#SinsInTheDark
So here is a rough draft of my gothic horror playbook sheet. When your wife is doing your design, and then gets super busy with actual work, you take what she gives you.
The game is Blades in a Ravenloftesque setting where you play the monsters, each with a dark patron that gives you addition powers (instead of a crew). The setting will be larger than Duskwall, and I think you’ll be trying to control towns and small cities instead of claims.
I’d love to hear feedback on the rather baroque artwork, as well as the abilities for my first playbook, the Vampire.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2CV5dv0ZQVgLWZkbWpYeWg0UGM
oh man that stain glass!!! Bravo sir! Very evocative.
Beautiful, but the actions are super hard to read. Can’t argue with the effect, but the usability is rough. You’ve got a lot of unused space though, so maybe increase the size of the “Rose Window” motif and move the rest of the bits to the bottom left.
Harm (3-2-1) might need to be reversed as you need more harm slots for lower levels.
Calling out vice in “Thirst” move seems a little odd. I’d probably just list only “Blood of sentient creatures” as the only vice.
Though it might be interesting to expand the idea beyond the traditional (a Jiang Shi might drain breath, a goul might eat flesh) I imagine you want to drive home the traditional Gothic image.
Transform could have more than one “tick box” for each usage. That’s how it works in core, though that’s not necessary. The ideas is good and well implemented.
Create Spawn is amazing, but using crew tier as the limit for how many stress to spend seems odd. Trauma +1 seems a natural fit in my mind (More screwed up vampires produce stronger spawn).
Sparkle: Ha. What you did there. I see it. Just passively being super attractive seems sorta odd, I’d make it a Dominant Position or a stress cost personally.
Rest of the moves are rockin.
I like the feel of this.
One small request: Can you change the name from “Blades in the Dark” to something else? When stuff like this gets passed around the Internet, people can easily get confused about what’s a hack and what isn’t.
Thanks Aaron Berger, but all praise for the graphics goes to my wife. All I did was hand her a blades sheet and said “Can you make this look gothic? Maybe like a church?”
Dylan Green I appreciate the feedback. As far as readability goes, that work is ongoing (or rather paused until she has free time again).
Great point about the harm, didn’t even occur to me.
Right again about the vice, and that will save me some room. I have a problem being concise. I think we’ll stick with just blood for now because I’m going for a very specific genre, but nothing stops anyone from breaking any rules I set out and doing their own thing.
I like trauma much better for create spawn, thanks for the idea.
With Sparkle I can’t tell if you’re taking issue with the first sentence, the second, or both. Are you saying you’d prefer +position instead of +1d, and that you can spend stress to say a person is attracted to you?
John Harper Eek! Sorry. It absolutely is not called Blades in the Dark. I didn’t even realize the original name was on the PDF. The working title is Sins in the Dark, although I’d ideally like to be more clever. I’m bad at naming things.
For Sparkle I was referring to “Anyone who could be attracted to you is.” I would say that making this a passive fact that is always true MIGHT be to powerful. I try to make it so these things engage with the mechanics by calling out position or costing stress.
Honestly, this isn’t necessary just my personal guideline.
Dylan Green Gotcha. It wasn’t my intention that it always be true. The key part is anyone who COULD be, and some people can’t be.
Now who can’t be attracted to you and why? Some people aren’t attracted to whatever gender you are, some people might have seen you do too many evil things, and there may be other reasons. Basically I am leaving it up to the group and GM to decide if you get the bonus. But I’ll think about it some more.
/sub