next pool.
- The GM forces your flaw.
- Something else that’s creative.
By moving beyond a simply binary of success and failure, the game inherently
encourages both game masters and players to engage deeply with the outcome of
any action resolution. Young players, in particular, get really engaged by the
results.
Problems have a Severity and Troubles have an Intensity. Both measure how difficulty it is to solve or overcome them. As Problems and Troubles are resolved, the story of your magical kitties will slowly come to an end… or you can have new Trouble come to town.
This sounds like a really lighthearted
game, but I admit some of the Problems you mentioned hit nerves for me as a
player. How are you supporting players in encountering topics that might be a
little bit, uh, Problematic?
One of the reasons we’ve embraced the Source
+ Emotion method of generating problems is that it isn’t providing
specific problems. That specific problem is still coming from the player. If
you ask a six-year-old what “money + sad” or “friends +
angry” means, you won’t get the same kinds of problems you will if you ask
a twelve-year-old or twenty-four-year old that question.And since we’re
not pushing a specific problem into the playing space, the players generally
self-control for what they’re comfortable exploring through play without even
really thinking about it.
Magical Kitties is framed as an all-ages
game. What have you done to make the game approachable for people of different
ages, backgrounds, and abilities?
In working on Magical Kitties I’ve
personally done a lot of research into age-appropriate cognition. The results
are frequently surprising! For example, character creation uses
d6-as-percentile tables. I initially thought that might be a difficult concept
for our target age range and was looking at alternatives, but it turns out that
specific exercise if used in Grade 2 curriculums.
Our creative team for Magical Kitties is already diverse, and making it even more diverse as we bring more creators
onboard is a priority for me. Bringing all of these different viewpoints into
the Magical Kitties universe is making that universe bigger and more
exciting in every way possible. If there’s one thing we’ve discovered, it’s
that the love of kitties is about as universal as you can get! Kitties and the
people who love them can be found everywhere.
I also believe that Magical Kitties can be an opportunity for people who have never played a roleplaying game
before to discover a whole new hobby. We think reaching out to all-new
audiences is really important in terms of making sure that all voices get to be
part of our conversation. To that end, Magical Kitties includes a lot of
tools for new players: There’ll be a solo play scenario, for example, so that
within literally moments of cracking open the box you can start playing the
game for the first time. And there’ll be a My First Adventure book for
first-time GMs, taking them step-by-step through running their first scenario.
Magical Kitties are for everybody!
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Thanks so much to Justin for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Magical Kitties Save the Day on Kickstarter today!
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