Welcome Back to the Chaos Crew

Hey guys, it's Little Chomp (and my dogs in the background), and welcome back to the Chaos Crew 2. Lio is developing a Digimon Beatbreak game system, and I’m loving the playtest so much that I have to share it with you all.

Featured character: Shelbie Koji

The Digimon system we're using is being homebrewed by Lio as we play test it. Our theme song and graphics were made using AI, and the background music in most episodes comes from M4S on Spotify.

Transcript

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Hi, it's Little Chomp, and welcome back to Chaos Crew 2. It's right after hiatus. I'm bringing it back. We'll see how this goes. Before we get started, I'd like to apologize for the dog noise. My puppy and dog are both in here, and I well, I'm just not gonna be able to edit out all of the squeaky toys and jingles and stuff. So this is like the random bird songs that were in the talkie parts in some of the episodes from last time. This is gonna be a more casual one because I didn't record the first session. After everything that happened, which I tried to keep from leaking into the first podcast. Just well called various things, but eventually chaos for I just wasn't sure how things were gonna go. Now the footage is gone forever. So I'm gonna do my best to recap it. Alright. So first off, setting-wise, we are playing in a homebrewed Digimon game. Um our setting is based off of Beat Break, but the other Digimon settings do exist in universe. We just aren't there right now. We do get a couple of the words and things wrong. Guys, we're trying to be semi-professional. Puppies, what can we do? Oh yeah, we make a few mistakes with names and plot things in the early sessions because we're both still watching the first few episodes, and we're both also people with like families and jobs and stuff. So getting everything perfect isn't very high on the to-do list. Also, there's gonna be some awkwardness and some changes week to week because this is a play test of a system in development. So as I find and break things, they get fixed. Okay, so session one. Shelby Koji, a 23-year-old woman of mixed Japanese and Canadian heritage, is standing on a bench looking out at the Shangri-Law Project Egg, which is a huge domed habitat where all of the rich people live and everything is perfect. And a family that works at the same place her dad works gets admission. And it feels weird because she knows her parents have been working to get in there forever. Um, but obviously we haven't saved up the money yet, and she's got kind of complicated feelings about even moving in there in the first place. Um, an older guy in dirty clothes comes up and asks her for money. Uh, they go back and forth a little bit. She's generally good-humored, but ultimately decides he just needs money for food or something. Swipes in like 20 bucks from between their sapatamas and doesn't think anything of it. A sapatama is an egg-shaped, essentially smartphone with an AI on it that uh is powered by your thoughts and feelings. So that's fun. Um she starts heading back to her place, her phone rings, it's her dad. She answers, and they have this tense, awkward conversation because her father does not deal with emotions well, and basically is like, here's the agenda for your mother's party, here are all of the things that you need to do. I have sent you money to handle it, go handle it. Um, and also we want you to come in person, and it's awkward. Um, and she tries to hang up the call because she's walking through an alley on the way home, and this is kind of in a dystopian cyberpunk setting. So, you know, I don't feel like you really want to be distracted when you're walking through the alleys. But he just cannot fathom what that means. So she lies and says she is on the train and she's gotta go, and she hangs up, starts jogging home, slips, slams into a dumpster, and this green-skinned creature, two or three feet tall, comes crawling out of there, and it's like, where's that e-pulse that smells so good? Epulse being the thoughts and emotions that humans make. She's freaking out because uh monsters aren't supposed to be real, and also uh things aren't supposed to be in the dumpster. It's just not it's not it's not good. It's not good. So she tries to get away from the situation, but the creature, Goblin One, is faster and stronger than she is. So she can't run. Um she tries throwing, I'm trying to remember, she tries throwing a bottle at it and misses. She breaks a different bottle, is gonna use it to stab. It's session one, and I don't understand combat yet, so I'm like, bye. I'm gonna run up to melee range to see how this goes. So I run up there, gonna stab it with my broken bottle, and I miss, and it bites me. And I almost pass out. Um Drenrum Lynn Rush hits, I get a lot of points to try to improve my stats and save myself, but there is really nothing I can do. I have a like an NPC civilian stat block. It has a monster block with actual like special attacks and like powers. Then on the rooftop of a nearby building, that hobo guy shows up again, and he has this cat ghost. Um it's like the it's like the white sheet type ghosts, except it's like a red cloak, and you can tell it's a cat ghost because there are cat ears on the on the hood, and there's little like wisps of blue fire around it, and they also will sometimes have like little cat ears. It doesn't talk, um, but it's pretty expressive with its like glowing blue eyes in the darkness, and um being able to reshape the little wisps into things. So while Shelby's laying on the ground, like bleeding out basically, um she watches the old guy and the cat ghosts fight this thing and win. And um they come down to get to where she is. The old guy named Polio injects her with something, but that there's not really a chance to ask because she's not doing okay. Um, and then she just kind of blacks out and wakes up temporarily in a veterinarian's office, and then passes out again, wakes up in the lobby of a weird building. Um still don't know what that building is. I know we were not supposed to be in there. I know that um at one point while Shelby was trying to like process everything that was going on, uh polio took a dump in somebody's office. So it's a building that gets used, probably, because he's very much acted like somebody's gonna uh somebody's gonna respond to that. But anyway, um he tries to explain that uh his e-pulse is like really delicious, I guess. And since they like their sapotamas interacted when she was swiping him money, some of his e-pulse smell, I guess, got onto her device, and that's why the thing was attacking her, is because it smelled his energy. Um and he can't like just remove that. I think he uh do really many things about it, although he does try to give options. Um yeah, so the options she has are um just do nothing. Go home and act like this didn't happen, and random monsters will continue hunting you until one of them kills you. Um let this old guy move into your place and stay with you 24-7 because somebody needs to protect you from this situation. Um, give him like six or seven hundred dollars to try to fix your sapotama so that you can have it back and they won't attack you. Or um essentially like trade sapotamas. So the cat ghost will go with her while he like tries to get her other one fixed. Um and the cat ghost will protect her. Um so it's a lot. She does not handle it well. Um and he gives her a little bit of space to process. It's it's just a lot. After wait, did I throw a bottle? I think I did not throw a bottle. I think it threw a bottle at me and I took it to the face and it shattered and cut my face up. I think that's what happened with the ranged attack with the bottle. I think I just made a melee weapon that's like if you come close, I'll I'm gonna slash you. So her face is all cut up. She was completely helpless and bleeding out on the ground earlier. Um got drugged, got kidnapped, is now being told all this stuff, cannot call home because her sapatama is not working. Like it's bad not working. Um, so there's no like call on your rich parents to save you kind of thing. Um even that's complicated. So we actually end that first session with um her trying to make that choice because over the course of the next week, yeah, week, um, we had to figure out what Digimon was gonna hatch out of her Sapojama. So, like which one was supposed to be her partner and would have like a connection to her spirit and stuff. So we did that. And uh episode two picks up basically right there. So Dan, saying it all in this condensed form, it doesn't feel like it was so much, but it was so much. Oh, that is fun. And uh I hope you will come back for episode two and hear the actual gameplay, and uh maybe share this with a friend or stick around, or both. Why not both? So, thanks for listening, and I'll see you next week. Bye.