Lore and Legends

This chapter of the book will give Story Guides some insight into the beings that might inhabit Makasing, beings that can challenge your Players in a variety of ways. Some might be friends, others are likely to be foes. Most will fall somewhere in between.

Before we get into the details, there are a few important things you need to know about these entries. With the exception of human beings and animals (described as Fifth World beings), none of these beings canonically exist in the world of Coyote & Crow. Whether they actually exist in your Saga, or whether they are just myths or stories is up to the Story Guide.

Remember that you are playing in a world that is just waking up from its long, cold winter. Did certain things awake as winter retreated? Things only talked about around fires? Or are those just the flames of old stories being fanned by people who haven’t walked this new world? Unlike other game systems or worlds, we’re not going to tell you who or what it is populated with outside of people and animals. You’ll make that decision.

In a similar vein, we’re only listing a sampling of animals and of the groups and organizations that people have formed. Do not feel you have to use all or any of these if you have your own ideas.

Native Players

Feel free to add to the Spirits and Creatures listed here. This chapter can serve as a guide for how you might create something from your own culture’s stories. The ones listed here are sometimes created from real Native legends and other times created from whole cloth.

Understanding the Entries

There are three main Types of entries in the following pages: Legends, Icons, and Fifth World Beings.

Legends

Legends are presented as a simple description. There are no specific Stats or Abilities listed, often because the entry refers to a group of beings that could have a wide variety of powers and aptitudes.

As a Story Guide, you can use the Legends entries as launching points for Stories or for ideas around creating specific non-Player Characters, with Skills and Abilities as you see fit.

Icons

Icons are slightly different. These are specific beings with a unique set of characteristics. Don’t feel beholden to the numbers and text listed. You are always welcome to change them up to suit your particular group or needs. A particularly powerful group of Characters might need a more difficult challenge. Simply raise the numbers needed or give the Icon more powerful Abilities.

Icons might be singular beings or they might not. In general though, if you encounter one it will have similar characteristics as the next one you meet.

Fifth Worlders

Fifth Worlders, like Icons, have stats listed out but represent average humans and animals you’ll meet in Makasing. The term Fifth World beings is just a way to indicate that they are beings and animals based on our understanding of the physical world.

They represent generic versions that Story Guides can use as a framework for building out more specific Characters to fill their world, or as a quick reference for less important Encounters.

Name

Many of these beings have multiple names even within the same language. We’re providing a single Chahi term for the beings in question, if they have one, and a rough English translation.

If you’re Native, feel free to call these beings anything you like. If you’re non-Native, we suggest you stick with the Chahi names.

Categories

There are four main Categories for all of these beings and each has a short definition. Every living thing in Coyote & Crow falls into one of these four categories.

Human

Just like it sounds, humans are normal human beings, likely imbued with Abilities from the Adanadi and otherwise bound by the normal rules of humanity. They follow all the rules and have all the limits that Player’s Characters do.

Animal

These are normal animals, like the ones we see in our real world. They have Stats and Skills, just like humans. Unless otherwise specified by the Story Guide, Animals are considered dead when they reach zero Body.

Creature

Creatures are similar to Humans and Animals in that they have physical flesh, can be born, sometimes have offspring, and can die. Unlike Humans and Animals though, they can often break the rules the others are bound by, allowing them to do unnatural things.

It’s important to note that the terms creature and unnatural should not be confused with bad or evil. Being an unnatural creature has no connection to the being’s morality or ethics.

Spirit

While Spirits can take physical form, it is hard to determine if they are alive in the same sense as the other categories. Spirits, when destroyed, often vanish only to reappear a day, a year, or a decade later. Whether they are the same contiguous being or a new manifestation is hard to say.

Some Spirits stay in an incorporeal form and can’t be harmed at all physically. Others only appear in The Black. And as with Creatures, Spirits are not bound by concepts of good and evil. They may have an objective agenda or they may act in ways that are completely beyond human comprehension.

Entry Index

Skill Check

Each entry will have a note called “Skill Check.” This will list the Skill needed by a Character to see if they have any understanding or knowledge of the being prior to meeting it in the game.

As a rough guide, every 2 Successes gained from that Check should garner the Player one paragraph of information from the being’s background description. Which paragraphs or how much information given should always be at the discretion of the Story Guide.

Often, handing over a complete set of detailed information on an opponent can be anticlimactic, when instead it should be that one small kernel of truth that helps the group of Players in a clutch moment. Hand out that information thoughtfully.

Actual statistics (Stats, Abilities, Skills, etc.) should never be given to Players outright. You might describe something as inhumanly strong, but you’d never tell Players that their opponent’s Strength Stat is 7.

Other Notes

Entries in this section condense much of the information found on a typical Player Character sheet.

For example, in the Skill section, rather than list the Rank of the Skill, leaving the Story Guide to determine the total Dice Pool, the Skill is listed with its total Dice Pool.

Abilities may include things that come from the Abilities section of this book, but also unique attributes that the being may possess.