Field manual
Everything around you is a sleeper agent waiting to fight. Point the
camera at one and you have caught it.
That one had been standing on a step for years, waiting for an excuse to cause violence.
Every card blinks. One in two hundred comes back gold.
It already had these stats. We have just dragged them into the light.
- Heft — how much of it there is. Health, and how slow it is.
- Menace — how much you'd not want it swung at you.
- Charisma — whether anyone would look twice.
- Wear — how hard its life has been.
- Whiff — exactly what you think.
A wardrobe is slow and hard to shift. A rubber duck
is neither. Go after something with a bit of character.
Not everything is worth a photo.
Fill the frame with one thing, in decent light. It
reads the object, not the photograph — a blurry corner of a room scores like a
blurry corner of a room.
- Beast — alive, or was once. Hits 20% harder once it's nearly gone.
- Tool — a handle or a switch. Quick moves land 25% harder.
- Fixture — too big to pick up. Takes 20% less, and moves last.
- Vessel — something with an inside. Gets 13 back every turn.
- Relic — older than you. Shrugs 30% off the first hit it takes.
- Refuse — on its way out. Takes 15 with it when it goes.
Its best of Menace, Charisma, Wear and Whiff becomes the
heavy move, and the third-best decides what the trick leaves behind — rank
things leave them Soggy, striking ones leave them Stuck. Battered and smelly
beats box-fresh. Heft is only health and speed.
Rarity is earned, not awarded.
- The kind — a mug is not rare. A suit of armour is.
- The edition — how many of that kind anyone has caught before yours.
Every one before you pushes it towards Common, so being early counts.
- What you hold — your fourth mug drops a tier for every mug you
already have.
Rare pays more wad when you catch it, fills its till
faster and gets a low edition number. It does not hit harder. A Legendary and a Common with the same stats do
exactly the same damage — what you happen to own is not a skill.
Then your things fight other people's things.
One card each, face to face, three moves apiece.
Damage sticks. Six types, and each one beats another — a Tool takes a
Fixture apart, a Fixture outlasts a Beast.
You take three. The fourth stays empty — when those
three are down the fight stops dead and you catch whatever is within reach,
ready or not.
Somebody will challenge you when you're not looking.
A fight is two people at once. Without notifications
you find out you were challenged by opening the app and seeing it expired —
which is how a game between friends quietly stops happening.
You can change it later in your
account.
Your cards earn. Spend it.
Every card has a till that fills with wad while you're
away. Rarer ones fill faster, shinies a lot faster. A full till stops, so pop in
and empty them.
Catching things and doing Gary's jobs pay a lump. Spend
it on levels: every level is +1 to all its stats, and its till fills faster. Fighting
fires a card up, and its till fills double for four hours.
A card that has been in a fight carries the damage
into the next one and heals in real time — a Vessel in a couple of hours, a
Refuse most of the day. Nothing is ever benched. Fielding your tired three is
simply worse than going and finding something.
Yours: no tag yet
Grow them. Then send them to Kevin.
Power is the number on the corner of every card: how
hard it fights. Every level adds 1 to all its stats, so a levelled card really is
tougher.
At level 10 a card can go to Kevin's shed and come
back evolved: a new look, a new name, new moves and 12 more on every stat. Again at
level 20 for its final form.
Give Kevin parts and they decide the look: a Tool
makes a mech, a Beast an anime beast, anything green a forest spirit. The parts
are built in, and eaten.
Evolution credits skip the level: one for the first
evolution, three for the last. Buy them in the shed, or beat Kevin and Gary, the
Estate League's two bosses.
