The Mutant

The Mutant

#glowinthedark

This is the last playbook I’ve planned for Glow in the Dark at this time, and I freely admit it is the weirdest and shakiest one. Part of me went for that Hull/Vampire/Ghost “prestige class” feel, while part of me wanted to make sure it was something with which you could jump in from the start.

It’s a LOT of Gamma World injected into a series of playbooks that have mostly stayed Mad Max or Fallout. If you stayed purely Mutant, you’re gonna be pretty freaky. However, I think mixing up Veteran advances one way or the other could be pretty cool.

I’m shaky on the items, because the underlying theme of the playbook is that you rely on your own gifts. That said, I kind of have a gear list relating to delving into pre-war sites, which seems to be broad and useful enough without pigeonholing too much.

One thing that’s broken at this point that I don’t have an answer for yet is the Channel action. In vanilla Blades, Attune can be used by anyone, and there’s a reason for that. Channel was only ever going to be a Mutant action, and I’d actually go for other actions given any one of those abilities. Scanner would use Read or Wreck or Finesse or Boss. Natural Weapons would be Prowl or Raid, etc. So disregard those Channel dots for the time being. 🙂

Ghoul: You are wizened, leathery, and tough. When you bathe in radiation during downtime, you gain +2 ticks on recovery long-term projects. You also get +1d to Prowess resistance rolls.

Superhuman: You are freakishly-muscled and massive. Spend 1 stress to perform a feat of superhuman strength or speed. This factors into effect.

Scanner: Your bloated brain swells with strange power. You may telepathically communicate with anyone you can see, and can pay 1 stress to: locate all minds around you – move an object remotely – briefly control a person or animal – read a person’s thoughts

Wings: You can fly as fast as a vehicle when you carry a light load, and as fast as a running person under a medium load.

Natural Weapons: Your body bristles with bone spurs, quills, thorns, or claws and fangs. Your natural attacks gain potency against unarmored targets. When you get inside an opponent’s guard, you get +1d to fight them.

Conduit: You are bioluminescent and crackle with energy. You can release this energy around you or project it as a beam or jet. Take 1 stress for each level of magnitude.

Venomous: You are patterned and colorful. Choose a drug or poison to which you are immune. Pay 1 stress to secrete it through your skin or exhale it as a vapor.

Invertebrate: You are rubbery, slick, or squamous, able to contort through tiny spaces. You can perform feats of inhuman flexibility. When you use contortion to do things a human could otherwise do*, you get +1 effect level.

*I also don’t like how this one’s worded. I want to say that Invertebrates can do things people can’t, but when they do contortionist stuff that people COULD do, they’d get a bonus. But not when they do their inhumanly-weird contorting.