#AgeOfBlood

#AgeOfBlood

I’m back with another preview! This one is super text-heavy, so I broke it up with a bit of art as well.

First up is an Action preview (Marshal) and some notes on Heritages in the Age of Blood setting, followed by 3 of the currently 8 playbooks as they stand for the upcoming roll20 playtest with my BitD group.

The Captain has always been an important playbook to make work for me because it was something I really wanted in the setting, but I struggled with it for a long time. Part of this stems from the ‘problem’ of Command.

On it’s own it is fine but I wanted to wrap up some concepts I had for making a strategist, logistical mind, and military leader archetype work. The action name of “Marshal” was suggested to me by the preview materials for Dylan Green’s Blades Against Darkness hack. I hope you forgive me Dylan! The Captain’s playbook ability, Band of Brothers, was inspired by one of the Iruvian playbooks (Faris), which was made by Johnstone Metzger. It wasn’t until I had both of those things in place that I actually felt really good about the Captain.

Next up is the Slayer, which is the oldest playbook in Age of Blood and one of the first things I wrote for this setting about a dozen years ago back when this was a lonely text document for a homebrew DnD setting that never took off. It doesn’t look much like it once did, but this playbook still wears the influences of Geralt of Rivera and the Belmont family on it’s sleeves. I boiled the concept down slightly to make it work for a few more warrior concepts, since this is the Cutter-replacement of the setting.

Finally is the Hunter. Not much to say about him, it’s very much one of those self-evidently necessary playbooks for the setting. One of the things you might notice is that the slice of special abilities these guys all draw from are “Military”, which is a big 15 item list universal to them all (the examples on the playbooks are just from the sample templates offered to each). As the various Training abilities hint at, there is also a Religious list, a Tribal list, and, uh, 3 Occult lists (we’ll get to those later).

For Age of Blood I wanted to reign in the wild possibility space of Veteran playbook advances just a bit, partially because there are a real metric ton of SAs in this hack (at current count around 60) and narrowing the possibility space to prevent death by analysis paralysis feels useful. In addition, I tend to like at least somewhat focused thematic character archetypes (just choose 2 pie slices and be done with it, gosh) and the touchstones of this game have often been somewhat dogmatic about the silly concept of “multi-classing”. The universality of the 12 actions deeply undercuts the distinction between warriors, wizards, and the like in this setting but this is still a gentle nod to that. We’ll see if the “Training” abilities survive in playtesting or if they fade away to be replaced by the simplicity of Veteran advances.