#glowinthedark
Here’s my first draft of some new entanglements for Glow in the Dark, my hack about using BitD for Mad Fallout Max Gamma World. The term “Supplies” is alpha for sure, and represents some sort of crew resource. I don’t think Coin and Heat map completely to a post-apocalyptic wasteland setting, so I’m working on modifying the default feedback loop to maybe be more of a slider. Low supplies is bad, because you can’t obtain things easily, but having high supplies needs to bring problems as well, and hopefully different kinds of problems. The effects are all over the place (it’s a first draft), but does illustrate some of the issues with lack of variety when you only have a few crew resource tracks to mess with.
Fallout
Replaces Entanglements. After your crew finishes an adventure or resolves a crisis, find your current Supplies total on the chart below and roll to see how your crew’s new situation has attracted attention. Factions in the wasteland are always keeping tabs on each other. The weak become easy prey for outsiders or fall apart as resources dwindle, but the strong risk losing their power to greed and internal strife.
Supplies 0-3
Unrest: People within your crew are talking about leaving, rationing supplies, mutiny, etc. Forfeit your Tier+1 in Rep as you focus on quelling the infighting, or deal with the problem some other way.
Favor: Your crew needs supplies and another crew you have positive status with (typically +2 or +3) needs something distasteful done. Agree to the deal or forfeit 1 Rep per Tier of the friendly faction.
Vultures: Another faction sees your crew as easy pickings and mounts a raid. Pay them off with their Tier in Supplies or stand up to them, losing 1 Status with them.
Sickness: Your crew’s medical supplies are running low. Do something about it now or treat your crew as being at war (lose 1 Hold, single downtime action, etc). Until this crisis is resolved, you also lose the ability to Recover during downtime.
Drastic Measures: Desperate for raw materials, your crew razes one of its own claims for resources. Choose a Claim to destroy, gaining your Tier in Supplies, or stop the madness some other way. If you do not have additional claims, then you must take the second option.
Siege: A rival faction gets wind of your dwindling supplies and lays siege to your turf, hoping to starve you out. Give them 1 Claim or go to war (-3 Status).
Supplies 4-5
Probing: An enemy faction grabs a friend or contact, interrogating them about your defenses. Pay ransom equal to 1 Rep per Tier of the enemy, let them keep your contact, or show them you are not to be trifled with.
Hijacking: While you were out, another faction steals a fuel-laden vehicle or other fuel source from you. Lose Supplies equal to your Tier+1 or go get it back.
Vultures: Another faction sees your crew as easy pickings and mounts a raid. Pay them off with their Tier in Supplies or stand up to them, losing 1 Status with them.
Mutants: You encounter randos with unknown intentions. Are they there to steal supplies? Eat your people? Act as a distraction for some other faction?
Weather: Severe weather (even for the wasteland). Radiation storm, killbot swarm, fire tornado, etc. Treat the next session as if your crew is at war (1 downtime action, lose 1 Hold, etc) as people are lost to the elements, or face nature’s wrath and try to save what you’ve built.
Diplomacy: Another faction sends a party to barter (or invites your group to do the same). Denying the offer reduces Status with that faction. Will they honor their deal? Will you?
Supplies 6+
Indolence: One of your cohorts causes trouble due to their flaw(s). Lose face (forfeit your Tier+1 in Rep), make an example of one of them, or face reprisals from the wronged party. There’s no fallout if you don’t have a cohort.
Wastrels: Flush with resources, your crew overspends. Lose your Tier in Supplies and reduce everyone’s stress by 1, or deal with it before it gets out of hand.
Diplomacy: Another faction sends a party to barter (or invites your group to do the same). Denying the offer reduces Status with that faction. Will they honor their deal? Will you?
Mutants: You encounter randos with unknown intentions. Are they there to steal supplies? Eat your people? Act as a distraction for some other faction?
Aid: A friendly faction comes to you asking for help. Pay them Supplies equal to their Tier, ignore them and lose Status, or assist them in their plight some other way.
Big Fish: A larger faction or a temporary alliance of smaller enemy factions decides your crew’s good fortune should be redistributed. They mount a major assault. Give them 1 Claim (or the enemy’s Tier in Supplies if you have no additional Claims) or go to war (-3 Status).
I really like the tone you’ve set with these entanglements. Upon first read through I’m not noticing anything that really looks out of place. The only thing I could think of would be to potentially place weather in more of the tables. Unless you want bad weather to be a fairly uncommon thing.
Good point. Some of the “some faction attacks somehow” results could be more generalized, combined, and then that would open up some room for man vs. nature stuff we don’t get (or need to get) in Duskwall.
So you want to have both Coin and Supplies? In this setting I feel like you could just replace coin since there probably isn’t a currency? But then it’s weird that you’re also using supplies instead of Heat. In Blades there is a push and pull where you want to keep coin high and heat low, but you need to generate heat to make coin. Looking at this table, and imagining how supplies works, I imagine you just want to keep it high all the time. Basically, I’m more interested in hearing about your economy is going to work.
The tables look fine, although the windows seem a little small. It’s probably something you’ll keep refining over time and will keep getting better.
Fallout is a good word.
I like the simplicity of Supplies. Is Supplies only a Crew resource? Is there a replacement for PC-Coin and PC-Stash?
I don’t want to have Coin – as you say, it doesn’t fit the setting I’m working with. And there’s no police or overarching authority present to make Heat make sense. What there IS, though, is… well, scarcity, ironically. I’m going for a tug of war where you need supplies, but in order to get more you need to expend supplies, and that affects other factions who then might affect you, and so on. Plus I’m trying to throw in some more random/natural events as well, to represent the setting not being a city but rather an expanse of territory. Finally, get too many supplies and others will want to come take them from you.
I thought about having multiple types of supplies, but came to the conclusion that it’s counter to how BitD handles its resources. The fictional specifics of what those supplies are can be determined by the group (or the fallout, as with the “Sickness” result) and what they want to focus on in their own game.
I’m kind of designing by the broad side of the barn here. Throwing crap at the wall and seeing what sticks, refining that, then letting the connective tissue grow logically from the bits I’m more invested in or have stronger opinions on.
Jason Eley wrt PC-level supplies/coin/stash, I want to say… yes, probably? Some sort of exchange rate – I’m thinking that going into a raid or mission with heavy loads should probably ding your crew’s supplies more than light loads, right? Because hiding how geared-up you are from the police doesn’t matter anymore, so Load loses its mechanical significance unless we can fit something else in its place.
I think the balance of Heat and Coin works really well in game, and I worry that turning that into a single currency will be less ideal. Only play testing will really show one way or the other.
So Heat and Coin don’t work, and you’re turning Coin into Supplies, which is cool. Why not turn Heat into another currency that makes more sense? There is no authority, but there are other groups who could wish you ill. You could track Enmity or Envy of the various warbands as you perform missions. Generate enough Envy and you gain a level of Hatred (which is the same as Wanted).
Mark Griffin That could really work well for the setting. It helps to have some abstract idea of external forces coming down on the group.
Hey, if I can bring back a Heat-equivalent, awesome, because you’re right, a single track is proving troublesome as a foundation for a rich metagame economy.
Let’s look at what makes Heat Heat, though. You always get some Heat in Duskvol, and you get more when you do things that kind of run counter to the “archetypal” heist – get in, get out, get paid, nobody knows you were there. You get dinged for killing people, because there’s an in-setting rationale that reinforces the heist movie theme where the protagonists usually don’t go into things planning on a mindless slaughter. How many heist films use some variation on “nobody needs to get hurt” in order to sway one of the thieves? So essentially there’s this Heat track that exists to enforce what the game is about. Coin is the other, simpler track – thieves steal money, and that maps nicely to Supplies in the wasteland. Your group acquires supplies so you don’t all end up as sun-bleached skeletons in the sand.
I’ve got to look at what the archetypal behavior is for the genre I’m trying to model here. I’m taking inspiration from 3-4 primary sources: Gamma World, Mad Max, Fallout, and the Walking Dead (primarily the recent seasons where they really start contrasting various groups and settlements). Gamma World and Fallout have a lot of dungeon crawl DNA to the tasks within: Go into an Ancient ruin or competing encampment, kill things, take their stuff. Mad Max honestly isn’t that different – the Road Warrior features one nomadic group laying siege to another, trying to get at the resources within. Thunderdome gives us a look at what can happen with internal strife within a crew, plus provides inspiration for a potential “retirement” or endgame goal: Survive long enough to reach the fabled Tomorrow Morrow Land or wherever (or the Green Place of Fury Road, or the Plains of Silence from the Mad Max game, etc). Fury Road I see as a successful initial heist plagued by a horrific set of entanglements leading to a second session where it’s nothing but reprisals. At the end, they raise their Tier, they gain a Claim, and end their war.
In this wasteland setting, I could see replacing the Heat penalty for killing with a similar penalty for destroying supplies. You go in hard and blow up enemy trucks and torch their fuel depot, that’s going to hurt more – and get your crew a bad reputation – more than killing some of their dudes will.
I like what you are thinking there. The destruction of supplies idea adding to heat especially. I think the most important thing to remember with Heat is that it is pretty abstract by nature. Even in Blades it is used as a really nebulous idea of small stuff that may have been done out of narrative to bring more attention to the crew. In GitD you could just work on finding a word for it that fits the setting and then using it as a means of applying more pressure to the PCs. For example, remains of a PC raid can still be found by other crews. The only major difference is that pressure is brought by other raiders/settlements as opposed to the Bluecoats.
In my own hack I’m struggling with similar issues of finding how to work in heat to the setting. I just have to keep reminding myself that it is pretty abstract, and not super specific actions that contribute to heat.
I hope this post is actually helpful and not too rambling.
Adam Schwaninger That’s a very insightful look into your design process and what Heat is, and it’s cool that you’ve really thought about it. I really like the idea that in this kind of setting resources > life, and that the real taboo is not murder but waste. I think you just need to find the right words and concepts to replace the coin/heat economy for you game, and you’re already more than half way there.
Obviously writing new mechanics into your hack is one way to make it stand out from the crowd, so tinkering with the economy is a cool idea. There is probably something cool you could do, but it would require a lot more play testing than just slapping a new theme onto an already well tested piece of design.
I look forward to following the rest of your work here.
You could use Hold for this chart. Strong = attacks unlikely, Firm = attacks moderate, Weak = attacks likely. That might give Hold a little more utility than just a buffer against losing Tier.
You could also try comparing Rep to Supply somehow. Rep > Supply = people think you are too badass to attack. Rep < Supply = people think you are ripe for the pickings. This may create a cycle where increasing Tier becomes an event unto itself, as you suddenly go from Rep > Supply down to Rep < Supply (although I'm not sure the fiction for that makes much sense to me).
That’s an interesting handle Will Scott. I was playing with some ideas about weather and sickness effectively putting your crew “at war”, which would make Hold more valuable, but again, it’s just as a buffer, like you say.
And your Rep/Supply interaction makes sense to me, if you think of it like Tier 1 is 10-19 Rep, then Tier 2 is 20-29 Rep. The thing is, you aren’t going to be taken seriously by Tier 2 factions until you crest that Tier level, at which point yeah, you run the risk of being a small fish in a bigger pond. To your old Tier 1 rivals, your Rep is still greater than your Supply so to speak.
Do you Want more of a PvNature sort of thing, or more of PvFactions? I wonder if you are open to some more abstract replacements for Heat. Rivalry could work if you want to retain the focus on the settings’ Faction conflicts. Heat in BitD is basically what the characters actions are producing as a consequence to easy-way-out actions, which I also liken to the fuel for conflict stories with the other factions. [in my vision of GitD]
I think the meat of this hack is still PvFactions, but default Duskvol doesn’t have a lot of nature left so adding any of that in looks new and shiny. 🙂
Oh, maybe Friction as a Heat replacement, which is kind of silly because friction makes heat… anyway, I just remembered the old Commando book for Top Secret SI. That used a Friction mechanic to represent Murphy’s Law, plans going wrong, bad intel, etc.
Yup, gonna switch Heat and call it “Friction” instead. John’s been through enough playtests (and I haven’t) to stick with Coin and Heat tracks. This area of my hack (the metagame economy) interests me, but I don’t think there’s enough other things nailed down yet. I’ll use Friction as the working concept, work on some playbooks and crew types where I do have specific visions, and see if I need to revisit it after that.