It’s been a while, but I’ve got Glow in the Dark (my Fallout/Mad Max/Gamma World hack) up to v5.
Claims are back, although the UI for it (as it were) is rough still. Several playbook abilities got edited. Relics are still light on details.
I think I need to get a playtest group together to specifically run a Relics tribe. It’s helped make the Shepherds tribe type much more cohesive, and Relics need the same love. Looking at tentatively probably fortnightly tuesdays perhaps.
I’ve been making a lot of revisions to my Glow in the Dark post-apocalyptic hack in the wake of some great feedback from playtesters. One group came to a close but I’m still playing with my tribe of “Dealers”, the Third Rails. One of them is playing a Junker, a techie/jury-rigging/scrounging playbook, and during our downtime last night he pulled off quite the combo.
Zeke the Junker wants to fix up Johnny Tabernacle’s (the Leftover – think Fallout protagonist) bodytank/power armor. The suit has a flaw “limited power”, where a clock ticks over until the suit’s drained and needs to be charged. We decide, using the BitD crafting rules, that it’ll be a Complex project and require two entire design/build phases.
1. Design new power core (8 clock)
2. Build power core, quality 4
3. Redesign new suit wiring (8 clock)
4. Install core and wiring, quality 2
The tribe has a lot of rep but not many supplies, but they took the ability The Check is in the Mail:Your crew is true to their word. You may spend rep instead of supplies on downtime actions to increase the result. When you buy an additional downtime action with rep, you add +1d to your roll.
In addition, Zeke has Blackfinger:You get an additional downtime activity to work on long-term projects involving technology or to acquire technological assets. You get +1d to this bonus activity.
as well as Mechromancer:When you invent or craft vehicles, robots, or drones, take +1 result level to your roll. You begin with one special design already known.
Zeke blows through the first design clock with rep and uses his Blackfinger bonus action to build the core, mitigating the difference in quality with Mechromancer (power armor’s like a robot AND a vehicle, I rule it applies) and minimizing the tribe’s supply cost. I’m astounded he rocked it that hard but happy that Zeke’s player’s found that kind of emergent synergy. That’s exactly where the Junker is supposed to shine.
Near the end of our session, we started a Deception score to sell a tracking device to Blacksand, a walled community of oil/gas hoarders, so they could keep track of their trade convoys. Zeke and Johnny plan to sell the frequency to Blacksand’s enemy, Big Red (an autonomous, insane drone truck from before the War), scavenge the inevitable violence, and get paid by Blacksand’s rivals at Hightower (think Tenpenny Tower plus Bartertown).
I was concerned that Glow in the Dark wouldn’t lend itself as well to social/deception plans as vanilla Blades, but the last few scores my group’s put together have been fairly covert. I’m glad they’re looking at how factions interact and where they can stick their knives.
I made a… thing… with yEd, graphing the faction relationships for my post-apoc Blades hack. This is a fraction of factions (heh) compared to what Duskwall contains, but it’s enough for the wasteland. Size of the node is Tier, red arrows are enmity, green represent allies. Stronger relationships (good or ill) have arrows going both ways.
Trying to add a “theme song” entry to my Touchstones section in my hack about using BitD for Mad Max Fallout Gamma World. Opinions (and suggestions, I love going on music hunts) welcome!
Had a good #glowinthedarkrpg playtest session last night (thank you Mark Cleveland Massengale, Steve Moore, and Evan…
Had a good #glowinthedarkrpg playtest session last night (thank you Mark Cleveland Massengale, Steve Moore, and Evan Saft) where we explored the “free play” part of the game and I got to really put some setting elements to the test and lay some worries to rest; namely, the feeling I’ve had that Glow in the Dark would fall too easily into “let’s just shoot them”.
I was pleased to see that it wasn’t the case – we had some barter, some sway, some interrogations, and some sabotage, but no overt violence. I’m also the middle of fleshing out the setting some and realized it’s super important that the factions can’t all be these walled-off themed communities. The setting needs those, and IMO it’s a big part of the post-apocalyptic settlement vibe, but there needs to be ways to get rumors, news, and meetings out there and available to the characters. Convoys and explorers and traders and mobile gangs that aren’t simply reavers are going to play a huge role in providing opportunities for the PC tribe.
We also talked about adding more factions, which I’m in agreement with, but not as many as Duskvol. It’s supposed to be a sparse, scarce kind of place, but I think with the Shepherds especially (the cargo cult tribes) the game would benefit from a few more examples of weird post-nuclear religions and beliefs that can conflict with the PC’s tribe.
So back to what happened. Big Red, a sentient AI-driven cargo truck from Before, arrived close to the Razorbacks’ settlement and an impromptu swap meet sprang up around the large robot truck. There were your typical array of scavengers with jalopies and rickshaws, plus a robotic envoy from Noah (the remnants of the NOAA mainframe) as well as a few Knight Riders (unfriendly to the Razorbacks). The players got some rumors from the passersby and sold a Sleepwalker prisoner to the Noah envoy for a fair amount of supplies (after flashing back to the Sleepwalker’s interrogation). They bartered for more information about the Sleepwalkers’ lair and decided to raid it for supplies.
Pretty straightforward – the PCs stuck with their current line of enmity with the Sleepwalkers, which was perfectly fine. Noah’s presence provided a way for them to dispose of their prisoner and get some more information, plus they seemed receptive to cultivating a friendlier relationship with the rogue AI. Looloo (the Driver) couldn’t help starting some shit with the Knight Riders, and sabotaged their truck. They gave chase but weren’t able to influence the engagement roll thanks to Noah helping to hold them back.
We had a lot of catchup, but once we got going I felt it went well. I got some good immediate feedback and work continues!
With the help of two playtest groups and the continuing evolution of the BitD rules through v8, I’ve made some progress on my post-apocalypse Blades hack, Glow in the Dark.
-Some abilities revamped in light of how v8 does it
-Fallout (entanglements) redesigned to be more players vs. factions rather than having internal strife, bad luck, and weather playing such a large role
We find out what Johnny Tabernacle, the Third Rails’ Leftover, was doing as a prisoner of the Boneyard Bulldogs before his friends came to rescue him. Zeke the Junker gains no XP and Johnny Traumas out during a flashback.
Last time, Lt. Dan Halen (a Reaper) and Zeke rolled up on the Bulldogs’ fortress in a ruined high school but got a 1 on the engagement roll. Before addressing that, I spent some time bringing Johnny Tabernacle’s player up to speed and playing through his downtime as a prisoner of the Bulldogs, which limited his options but he found a way to indulge his vice (denial, satiated through his hand terminal’s offline Netflix library). He managed to Barter his life in exchange for granting the Bulldogs access to the few stored sports movies in his hand terminal’s library (like Scheherazade). By making himself a useful prisoner, Johnny secured himself access to the sports doc and was able to Recover his wounds from his first session as well.
Sadly, as a complication from his Barter roll, Johnny’s library ran out and he was next in line for the Bulldogs’ next sadistic bloodsport. Meanwhile, Dan and Zeke were making their approach. We talked about what kind of terrible situation Johnny could be thrown into and settled on “fighting mutant beasts”. I had mentioned that the Bulldogs had two stripped-down bodytank frames that they used for certain sports, like “swing prisoners in bags at each other like a bloody pillow fight until one power armor frame gets knocked off a platform”. As a Leftover, Johnny had a bodytank available as one of his personal items.
Letting a prisoner have access to powered armor just because it was on his sheet? It’d make sense for it to be a hard “no” this time, but I figured maybe this is how Johnny gets a bodytank. Plus, it was license to make the creatures he was up against pretty nasty, so Dan and Zeke saw their friend in the middle of the astroturf facing three radscorpions. Johnny’s power armor didn’t have much in the way of actual
armor (the obvious weak spot flaw) and its powerplant was draining fast (limited power), but since Johnny was a former moon colonist and not some wasteland savage, he was able to jailbreak the armor’s admin settings and unlock potential the Bulldogs weren’t aware of (the Fast and Strong edges).
There was still the problem of the 20+ Bulldogs in the bleachers and on the field spectating, plus the four watchtowers surrounding the area. Dan took one watchtower guard while Zeke used a flashback to trade favor for favor with the Monarchs, a gang of plant and insect mutants who are trade partners with the Third Rails (the Monarchs originally asked for more than just a favor, but Zeke’s Barter roll was superb). A squad of a dozen locust-people arced down out of the night sky into the Bulldogs, causing instant chaos!
I like running big, complex fights in Blades. Using clocks and Tier/fortune rolls lets you engage the mechanics (so you’re not just using fiat) but still prevents a battle from feeling onerous. Within the larger chaos, a few interesting choices and mechanics were tested:
1. Lt. Dan knifes a watchtower guard and sets up to just shoot a second guard. He has more dice in Raid, but chooses to roll Hunt instead because Hunt won’t cost him an ammo dot and Raid will. My hack: working as expected!
2. Unlike my vanilla Blades game, I wanted to set a precedent for resistance rolls reducing harm by default instead of avoiding harm (I was a softie before and it’s bit us in the ass now that the characters are all experienced). Dan’s choice of Hunt got him a “Grazed Thigh” wound, downgrading from “Shredded Thigh” instead of avoiding it entirely. It makes spending armor – and remembering to keep back some load items for it – more important, because I generally do let Armor just stop an attack cold unless I can’t reconcile it in the fiction.
3. Zeke throws molotovs and hand grenades from the relative safety of outside the fence. It helps some (the molotov separating Johnny from the scorpions flanking him, allowing him to pitch one into the Bulldogs in the bleachers) and hurts some (a 1 on the grenade peppers Johnny with shrapnel instead of the scorpions). While effective in the moment, we’d see later that when Zeke doesn’t act like a Junker, his XP triggers don’t fire. If he had whipped up a homemade bomb, he’d have gotten XP for it. I asked afterwards if it was weird or discouraging, but Zeke’s player agreed that he wasn’t taking desperate risks and he wasn’t doing Junker-type things.
As the Bulldogs beat down the remaining Monarchs, Johnny crits the two remaining radscorpions, killing each of them with the other’s stingers. He makes a run for it, using his suit’s fast edge to outpace pursuit. Dan slides down the watchtower, landing on his hurt leg, and is about to be overtaken on his way back to Zeke’s jalopy when Zeke charges the pursuing Bulldogs in the Subaru Bratmobile. He ticks Armor as one shotguns the windshield (pig-iron welding mask), Dan clambers in, and the Third Rails take off into the night.
Payoff, aka “No Reward is Worth This”
Other than stripping the bodytank for parts, which they didn’t want to do yet, the Third Rails really only recovered Johnny on this run. That would leave them with only 2 supplies after upkeep, so Johnny asked for a flashback where he was palming valuables during his captivity. He had no dots in Finesse or Prowl, so he’d rolling 2d take lowest. He was getting high on stress and didn’t want to push himself and although I don’t remember the devil’s bargain I made, I remember he didn’t want to take it.
The dice came up 6… and 1.
The Bulldogs discover his trickery and lock him in a room where they play the Monday Night Football theme on a loop (shades of Daryl from the Walking Dead). Level 2 Harm, “Catatonic”. Johnny resists with Resolve, avoiding the harm, but only gets a 2. The extra 4 stress is too much and he Traumas out.
During a flashback.
Johnny’s player figured out the answer. His rival is “Nine Cat Nine”, a radio voice. The Bulldogs called in a favor and Nine Cat Nine starts broadcasting the MNF theme over open air. Johnny’s bodytank radio picks it up and, unable to escape the music, collapses in a catatonic heap.
When the crew returns, they find the denizens of Prism City hungry and anxious. When it becomes known that they returned practically empty-handed, the settlement turns its eye on stripping down anything they can to trade for food. This was the Fallout roll, which resulted in Drastic Measures: Desperate for raw materials, your crew razes one of its own claims for resources. Choose a claim to destroy, gaining your tier in supplies, or stop the madness some other way. If you do not have additional claims, then you must take the second option.
We stopped there and will do downtime and upkeep next session. How will the Third Rails stop their own settlement from literally tearing itself apart? How will the Boneyard Bulldogs retaliate? What kind of favor will the Monarchs call in, and when?
The Third Rails playtest the Fallout (Entanglement replacement) system and do downtime.
My vanilla Blades group has Slippery, where you get to pick from two entanglements. They are spoiled. There’s a lot more old-school “this is the crap life has dealt you” feeling when you just roll one die and that’s what’s gone wrong.
For Glow in the Dark, you roll for Fallout, and like entanglements, I have 3 charts. The chart you roll on is determined by the relationship between your crew’s Supplies and its Friction with other factions. The Third Rails had 4 Supplies and had 3 Friction, so they rolled:
“*Probing*: An enemy faction grabs a friend or contact, interrogating them about your defenses. Pay ransom equal to 1 rep per tier of the enemy, let them keep your contact, or show them you are not to be trifled with.”
Johnny Tabernacle’s player wasn’t there, so Dan’s player suggested it was Johnny who was taken. I was about to say that I meant it to be an NPC but then… fuck it, you know? We were all laughing at the idea, so we went with it. It made the most sense for the Boneyard Bulldogs, the sports-themed raider group the Third Rails tussled with last time, to be the kidnappers.
Once that was established, I explained about downtime and that since the Rails had The Check is In The Mail, they could spend rep as well as supplies to buy additional downtime actions.
Both Dan and Zeke indulged their vice, and accepted Devil’s Bargains to gain more dice. This is also in stark contrast to the experienced characters in my vanilla Blades group, where they have enough dice in all their attributes that they can typically wave off my attempts to complicate their lives.
Zeke started a LTP to repair and upgrade the “Robutler” they defeated last session. With Mechromancer, Zeke completed half the clock in one go (bonus effect when working on robots and drones).
Dan called in a favor from a bounty hunter he knew, Vegas. He described Vegas as Emily Blunt from Edge of Tomorrow, and when I asked if that included the powered armor he readily agreed. Zeke’s player suggested that Vegas was maybe an exiled Iron Maiden, one of the factions he has a sordid history with, so that was cool to so quickly establish this NPC into both PCs’ backgrounds. Anyway, Dan and Vegas Gathered Info on Johnny Tabernacle’s whereabouts and, with the bonus dice from using a contact and the bonus effect from the downtime investigation, found their friend at one of the Bulldogs’ fortresses. It used to be a high school, surrounded by a killing field of crumbled gravel and asphalt, with a large rectangular field of green. Green.
It was Astroturf. The Bulldogs had captured prisoners (including Johnny) and were keeping them inside giant nets on either end of this field marked with strange white lines and circles, and were playing a sport where the goal was to fling spiked iron balls into the nets. Kill a prisoner, get a touchdown.
Dan went to get Zeke and they attempted a Stealth rescue under cover of darkness. The engagement roll was a 1! The Bulldogs changed up whatever “sport” they were playing at and dragged Johnny from the net. Something new was going on and it wasn’t good! Had the Third Rails been spotted?
We’ll find out next time. Hopefully Johnny’s player can make it again so I can thrust him immediately into something Desperate and confusing.
Hey all! My usual playtest group is off on various vacations this thursday, so I’ve got a slot open I could run Glow in the Dark (a post-apocalyptic Blades hack inspired by Mad Max, Fallout, and Gamma World) for people who were interested.
Thursday, 11/10, 9pm eastern. Probably 2 hours unless everyone is cool with going a little longer. My thoughts are to do crew/character creation and leave things open to schedule a second session to do a score/downtime. We may be quick, though, and get to the score the first session. We’ll play it by ear.
