Hack Announcement: Academy
Hey everyone!
I got inspired watching some Blades actual plays over the summer and Adam Koebel’s playthrough of Persona 5 and decided to hack the system to fit what I call the Magical Schoolkid Genre (TM). I’ve called this hack Academy.
Academy is about students being thrust into a supernatural world (called the Unknown) and having to balance their normal, mundane lives with saving the world. The passage of time is marked through a calendar set up by the GM and visible to the players, who will have certain missions to complete and threats to deal with before certain deadlines. It is meant to be setting-agnostic and will include collaborative worldbuilding rules for Session 0.
This is my first ever game design project. I had no idea what I was doing, and only converted this into a Blades hack after a few dozen hours of work. It’s not pretty right now. I learned a lot through this pre-alpha-creation-process, but I feel like you guys are more knowledgeable than I am, not only in game design but also in terms of “how do I turn this from a poorly-organized google doc into something readable?” and “what path do people usually take if they want to get their hacks published?”
Inspirations include:
– Harry Potter
– Persona
– Percy Jackson
– RWBY
– Ender’s Game
– Soul Eater
– Monsterhearts
– Life is Strange
– The Kingkiller Chronicle
– Tales from the Loop
– Masks
– Buffy the Vampire Slayer
– Kill Six Billion Demons
– My Hero Academia
– Misspent Youth.
Academy is ready for playtesting locally, with people at my university, though the rules aren’t in a fit state to be shown off in front of the critical eyes of the internet. I’ll keep you guys updated. Thanks for your time.
As always,
Matt Chodaczek
Wow, Matt Chodaczek, Nice, hefty list of inspirations there. I’m eager to see it. I’m running a non-blades magical school game, and would love to hear more about the GM calendar and time passage system you mentioned.
Adam Minnie Yeah, so that’s definitely up in the air right now. I need to make sure it works in action, but the idea is that the players can take a number of downtime actions each week, one of which is “Get the team together,” basically go on a Score. They can avoid doing that to get more downtime if they want…but then that might mean putting more pressure on themselves to deal with the Threat in time.
The calendar is just there so that both the players and the GM have a way to track time and see things loom closer and closer on the horizon (Threat deadlines, Exams, Holidays, etc.) and give them the feel of having to balance their schedule. I think it could work with any system, but I think it should work especially well for a resource-and-downtime-focused system like Blades. We’ll see.
What system are you using for your game?
Matt Chodaczek I’m using Open Legend, which is working well enough, due to it’s pretty open way of working with ‘magic’. I would really like more crunchy mechanics for players to feel like they’re actually unlocking secrets or puzzles related to how magic and the world work as their characters likewise learn and grow. Any thoughts on how to make the learning journey more interesting than “you study for a week, and understand magic more; go you”?
I don’t have a good way to manage time passing though, so so far, it’s just not really. We’re still in the first week.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how I wished there was some sort of anime PBTA game out there, specifically in the vein of Persona, so I really like the idea of this ^_^