Xcrawl Classics Designer Diary: Fame|Goodman Games

Posted By billward on Jul 23, 2023 |

Xcrawl Classics Designer Diary: Fame

by Brendan LaSalle

Xcrawl can’t simulate superstar athletics without introducing the celebrity experience: getting mobbed by fans clabbering for your autograph, radio DJs arguing over your position on some Top Ten list they’re fighting over, making a production assistant go out in zero-degree weather at 2:00 AM to find an open restaurant with vegan hot wings that aren’t too spicy. At some point, it’s all about fame.

Fame is a key part of the Xcrawl Classics experience, and Fame points are how we measure it.

When I first started running Xcrawl for my roommates back in Seattle, we dealt with fame strictly by role-play. The more dungeons my players survived, the more popular they became. I talked about how they were becoming media darlings, and how they were getting recognized in public by folks who had seen them killing monsters on TV. But the actual gameplay only took place in arena dungeons – we mentioned the character’s lives outside the arena but we never role-played any of that. That was my original conception for Xcrawl – just dungeons, with RoboCop-esqe glimpses at the strangeness of the fantasy dystopia that was the North American Empire.

Once I started running adventures that took the team outside the arena, the need for a fame system became evident. The PCs were using their notoriety to make stuff happen – they wanted super star treatment. I remember one player spending a lot of time trying to parlay his celebrity power into a magic item that would increase his Charisma. That was a huge ask – way beyond the scope of the silly they let you cut the line at Six Flags nods to celebrity culture I gave in those early days of Xcrawl.

That player wanting his character to bootstrap being a famous monster slayer into a magic artifact windfall wasn’t unfounded. That kind of huge celebrity get happens again and again in our real, magic-and-dragonless world. The American Express Black Card was an urban legend until Jerry Seinfeld asked about it and the company did a lot of work and developed “the Centurion Card” because a famous funny person wanted one.

If you think about it, Fame is the ultimate cursed superpower. Even folks who are famous for nothing at all (and I was going to add a list here but decided against it because y’all know exactly who I’m talking about) get so many unearned opportunities, so much free stuff, so, so many second/third/umpteenth chances that you and I and the rest of the hoi polloi would never get. On the other hand, sometimes the truly famous wake up and discover that overnight everyone in the world developed an extremely intense opinion on a personal, painful, humiliating aspect of their private lives based on a rumor some gossip rag published as fact.

A factor of a game that powerful and subtle needed a system. After several false starts in earlier versions of the system I present the XCC Fame System: a simple, hopefully elegant, easy-to-use system, rather than a more complicated one that tries to quantify every possible situation that might occur to the budding superstar. Earn fame, spend fame, lose fame: a very easy framework that players and Judges can use to role play the high highs and low lows that are the hallmarks of becoming a household name. PCs can Fameburn to make life very comfortable and profitable for themselves. They can also lose Fame for negative happenstance outside the arena, and once their popularity drops they will have to work hard to get back on the good side of the Empire.