Many Minds Move as One Spirit Summary and more!
about 4 years ago
– Wed, Feb 05, 2020 at 01:33:23 AM
Hello folks! Maggie here and I apologize for the late update, but I come bearing a Spirit summary, a production update and a promise that we will post a Spirit Spotlight tomorrow!
Introduction
On one level, a flock of birds is dozens or hundreds of individual beings: each has a separate body, a separate brain, lives or dies separately, makes its own choices, and may compete with the others over mates or food. On another level, a flock of birds is a single organism, twisting and turning in flight, mobbing predators and keeping watch, finding food and safety for its member birds as best it can.
Many Minds Move As One is a Spirit of these aggregate beings: flocks of birds, swarms of insects, schools of fish. In particular, it is a Spirit of *joined movement* towards a common cause - a single mind manifest in a multitude of bodies.
It is not attached to any single swarm or school, and indeed, maybe in-with-of many such groups at a time, each flock having a distinct single-mind formed from that particular union of animals. Of course, in keeping with its nature, those distinct hive-minds can then move in concert with each other as part of a still-greater aggregate: it has both multiple selves and a single self at the same time, reflecting the thing it is composed of. It has a very different mindset about minds than humans do - it can be a bit confusing to communicate with, particularly because it finds humans equally baffling in their monolithic isolation.
Since the Invaders arrived on Spirit Island, there have been occasional tales - usually from outlying farmers - about someone walking near the edge of the treeline who sees every single bird staring intently at them. These get laughed off - "of course the birds are watching you, you dummy, you've moving nearby!" - but there's truth to them; Many Minds Move As One has been keeping a wary eye on the Invaders since shortly after they showed up. Its instinctive caution is well-founded.
Design
If I had to point to a single source for the idea behind Many Minds Move As One, it would be a riverside encounter with a flock of Canada geese. There's something deeply unnerving about 40 separate animals all raising their heads to look at you at exactly the same time, with the exact same body language. (Particularly when that body language is, "...do we have to start something here?". The geese around here are pretty blasé about humans.)
But appropriately enough for this Spirit, I think the concept emerged from a small constellation of pieces, and the incident above was simply the catalyst. Some other pieces include:
- Beasts tokens can represent a variety of dangerous animals, not just hunting-predators, and I wanted to portray that at some point.
- Sometimes I think about what Spirit a Major Power might be the high-octane expression of, on a thematic + mechanical level, and Insatiable Hunger of the Swarm didn't really have a Spirit it was super well-suited to.
- The short story _Bird Bones_ (by T. Kingfisher, in the compilation "Jackalope Wives" - her work is fantastic, go read it).
- Realizing that core Spirit Island didn't have any Power Cards that referenced birds, which are a major and visible portion of any ecosystem.
- Wanting a Beasts-centric Spirit that played very differently from Sharp Fangs Behind the Leaves.
- Wanting Jagged Earth to have at least one Spirit that was really good with Fear without being especially strong on offense.
Early versions of Many Minds had a direct correspondence/transformation between its Presence and Beasts tokens: 1 of its Presence acted as 1 Beasts token, and some of its Growth options turned some # of Beasts into that many Presence or reverted 1 Presence into 1 Beasts. This Presence transformation was neat in theory, but in practice, it would run up against a Beasts limit pretty quickly, at which point a lot of effort got spent on just getting Beasts out so it could turn them into Presence - it didn't have the super-fast swarm-y ramping I'd been hoping for.
Also, it managed to simultaneously have too many Beasts splattered all over the map (1 per Presence plus a bunch of its Uniques could add Beasts), but to feel not at all swarm-ish or mobile due to difficulty in positioning - it felt like the easiest way to get Beasts, where it wanted, was to just dump more on the board, leaving pre-existing Beasts to just hang out and hope they were useful someday.
The eventual solution was to tone down the # of virtual Beasts (to 1 per Sacred Site rather than 1 per Presence) and to give its Beasts better intrinsic mobility - the ability to Gather from / Push to 2 lands distant instead of 1. Lowering the potential for blasting out Presence extra-fast (up to 3/turn in some incarnations) also meant its Presence tracks could get better, and offer more differentiation between beginning-game and endgame.
The only other structural design challenge was its Power Card dynamics - with decent plays and only getting Power Cards by Reclaiming, it was often severely power-card bound and not able to sustain a high-Plays strategy. (Lightning's Swift Strike manages this, but only because it's built around being bursty.) I compensated by giving it five initial Power Cards (There's a mild elemental slant for Air-centric spirits to start off with more Power Cards, and/or have worse Power Card gain during Growth), as well as building some capacity for it get new Powers via the +Plays track.
Beyond that, it was all details and tweaking.
A Side Note on Tokens
Even though I originally designed a Spirit to "showcase" each of the 4 token types first introduced in Branch & Claw, that was just so players curious to play around with those tokens could do so in a way that was more predictable than Power Card draws - the intent has always been that many different Spirits could make use of any given token-type. So Sharp Fangs Behind the Leaves isn't the Beasts-centric Spirit, it's a Beasts-centric Spirit.
With Jagged Earth, we're also starting to get Spirits that "splash" smaller doses of particular tokens into how they work. E.g., Grinning Trickster Stirs Up Trouble has a small side-order of Beasts interaction, and Lure of the Deep Wilderness is stronger with some token-types than others. These Spirits might not use a splashed token type at all in some of their games, but in others either their Power draws or their teammates might make it more worth focusing in that direction.
But back to Many Minds Move As One, which is very focused - Beasts, Beasts, and more Beasts.
We've already discussed the two Special Rules - better Beasts mobility, and your Sacred Sites counting as Beasts.
The first two Growth choices are pretty straightforward, though it's worth noting that Growth #2 often effectively adds a Beasts to the board due to making a Sacred Site. (Mostly. One nuance of "your Sacred Sites can be Beasts" is that they can't be stacked, since you only ever have 1 Sacred Site per land.) Growth #3 is more unusual: you get to add an actual Beasts token along with a Presence, and you get to choose a land within Range 2 and Gather a Beasts there. The obvious use for this is to set up your Beasts-centric powers (especially if you aren't confident you'll be able to hit your first innate, or if you already need that for some other problem spot), but it can also be used to swarm across the island by Gathering a Sacred Site of yours, if you need that for targeting purposes.
Its Energy track is on the low side, but its Unique Powers are super-cheap, so it doesn't face the same "all the plays but no Energy to use them" problem as Lightning's Swift Strike. Also, its Plays track isn't nearly as good as Lightning's, though it's not terrible - pretty average, though it does have the unusual benefit of "Pay 2 Energy to gain a Power Card", which like all non-Element Presence Track bonuses may be used once per Spirit Phase.
Both of its innate powers are real workhorses - The Teeming Host Arrives gives it a second way to move Beasts, and Beset and Confound the Invaders is a phenomenal Fear-and-Defense combo that it can hit every turn. The catch is that it needs Beasts in the land - and higher innate levels require more and more Beasts to be present!
Its Unique Power Cards aren't shown but can be summarized: very low-cost, no damage at all, good at stalling, and often better with more than one Beasts in the same land.
So: on the downside, Many Minds Move As One isn't very good at outright attacking the Invaders: birds and insects can kill individual humans pretty easily, but taking out entire towns worth of people is more than its swarms are usually capable of. (This is not an absolute truth: when opportunity presents itself - represented by a damage-dealing Beast event being drawn - Many Minds will absolutely take advantage of it, and if it grows into new Powers it may acquire new offensive capabilities. But in the normal course of things, it's far better at harrying than assaulting.)
On the upside, what Many Minds does is deeply unnerving to most humans. When the birds, ground-squirrels, biting flies and other teeming life in an area are all behaving unnaturally in a way that suggests they have it in for you, it's creepy in an up-close-and-personal way that natural disasters don't quite match. A couple of its Unique Powers do some Fear; between that and Beset and Confound the Invaders it can really tear through the Fear deck in smaller games.
Its biggest limitation and difficulty tends to be getting the Beasts where it wants them, rather like Thunderspeaker's biggest limitation tends to be Dahan mobility. Other than this similarity, their gameplay feels very different (Beasts are very different from Dahan), but there will probably be a strong overlap in players who enjoy the two Spirits due to a fondness for strong positional play.
Production Update
We received the e-proofs from the factory before they left for Chinese New Year and we finished our internal review. The factory will be able to begin working on Spirit Island: Jagged Earth by the end of the month, if not sooner!
There is a slight delay due to the extension of Chinese New Year because of travel bans, and we are currently anticipating that it will arrive at the tail end of May and begin shipping in June, but we will try to make up time where we can. With this timeline in mind, we will be closing the Backerkit and locking addresses at the end of April.
Tune in tomorrow for a new Spirit Spotlight!
-Maggie
