Is anyone working on a hack inspired by Indiana Jones, Uncharted, Tomb Raider, The Librarians, etc.

Is anyone working on a hack inspired by Indiana Jones, Uncharted, Tomb Raider, The Librarians, etc.

Is anyone working on a hack inspired by Indiana Jones, Uncharted, Tomb Raider, The Librarians, etc. etc.? Because stories of pulpy, jet-setting adventurers exploring exotic locales and interacting with powerful artifacts seems like it could be a great fit for this system.

18 thoughts on “Is anyone working on a hack inspired by Indiana Jones, Uncharted, Tomb Raider, The Librarians, etc.”

  1. I could see it working well!

    Each “Score” could be a different site, have some downtime activities that include travel or research. Skills don’t need to change – Attune for dealing with artifacts as well as instinct, “gut feelings”. Study already includes research and could account for ancient languages / cultures. Finesse already covers vehicles and Tinker already covers traps.

    You’d have factions for locals based on the place, maybe a resistance group in some countries, nazis (or Trinity in the case of Tomb Raider), pirates, other explorer groups.

    Drop the ideas of Turf and Hold.

    Crew sheets could be an archaeology team, thieves/smugglers, or even a military expedition if you want to flip the nazi angle on its head. You’re losing a war, go uncover some maybe mythical items.

    I’d probably try to limit the globe trotting a bit just so that you spend more than one session in the same community, but there’s so much to see that it would be easy to keep it fresh, too.

    Man, I really want to write this now.

  2. Yes, actually. Or something similar.

    I want to add some bits before I post an example here but I’m working on a hack inspired by a diverse selection of adventure stories like Treasure Island, Indiana Jones, Sherlock Holmes, Black Sails, etc. (along with a splash of other genres).

    The primary rules additions are for traveling between regions, genre specific playbooks, and playing as people who tend to have a bit more privilege than your average Blades scoundrel.

  3. I had an idea a while ago which may actually port over well, where you play as servants of an eccentric marquis who has been cursed to never leave his home, and so you must bring the world to him.

    It’s set in a world where the initial attempt on Franz Ferdinand’s life injured a spectating wizard who dropped his disguise, and instead oh WWI all the pulp nonsense started crawling out of the woodwork. Each session would be another mission out into the world to procure your employer a yeti to fight, or somehow bring him a fresh New York hamburger.

  4. Thanks for the link Serf McSerfington! I’ve only taken a brief look so far but I’m excited to give it a proper read. Thanks to everyone else who’s weighed in too.

    Christopher Sniezak, I was playing Uncharted 2 the other day and I saw a familiar sequence:

    Wake up in the middle of the action in a Desperate position: you’re sitting in a train car that’s dangling off a cliff… and you’ve got level 2 Harm to the gut! Attempt to climb out but suffer Severe Harm: falling to your death! Resist to grab onto a railing at the last minute. Make a series of rolls to climb up the train car to safety, but many rolls have complications in the form of the train falling apart, lengthening the overall distance you’ve got to climb.

    youtube.com – Uncharted 2 Intro/Gameplay

    Scoundrel playbooks could be an almost 1:1 reskin (Leech becomes Scientist, Slide becomes Dilettante, etc.) and Districts could be made into Exotic Locales pretty easily. Thinking across a few different movies, Factions would be easy too (Nazis, colleges, museums, Medjai, mad scientists, the Flying Legion, cults, etc.).

    I think the “pressure cooker” atmosphere is maybe the weakest link for this conversion but honestly I don’t think that atmosphere is as dependent on the cage of Duskwall as the book implies. In pulp stories like Indiana Jones, The Mummy, Doc Savage, etc., there’s always a way to escape immediate danger but there’s also always a way for your foes to track you down (even on the far side of the globe). That’s a pressure cooker too, it’s just not bound by geography.

    I know you’ve got a keen mind for procedure though Chris, so I’m curious what you think about the merits of a conversion like this.

  5. Eli Kurtz I guess that’d be my main question: what’s the motivation or driving force beyond “artifacts are neat!”? Doesn’t have to be a pressure cooker if we’re at a global scale but they need to be up against something. Unique artifacts for each region sounds cool

  6. I think this dilemma is where the classic “quest” comes in. In At Death’s Door the quest is akin to searching for the fountain of youth or the holy grail and there is a campaign length timer that eventually implodes the party if they don’t make progress in that direction swiftly. Finding artifacts could be a part of that but not a whole. Think Indiana Jones, where he has to gather a few artifacts, deal with baddies, make friends, etc. but the ultimate goal is one big maguffin.

  7. Blades in the Dark has a narrative motivation (climb the criminal ladder) and the mechanical motivation of xp triggers on character and crew playbooks. I think the playbooks can carry a lot of that weight. As for a narrative motive, maybe something like “explore furthest.” Your Tier is a function of prestigious expeditions instead of successful scores, and as you rise in tier you find rivals who are more and more serious about holding onto their prestige–and bringing you down.

  8. Maybe factions have their own end goal or plan. Low-mid level factions might have simple or more locally focused ones like guard the temple or preserve our heritage. Big Factions (high tier) have far reaching “end game” plans like the Nazi’s total domination or a rival explorer’s drive to be the premier exbiditionist. Likewise, when you choose your party’s playbook you pick a long term goal which can function like an XP trigger. Just a thought

  9. Yeah, I think to keep the pressure cooker kind of feeling you’d want to deviate from Blades as written to ratchet up the strength of a particular faction, who you are essentially always at war with, like the Hegemony in Scum and Villainy.

    Whether it’s something like nazis (Indiana Jones) or Trinity (Tomb Raider), or Templars (Assassin’s Creed), it’ll give some clocks and the constant sense of being outmanned and outgunned. As much as pulp is about the exploration and travel, there’s also a real sense of being the underdogs.

  10. Michael Pelletier that’s a good point but I’m not sure it needs to be monolithic. Maybe just make it clear that every Starting Situation needs to include one faction that’s Tier IV or higher, and then make sure that each Tier IV+ faction has some sort of “supervillain” gambit. (I say supervillain in quotes because the hack I’m picturing would work equally well if the PCs choose to be good guys or bad guys, but they’ll need a high-Tier opponent either way.)

  11. Ashton McAllan has an early access hack in this vein called Antiquarian Adventures: acegiak.net – Antiquarian Adventures

    She’s done some great work coming up with a character creation system and special abilities that evoke the tropes of those sorts of stories really well.

    I’ve also been thinking of hacking something like this. Perhaps with a hideout or office replacing the crew, a place where you collect trophies and information that helps when planning jobs or adventures at associated locations or periods of history.

  12. Eli Kurtz I now completely understand. I think you can probably do away or change the faction part of the game to be something different from what it is in Blades.

    Using clocks and goals would probably work better since a lot of pulp stories revolve around a Macguffin. So the clocks are part of the factions and their goals in relation to the Macguffin.

    You can also replace the heat mechanic with these clocks too and just say when the characters do something that would generate pressure it gets applied to the relevant clock.

    This makes for a more linear game but would probably work better for the Macguffin hunt stories like The Mummy movies and Indiana Jones tales.

  13. In Sea of Dead Men, a pirate hack for Blades, you mostly gain heat from disrupting the interests of certain factions. So if larger factions in this setting had defined triggers for that or the GM had a simple way to consider each factions interests then you can use heat almost as normal. The difference is that you gain heat with each faction, not generic heat. Heat is just another clock.

  14. I’ve been tinkering with a hack in this vein entirely focused on the idea of a tightly-structured plot-engine forming the backbone of a Season’s play, in the form of two competing clocks (the crew’s and the villain’s) working towards a common goal but with opposing ends, sort of like what Christopher Sniezak is talking about. With these kinds of adventure stories, it feels to me like the cut and thrust, flowing actions and consequences nature of Blades would need to be kicked into overdrive to really sell that pulp adventure sensibility.

    The one thing that’s really stopped me in my tracks is that, if I’m gonna write a hack like that, I’d want to really grapple with the genre’s uncertain and often ugly relationship to Empire, colonialism, cultural theft, and plain-old-fashioned racism, and I don’t really have the bandwidth to focus my energies like that right now.

  15. Calum Grace I know exactly what you mean about the genre’s dark side. My plan is to subvert it: present the world as an overreaching dystopia, and the players take the role of marginalized people who go on thrilling adventures to far-flung parts of the globe to liberate their cultural artifacts from colonial museums and private collections.

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