Disclaimer: Again, this is purely a fan thing... just something I do to kill time. It's not endorsed, supported, approved or requested by the good folks from Tecmo who created this super-awesome PlayStation2 series.

Just like I did with Red Dwarf, Mitchell, and my heretofore crowning achievement, TaleSpin, Fatal Frame: the Card Game will be freely available online in multiple PDF downloads until I get a call from a lawyer. I don't know if it's cathartic or what, but I seem to enjoy designing card games based on the media works I'm currently obsessing over. I have quite a few unfinished efforts sitting around my den, but Fatal Frame is the one that has made it to alpha mode... IE, workable ruleset and first drafts of Photoshopped card designs. Fatal Frame: the Card Game will be subtitled "Crimson Butterfly Edition" because I'm working solely with the second game in the series, Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly.

I've been asked many times why I concentrate on making card games out of established licensed properties, and the answer is awfully utilitarian. It's just relatively easy to find art resources for something that already exists. Sure, I could create a card game based on something original, but then I'd have to do all the artwork... and that takes time. Not that I wouldn't consider doing my own thing someday with an eye towards publishing it, but that's a difficult road to uncertain ends in a miserable market.

Back to Fatal Frame. The two PlayStation2 games in the series follow a common theme: reluctant heroine wanders into ancient haunted locales with only a spiritual camera for protection. The camera can exorcise the ghosts by taking pictures of them. While the heroine tries to find her way out of the mansion/village, she gradually learns of horrible and disturbing rituals that were once held there. And, of course, the ghosts are working to re-enact those days on her.

Turning a video game into a card game naturally comes with changes and concessions. For one thing, the atmosphere of a horror game is almost impossible to duplicate in card form. Third World's Testimony of Jacob Hollow is a good horror card game, but it's not scary... it's still just a card game. The immersion just isn't there. My Fatal Frame will have the same problem. I can use all the gory artwork I like; it's not going to be scary. My main effort towards adding to the atmosphere is in flavor text. Lots of flavor text. One of the problems of the modern card game is that the flavor text tends to be lame. I've talked about this before and the situation hasn't changed since then; most flavor text is used to lump in weak sarcastic jokes. I'm going to prove my point by randomly grabbing a card from Spycraft, last year's new game from AEG...

From one of the secret agent cards: "Oh, you wanted subtle. Yeah. I don't do subtle."

See, that character is tough, a smartass, does things his own way, a loose cannon. A raging cliche that I couldn't care less about. His flavor text is no different from 20 other guys in the deck. It adds nothing to the gameplay, and even takes a dump on the game's setting by cheesing it up. Magic has a history of lame flavor text; the example Mike and I always quote is Jaya Ballard, Task Mage, from the Ice Age set. Jaya was another character puffed up with action movie stupido quotes. Like "Yes, I think 'toast' is an accurate description" on the card Incinerate. She sucked.

Gah, off track again. Anyway, I'm using actual in-game text for the ghost cards. Plus some pretty lengthy stuff for cards that represent the game's many notes and files you find. I'm hoping that players can piece together the story - and at least, shades of it - just by paying attention and sorting through the flavor text. Because it's Crimson Butterfly's story that makes it scary, with the rituals and sacrifices and pain and such. It still creeps me out.

The camera is another important facet of the series. Duplicating that with cards is rough. I originally had a strange centering mechanic, where you would roll to see if your photo of the attacking ghost was centered, for maximum points. That got weird. We're down to a simple die roll now for fighting ghosts, but the camera asthetic survives via camera upgrades (film, etc) that help out your roll and a "photo album" where you store the ghost cards you have beaten.

Basically, players will each start the game with a camera as they enter All God's Village (the setting for FF2). The Village is made of 9 exterior location cards, all facedown. So the Village will be randomized each game for variety. The game's Houses will be on these cards, and if you want to enter them, then you pull cards off a separate interior location deck. As you walk through these locations, interior and exterior, you will attract ghosts. Most will be played on you by opponents, but you can play ghosts on yourself if you're feeling lucky. Ghost combat is done with a six-sided die, assisted by the camera upgrades you've collected. Some ghosts are worth points, but the big points come from finding Items (which can only be played at interior locations). Once you get 15 points, you can enter Kureha Shrine to fight one of three random Boss ghosts. Beat the Boss and you win the game.

I'm trying to stay as close to the source material as possible. But like I said, some things just have to be altered to make sense in a card game. I originally considered making it a two-on-two team game... to simulate Crimson Butterfly's focus on twins. But I decided I'd rather keep the format to the usual 2 to 4 players, plus I didn't want to hamstring the rules should I decide to make a Himuro Mansion Edition later on (based on the first FF game, which had no twins, although I suppose I could have treated Miku and Mafuyu as effectively "twins"). I'm actually not mentioning FF2 lead characters Mayu and Mio in the game much at all - although they feature prominently in the artwork panels - because I want the players to become their own explorers of All God's Village. What will probably happen is I will use their story to frame the rulebook. And yeah, I know FF2's final moments take place below Kurosawa House, not Kureha Shrine... but, well, it's complicated. Since Kurosawa House is the biggest House in the game, I wanted players to be able to explore it when they find it, just as Mio does.

Alpha stage means I have a complete, playable deck. I'm testing out the rules and card interactions, seeing what works and what doesn't. This game will be simpler than TaleSpin by design; for example, the first thing to go was the concept of playing cards on an opponent's turn. Any game that allows you to play cards on somebody else's turn invariably leads to timing problems. Not that "fast effects" are a bad thing, just that for this game, I'm trying to forge a game that avoids those issues.

Since I'm a sucker for good presentation, I have a nice red Asian-themed box to hold the cards (found at Pier One). I'm going to attach some bells to it so it jingles like Chitose! I also have a bunch of small photo frames, all black with red embroidery (found in the dollar bins at Target)... but I couldn't find a use for them. Maybe I'll print out some screenshots and hang them up somewhere. The design of the cards lifts some background elements from the FF2 website, lots of artwork found at my favorite FF fansite Beyond the Camera's Lens, and some screenshots from my own saved games.

To get the screenshots, I ran the PlayStation2 into Rhonda's iBook. Unfortunately, the video-in box I'm using is fairly old and crappy - it uses a slow USB connection so the screen refresh is delayed, making gameplay difficult. I need some shots of the Houses, but I've been too scared (and unskilled) to play my saves much.

I figure I'll have a "teaser" site up before too long. I won't get a complete site up for quite a while, not until the rules are solid and the card PDFs finalized. I think I had a TaleSpin teaser page up for almost two years before the final version launched. But Fatal Frame: the Card Game, Crimson Butterfly Edition is coming. Once I get into the Photoshop phase, that's a good sign that I'm serious enough about the project to finish it!