“The traits on spirit playbooks are not special abilities, and cannot be taken by living characters by using a veteran advance.”
In the last Blades game I played, I was a Spider with the Vampire’s Arcane Sight.* I used it to read Elstera Avrathi’s mind and find out who her spymaster was, with a view of forcibly making them our crew’s Informants. I also read my fellow PC’s wife’s mind – she was a foreigner from the Islands and it was difficult to parse her language and culture, but I still learned that she was surprisingly content with the situation that her arranged marriage put her in. Later down the line, I was also planning on taking Possession, to be able to control living bodies, because that’s a thing to do. I am also looking forward to playing a demonblood cyborg Lurk with the Hull’s Compartments as the first playbook advance.
As you are reading this, you are probably thinking two things – “fuck, that’s cool”, and “damn, that seems like it would be a little bit difficult to GM.” If you are thinking the first thought, well, thanks for the compliment! As for the second, you and me both know that you will manage just fine.
“Don’t” is the wrong thing to say to this stuff. “Be careful” is enough.
*The GM ruled that I also had to take one of the Vampire’s Strictures. I could not enter a private residence without permission. It was great.
The point of being a Hull is your spirit is in a machine, so it makes sense you can’t pull off the things you could in life. Likewise, taking the Vampire and Ghost abilities without the fictional prereqs sounds kinda gonzo to me, but ok.. if it makes you and your group happy, sure.
I would’ve made you find a source in the fiction for learning such things to somehow make sense of it all, but that’s just me. Do whatever makes you happy I guess
The Ghost stuff could be some form of psychic ability, which would mesh well with the feel of the game. Or perhaps a side effect of over exposure to electroplasm. Cyberpunk stuff for the hull seems fine, as the spirit of your body inhabits the frame, and maybe needs extra juice through stress. The Vamp abilities could be explained through the Vampire Hunter D route: Dhamphire. Or perhaps a thrall. Just my two plugs…
That does sound cool but by opening up those abilities for everyone to use might make them lose their “omph”. In the rules as written the vampire feels significant because they first had to die then find and prepare a Hollow, which isn’t that easy and likely unethical. Those layers of narrative weight that vampire playbook has around it’s neck are part of what makes it interesting.
You can either embrace the fact that you’re veering away from that design goal or use this as a point of setting off a different development into dubious-occult-existence town. Have this Spyder see bizarre eldritch things between the edges of reality, have electroplasmic devices and occult artifacts go haywire do to his peculiar nature, make him hunger instead of love, disdain, fear or lust when he looks at people sometimes, bottles of life essence suddenly seem appetizing, have thier bodys reject them like a foreign entity sometimes, have Deathseeker Crows sometimes fly up to them give a confused look and fly away in embarrassment, if any NPCs who are highly attuned to the ghost field or demons give the Spyder confused looks. Dangerous arcane powers should be dangerous and arcane.
You’d better watch out Daumantas Lipskis​, the Game Police will be after you. But seriously, that’s cool and I’m sure you had a solid (if one-in-a-million) reason behind having the ability. It’s your table that are the real judges.
Fiction-wise, there’s not much you can’t justify in a setting that has strange technologies, strange magic and strange alchemy. Drugs did it. I’m a Tycherosi. I’m from Doskvol Academy’s basement. I’m friends with a demon. I’m a ranking member in an actual god’s cult. I’m a mesmerist. I lost my hand in battle, this is a new one they made. A ghost lives inside of me.
Moment-to-moment situation can stop a lot of things from occurring in the fiction, but character creation is setting-side stuff, and the walls of that particular sandbox are pretty wide apart.
A possible thing to worry about is that Blades positions itself as a crime drama first, and the trope of “this human shares abilities with powerful, distinctly unhuman creatures” is one from superhero stories or anime. Default Blades has that “you have superpowers” thing going on already in its default playbooks, though, just spliced in for spice rather than as a focus.
I’m not saying that – listen, there’s already pepper in that dish, adding more pepper won’t change it. Maybe you like it more spicy, though?
There are also some advances that aren’t really that much of a problem to begin with. A Leech with Interface doesn’t even drift the baseline assumption for what a Leech is by even an inch. A Lurk with Void in the Echo only barely does.
Hell, for my Spider (Quicksilver poisoning that left him in a wheelchair, if you must be so gauche as to demand an in-fiction explanation for these things), I didn’t really default to Arcane Sight on a whim. There just aren’t that many abilities in the game that have to do with enhanced perception, which was what I was primarily interested in.
This kind of house-ruling is great. Bend the game to be what you want!
Personally I enjoy working with players to come up with special fiction based moves and abilities so I love this sort of stuff. Certainly think about how it changes the balance and flow of a game but otherwise just letting my players know that I reserve the right to restructure this new ability is enough to keep them from abusing it in unintended ways.