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Is there anything along the lines of a Unknown Armies/Mage: The Awakening style hack? I'm interested in a game that allows "Mages" or whatever they might be called to start picking at the fabric of reality, confronting hubris and obsession in the search for power.
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Jul 15, 2015 22:24
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 05:44 |
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Thanks for the recommendation guys! I've been wanting to play Mage/UA for some time but don't care for either system much. Seems like PbtA would be perfect for the incalculable-yet-deeply-personal style of symbolism, power, and intrigue that both games have going. The World of Our Desires is pretty neat, but is definitely aiming for that slick, neon and grime UA Occult Underground feel - I think the Magehack I was invisioning would have a sort of progression wired in - as you start on the fresh-faced-recently-discovered-magic side of the power spectrum, the Occult Underground is perfect. But as you gain more power and see more of the Lie pulled back from reality, your character would become less tied to the more "mortal" or illusory aspects of their personality and world around them. Magick would become less about obsession and more about hubris, titanic battles of power, overtly changing fundamental realities, etc... Whereas the UA style will probably end up with a hosed up embodiment of their own mistakes killing most of players in their nerd-basements, which isn't bad, but a little smaller in scope. I think the best way to articulate this progression is a binary between Mortal (The Lie) and Immortal (The Truth); the characters' lives versus their innate magick potential. Binaries would be the core mechanisms throughout this hack. What TWoOD also lacks is a built in flavor for magick. There's no Life, or Fate, or even Forces qualifiers - which directly serves the idea of individual magick-users obsessions fueling their drives, which is rad. Again, I think that if you were to use the "facts" of magick built in to the playbooks, say, each Mage playbook getting to choose from a few magick-types (Death, Time, Matter) you could use those categories of power as an isolated "truth" within the illusionary world. Like, there needs to be no overt rules for where capital M-Magick comes from - each individual game could decide that on their own. Maybe its a great split from the truth to illusion like M:tA. Maybe its' a little more fate-and-doom style like UA. Whatever works. Point is, you could use the power structure that your players advance and manipulate to interact with their world as a fundamental truth on which to build. Example: It doesn't matter if Magick is a cruel joke pulled on humanity by the Greek Gods: Magick still articulates itself in axises like Life/Death, Matter/Forces. The Greek Gods bit would be the flavor on which PbtA hacks thrive. On this note, TWoOD's Cabal and Duke generation is perfect, and could be modified to advance in scope with the players built in. However, the "truths" generated by the stakes from the Cabals and Dukes should instead come from the player's own experiments and encounters with magick. Truth, not fireballs or real estate, would be the real currency. Anyhow, I've been thinking about this for a few weeks. I'm definitely going to try and come up with some basic moves and playbooks ala TWoOD. Arashiofordo3 posted:Tbh, I've been thinking about something like that, though I doubt I've got the skill to make it. I'd love to bounce a few moves and general philosophies off you in the next week or so!
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Jul 16, 2015 22:31
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Arashiofordo3 posted:So regarding a pbta mage game. definitely think that it would need to do a spirit of 77 style split during character creation. I've been trying to come up with some ideas for the mundane side of things. But I'm struggling to find insperation. Anyone got any ideas? I haven't had a chance to read So77. But I agree, the "vanilla" start for Sleeping World is a Uknown Armies style cityscape in which the GM is encouraged to wreak havoc and push the players together. In addition, one of the planned magic-playbooks is Traveler - a concept specifically designed to split the party and be rewarded for doing so. Of course, they're often responsible for being followed by horrible things back to the other players: Life mages might be marked and tracked by the spirits who live inside our veins, Space wizards can be tailed by unfeeling monster from beyond the 4th dimension, and Matter mages might be hunted by the Earth golems who call the NegaPyramids their own! E: Forgot the mundane - I'm using two playbooks per character - one to represent the magic-abilities and proximity to universal truths, and the other to represent the mortal abilities. Each character starts with much of their mundane book unlocked, but as they grow in magic power and reject the illusion, they grow more distant from their mundane abilities! Some examples of mundane playbooks are The Warrior and The Liar. tokenbrownguy fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Jul 23, 2015 |
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Jul 23, 2015 21:25
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Yes, the player can definitely choose whether to remain grounded in their lives. And So77's sounds exactly what I was planning. The Liar / Tyrant! The Warrior / Unhinged! Guess I really need to get So77. How are the playbooks physically set up? Two double-sided pages each? Both Tyrant and Puppetmaster will have moves that run toward locking everyone else down! And yeah, getting way ahead here. Gotta finish up the basic moves before anything else.
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Jul 23, 2015 22:22
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Arashiofordo3 posted:Sweet, I look forward to it! Hugoon Chavez posted:That sounds great, exactly what I've been wanting to play and I'd love helping out! You guys don't have PMs. Where should I send this gdoc?
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Jul 27, 2015 04:30
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Sent! I'm looking forward to your thoughts and critiques.
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Jul 27, 2015 10:17
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Responded to the comments made on MageHack. Should have a few playbooks and more thoughts on the Hubris-sphere-playbook mechanics by the end of the week. \/\/\/ - Awesome! Thanks again. tokenbrownguy fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Aug 23, 2015 |
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Aug 23, 2015 22:02
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Arashiofordo3 posted:Yaaay! I was starting to get worried you'd died. I'll take a look at it after I get home from work tomorrow. First Archetype and Mage Playbook are up on the draft. The Warrior and Puppetmaster. Not super happy with the former, but pretty excited about the latter. Still pondering the Magic-hubris-numbers.
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Aug 31, 2015 04:49
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Hey folks, update on Magehack. Not dead, but I've hit a major spike in demand from work. I'll have to put off any updates to the current draft until late December.
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Oct 22, 2015 08:13
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Anybody run a Legacy 2e game? I’m wrapping up a year long Blades game and looking at my next campaign.
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Nov 19, 2018 05:23
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Hey, congrats on the 2e publication dude. You've got a real neat game here! I'm getting stoked about potentially running it. Like I said, I've a Blades campaign wrapping up. Afterwards, I'm thinking about running Legacy 2e for my crew. I've gone through the core book a couple times—your play advice section has been a big help. However, I've got two big concepts I'm struggling with: 1. I've really begun to rely up on the "score -> downtime -> score" structure of Blades. I understand the core gameplay loop in Legacy is "zoom in -> characters -> zoom out -> family -> zoom in" but I'm concerned that picking up and putting down my player's characters will put off my crew, who loves their lovely, terrible Blades protagonists to death. How do you recommend keeping the family, not the characters, in the forefront of this cycle? How do you keep the pressure on the families as the gameplay loop cycles through the third or fourth age? 2. My players are great, but petty as hell. I'm a strict everyone-having-fun, consensual, non-catpiss kinda MC, but I know, for example, that one of my players would zoom in on the Tyrants and likely start doing Tyrant things as much as possible. PVP would be an inevitability with my group. I understand your advice is to try and keep the players working at cross-purposes, rather than all out war, but how much do you recommend stretching the scope of the heartland and area around it to enable this sort of cross purpose conflict? I understand being a PbtA game there are actually few assumptions about an individual game world, but I'm curious about your recommendations regarding Homeland scope as a way to mitigate / facilitate player conflict. For example, take the Tyrant family I know will pop up in my game. I would want to give the Tyrant room to put around and smash sandcastles. I guess the "default" Homeland is sorta-populated, scattered communities, with only the other player families actually owning and holding solid ground (assuming any selected Settled starts). In my mind, this would start the Tyrants immediately marching and trying to conquer my other players' territory. Should I try to put more npc controlled territories in the Homeland to give the Tyrant targets that don't put them at life-or-death odds with other Families? Does the default start assume large communities that the families are minor populations of or isolated communities comprised of entirely Family-members?
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Nov 21, 2018 01:28
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Thanks for the breakdown. I think I'll need to see it action to really understand. Thankfully your blog has a bunch of examples of that. Time for some reading!
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Nov 22, 2018 23:05
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paradoxGentleman posted:It's very fascinating but I honestly have no idea how a game of it actually looks like. I hope there will be examples in the final product. Honestly, that's the worst part about PbtA and FitD games. I've ran three campaigns of Blades and Apoc World derivatives—when I got my hands on Band of Blades I pretty much just threw my hands up and waited for Strass to run an AP.
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Sep 27, 2019 18:08
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Yeah, the issue isn't so much "How does Ectoplasm work?" I get the need to figure that out as a group. It's more, "How the hell do I make the BoB campaign fun from the get-go?"
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Sep 27, 2019 20:59
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Good questions. I agree that the strength of PbtA and FitD systems is the easy-bake concept. BoB’s premise grabbed my group right off the bat. We played three sessions of Saving Private Frodo and loved it. Same with Blades—the crime shenanigans are a license for every character to let out their inner murderhobo, and I’ve never run a session 1 that wasn’t a blast. My issue is the mechanics designed to facilitate extended play often times aren’t as explicitly outlined as I’d hope. I had a three “season” Blades game over a year-and-a-half real time that was fun the whole way through, but definitely showing the weakness of the system by the end of the campaign. Mostly, this was because I made a few mistakes in the first two seasons: - Didn’t press my players with nasty enough consequences to fictional actions - Didn’t make higher tier threats as threatening as they should’ve been - Was too generous with experience - Didn’t account for what an extra player (# 5) would do to the stress economy These mistakes led to the already terrifyingly effective Blades PCs become fictionally invincible except to truly out-of-scope threats. Not that this capability is by itself an issue—I believe that PCs should be capable for what they’re built. But the level of pain necessary to actually put them on the backfoot became more of a… high-stakes superhero or fantasy level in the fiction rather than a street-level crime game. By the third season they were running around in a demon-apocalypse’d Duskwall being chased by millitarized/Mad Max’d elements of the Bluecoats utilizing machine guns and mortars, wrestling demons, and flying skyships laden with ghost-nukes, and they’d still generally come out of scores relatively un-stressed / flush on resources. Again, this was a blast. But now that I’m running a Hack the Planet campaign, I’m much more careful about outlining threats, sticking to the fictional strength of those threats, and generally speaking being nasty about consequences. I think while BitD encourages you to avoid the mistakes I made, I don’t think it conveyed what failing to do so would do to an extended campaign. Or conversely, the text never communicates what PCs at session 23 should look like in a “balanced” Blades game. So when I ran Band of Blades, I was really uncertain how far I should pushing the limit with the mechanical threats / consequences. BoB claims that it is a very lethal game, and folks who’ve played (myself included) seem to agree that death spiral is, if not inevitable, pretty easy. Where’s the line? What’s the tipping point for players either getting too powerful, too quickly, or worse, getting the poo poo kicked out of them into a place where the game’s been lost? I guess, ideally, I’d like to see more work done in PbtA and BitD systems to support extended play. That’s why I decided to wait for an AP of Band of Blades to come out. Not because I think my group couldn’t have fun with the game—because I wanted more clear expectations on how to keep the extended play mechanics engaging and in-tone. And hopefully, fun.
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Sep 28, 2019 21:29
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 05:44 |
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I’ve had players express similar problems with the Legacy Claim By Force move. Best case, there’s a cost.
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Nov 24, 2019 07:12
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