So, this is just a random thought drifting but if BitD was scaled up, you could make an interesting hack for the Song of Ice and Fire setting. Factions, influencing, intrigue. Could be good.
So, this is just a random thought drifting but if BitD was scaled up, you could make an interesting hack for the…
So, this is just a random thought drifting but if BitD was scaled up, you could make an interesting hack for the…
You should look into The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power; it’s much closer to what you’re looking for.
I’ve been thinking about a Song of Ice and FIre-style hack for Blades for a while now. It would change a lot of things though, most notably taking place over a much longer period of time (think decades). I haven’t gotten too far into working on it though. I have thought of the crew playbooks though: House, Guild, Revolution and School.
I think so!
Also, Lex is right that the Sword, the Crown, and the Unspeakable Power would be a good resource for ideas – it’s collaborative setting-building exercises are a gem. It might not be for you though since you literally want to play in Westeros and so wouldn’t use those.
But yea, it should work great if you totally replace factions from the War in Crows Foot situation with three minor houses in north Westeros, and you can scale things up to have a decent go of it
Thomas Berton I’ve been considering a game that spanned generations too. Not on the scale of SoIaF, but yea: scores taking up year(s) of each PCs life, and Entanglements inspired (in part) by Pendragon’s calamities
I had considered a fantasy-feudal Japan hack (think sengoku period) with the PCs running a clan (nobility, criminal, shinobi, temple…) and contending with the other clans. The biggest obstacle is the sheer number of npc retainers, which I fear would bog down things a lot. Also, mass battles and figuring out what happens when being away from your region for months (campaigns & travels)… they seem too much for a simple fortune roll.
Hm. But it seems fine since cohorts can be groups or individual experts. Also, progress clocks for complex objectives should fix the fortune roll from being too decisive
Mark Cleveland Massengale Yeah, but the scale of it all worries me. Like, a cohort in this case would be closer to 50-100 people, and you would start with several of them (a clan cannot be formed by three or four people, that would be ridiculous). In Blades too you might end up with hundreds of people following your lead, but it’s something you gradually achieve, not a whole lot of bookkeeping dumped on you from the very beginning. I’m torn because the setting would be promising, but the implementation has issues. I also considered limiting the scope to a single region in order to scale down everything, but that would pretty much defeat its purpose (which is to be a less kitchen sink-ish, more researched L5R). * sigh *
Oh, right RoosterEma I worked on this issue before with my Star Trek hack of Blades…
This may be a good starting point for your thing, in other words: tier 0 crew is about 50 people / tier I, 100 / tier II, 250 / tier III, 500 / tier IV, 1000 (doubling thereafter).
The cohorts are just the ones with enough special training to be noteworthy. Keep cohort scales as they are in the book (so two named departments can’t dwarf the rest of the crew).
And for the rest, the unnamed ones, I added a special cohort, The Crew (The Clan probably for you). Which is free, has no edge, flaw, or types (it is equal, 0d, in all tasks) and has scale equal to tier+1. The crew could take an upgrade to give it +1d when led to action. It worked well for our game so we could focus on the personnel they did care to detail, while also acknowledging that there are more than just the named crewmen/departments they could call upon.
Mark Cleveland Massengale interesting. How are you handling the contacts? Are they on board the vessel or around the galaxy, or both? And how can the group contact them when several solar systems away? You are indeed dealing with issues similar to mine.
RoosterEma We decided some were not on the ship, and some were. Most were, and probably crewman or family of someone on the crew – the ones that weren’t, they could be on another Federation world of their choice from the claims sheet (which we would name together as we went), but within the same quadrant was preferred (travelling across the quadrant was the theoretical limit for a single downtime action spent at warp anyways).
If they needed to make contact from far away, they could freely do so at times from within the same star system, but might have to acquire an asset or flashback to make sense of their use if not. During downtime, they could just do it within the same quadrant, or they could come up with another way during free play (probably using Engineer)
Mark Cleveland Massengale increasing downtime costs for travel/communications might make for a good solution! I also like Stras Acimovic’s Band of Blades approach, with dwindling resources across the various operations.