37 thoughts on “HACK CHECK-IN!”

  1. Kicking it off… I’ve ‘completed’ seven of my nine new playbooks for Thieves on the Rock. Everything but the Psycher and the Wisp, since I want to ruminate more on my redefinition of Attune before building the two magicky playbooks. The Vanguard (the armor and tech playbook) needs some fine-tuning on items, which I’m going to finish tonight. THEN: Playbook layout.

  6. My Glow in the Dark hack for doing Fallout/Gamma World/Mad Max is on its way to v6. I’ve had 3 playtest groups so far and I have a for-real artist (I’m cheating because I game with him but still). My favorite thing about it besides the setting (because that’s tuned so personally to my tastes) is that so far the idea of scarcity seems to be working well when paired with replacements/mods to the coin economy. I just have “Supplies” instead of coin, and they’re only specific things if the fiction says they are. Otherwise they’re whatever you need. It’s like how Load works, but applied to money.

  7. Well, you asked! I have :weak laugh: like.. five projects in varying states of playtest now. Three of them I touched this month.

    That is, 3 free fan products (because licensing). And 2 original games:

    * Runners in the Shadows (literally Shadowrun) – 90 pages.. beta.

    * Final Frontier (literally Star Trek) – 60 pages.. alpha.

    * Midgar (literally Final Fantasy) – 20 pages.. alpha (collaboration).

    * The Upside Down (fantasy sci-fi adventure game, neat feature is there are GM playbooks and audience options) – 75 pages.. alpha.

    * Desperation (escalating horror game, neat feature is it’s a party/one shot game with Bladesian mechanics) – 5 pages.. alpha.

  8. I have two hacks in the works right now. One is a simplifed version of the game based the Duamn Figueroa’s World of Blades, that is made so that children can play. The other is currently called Bazaar which is about an interdimensional marketplace where you can buy immortality potions for cheaper than bootleg dvds.

  10. I’ve got an idea for a hack in mind (trying to flip the “build up your crew by gaining turf” aspect to a “develop a colony by taming more of an alien world” kind of concept), but still haven’t run “vanilla” BitD yet. Gearing up to start though so I can get a better idea of where to start hacking.

  11. Michael Raichelson I totally agree playing Blades as-is will help. Also check out the various twitch/youtube actual plays.

    But most of all there’s a video with John Harper and Adam Koebel talking about hacking Blades.

  13. Last night as I drifted off to sleep my brain merged my hack with the COIN board game mechanic to manage faction conflict. Which increased the amount of work one hundred fold.

  14. The 2 I’ve been working on have hit a lull a bit:

    Harbingers of Twilight needs a little rework and some playtesting of the downtime/score full loop cause I broke downtime into two different things w/ it.

    My other one is an idea of a one-shot type thing (w/ the option to play longer term i just dont have the historical background for it) that needs a playtest when I find time for that and people willing “Shadows of Light” playing resistance fighters in Occupied Paris during WWII

  15. I’ve gone pretty far off BitD but it’s the major inspiration of Stupids Gob’s, a game in which each players run a gang of gobs. It’s pretty silly but quite fun.

    However, I have to rewrite the magic system from scratch as it was completely broken, then translate it in English.

    And I think it could be rewritten entirely for clarity.

  16. I am working on two.

    I am pretty deep into a conversion of Onyx Path’s/White Wolf’s Werewolf: The Forsaken set in the Rockies into a Blades hack. The territorial, go on hunts, build up your pack themes underpinning WtF seem so quintessential blades, while the Blades mechanics, IMO, handle the complexities of being a werewolf much more elegantly than does the storyteller system.

    I have some stuff done on a medieval warriors hack. Basically, I saw the trailers for the upcoming LotR game Shadow of War, and was like, “I want to do that in an rpg, but with a PC party and GoT levels (i.e. low) of magic.” I know the playbooks (character and companies) I want, but the setting details are giving me a headache right now. Here is a sample. Any suggestions welcome.

    docs.google.com – Blades at War sample

  17. Still working on my mech resistance fighters hack, but the fact that I am making some rather large changes in my life means it is on the back burner (and has been for a bit sadly)

  18. I’m in the early stages of developing a hack of Blades based on the Brigador video game universe. The main thing I’m interested in is developing new rules for vehicular combat, because otherwise I think it’ll be a pretty straight conversion of the basic rules.

  19. A Parliament of Owls is very early in its development. I have some people for playtesting and discussions. I would anticipate it being probably more than six months from completion.

    EDIT: It’s a hack about politicians in a parliamentary democracy vying for votes, power and influence. More faction-based, and with an attempt to optimise for play-by-post formats.

  21. Well, aside from my Squint playbook I’m still in the process of working on the Sevrin – Severos’ Shadowed Frontier – cityhack (factions and all), which will also include new playbooks. I’m the kind of person who’s too much in-love with the setting of the game to try and put the mechanics somewhere else.

  22. Tim Groth​ and I have been working on a Marxist agitator crew book (duskvold is primed for revolution), and there’s an are magical hack on the backburner with Sean Winslow​

  24. I’m also kicking around A Nocturne, which is way more involved and weird (it’s a game about terrifying space capitalists and relativistic space travel that uses some Blades concepts, but remixes and rejigs a lot, gets a bit Apocalypse World, uses weird dice) – I’m currently working on a much more streamlined and coherent v0.7 (the core mechanics are getting a much-needed overhaul), but here’s the current playtest doc if anyone wants a taste:

    thysane.itch.io – A NOCTURNE (play-test) by Calum Grace

  25. The third playtest of Laws of The Dark is coming up tomorrow. The scenario is a mythology/Court drama, with a convoluted murder case and Odysseus as the prosecutor.

  26. It’s so exciting to read about all the cool things people are doing here! I can’t wait to see some of these 😀

    Recently: I finished up the non-core blades parts of S&V. Scum & Villainy (which is space opera that mashes a bunch of different space opera genres) is available either through the KS or DriveThru.

    Working on: Band of Blades atm (I’d say it’s about 50% to Alpha – this is a dark military fantasy hack). I’ve got 3 of the playbooks laid out and working on the map and campaign sheets atm.

    Pie in the Sky: Have a Blades Lite hack for doing some dungeon fantasy delving in mind, and a Dune-style factions in space politics based hack called Throne of the Void scheduled for way down the road.

  27. A man spends some time with his kid over Father’s Day weekend and the post blows up. Jiminy Cricket!

    I echo Stras Acimovic’s point – this is absolutely fascinating. A large part of my love of Blades is that I have high hopes its Apocalypse DNA will result in a bajillion hacks. I am glad to see these hopes are well founded.

  29. I’m currently about 50% to alpha on my optimistic hippiepunk sci fi hack “Ad Astra” and will most likely be looking for playtesters soon. It’s a pretty involved hack because of the conversion into an optimistic setting, but it’s coming along really well.

    I’ve completed the QuickStart for my Star Trek hack of blades “To Boldy Go.” It’s the final version I will be working on, but everyone else feel free to borrow or use it as you wish.

    I also have a few more ideas tumbling about in my head (including a Fast and Furious inspired hack that I have actions for), that may be quite a bit further out yet.

    drive.google.com – ToBoldlyGo.Quickstart.pdf – Google Drive

  32. My bad! I thought it was explicit.

    In my hack you play goblins at the service of an Epic Evil Vilain. The more greenskin you have in your gang, the more dice you roll (and dice are less punitive) but doubles add consequences.

    Beetwen raid, you can have a darwinist training, sacrificing gobs for perks.

    Since my holidays are f***ed by health issues, I might rewrite it (in English) next week.

  33. I’m doing a kind of medieval survival with a bit of post-apocalypse strangeness thrown in, called Green Frontier. I like to think of it as one part Oregon trail in Roman Gaul, one part Deadwood in the Yuan dynasty.

    There’s going to be a focus on exploration, developing the settlement or hurting the viability of others and some frontier politics stuff. Oh and lots of harm and death. So as well as physical harm and mental trauma there’s social harm – if you become too much of a social outcast you can’t survive any more than if you trauma out or die. Each playbook has a death move, so you can kill off or remove your character with some story impact.

    The playbooks are pretty much playable and most of the important systems are ready for initial playtesting but the crew sheets aren’t there yet.

  36. I have a few ideas but haven’t started writing any of them out yet. I feel like I’m still learning Blades in a lot of ways, as I frequently learn something new about the system each session, even after having played for months now.

    But I do have a few urban fantasy ideas in mind, which I guess makes sense with the Blades foundation, and then for something more further afield I’m looking at some Asian fantasy.

  37. I’ve begun noodling about with the idea of using the setting of Haven City (from Jak II: Renegade) minus the eponymous MC, to see if I can make anything of that.

    As a side-effect, a Dark Experiments Crew for vanilla Blades will likely result too; failed forced-experiments into Ascension from the Church of Ecstasy, dumped into the Lost District to die.

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