Author: Adam Sexton

It is a final Playbook of Great and Terrible Power

If you want to be Cecil Palmer in Welcome to Night Vale or the Ancestor from Darkest Dungeon, or a voiceover in an HGTV show… play the Voice. Social Media Savant is weeeird, I want to find a way to make that work, cause streaming features are cool. I want them to exist. If Twitch chat can be harnessed to make this game even more Terrible, then I must have it inside my ears and mouth.

This is my fifth playbook out of my current six for Household Renovation of Great and Terrible Power.

If you’ve watched Property Brothers, you know that the Realtor is the other half of the Contractor/Realtor coin: the very work-centered corner of the playbooks. You probably can get very good at taking care of the money thing with this playbook.

“I’m seeing these beautiful rays of pink in your aura! Did you have a grandmother you looked up to?”

I’m digging The Cold Read and Blackest Magick. As usual, I want to hear your beautiful ideas.

Having rearranged the character sheets and added just a couple of contacts for each playbook, here’s my next one!

This one’s short, sweet, and sane. The Contractor is the engine of the crew they’re in. You can’t just have the Medium reading everyone’s auras and the Freak caressing the patterns on the ceiling: this two-story needs a deck that doesn’t exist yet. Plain and simple.

Household Renovation of Great and Terrible Power:

So this is my wonkiest playbook at the moment, because you’re playing two separate characters that are treated as one unit. I’m pretty satisfied with my choices, but I’ll listen to feedback about this one cause it’s a little weird in the ways that the Ghost Playbook is in core BitD.

I want to draw attention to everything about the Two Hearts, Just one Mind Special Ability, the 2nd XP trigger, and how they interact.

This playbook is supposed to represent the vapid couples in every House Hunters, Property Brothers, etc. episode. I want their unique XP trigger to be kind of less triggerable (or less safe to trigger) First, to balance their extra, customizable action dots, and more importantly to make them a playbook you grab for a few sessions and discard for a new Pair or other playbook as the game keeps going.

This is a really early character sheet for a Blades Hack I’m working on called, “Household Renovation of Great and Terrible Power”. This playbook is The Freak, and they’re the fit for the weird playbook.

They’re not the playbook that’s certified to do the mundane tasks of renovating a home, but can be perfectly capable if you assign them tasks like installing roofing and siding; handling evictions by instructing squatters in the several synonyms of fear; and being a contact you can trust that takes care of pest control by, uhugh, devouring… the pests. Sure, there are probably all varieties of urban legends and horror stories in their wake. Maybe demolition crews found… off-white… eggs… like squished water balloons between the first and second floor, but, hey, maybe the story there is: someone had a deadline, or residential construction got hit hard by a recession, or someone was really desperate, and made a deal with the devil just to get by.

I’m hacking Blades into a game about renovating houses and the stress and trauma that come from it, inspired by my own teeth-grinding experiences with renovating, and synthesized from media like Property Brothers, Flip or Flop, House Hunters, Long Island Medium, Welcome to Night Vale, Darkest Dungeon, and American Horror Story, loosely framed by The Matrix cause it’s all in a…ahem… (spooky voice activated), “REALITY”, WELL LIT AND FAKE, EVERY MORTAL SET ON STAGE FOR THE AMUSEMENT OF BEINGS OF GREAT AND TERRIBLE POWER.

But I digress. Can we discuss what the potential consequences might be if I just smoosh together Coin and Heat into Charging your credit card and accruing Debt Levels if you don’t spend downtime actions paying your bills? I’m not seeing any currently, but I’m not at my first playtest yet, so I just don’t know yet.

Payoff needs to be tweaked and it gets a little weird. But if you pick “Remove the Satanic paraphernalia and blood from the basement, then turn it into a bright, open concept game room for the three boys” as a score (or this game’s equivalent) for the session, ARE YOUR REALLY GETTING PAID AFTER THAT PART? Thoughts?

(I didn’t know if I wanted to put this under Hacks and Add Ons cause I’m wondering if that’s specifically for the kickstarter hacks and settings?)