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Golden Bee posted:I feel like you have woe handled, but what about weal? Why are the PCs powerful, why does their duty matter? I'm sure it'll come across in the playbooks, but if I'm playing inspector, I want my decisions to be Final and Irreversible. What period literature and modernist literature are you reading about from the time? A lot of the inspiration is from history books, in particular: The Enemy Within by John Demos The Devil of Great Island by Emerson W. Baker The Devil Within by Brian P. Levack My to-read-pile on that front includes: The Arch-Conjuror of England by Glyn Parry The Lancashire Witches by Philip C. Almond England's First Demonologist by Philip C. Almond The Tyrannacide Brief by Geoffrey Robertson Some of the Diary of Samuel Pepys Also probably a bit of Paradise Lost. The fictional inspirations are much more modern, things like Buffy, Hellboy, Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer, Supernatural and the X-Files. Kind of mixing more modern monster hunting tropes with some of the historical religious background and aesthetics. EDIT: I have added some draft Archetypes, and some draft starting moves. I would be grateful for comments on those. thefakenews fucked around with this message at 11:46 on Nov 4, 2015 |
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Nov 4, 2015 07:33
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Just a head's up: physical copies of Urban Shadows are available for sale.
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Nov 6, 2015 16:02
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thefakenews posted:Pretty much all of this to some extent, although investigation and monster slaying are at the forefront. I'm not looking to go too deeply philosophical with this game bu,t given the setting puts the player either in the middle of, or emerging from, the War of Religion, I definitely want to make the conflict between characters' beliefs a part of the game (although more as a source of tension between PCs, and between PCs and human NPCs - the characters should be generally united in the goal of confronting the Darkness). I'm going for something mostly an action RPG, rather than anything particularly metaphorical. Likewise, at this point, I'm thinking more in terms of professions for playbooks, rather than any clever metaphors. IMO you should really focus on trying to emulate one of them well - that's when the apocalypse engine really shines. You'll probably get the ability to do other styles with it as the moves develop, but trying to build a framework to support every aspect of the broader genre will not be as effective of a game.
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Nov 6, 2015 16:06
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Captain Foo posted:IMO you should really focus on trying to emulate one of them well - that's when the apocalypse engine really shines. You'll probably get the ability to do other styles with it as the moves develop, but trying to build a framework to support every aspect of the broader genre will not be as effective of a game. When I say investigation and monster slaying, I mean it in the sense of finding out what the bad guy is and what its weaknesses are. I don't mean that it's intended to be a Gumshoe style investigation. The "investigation" is like the investigation in the average episode of Buffy or Supernatural - working out what you're dealing with so that you can go beat it up.
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Nov 7, 2015 00:31
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thefakenews posted:When I say investigation and monster slaying, I mean it in the sense of finding out what the bad guy is and what its weaknesses are. I don't mean that it's intended to be a Gumshoe style investigation. The "investigation" is like the investigation in the average episode of Buffy or Supernatural - working out what you're dealing with so that you can go beat it up. This makes sense, it's more about setting the stakes and preparing to face evil than whodunnit.
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Nov 7, 2015 00:37
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Having said it's not a Gumshoe style investigative game, the thriller story cycle as set out in Night's Black Agents is, I think, pretty informative for the kind of structure the game will take in play: In the thriller, the reward for danger is information; having information points you into danger. When the hero rests, add more danger. - Page 180 I have added "» Trade danger for information" as a GM move.
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Nov 7, 2015 01:42
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What can I use for a BPRD game?
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Nov 9, 2015 19:36
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Monster of the Week's revision is built for that, but I haven't taken a close look at it yet. Urban Shadows could work for the early comic stuff, but would likely tend to break down if you move into the bigger meta-plot stuff later on.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:43
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Yeah, go with MotW. One of the bonus playbooks is The Summoned, which is straight-up Hellboy, with the weapon option "Red Right Hand".
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Nov 9, 2015 19:55
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Evil Mastermind posted:Yeah, go with MotW. One of the bonus playbooks is The Summoned, which is straight-up Hellboy, with the weapon option "Red Right Hand". And the wizard is pretty much Dresden. I do love me some monster of the week.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:59
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Arashiofordo3 posted:And the wizard is pretty much Dresden. I do love me some monster of the week. Funny enough, Urban Shadows is similar, if my player is to be believed.* *I have never read Dresden Files.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:02
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Yeah, in Dresden Files the wizard is basically a noir detective with magic. The wizard in Urban Shadows has exactly the same sort of thing going on.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:06
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Basically the difference between US and MotW is that US is decidedly street level. Early Dresden basically. Smaller scope and more personal, significantly less action (US characters can be quite fragile). MotW is more supportive of combat encounters and comic book action. There's overlap between the two, but they are designed for different kinds of games.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:07
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As a good rule of thumb, if you're US game starts to look like MotW (like it happened early in my campaign), dial it down.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:08
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Basically, MotW is Buffy and Urban Shadows is The Wire (Or Breaking Bad) with vampires.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:10
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Covok posted:Funny enough, Urban Shadows is similar, if my player is to be believed.
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Nov 9, 2015 20:15
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Evil Mastermind posted:In the sense that they're both designed around the idea that your power can get out of your control, yeah. The main difference is that the MotW Spell-Slinger is more focused on combat magic, whereas the Urban Shadows Wizard's moves are more balanced between combat and utility. I think both of them are "one step away" from Dresden. The MotW playbook for it plays like a kick-in-the-door, no-prep Dresden (which we see sometimes), and the US playbook plays like scheming, prep-and-good-times Dresden, complete with sanctum with intelligent spirit, a classic Dresden wizard death-cure, and tracking spells. Both of these styles show up across the books, and I think you'd probably have to hybrid the classes together to get Dresden's full set of skills back. QuantumNinja fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Nov 9, 2015 |
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Nov 9, 2015 21:06
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Part of the deal in MOTW is that, thanks to the vaguely Buffy origins, ritual magic and prep is a thing everyone can do (Though most folks aren't that good at it.) The Spellslinger gets a couple of moves to make that better, and to ask extra questions when investigating like "What magic was done here" but since basically everyone is a little bit wizard-as-detective or can arrange a big ritual with instructions, the spellslinger focuses on being "Harry as blunt instrument with a lot of raw magical power". I am kinda surprised it doesn't have the option to get a limited version of the Expert's Haven as an advance, but I'm not sure what existing advance I'd pull out in exchange for that.
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Nov 9, 2015 21:31
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I really like Monster of the Week for its cartoony, action-y focus (and loved the janky, cartoony art in the 1st ed), but for some reason I hated the Spellslinger. Has anyone ever run a MoTW game on the forums?
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Nov 11, 2015 04:05
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Vulpes Vulpes posted:I really like Monster of the Week for its cartoony, action-y focus (and loved the janky, cartoony art in the 1st ed), but for some reason I hated the Spellslinger. I did a few years back. It was pretty fun, but we only got through one story before it fizzled on account of me moving across a continent and an international border and being without reliable internet access for a couple months.
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Nov 11, 2015 04:30
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GimpInBlack posted:I did a few years back. It was pretty fun, but we only got through one story before it fizzled on account of me moving across a continent and an international border and being without reliable internet access for a couple months. I wish you'd run it again in roll20 or something. For some reason we had a paranoid conspiracy theorist teaming with her dad and a punk kid, whose gender was female! And also others.
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Nov 11, 2015 07:47
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Golden Bee posted:I wish you'd run it again in roll20 or something. For some reason we had a paranoid conspiracy theorist teaming with her dad and a punk kid, whose gender was female! And also others. I loved that game, it was my first pbta game. Made me fall in love with the system. I'd love another go, playing the spelcaster, oh man, poo poo be awesome.
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Nov 11, 2015 11:42
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Golden Bee posted:I wish you'd run it again in roll20 or something. For some reason we had a paranoid conspiracy theorist teaming with her dad and a punk kid, whose gender was female! And also others. Arashiofordo3 posted:I loved that game, it was my first pbta game. Made me fall in love with the system. I'd love another go, playing the spelcaster, oh man, poo poo be awesome. D'aww, thanks. I had a ton of fun running it. I'm definitely not opposed to running it again over Roll20 or Hangouts or something, but funny enough I might be a few weeks away from another international, cross-continental move (going back the other way this time). But if you (and any of the other players who might read this) shoot me an email at my screen name on gmail, I'll let you know how stuff shakes out and see if we can't schedule something.
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Nov 11, 2015 16:12
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I've never had the opportunity to play or run a game, but I was wondering, how much a thumb do you as a GM have to keep on the "Use Magic" move? Or do the GM imposed restrictions tend to keep things running ok?
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Nov 11, 2015 18:08
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Vulpes Vulpes posted:I've never had the opportunity to play or run a game, but I was wondering, how much a thumb do you as a GM have to keep on the "Use Magic" move? Or do the GM imposed restrictions tend to keep things running ok? The key to the Use Magic move, IMHO, is to develop early on (like, the first couple of times someone uses the moves) what magic looks and feels like in your setting. The options and restrictions do a decent job of keeping power levels from getting out of whack, but knowing how magic works gives you the basis to springboard your GM moves off of. For instance, in the PbP I ran, we decided in the first couple of scenes that magic relied on unbroken symbols drawn in blood: lines, circles, glyphs, etc. That gave me stuff to work with when I needed to look to the fiction for how to respond. Like, one time two characters were trying to ward a door to keep the monster (which they didn't know how to kill yet) trapped in a room while they got away. The Use Magic roll succeeded, but the "aid another" move failed--which, according to the rules, meant that the spell went off successfully but the helper was exposed to danger. Because of how magic operated on unbroken symbols, I decided that the glyph had been drawn and the spell was active, but in the chaos of the moment, the glyph was partly drawn on the helping characters hand. If he moved it, the spell would be broken. So while the rest of the characters had time to get the civilian out of there, he was stuck waiting behind and didn't have a head start on the monster when he tried to book it. That scene would have played out very differently if magic worked via, say, words of power or the music of the spheres or weird relics or whatever.
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Nov 11, 2015 19:48
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I'm thinking "Monster of the Week" might be a fun intro to PbtA for my D&D group, are there any good online resources for playbooks etc that you guys know of? I'd likely be DM'ing, but it will be my first foray into PbtA games as well.
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Nov 12, 2015 17:25
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Gerdalti posted:I'm thinking "Monster of the Week" might be a fun intro to PbtA for my D&D group, are there any good online resources for playbooks etc that you guys know of? Aren't they bundled in the book? They're also on the EvilHat Website. http://www.evilhat.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Monster-of-the-Week-Revised-Playbooks.pdf Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Nov 12, 2015 |
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Nov 12, 2015 17:34
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Golden Bee posted:Aren't they bundled in the book? They're also on the EvilHat Website. I think they are, I'll be buying it tomorrow (payday). I was looking to see if there were some extra playbooks or anything out there. I did manage to find a few (Meddling Kid, Luchadore, etc.).
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Nov 12, 2015 17:44
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Gerdalti posted:I think they are, I'll be buying it tomorrow (payday). I was looking to see if there were some extra playbooks or anything out there. I did manage to find a few (Meddling Kid, Luchadore, etc.). There are a few; The Summoned, The Hardcase... I don't remember them all but I have a bunch. I can link them later.
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Nov 12, 2015 18:05
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I wrote some! They are unpolished and possibly bad but The Celebrity: For playing the dudes from Fright Night, Bruce Campbell in my name is Bruce, etc. https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B67MVAfQf1SjS2VDRWcxVkZpSlE The Cryptozoologist: Because the existing scientist playbooks I've found are less about 'studying monsters' and more about 'let's kill monsters with death rays'. https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B67MVAfQf1SjZFBaYjZZTy05UzA The Athlete: Jocks vs. Monsters. https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B67MVAfQf1SjcTNxb1RmY180d1k
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Nov 12, 2015 18:13
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Mike Sands has a bunch of files and whatnots on his website, there are a bunch of the 1st ed. playbooks there for download.
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Nov 12, 2015 18:38
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Evil Mastermind posted:There are a few; The Summoned, The Hardcase... I don't remember them all but I have a bunch. I can link them later. I'd appreciate it. unseenlibrarian posted:I wrote some! They are unpolished and possibly bad but I like these, thanks. Vulpes Vulpes posted:Mike Sands has a bunch of files and whatnots on his website, there are a bunch of the 1st ed. playbooks there for download. These should be mostly compatible with the most recent edition (2nd I guess) right? Edit: Looks like you just ignore the "Highlight" and old EXP rules, should be straightforward. And just like that, I have a ton of playbooks for people. 
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Nov 12, 2015 18:47
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Yeah, that's all the ones I have, so you're set. There was an Action Scientist playbook too, but I don't seem to have it...
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Nov 12, 2015 19:39
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Evil Mastermind posted:Yeah, that's all the ones I have, so you're set. This should be a link to the Action Scientist, but work blocks gdocs so I can't verify if it's still valid or not.
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Nov 12, 2015 19:43
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It is indeed! Thanks!
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Nov 12, 2015 19:50
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GimpInBlack posted:This should be a link to the Action Scientist, but work blocks gdocs so I can't verify if it's still valid or not. Thanks for this one too, it looks super fun. Edit: Here's Luchador, because I didn't have it until just now: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8kVRNcLOnTtQS0wR0RYbkNBSmc/view?usp=sharing Gerdalti fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Nov 12, 2015 |
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Nov 12, 2015 19:55
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I updated the OP with a few new titles that have come out. Anything else come out recently that I missed?
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Nov 19, 2015 16:47
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Covok posted:I updated the OP with a few new titles that have come out. Anything else come out recently that I missed? Fellowship isn't there, if you're listing in-progress ones.
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Nov 19, 2015 23:00
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UrbanLabyrinth posted:Fellowship isn't there, if you're listing in-progress ones. Added it in. I am so bad at spiels.
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Nov 20, 2015 02:07
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I've made some substantial additions to Malleus, my 17th Century monster hunting hack. Still mulling new archetypes, and it needs more commentary on the moves, as well as proper GMing advice but the majority of the mechanical stuff is now in place. I got some very useful feed back from a few people last time I posted, so if anyone wants to take a look I would be super grateful. Looking to lineup some more play testing, including over Roll20 if anyone is interested. The current draft is here.
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Nov 22, 2015 12:13
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