Author: Galen Pejeau

Hello scoundrel types, here’s the early playtest sheet for the Pilot for my cyberpunk EMT hack.

As you might have notices, there’s a few details that this community could help with, if you find yourselves willing:

Names: My terms for a lot of these things are subpar, and could use a boost. Any cyberpunk or medical drama fans have any good suggestions for:

1.)A slot where you store the cards you claimed as successes There’s a spot for crits, which you can spend as a fuel for abilities, and regular successes, which are just gone. Currently they are “the sleeve” and “the hole.”

They are kinda punk, not very cyber.

2.)The actions. I’m not sure how well the three social ones are working. It seemed like there should be a trinity for leadership, haggling, and social bonds, but the names (commanding, dealing, chumming) don’t quite line up.

3.) Finally, characters. The original plan was to provide the players with character portraits to pin down near the bottom left, and they would mix and match with their playbooks. How does that sound? Would you like to see more predeveloped characters? Would portraits be a distraction?

Either way, I’ll drop the other character playbooks here as soon as I’m able. Currently they are The Orderly (rough, tough and deals with stuff) and the Tech (lean, mean, tends the machine) but a fifth playtester is having us consider others, (the suit, the local guide, the corporate merc)

Enojoy! -G

CRASHCART:

Testing continues, in addition to playbooks, the players get a sheet for their EMV (flying ambulance) and one for each patient.

Currently the play loop is GM rolls up a patient, a situation to extract them from, and their issue that caused them call the EMT’s in the first place.

Then we start the run at the last possible moment before things get interesting and proceed from there until the EMV makes it to the patient’s destination. (Usually, but not always a hospital.)

Then the players get a downtime actions at the HQ, and then another call.

I was trying out 2-way clocks, where failures fill them and doctoring actions erase them, but it’s potentially a stalemate maker, so I’ll probably go back to the medical emergency having one clock to kill the patient, and the doctors having another to patch it.

It’s super early to be talking about this, but I’ve been working on a new Forged in the Dark game.

It will replace the dice with a modified deck of playing cards shared by the whole table, success cards will get moved in and out to show the EMT crew’s fatigue and fraying nerves.

It will be “Bringing Out the Dead,” but cyberpunk, and I think it’s got a lot of potential.

I’ll let you folks know how it goes, as it goes.

Typhoon Atolls: a guide to the isles pt.5

There are weirder things out there upon the waves than mountainous, crumbling skulls of dead titans.

But not many.

Leave them be my friend, they are blasted, withered places. Fit only for ghosts and scuttling carrion insects.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1VrJMrIpWMorn2XaNAT6M5XARqNDZ4y_e

Typhoon Atolls: a guide to the islands, pt.4

In these guides, the focus tends to be more on the feel of the islands, their creatures and the politics of the Spirits for a couple of reasons.

First, and most importantly, I’m trying, and perhaps not always succeeding, to avoid being drawn into one specific real-world mythology, and all of the attendant controversy that could surround cultural appropriation. That is not what this should be about! Island life would necessitate certain types of building or transport, but it’s important for this to also be about the weirdness of the world, and how alien it would all feel to its first explorers.

Secondly, and connected, the culture of your humans should be flexible and entirely built by your players! In our play test games we’ve had Pellikoi change gender identities over the ages both through magic and through later generations picking up a different gender’s mask and making ti their own. We’ve had peoples go from warlike to peaceable and back again.

So I focus on describing appearances and hope that your people and heroes find a good playground within.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1t3ZO3gDa4AIXV5o0gR4OibpwFL4Nx_nY

Typhoon Atolls: A guide to the islands, pt. 3

Living with an ecologist, you absorb certain things, and find them inescapable, even in fiction.

If we were to all disappear tomorrow, our cities wold hardly become the green paradise that so many apocalyptic stories imagine. (When they don’t all become the Australian desert and everybody robs the sporting goods stores, of course.)

The concrete would crumble and be replaced with invasive species, nasty competitors such as honeysuckle, buckthorn and phragmites.

We’ve made a permanent mark folks, no matter what we do next.

I hope it is for the better in the long run. Many days I feel like we’ll end up like whoever built the ruins below.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1A3abnDqqr9gcO7qZOxqKWI1ZEZEYYG0B

The Typhoon Atolls: A Blades Hack

a guide to the islands

A floating forest could be encountered anywhere, a towering mass of intertwining vines, leaves and chattering creatures.

In playtest, we had one that the players used as a waystation on their first journey, and grew to contain an order of seers who later travelers would make pilgrimages and offerings to. The treedwelling octopi were considered holy there, and left to their own inscrutable octopus games.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1wLaze2nFw2baq5agCFQOu7qq2Fas7_VB