Playtest report #3 of Age of Blood (our first Downtime) is on it’s way, but in the meantime an update on development.

Playtest report #3 of Age of Blood (our first Downtime) is on it’s way, but in the meantime an update on development.

As ideas were batted around with my players it became clear that we had some stories we wanted to tell that couldn’t fit inside the singular box of the “Town” playbook, and that combined with inspiration from seeing what Andrew Gillis did with the ‘crew’ playbooks in the outstanding Girl By Moonlight hack has led me to expand the focus of Age of Blood to a series of diverse “story” playbooks which define the scope and theme of a season of play.

Right now there are approximately 4 of these I’m interested in pursuing, and they roughly correspond to thematic grounding points for the players in the world of the setting.

The Town : The place where this all began, the PCs are influencing and rebuilding a frontier village on the outskirts of civilization, exploring ruins, slaying monsters, and interacting with indigenous tribes. The core mechanics are very much like a crew in BitD, it’s about filling in boxes on your crew sheet to Build Something and become a major player in the world. To summarize the initial vision of Age of Blood and this playbook, it’s kinda like Darkest Dungeon but with a little more talking, yo.

The Outcasts : In some ways the inverse of the previous, PCs are leaders of an itinerant clan/tribe/cult/caravan and periodically uproot their Base Camp in order to travel around the frontier. Mechanics include fluctuating amounts of “Friction” with other locals and instead of Wanted level the major tracker is their relationship with the dominant society of the land they are in (it’s best to be completely overlooked). They’re a little more Stealth and Deception-focused and seek to explore themes of disenfranchisement and colonialism from an underdog’s perspective.

The Acolytes : This one’s for the Dark Heresy fans. The thematic idea is PCs as roving troubleshooters sponsored by an Inquisitor and authorized to do what is necessary to defend Vanderia from enemies without and within. This one’s still looking for mechanics.

The Fellowship : There’s a preview of this one’s playbook below (last image). The Fellowship is going to have the most heroic tone and will feature the PCs racing to save the world from a massive threat (by learning about friendship and stuff). It’s more than a little bit Lord of the Rings, and might make an interesting capstone ‘season’ to see off a group of PCs established by one of the other story playbooks in a previous season of play.

My goal is to have around 3 of these 4 available in some state of feature completion when I make version 0.6 of the rules public for playtesting.

#AgeOfBlood