The Wordsmith's Forge

The PDF copies of Coyote and Crow have been released. The book is gorgeous, but there are some issues. The overview is generally positive. I'm going to argue about some things later on, which is likely to please some people and annoy others, so I'll start by laying out some of my relevant credentials. You can decide for yourselves whether my critique is valid and useful, or not.

Continue with Opening the Can of Worms, Religion, and Argument Fuel.


Credentials:

* I am a reviewer with decades of experience across multiple genres and product types, including roleplaying games.
* I am a gamer with decades of experience, across multiple platforms.
* I have some experience with game design, but more of my understanding comes from analyzing other people's games.
* I am a writer and that's part of my college degree.
* I am a gender scholar and that's part of my college degree.
* I am a hobby linguist, sociologist, psychologist, historian, naturalist, and a bunch of other stuff that amounts to being a student of human nature and the world in general.
* I am an activist trying to make the world a better place. And I'm very old-school in that I will ally or argue with people based on the point of the moment, regardless of what sides we were on last protest.
* I am clergy, I practice a variety of traditions, and Turtle Island talks to me.
* I have very distant connections to Cherokee (mother's side) and Lakota (father's side) but no direct connection to any tribe. I generally support tribal causes, contribute what I can, and worry about the mess of problems they have to deal with.


Overview:

The book is beautiful. The artwork is gorgeous. You could buy this thing just for a collection of vivid tribal style, mostly native-made art if that's something you like to patronize, and get your money's worth. The neon styling really puts me in mind of the color palettes favored by the modern powwow grass-dancers who make their regalia with dyed yarn.

My only visual quibble is that the title font is a bit hard to read because some letters are split into parts, but it's generally presented at a large enough size to be legible with just a little extra staring. People with worse vision than mine might have more trouble, and I have no idea if "scan and read aloud" software could parse it or not. The main text font is minimal-serif and easy to read.


The main map is oriented so that Turtle Island has north at the bottom and south at the top. It would help if the maps were more boldly marked to show directions, because the text often uses directions, and people are used to "north is at the top." This could make orienteering more difficult. Still, it's a bold twist that ties into the cultural movement of map-flipping. This approach is an effective way of asserting a different cultural perspective.

The map of Cahokia doesn't seem to have directions marked, and given how the river cuts across it, I suspect east may actually be at the top, but I can't really tell. In terms of reading, I judge the minor challenge of orientation worth the large gain in differentiation, despite my impaired direction sense; I don't know if that would balance differently in play.


The worldbuilding is brilliant. People put a massive amount of effort into extrapolating a different track of history. There are points they didn't pick up on -- frex, the Americas had wheels, but may or may not have used them in similar ways as Europe -- but that's okay. There's never room to include everything in a given project, and the choice of what to take or leave is a key part of what distinguishes alternate history projects from each other.

The premise is that the Americas were never conquered by the European Invasion; the divergence point around 1400 CE (in our world) happens well prior to that. Well, sort of. That's the game timeline. In our world, there are multiple competing theories of who got where first, some of which predate 1400 by centuries. Given certain other choices the designers made, those would've been damn useful to activate and could've avoided or at least attempted a different solution to some very sticky issues. But anyhow, this is a spectacular noncolonial setting. As far as anyone knows, it's the first game based on that premise. Even in fiction it's extremely rare; I've done it repeatedly, I think the first time was in junior high (I used a comet then too, my latest version used vulcanism), but it took a very long time before I found any other examples. It's the kind of thing I wished for in college but couldn't find much of. There are only a handful of other modern, native-made native-themed games at all and nothing very close to this. That makes Coyote and Crow a groundbreaking game. Like any other first of its kind, it has some flaws, but the overall build is excellent.

The cultures are well conceived, somewhat inspired by some of the major tribes here, but developing in their own ways based on a divergent trajectory. I'm thrilled to bits that they made Cahokia the central focus; it's well chosen and executed in addition to being a personal favorite. I've been there; it's a perfect fit.

The designers have made the choice to sketch out the main cultures of Makasing (North America) but focus on the city of Cahokia in detail. I think that's a prudent decision for the first release. You get some idea of the context, and one setting fleshed out enough to start playing without having to cobble up a lot of stuff yourself. Additional expansions are planned to feature other cultures/settings in this gameworld.


The xenolinguistics is excellent. They invented a verbal trade language, Chahi, which resembles some other Turtle Island languages. My bet is they either hacked roots and affixes out of one or more languages, and iterated those into new words (like I've done with Proto-Indo-European and various others) or they analyzed phoneme sets and grammatical features to start from scratch and make something that would sound similar. Chahi doesn't seem to be a tonal language or use diacritics or special characters, though, so it's easier to read coming from plain English, compared to most transcriptions of indigenous languages trying to shove them into English script that really, really doesn't fit. They must be borrowing at least some things from extant languages, though, because I've recognized a few bits. "Gichi" in "Gichigamins" (sea) means "great / large" in some Turtle Island languages. Anyhow, they built a usable model language that fits the context, so that's well done.

EDIT 12/6/21 -- A reader has pointed out that because Chahi words are not italicized in Coyote and Crow, that makes it difficult for English language learners to distinguish between Chahi and English.  That's why foreign words are typically italicized, so people can tell they're foreign.  The only way to tell for sure is whether it's in the Chahi dictionary in the back.

So far the only glitch I've seen with the language is that they do not consistently follow the rule of defining a new word the first time it appears (either Chahi or game terms). Sometimes it can be figured out from context, other times not. This could be because they didn't have anyone with sufficient formal training to know that rule -- it's usually taught to journalism or technical writing students but its appearance is patchy elsewhere -- they thought it was silly or cluttery, or they meant to do it but after dozens of edits everyone lost track of which was the first appearance.

In the back of the book, there is a Chahi-English Glossary and a Game-Terms Glossary. So if you can't figure it out from context, you can look it up. An English-Chahi glossary would be a great asset, although not as vital as Chahi-English. The more something is used, the more you need a two-way reference, because not everyone is equally good at memorizing vocabulary. They're planning to do more online, though, and this is just the first release, so additional materials are likely to develop over time. It's an excellent start and usable as it stands.


The overall game mechanics look promising. I haven't gotten much into those details yet, as most are farther back in the book, but the setup is good. It seems both playable and entertaining.

For probabilities, it uses 12-sided dice, and 12 is the sacred number in Makasing. So that gives lots of flexibility in results. The leading favorite sacred number in Turtle Island is 4, in Europe 3, and in Sumeria it was 14 but their math used base 12. Most Turtle Island tribes have based their math on either 10 or 20, as shown by their numerical vocabulary. Also, Turtle Island dice are usually 2-sided and named after their material: plum pits, gambling stones, gaming sticks, etc. used in an extensive variety of gambling games. I've only seen one modern game that used custom d2s (brilliantly) and that's Call to Adventure, though there may be others. Plenty of games use hi-lo dice, coin flips, etc. to generate 50-50 probabilities.

Some aspects of tribal culture figure heavily into game mechanics, which anchors the theme to the game engine. For example, storytelling is vital in tribal cultures, and the player characters are destined to be great heroes of legend, so character advancement takes the form of story development.

Unique to this setting is the Adanadi, or Gift. (That shifted from the original Kickstarter version, Adahnehdi; the new one is easier to spell, which is probably better.) It spans magic, science, and spirituality to allow most people enhanced abilities and some people exceptional powers. Each "Path" is based on an animal, which defines the types of enhancements and abilities available. Comparing this to other games, it's more like a template applied to a base creature than like a character class. Comparing this to tribal customs, it's somewhere between a totem and a clan or moeity. While the game is designed for epic characters, the materials would just as easily support a low-powered or even unpowered campaign if that's your preference. It just depends on what kind of adventures and storytelling you prefer.

Some aspects of the rules, like dividing players by race and giving them different instructions, seem likely to cause more problems than they solve. I'll go into more of that in another post.


The vignettes are really good. They're also impressively well fitted, not just to the gameworld, but to the source cultures from Turtle Island. So if you're familiar with storytelling conventions, myths and legends from here, you'll recognize similarities, like the Trickster nature of Coyote. If you read gamebooks for such snippets, you'll have fun with this one.

In game terms, you're supposed to tell your character's story. So these vignettes have a more important role here than in most games. You can use them as style guides to match your storytelling to the Makasing style.


The culture-driven stuff, like art and storytelling, is this good and this accurate because the design team is almost entirely tribe members, augmented with a few outside specialists. So in addition to creating a good playable game, with solid thematic material, Coyote and Crow is also an example of native entrepreneurship. I think they've put out the first piece of what could become a thriving franchise generating a bunch of jobs for mostly native folks. That is desperately needed because most reservations have few if any jobs of any kind. If you want to support tribal economies, buying native-made stuff like this is a good way to do that.

Hopefully, the wild success of this game's Kickstarter and its generally high level of quality will encourage other people to form teams and create more native-made native-themed games. There's a ton of cultural material and a vast Turtle Island gaming history to draw on -- hence why the very few such games are so scattered with little in common beyond coming from Turtle Island tribes. The more, the merrier!