A NOCTURNE – playbooks update #2
Here’s the four playbooks I’ve got so far: The Broken, The Forgotten, The Killer, and The Outlaw. Yes, The Forgotten is meant to be as creepy as it seems, and I spent far too much time evilly cackling while writing it. Also, yes, if you look at some of the character creation options you’ll see that A Nocturne also secretly doubles as a cyberpunk mecha game. Shhh, don’t tell anyone!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_sURh-eDnchZklMUDBKNlczcmM/view?usp=sharing
Looking very good! What other playbooks have you got in the pipeline? Also, do you have an ETA on your draft rules? Would love to take a look at what you’ve done so far.
Matt Kay The other playbooks I have to do are: The Charlatan, the Explorer, and The Overloaded (a kind of mutant tech wizard), and if I’ve got time I might try out The Changeling (a true alien searching for their origins) and The Heretic (a dissident or cultist who rejected or sought to undermine wider Panhuman society).
The draft rules for 0.7 are currently under way, and may be a week or two. I’m currently doing the character creation chapter, which is why I’m making these playbooks right now. To come: Craft Creation (and the attendant Craft Playbooks), Player and GM principles, a re-done Cluster Creation section (for making the sandbox), a sample Cluster, and some interstitial stuff elaborating on existing rules.
Sounds intriguing. Apologies if you’ve posted previously, but what’s the elevator pitch for your hack?
Matt Kay The player characters are the variously outlawed and damaged crew of a spitter craft, a massive, old, weird interstellar spacecraft, operating on the edges of the Panhuman Diaspora, a loose scattering of worlds populated by a kind of uneven transhumanity.
It’s mostly about time (especially as it pertains to relativistic space travel), massive power differentials (the spitter craft confers a dangerous amount of power on the crew, but other craft are equally dangerous), and getting Profit by any means necessary.
Oh my god, I thought it was a Cyberpunk-ish hack at first, but now my interest is piqued about 100-fold!
Matt Kay There’s definitely a lot of cyberpunk in there, ‘cos it comes with the “edges of transhumanity” territory, but yeah. I like to call it a “space bastard simulator”.
I’m pretty sure if I asked my group if they wanted to play a “space bastard simulator” they would force me to play tomorrow. Sounds awesome.
This looks absolutely badass! Just read through the playtest on itch.io and I love everything about it (although the cluster creation rules look like they’ll take some getting used to). Can’t wait to see more!
Renaud van Strydonck Yeah, the cluster creation stuff needs some tweaking to make it a bit more manageable and streamlined, but I also intend on including a default cluster for quick starts.
One more thing: I might be bringing the default dice mechanics more in line w/ Blades core stuff. The funny dice have been a fun experiment, but I’m not sure if I’m trying to reinvent the wheel, so to speak.
I was thinking the same thing. One of the odd little things I quite enjoy about Blades is the fact it uses only d6.
Regarding cluster creation, as I was reading I was already wondering about using something along the lines of the Diaspora system instead.
You lose out on the ability to make hard distance calculation, but that feels like something quite un-BitD-ish anyway… I realise it’s part of what puts the “hard” in A Nocturne’s Hard Sci-fi, though.
Love the Touchstones by the way!
Renaud van Strydonck Diaspora has definitely been on my mind as a possible alternative inspiration for the clusters. I do really love the isometric projection stuff though. I agree that the distance calculations are maybe a little foreign to BitD’s style, but I feel like it’s necessary to drive home the vastness and the cost of travel. Will think on it.
Another thing I might do is make clusters a little smaller or more sparse by default to let people drill into it a little easier. The cluster I have rolled up for testing only has 6 systems and it’s actually a really useful size.