#AgeOfBlood
Some preview art and material for my own take on a dark fantasy hack of BitD. The goal is to to explore questions of survival and sanity on the wild ruined frontier of a declining kingdom. This isn’t exactly “Low Fantasy”, as powerful inhuman entities most definitely exist and can be invoked directly by the players for fantastic ‘wizard-like’ effects (see the Channel action). It is Dark however, as the consequences of such activity are unpredictable, dangerous, and socially-verboten. Very literal Goetic demons tempting humans for power at a price are a lynchpin of the setting.
This preview homes in on a few of the Actions which have changed. One of the things I loved about Blades is the way that Consort, Sway, and Command (and a host of other possible secondary actions like Study and Finesse) interacted to create unique and nuanced ways for each scoundrel to approach social situations. It really says something about a character when they choose to Command their way to attention in a social scenario, vs. Swaying others or Consorting.
One of the goals in AoB was to pivot the Action list to create interesting options for the players in combat scenarios to express character in a similar way. Age of Blood has to have a defined space for a “Dungeon Crawl”-style Expedition (replacing Heists) and a lot of that will boil down to vanquishing adversaries, which needs to be a similarly nuanced space for freedom of expression through a character. There are a number of other systemic hurdles to help home in on the thematic goals here (corruption, supplies and provisioning, camping, loot as reward system, etc.) but I’ll cover all of that in another preview.
This looks awesome! What playbooks have you decided on for this setting?
This looks great- I like your take on magic.
Wenyang Wu I’ll start teasing out some of the playbooks shortly, but right now there are 9 Playbooks in the current playtest version, divided into 3 categories (Military, Occult, and Divine). The three major types build their playbooks in slightly different ways. I also have some Tribal playbooks cooking on the backburner, although thematically I’m toying with the concept of leaving those in the back as a sort of optional ‘splat’ rather then making them a central part of the experience.
Eric Brunsell Thanks! As I was doing the world-building for the setting it became clear that a single ‘magical’ action verb might not cut it, which once I decided upon that it freed me up to specialize them into two very specific statements about where magic in the setting flows from.
Charles Simon im thinking about skipping playbooks in my hack and instead focusing on a bunch of starting archetypes (suggested starting special ability, vice, etc). Otherwise, I am stuck with a dozen playbooks.
Eric Brunsell I definitely think that’s a valid approach. For the purpose of this one, I think I’m going to just go with the dozen-odd playbooks approach, at least to start, for two reasons. One is because I like the way Playbooks guide players in ‘slotting into’ the setting and I can use them to direct player investment into their character’s place in the setting, and two because it’s somewhat in keeping with the touchstones this draws from (DnD, Darkest Dungeon, etc.). If I get feedback that they feel arbitrary or unnecessarily restrictive I may yet cut them back.
Charles Simon I agree with your approach too. I’m conflicted. One problem I have is that I always end up with generic DnD classes when I try to conceptualize the non-magic playbooks.
Charles Simon I ended up going with clustered templates (20+).