Forecaster: The Body You Share

You are an apprentice forecaster. Forecasters are responsible for sparring with weather spirits, protecting your world from natural disasters. You’ve been training for years but to physically interact with weather spirits all apprentices must undergo a journey where they will battle many tests and complete an Graduation Ritual, gifting them their true forecasting power. The ritual involves communing with a nature spirit, sharing with them a true understanding of your one self and letting them join in it. You’ve been training for years but you now have cause to suspect the ritual will fail for you. Because you are not one self. You are more than one. What is Forecaster? Forecaster: The Body We Share is a fighting game of selves-discovery, for 2 or more players using a deck of playing cards. You tell the story of a System, four characters sharing one body, and their journey. Forecaster is set in a magical realist world where spirits and strange powers are a mundane part of modern life. Your characters are an apprentice Forecaster living in a small university town getting ready to undertake a journey where they will spar multiple opponents in preparation of the final ritual to unlock forecasting abilities. The fact of your plurality is a semi-recent discovery. Given the emphasis placed on the idea of knowing a singular self for the ritual to be successful, many of you have wondered if your plurality means it will not work as expected, or perhaps even fail. Still you will undertake the journey, try and gain some understanding, and confront the possibility that your future is not what you know. You draw a trail of cards to determine the scenes of your journey, and the opponent's you encounter in each. In a given scene one player is the Front, the system member currently in control of the body, another player is the Opponent, an external character the system must meet and fight as part of their journey, and other players act as any other system members who are co-conscious in talking scenes. Fights are played as a trick-taking game between the Front and the Opponent. In the fight phase the player who was the Front acts as the whole system, switching between members as determined by the suits if playing cards.