TEXT:  
  1
  Seasons 
  Kyawaii RPG #3 
  By Ewen Cluney 
   
  A downpour of time 
  Upon this static world 
  The river is a circle 
  Fed by winter rains. 
  Helical hearts, leading down 
  To undiscovered lands. 
  Feathered wings, leading up, 
  An ever-changing sky. 
  Spring/Introduction 
  This is a weird little role-playing game inspired by Clannad, Air, Kanon, and other series of 
  the same general style. This game is for stories about the everyday lives of young people, often 
  but not always in high school. There's always a little bit of the mysterious that creeps into these 
  stories, but it's subtle, and however entangled in such matters a character might be, he or she will 
  still first and foremost be a person with desires and fears, just like anyone else. 
  Seasons is a very light and simple game, and the rules are mainly there to give you some 
  basic guidelines for getting into some more or less free-form role-playing. You don't need any 
  dice or anything like that, just something to write on and something to write with. 
  This game wound up somewhat resembling Elizabeth Shoemaker's game It's Complicated, 
  only not as good, so go and check that game out when you get a chance (see 
  http://dissolutegames.wordpress.com/). You can use it to do stuff like Pushing Daisies too. 
  Summer/Discussion 
  Before you get started, sit down and talk a bit about where your stories will take place, and 
  what kind of situation the characters are all in. The default is for it to be somewhere in Japan, 
  with the characters being mostly high schoolers. Pick one of the four seasons. Decide on some 
  themes you want to play with. 
  The story should involve some kind of supernatural element, so talk about what kinds of 
  things you want to play with. Angels, aliens, ghosts, psychic powers, and so on are all perfectly 
  good choices.
  
   
  2
  Autumn/Characters 
  In this game we define characters in terms of “chains.” A chain is a series of things about 
  your character set up in a chain of cause and effect. You designate something as a surface 
  feature, and then devise a series of intermediate steps leading to the root cause. Each step is a 
  “link” in the chain. The first link is the surface link, which is the bit that's very easily revealed to 
  the world. The links that follow are said to be “deeper” in the chain. 
  Below are some examples of different styles of chains. 
  I can't play basketball any more 
  I'm always eating ramen with 
  mustard 
  I say “Gao!” all the time
  ↑ 
  ↑ 
  ↑ 
  My arm got injured 
  I have a strange sense of taste 
  I like dinosaurs 
  ↑ 
  ↑ 
   
  We got into a fight 
  I'd never eaten food before I came 
  here 
   
  ↑ 
  ↑ 
   
  My father resents me 
  I'm actually an alien. 
   
  ↑ 
   
   
  My mother died in childbirth 
   
   
  To follow the source material closely, most of the characters should be girls, except for one 
  or two guys, and maybe a quarter to a third of them should have something supernatural about 
  them. There's no real difference between guys and girls in the game, though in the source 
  material guys tend to be a little bit jerky, but nice on the inside. A supernatural element basically 
  makes up one link of a chain, and it should be something subtle. 
  Each character gets two chains, a “gag” chain and a serious one. The gag chain is there 
  mainly to add some personality to your character, and should have two links. The serious chain is 
  your character's main thing, and it should have three to six links, depending on how long you 
  want the game to run. 
  Your stories can also have secondary characters who don't belong to any one player. 
  Secondary characters don't have chains, though they can have a lot of personality. They can 
  include parents, siblings, teachers, and pets. If you want a specific secondary character to appear 
  in your stories, say so now.
  
   
  3
  Winter/Scenes 
  To play the game, you do a series of scenes. Go around the table taking turns. When it's your 
  turn, you can set up a scene.  
  Then, pick a chain belonging to another player's character, and decide whether you want to 
  Reveal or Resolve it. That player will tell you the result (read the next link aloud, or tell you how 
  much progress will be made towards resolution). From there, you can decide who appears and 
  the general situation. If the scene needs secondary characters, ask some of your friends whose 
  characters aren't in the scene to role-play those parts. 
  Revealing brings elements from one chain from one character into public view. You just 
  pick a chain, and the scene will revolve around showing off the next link. You do have to do a 
  scene to reveal the surface link, though in the portrayal it will probably come to the fore very 
  easily. 
  Resolving is a little more difficult. This is where you try to help someone resolve a problem 
  within one of their chains. This takes some work. You will need multiple people to help out 
  across multiple scenes. You also need the chain to be fully revealed. If you ask to resolve a link 
  and not everything has been revealed, you get a reveal of the next new link for the scene instead. 
  To fully resolve a link, you need to accumulate “checks” on it. A check is the end result of 
  one person helping to resolve a link during one scene. The total number of checks you need to 
  resolve a link is equal to two times the depth of the link, plus one. However, each check towards 
  resolving a given link that counts towards resolving all of the deeper ones. 
  If you work towards resolving a link but don't get enough checks, that scene is somehow 
  inconclusive though not necessarily unproductive. 
  When you do resolve a link, the player of that character gets to decide what resolution 
  entails, however. If one of the characters is a actually an angel in human form, resolving her 
  chain might turn out to be her ascending to heaven, with a sad parting you hadn't intended when 
  you started working to resolve it. A resolution can remove a character from the story, but 
  normally it gives you a chance to restructure the chain in question. Whichever link got resolved, 
  you can replace it with something similar but more positive, and alter each link above it 
  accordingly. 
  New Year’s/Coda 
  And, that's it. You can play for quite a while, as you can see. (The stories in the source 
  material are pretty long too). Making two rounds of the table is enough for a decent session, 
  though you can potentially do a heck of a lot of sessions. 
  Anything not covered by the above stuff with chains is up to pure narration and role-playing 
  to decide, so it's best to work it in a way that doesn't invite arguing over stuff in the first place. If 
  you want to get fancy, you can do stuff with giving characters more chains, or making up chains 
  as you go along, that kind of thing. 
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Collections/Collaborative & Peer & Gm-less & Shifting GM/Seasons.pdf