#BladesAgainstDarkness update. Making lots of progress on dungeon crawling, Engagement, and Extraction. New plan for Crews, that I hope will finally gel some of those ideas. Oh and an approach to playbooks that I’m REALLY proud of! Check it out.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ipv4RaCiZWfP49peNFYKIfu2PFGkxTil/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ipv4RaCiZWfP49peNFYKIfu2PFGkxTil/view?usp=sharing
This looks great. Is there a working playtest? The most recently such thing on the hashtag looks to be two years old, which seems hopelessly outdated.
I guess I never actually posted it here… Just fixed that. The official beta was released a few months ago. It’ll be a few more before I’m able to rework everything I want to.
The playbook is pretty slick. Is the Widowmaker always an undead? I thought it had a variety of special abilities in previous versions. (I’ll read the beta!)
In the setting, lots of WM are pretty much fighters and only use the basic moves. Maybe 10% are undead and use the advanced moves. But some of the strongest feedback I got was “how do all these playbooks fit in the setting?” So, I gave the answer that I had come up with for myself. Now, I encourage you to re-write the triggers that open up the advanced moves and make the WM your own. I want to see other ideas! But a lot of people felt things were too vague. So I tried to provide clearer answers.
Seems like it pushes the undead angle pretty hard.
Dylan Green I do love the flavor. In the beta documents, the first paragraph of the WM is a great description. Perhaps you could tweak the playbook so that 1 option is undead and the other is the “walks with death” option.
Hmmm… I like the idea of a not undead option. But on the other hand I like the returning again and again from the dead and taking the unique traumas… I’ll have to see if I can come up with something.
IMHO, undeath shouldn’t appear on any of the freely-available playbooks like this. It seems too special for that: it’s a one-way trip fictionally, quite character-defining to become undead, and the changes to how the character achieves stress relief seem worthy of their own rules with fictional interactions governing their use (very much like how the Vampire in Blades is structured). The way I see it here in the WM book makes it seem like “not that big a deal”. EDIT: ..even though I know it is a big deal, given the area taken up in the playbook for it, and the way it is described. However, I think it feels out of place here on the book since it does have specific fictional requirements the players need to work out, all of which appear to stand apart from the other things that make up the Widowmaker book.
Regarding specific fictional requirements, you can actually expect more of that kind of thing. My goal is for each playbooks to have 2 branching sets of special abilities like this along with a set of general abilities in line with the traditional classes. So, a Widowmaker is a fighter… right up until they return from the grave as an unkillable murder machine. I’ve got some of the rest of these ideas sketched in for the other playbooks, but they aren’t totally crystalized yet.
So if your concern is that the WM has this aproach where a fictional bridge needs to be crossed to open up it full ability set then that won’t be unique to the WM. That will be universal.
If your concern is that “It’s too undead” then I encourage you to not use those ablities, write different triggers, or play a different playbook. 😉
Dylan Green This is really cool. Are all the branching sets of abilities going to be variations of undead versions of the classes?
John Scott no each playbook will be a refinement and expansion of the ideas presented in the current beta playbooks. They will have a small set of skills that set them up as the traditional classes (Fighter, theif, etc.) and then two sets of “Special Permisions” that open up more unique abilities. So the Warden will have a set of generic “ranger” abilities and a “speak with spirits” branch and a “barbarian” branch.
Now that doesn’t mean you can’t have access to them at character creation. It’s really easy to answer the questions posed by each of the special permision “branches” when you make your character. Hypothetically, you could use Veteran and even take one from another playbook at character creation. The goal of this structure is that it will help answer the question of how your character got the way they are. Where did you learn alchemy? Why does your god grant you special favor? How come you can speak with the spirits?
Awesome, I’m really looking forward to seeing all the playbooks!
Interesting response. I think I should reserve judgment on that until more realized since it seems clear you plan to double-down on the decision.
Mark Cleveland Massengale I’d say the use of undeath in a playbook really depends on the setting of the hack. For example, forged in the dark is perfect for a vampire the masquerade hack!