Had a good time with Adam Sexton’s Household Renovations of Great and Terrible Power hack today. Turns out there was a great big honking beehive in a casement window in the carriage house our crew was renovating, so of course the correct way to deal with it was to have the Freak draw the bees to itself with its honeyed skin and then have the Contractor plug him into the house.
You don’t get desperate XP for beekeeper masks and smokers. 🙂
It was a really great game. The hack is super unique, and I’m excited about the crew we have together.
Also, “This Great Old House” (possibly This Elder House). I like our name a lot but of course I keep coming up with them afterwards.
And yes, there is some genius at work in the action dot assignment. Also look at how the Freak’s traumas work. Caught me off guard in the best way.
I was about to write an AP and you just said pretty much EVERYTHING I wanted to say. I’m really excited about the game too.
Don’t forget we also rigged a single-cup coffee maker with surveillance equipment to spy on our competition… and client?
So far the theme appears to be “completely regular life obstacles present themselves and are overcome with dangerous, quasi-legal, and possibly occult solutions”. I fear for us if we have to do something like take out a loan or rent a van.
Adam Schwaninger HOW ELSE ARE YOU GOING TO GET XP? To your point, let me tell you a REAL tale from the Alpha.
“I want candy.”
Turns into:
“To solve this problem I shall hire a cloaked, armed psychopath in a ram’s-head mask from the Dark Web to make the delivery.”
“He knocks on the glass of the front door with the butt of his rifle, What do you do?”
also: “you just designed a coffee machine with an extra surveillance equipment slot – the government mandatory one, and our equipment”
More AP please … This sounds weird but compelling.
“Weird but compelling” is pretty accurate. Anything specific you want to hear about?
High level points + anything folks want to share. What’s the setup? How does a downtime and job flow – as seen via your gang.
We’re not in very far, but I enjoyed character creation. The playbooks have some specific Bonds stuff in them – at least I think those are called Bonds, having never actually played any actual PbtA games. I am a longtime Fate player, so assigning your final action dots is done similarly to doing a Fate phase trio with guest stars. You ask a question (the Freak’s first one was “Who fears me most?”) and that person assigns you an action dot (in this case it’s “assign me an action dot you wish I didn’t have”).
The fictional setup was we’re all a crew of renovators. Currently you can begin with renovators who may not actually have a show or blog or anything, but we spent our starting upgrades to at least gain a youtube channel. We were in a broker’s office bidding on a carriage house renovation, except we (of course) managed to turn that into a flashback/setup layer cake where we designed a keurig machine with a hidden camera and conned the broker’s front desk into thinking he had ordered it, then used the information from our surveillance to win the job (we got controlled position with potency but there was a very short clock for them to figure out what had happened).
Adam is a patient GM. 🙂
We only got into the first room of the house before stopping, but the way it looks like it’ll go is something like a dungeon crawl, where each room is revealed and has its own issues or advantages, and the job becomes accomplishing these tasks in the time allotted. An HGTV dungeon crawl, and given the occult weirdness in the setting you could end up in an actual dungeon as easily as you could end up in a shouting match with your carpenter over knocking out a kitchen wall.
I love my character for this game. It’s a Freak named “The Doll”, a featureless humanoid made out of fiberglass that’s a prison for That Which Hungers. I work with Ted Nope, a Contractor who is secretly spying on everyone for the Canalville Museum of Great and Terrible Antiquities. A Contractor, I might add, with the hangup where he doesn’t want to do any actual work himself. He’s 100% manager. As a result, noone has any usable construction skills, and we’re too small for a cohort, so we’ve been framing the renovation challenges as strangely as possible. That said, Adam’s added in something like a supercharged Push Yourself where you get +2d for 4 stress and can reduce that stress cost if you 1) lash out at a crewmate and/or 2) do a confessional. I think that’ll get us through the actual work part of this job.
We are very convincing, however, thanks to the Broker/Medium team of Gershwin Nash and Tristan Weisshund.
I personally feel like there’s a lot of Fiasco-ness in this hack (this is a compliment). Not anything specific, just the general mashup of mundane situations with skewed, broken people making poor decisions.
We’re also a playtest group, so we’re muddling through and tightening things up as we go. I think next game (friday I believe) we’ll have a clearer picture.
That’s a pretty great writeup ^_^ Exactly what I was looking for.
Also – load cost you stress to go above light, sweets are queasy illegal, adam equipment list now include BEES, two of my favorite actions are Expect (just sort of assume shit will happen) and Dream (which is pretty much the same, but when you sleep or daydream) and humanoid abomenations (Freaks) are an oppressed minority.
I am playing a Freak playbook in the other playtest of this, and its great. I never approach fixing an issue in a house (echo-y bathroom or oddly bright hallway) as a handyman and its been quite amusing both times.
It also meshed well with the contractor who’s like the straight man to my foil going like “What – are – you – doing?!”