A NOCTURNE — progress update
After a little of what was meant to be rest time, I found myself accidentally making another playbook. Here’s the current version of The Pilot, because you can’t have a spacecraft without one. The current version of the playbook is presented below. As always, feedback is appreciated! Also in development: a creepy post-singularity nanotech witch playbook, currently untitled, and a possible weirdo experimental stealth craft playbook called the Dark Orb, but it’s early days yet on that.
In the meantime, I’m itching to get in some playtest sessions of the current full version of the rules as they stand with my home group. Need to prod at the support beams and see if anything falls on my head.
Those also in developments, nice
Looks awesome at a glance, by which I mean ” well I’d play one!”
I’ll take a better look at it all when work pipes down a little 😉
Looking forward to seeing the Dark Orb and the Space Witch!
Super excited for the others!
Wait, I have a stupid question: is the Dark Orb a craft or a character? I assumed the latter and loved the idea of playing as a panhuman sleeved into a vehicle instead of a body, but I might be wrong.
Lex Permann It sounds like a ship and not a playbook, but now I really want to see an AI playbook. Maybe based on the Hull from Blades? I don’t know about you, but I don’t consider something transhuman until I see people treat bodies like vehicles at least once.
Slurms McKenzie I realized that I’m almost certainly wrong and now I’m really sad about it. I really want a playbook that stretches the extent of transhuman/panhuman identity through their chosen form (like, say, a talking spaceship), but maybe that’s silly of me.
Sorry about of the lack of replies from your’s truly here, had a power outage for most of the week.
Lex Permann and Slurms McKenzie: the Dark Orb is indeed a craft, although I’m most definitely thinking of developing a proper “body as vehicle” playbook loosely based on the Hull – current working title is the Armature, with forms up to and including small craft ‘cos that sounds sweet. I’m toying with the idea of making it a straight up regular playbook too, which would mean other playbooks could steal abilities from it via Veteran advances. Not sure yet.
Calum Grace Good to hear! I would definitely love for it to be a regular playbook.
As for the Dark Orb, what sort of archetype does it fit? We have a scavvenger ship and a warship, but I’m not as sure what sorts of Scores the Orb is looking at.
Lex Permann The Dark Orb is all about subterfuge, stealth, subversion, and theft. It’s also an experimental craft with a lot of possibility for some technological weirdness (mostly evident in the module map) – the next progress update here will have a preview of it.
Calum Grace Yay!
Calum Grace Will the hack be essentially “done” once you have three Craft and the Armature and Witch done, or do you have further ideas?
Lex Permann I’ll be trying to playtest like crazy once I’ve got those in (my weird gaming schedule is currently a little tight, so I’m stuck tinkering for now), but future plans include a streamlined Cluster Creation system,
(for expanding the crew’s horizons or starting in a different cluster entirely), one or two more character playbooks, and maybe another craft if I get a really solid idea (the craft sheets are actually really time consuming to make, so I’d need something especially good to make another).
In its current form, it feels close to where I want it to be, so no crazy central rules changes for future versions unless playtesting throws up something horrendous. Just add-ons and tweaks now, I’d say.
Calum Grace Glad to hear, and I’m excited for all of it! Your character playbooks are some of the coolest I’ve ever seen; my group has been fighting over the Broken and the Forgotten.
If you need another Craft, possibly something that focuses the crew on more social scores? Something akin to the Hawkers or Smugglers from core Blades, to go with your equivalents for Bravos, Shadows, and the unique scavenger ship.
Calum Grace Lex Permann I second the idea of a Craft associated with social scores; maybe some kind of luxury liner or merchant ship, for people wanting to travel from their star system to another?
I’ll have to play A Nocturne as soon as I get a chance to try out a new system, it looks like it will be tons of fun once I finally get it to a table. And hopefully that’ll stop me writing homebrew ideas for a system I haven’t even run yet.
Slurms McKenzie Lex Permann It’s definitely in the cards. I like the merchants-by-way-of-Hawkers angle, reckon I could do something cool with that.
Man, once you start hacking/designing it’s sort of hard to stop. I have at least two mini-rpgs I’ve been noodling with that I keep having to remind myself to put on the back burner.
Calum Grace Lovely news! I’ll stop distracting you now, and start counting down the days until the next update 🖤
Lex Permann Seconded. I can’t wait for that Space Witch.
Actually, I do have a stupid question for Calum Grace : what kind of visual aesthetic do you picture for A Nocturne? I’m imagining panhumans are pretty wild looking, with all sorts of crazy body modifications (extra arms, lots of sleek black carbon fiber implants) and a general sort of slightly-rusted hypertech edge to everything. Kind of like Biomega, from what little I’ve seen of it.
Lex Permann Yup, Biomega (and Nihei’s other big one Blame!) are definitely some good aesthetic touchstones. I might try to make this more explicit in the text, and the art if/when I get round to doing any full-blown art for it.
Calum Grace Might I recommend the Prophet comics as another good touchstone? The story in it isn’t very good but the art and worldbuilding is amazing – a little more gonzo than what you seem to be going for, but the ships and aliens in particular are a great source for transhuman ideas.
I’m mostly trying to figure out if a Forgotten who has a featureless synthetic face with no eyes that instead sees through floating orb drones is too gonzo for this setting or not. The existence of backups makes me think that this is a pretty nuts hypertech future and panhumanity essentially has the freedom to look as nuts and inhuman as they want.
Lex Permann That character concept sounds eminently doable (and sweet as hell – that was exactly the kind of weird shit I was thinking about when I was writing the Forgotten). Panhumanity is very specifically not called human for a reason.