hey hey!

hey hey! here’s the first look at a hack i alluded to yesterday, called Songs for the Dusk. it’s a science-fantasy post-apocalypse game with an optimistic tone inspired by things like destiny, adventure time, the legend of korra, and the pokemon mystery dungeon games, with a fair amount of the emotional tone of studio ghibli movies or any of avery alder’s post-apocalypse games (dream askew, the quiet year, the deep forest.)

v0.1 includes a general outline of mechanical changes from blades in the moment to moment, a really broad overview of the setting and genre, (tentative) names for seven playbooks and five crews, and three playbooks at approximately 66% completion.

some notes!

-i use arcana, the supernatural, the uncanny, and charmwork fairly interchangeably to refer to the magical nonsense that’s possible in this game. don’t worry if you lose track of what’s what

-the three playbooks i have…track pretty closely to the hunter, titan, and warlock from destiny. i’m struggling most with the narrative role of the witch (the one most inspired by the warlock) right now, trying to make sure there’s enough of the lorekeeper and midwife concept in there to counteract the slinging energy blasts around

-there’s a lot of footnotes in this game pointing out specific things that are tentative, but this is such an early draft that in general everything is tentative, up to and including the name of the game. Songs for the Dusk is evocative of an image i’m really fond of, but i might switch to something with a little more flow

-i ended up setting up more of a musical theme than was originally intended, and i’m waffling on how much of that theme is metaphor and how much will actually play out in the mechanics, so if a lot of that stuff seems strangely distant from the rest of it, that’s why

the core rules and changes are in the document below, which itself contains links to the setting document and playbooks. i’m really excited to hear what people think! goals for v0.2 are to develop at least a couple crew playbooks and make sure the playbook mechanics reinforce the narrative roles and the setting a lot more, and i’ll definitely be doing a lot of editing, so i’m really interested in what people have to say 🙂