Glow in the Dark downtime and playtest musings!
I’ve been making a lot of revisions to my Glow in the Dark post-apocalyptic hack in the wake of some great feedback from playtesters. One group came to a close but I’m still playing with my tribe of “Dealers”, the Third Rails. One of them is playing a Junker, a techie/jury-rigging/scrounging playbook, and during our downtime last night he pulled off quite the combo.
Zeke the Junker wants to fix up Johnny Tabernacle’s (the Leftover – think Fallout protagonist) bodytank/power armor. The suit has a flaw “limited power”, where a clock ticks over until the suit’s drained and needs to be charged. We decide, using the BitD crafting rules, that it’ll be a Complex project and require two entire design/build phases.
1. Design new power core (8 clock)
2. Build power core, quality 4
3. Redesign new suit wiring (8 clock)
4. Install core and wiring, quality 2
The tribe has a lot of rep but not many supplies, but they took the ability The Check is in the Mail: Your crew is true to their word. You may spend rep instead of supplies on downtime actions to increase the result. When you buy an additional downtime action with rep, you add +1d to your roll.
In addition, Zeke has Blackfinger: You get an additional downtime activity to work on long-term projects involving technology or to acquire technological assets. You get +1d to this bonus activity.
as well as Mechromancer: When you invent or craft vehicles, robots, or drones, take +1 result level to your roll. You begin with one special design already known.
Zeke blows through the first design clock with rep and uses his Blackfinger bonus action to build the core, mitigating the difference in quality with Mechromancer (power armor’s like a robot AND a vehicle, I rule it applies) and minimizing the tribe’s supply cost. I’m astounded he rocked it that hard but happy that Zeke’s player’s found that kind of emergent synergy. That’s exactly where the Junker is supposed to shine.
Near the end of our session, we started a Deception score to sell a tracking device to Blacksand, a walled community of oil/gas hoarders, so they could keep track of their trade convoys. Zeke and Johnny plan to sell the frequency to Blacksand’s enemy, Big Red (an autonomous, insane drone truck from before the War), scavenge the inevitable violence, and get paid by Blacksand’s rivals at Hightower (think Tenpenny Tower plus Bartertown).
I was concerned that Glow in the Dark wouldn’t lend itself as well to social/deception plans as vanilla Blades, but the last few scores my group’s put together have been fairly covert. I’m glad they’re looking at how factions interact and where they can stick their knives.
#glowinthedarkrpg
This hack is so dope.
I’ve been racking up silly hours in Fallout 4, so this is something I like to hear about.
As someone playing with a setting that’s a little more “open” I’m curious how you handle all the space (and, in turn, a little less direct pressure to interact with other factions for each score). I can get that this is a wasteland so resources are tight.
This hack sounds awesome. Also, I love that this is a post-apocalyptic hack of Blades, which is a Powered by the Apocalypse game. Full circle
Thank you John!
Thomas Berton I’ve never actually played Apocalypse World – I came in on Monster of the Week, but I recognize the orouboros here. 🙂
Justin Ford the openness of the setting is a concern I keep coming back to, but it helps that it is a wasteland, like you say. Like Duskwall, everything worth having is owned by someone else. Sure, maybe you can be a wretched scav or eke out a subsistence growing twisted plants in barren soil, but again, like Duskwall, there’s no playbook for “shitty factory worker”.
Adding in the Trek action (replacing Attune; there’s no supernatural presence here) allows for some hexcrawl/overland stuff. In my playtests simply asking how the tribe gets to the score (often going to a Trek roll, but sometimes rolling it into the engagement) is enough. Those scenes where you paint a picture of desolation and hardship (on a good roll) and sometimes throw in deadly weather or mutant creatures (on a fail/mixed roll) are a simple but effective method for differentiating the open setting from a claustrophobic fantasy-industrial sprawl.