This is the white-line nightmare of the Cold War brought to half-life, a mythical doomsday that never was. Twisted metal rusts away under shifting dunes. Maniacs kill for food, for fuel, or for fun. You are part of a crew – a gang of post-apocalyptic scavengers and warriors desperate to survive. We will play the game to find out if your crew can flourish despite other hungry gangs, forgotten pre-war threats, the unforgiving elements, and their own dark impulses.
This is the last playbook I’ve planned for Glow in the Dark at this time, and I freely admit it is the weirdest and shakiest one. Part of me went for that Hull/Vampire/Ghost “prestige class” feel, while part of me wanted to make sure it was something with which you could jump in from the start.
It’s a LOT of Gamma World injected into a series of playbooks that have mostly stayed Mad Max or Fallout. If you stayed purely Mutant, you’re gonna be pretty freaky. However, I think mixing up Veteran advances one way or the other could be pretty cool.
I’m shaky on the items, because the underlying theme of the playbook is that you rely on your own gifts. That said, I kind of have a gear list relating to delving into pre-war sites, which seems to be broad and useful enough without pigeonholing too much.
One thing that’s broken at this point that I don’t have an answer for yet is the Channel action. In vanilla Blades, Attune can be used by anyone, and there’s a reason for that. Channel was only ever going to be a Mutant action, and I’d actually go for other actions given any one of those abilities. Scanner would use Read or Wreck or Finesse or Boss. Natural Weapons would be Prowl or Raid, etc. So disregard those Channel dots for the time being. 🙂
Ghoul: You are wizened, leathery, and tough. When you bathe in radiation during downtime, you gain +2 ticks on recovery long-term projects. You also get +1d to Prowess resistance rolls.
Superhuman: You are freakishly-muscled and massive. Spend 1 stress to perform a feat of superhuman strength or speed. This factors into effect.
Scanner: Your bloated brain swells with strange power. You may telepathically communicate with anyone you can see, and can pay 1 stress to: locate all minds around you – move an object remotely – briefly control a person or animal – read a person’s thoughts
Wings: You can fly as fast as a vehicle when you carry a light load, and as fast as a running person under a medium load.
Natural Weapons: Your body bristles with bone spurs, quills, thorns, or claws and fangs. Your natural attacks gain potency against unarmored targets. When you get inside an opponent’s guard, you get +1d to fight them.
Conduit: You are bioluminescent and crackle with energy. You can release this energy around you or project it as a beam or jet. Take 1 stress for each level of magnitude.
Venomous: You are patterned and colorful. Choose a drug or poison to which you are immune. Pay 1 stress to secrete it through your skin or exhale it as a vapor.
Invertebrate: You are rubbery, slick, or squamous, able to contort through tiny spaces. You can perform feats of inhuman flexibility. When you use contortion to do things a human could otherwise do*, you get +1 effect level.
*I also don’t like how this one’s worded. I want to say that Invertebrates can do things people can’t, but when they do contortionist stuff that people COULD do, they’d get a bonus. But not when they do their inhumanly-weird contorting.
Second to last playbook. This one’s for Sulik, the Feral Kid, Savannah Nix, Benecio del Toro in the Hunted, Turok, Tarzan, Solid Snake, Crocodile Dundee, and Marc Singer.
Beastmaster: Animals and wasteland creatures will not willingly harm you unless attacked. You can interact with these creatures in exchange for small favors, such as extending their tolerance to a small group or leading the way to a location.
Ghost and the Darkness: When you vanish in plain sight, pay 1 stress and say how you do it.
Shadow: You get special armor vs. consequences from detection or security. When you roll a critical on a feat of athletics or stealth, clear 1 stress.
Predator: When you attack from hiding or spring a trap, you get +1d.
Snake Eater: You get +1d to resistance rolls vs. poisons, drugs, and tainted food. Your crew’s upkeep cost is reduced by 1.
Hunter’s Quarry: When you hunt a target you’ve previously tracked or wounded, you gain +1 effect level.
Sharp: Others often underestimate you because of your preference for primitive tools and methods. When you roll resistance with Insight, you get +1d.
Good Dog: Your animal companion is a mutant, cyborg, or similarly unique example of its type. You do not take stress if you lead it in a team action. Additionally, choose a trait for your animal: fast as a car – ranged attack – psychic link – massive size. Take this ability again to choose a second trait.
The shark (like loan shark) is the talking playbook. Formed entirely from the idea of “who would actually be good at living in Bartertown?” as well as the “high Charisma, never fire a shot” Fallout build. Also, the other playbooks so far have been pretty solidly actionactionaction. Needed to get some lying in there with the vehicular manslaughter and death-by-rube-goldberg. The Shark’s a team player – sort of. There’s not an “I” in team but there sure as shit is an “I” in WIN.
The Shark probably has the most abilities taken straight from the regular Blades playbooks, but they just fit. Didn’t end up seeing a need to mangle them when they worked already.
Everybody’s Buddy: Pay 1 stress to reveal an old friend or contact. Choose two of the following: they’re effective – they’re loyal – they’re free
Trust Me: When you interact with someone you haven’t yet lied to, you get +1d.
Takes One to Know One: You can always tell when someone is lying to you.
Hoarder: At the end of each downtime phase, you earn +2 stash.
Let’s You and Him Fight: You get +1d when you participate in a group raid action or when you take a setup action that leads to violence for someone else.
Connected: During downtime, you get +1 effect level when you acquire an asset, gather info, or reduce friction.
Frenemies: You get +1d to engagement rolls against factions you have positive status with.
Blather: As long as you keep talking to someone, they give you their undivided attention.
This one’s for all the Bruce Spence fans out there. 🙂
The Junker should probably feel Leech-y, although instead of the set effects provided by the bandoliers and alchemicals, the playbook has a Tempest knockoff called MacGyver that uses a combination of stress and “scrap”. Scrap takes load, but the idea here is that you can scrounge up some more if you have time to spare and that you’ve got limited “shots” beyond stress if you’re in a dust-up.
I don’t have much experience with Tempest, though, so is having a scrap prerequisite redundant given the stress cost?
Anyway, here are the abilities. I also worry that Blackfinger steps on the toes of Percussive Maintenance – do you see situations where you could have both and use both?
MacGyver: You can hack together surprising effects from random-seeming scrap. Take stress equal to the magnitude of the results (0-6).
Percussive Maintenance: When you thump something that’s not working, pay 1 stress to make it start working.
Organic Mechanic: You know proper surgical techniques take finesse, not butchery. You may use finesse to treat wounds instead of hack. When you do this, your patients get a free recovery action each downtime.
Mechromancer: You gain potency when you create, repair, or destroy vehicles, robots, and drones. If you’re building one from scratch, it has +1 quality.
Blood, Sweat, and Gears: You know every weld, screw, and wire like they are your own flesh. When you use things you’ve personally modified or created, add +1d.
Boom Shakalaka: Sometimes it’s easier to destroy than create. When you use explosives, choose an additional effect: increased scale – terror – precision – potency
Buried Treasure: You know where to look for the good stuff. When you scrounge for assets, you get +1 effect level.
Blackfinger: As long as you are personally attending to a mechanical or electronic device, it will keep working.
A quick follow-up to my Driver playbook – here’s the Reaper.
The Reaper is about killing shit and not getting killed in return. It’s a pretty bread-and-butter playbook, but the primary examples I’m using as inspiration are Furiosa, Wez, Ironbar, and Rictus from the Mad Max films. There’s a bit of standard 80s action hero in there too as well as a splash of slasher villain.
That Had to Hurt: When other foes see you kill an enemy, describe the poor bastard’s gruesome end. You gain potency against these enemies.
Ayatollah of Rock’n’Rolla: When you squander ammo, your ranged attacks gain +1 scale. You may take this ability a second time; this mitigates the requirement to waste ammo.
Blaze of Glory: When you mark a trauma you may retaliate against any and all enemies within range. Say how you bring ruin to your foes before they take you down. You may mark a trauma prematurely to use this ability.
Roadkill: When you attack from a vehicle, you gain +1d. If you are using personal weapons, your attacks gain potency against vehicles.
Last One Standing: When you’re outnumbered in close combat, you may spend 1 stress per additional effect: increase scale – adjust your positioning – increase effect
Brute Squad: When you lead a group action in a raid, you may count 6s across different rolls as a critical success.
Walk it Off: When you suffer harm, treat the penalties and recovery time as if it were one level lower. Level 2 harm only applies less effect and heals with a single downtime action, for example, and level 1 harm has no effect other than taking up a harm slot for the session.
Not Today: When you make a resistance roll against physical damage, you may appear to die (fall off a vehicle, disappear in an explosion, etc.) only to reappear in a location of your choosing with a +1d to your next action.
It’s been a while since I posted a new playbook. I had jumped over to flesh out the actual rules hacks for a while. In contrast to the Leftover, which can branch out a few different ways with its abilities, the Driver is laser-focused on vehicles.
Need for Speed: When you face a challenge using speed and precise driving, you gain +1 effect level. Pushing yourself only costs 1 stress in these situations.
Witness Me: When you sacrifice your custom ride in order to accomplish something, say why you’re willing to do that. Pay any additional costs set by the GM and describe how you succeed.
Maximum Overdrive: You get +1d when ramming smaller vehicles. If you’re running over pedestrians, your attacks also gain +1 scale.
Fast and Furious: You can make your vehicle do things it shouldn’t be able to do. You are able to find conveniently-placed rubble to ramp off of, half-buried wrecks to get you up on two wheels, make astounding jumps without blowing out your tires, and burst through obstacles that should shred your vehicle.
Tank Girl: You have special armor against collisions and crashes, plus anyone in a vehicle you’re driving (including you) gains +1d to resistance rolls against collision damage.
Beat the Snake: When there’s a question about who acts first, the answer is you (two characters with this ability act simultaneously).
Car Surfer: When you leap between or clamber over moving vehicles you never fall off.
Eleanor: When you name your custom ride, you may choose an additional edge and mitigate one flaw.
I’m almost done my first custom playbook for my Mad Gamma Max Fallout World hack, “Glow in the Dark”. I’ve got a question though.
I’ve got a playbook that could have a power armor suit (while not necessary to the concept, it’s a staple of the source media), and another playbook that doesn’t make much sense without a car. Would you expect these benefits to take a special ability dot? Be an option in the items list? Be given freely? A combination? Something else?
I’m not sure I have an equivalent to these assets for all the playbooks I have in mind, either, so there is that.
The Leftover is the Vault Dweller, Charlton Heston man or woman out of time. They come from literally another place and time or perhaps are just sequestered away in an enclave. Maybe they just found a fancy suit and are lucky enough to look the part.
My inspiration here was the “token human leader” role in so many shows and films, and as such the abilities are hard to pin down. I ended up focusing most on interacting with prewar technology, but I’m open to suggestions. The two abilities I’m pretty solid on (the gist of if not the mechanics) are Trusted User and Wrong Guy Wrong Place Wrong Time, because I love me some Die Hard and my other inspiration was that the Leftover’s whole deal is they’ve just been thrown into hell, a maniac world that doesn’t make sense but they keep on ticking.
Pasted here in case the image is hard to read:
O Trusted User: You know the Words of Passing and the Maidens’ Names. Pre-war security systems, robots, and AI do not consider you hostile unless you attack first. You get +1d to hack friendly systems.
O Good As New: You know the dinglehopper is really a fork. When you use hack to repair something, you get +1d effect level.
O History Buff: You gain potency when you get a read on locations that incorporate pre-war features or when you gather information using pre-war methods.
O Pearly Whites: You’ve got all your teeth! Gain +1d in situations where your appearance would play a major role.
O Untouchable: The Glow doesn’t want you. You get special armor vs. mutant powers and radiation. When you roll a critical using untouchable, clear 1 stress.
O Wrong Guy Wrong Place Wrong Time: This isn’t even your world, but the wasteland can’t seem to get rid of you no matter how bad it gets. When you accept a devil’s bargain, you get an additional +1d.
O Engineer: Provided you have the materials, you can build claims that require advanced technology.
O Inspirational: When you lead your gang, they continue to fight even when broken. They gain potency and 1 armor.
OOO Veteran: Choose a special ability from another source.
Dealers are weird. They have Convoy as a default crew upgrade, which means their lair/settlement and most of their claims are mobile, whether that’s a train or semi trucks or covered wagons or huge tracked compounds. They’re half Hawkers and half Smugglers, except in the wasteland there’s no laws to interfere with smuggling. That said, barter and trade are a big part of my source material (the constant traders in Fallout, Bartertown in Mad Max, the trade between Gastown, Bullet Farm, and the Citadel in Fury Road). In the fiction, the Dealers should need other factions to keep their trade going. They have some abilities to help them out with rep, supplies, and friction, and one wartime bonus focusing on defense.
I’m not 100% on their claims, however. In fact, I’m looking over all my crews’ claims and I’m seeing more of an RTS building/tech tree rather than turf to be carved out of competing factions.
I want to embrace the scarcity that’s part and parcel of post-apocalyptic source material, so I think I need to reinforce the claims somehow, but at the same time I like the implicit worldbuilding in having unique claims for each crew. It works hand in hand with the special abilities and upgrades to paint a clearer picture of what each crew’s about while leaving plenty open to interpretation.
I mean, it’d all probably work okay as-is, because for the most part I’m just renaming stuff and remixing some abilities. Maybe it’s enough to speak on what might need to happen to open up an opportunity to seize a claim, and have it be fictionally more in line with the post-apocalyptic theme rather than claustrophobic, crowded Duskwall.
