Post by ZiggyZapf in Short questions - Chaos Level, Crew Types, Equipment and MEM slots

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Writing up some notes for a game of HW I'm hoping to run or play, since I've got some interested players. I'm filling in gaps and homebrewing from the Forged in the Dark SRD. Currently breaking my brain on the Revisionist preview you posted earlier, since I'm excited about that crew type:

1. Inversion Lab: "Retroactively plant items in Archives."

My current interpretation: I have to be able to fit a "host object" into the lab. For example, I could put a briefcase full of documents in the lab and plant a weapon in the Archives so that I could Restore the briefcase to get the weapon out. How I'm thinking it'd play out at the table:

Player: "I'm carrying a briefcase full of documents in through the front door."
GM: "Security checks the briefcase for weapons."
Player: "That's fine. There aren't any weapons currently in there."
Player, later in the score: "I do a flashback where I brought along a ping rifle in the briefcase."
GM: "You're going to need to explain why the guards didn't find it."
Player: "I prepared to be searched by using the Inversion Lab. I put the briefcase in the wayback machine and added the rifle to its history in the Archives. I want to roll Restore to 'revert' the briefcase to the state where it contained the rifle I planted. The rifle wasn't there when the guards did the search."
GM: "That makes sense. You don't need to take any stress for the flashback, since it was a reasonable preparation. Roll Restore to see if you can retrieve the rifle."

Without the inversion lab, I'd probably have to pay more stress or have a better explanation of how I got the rifle in there undetected.

2. Memory Tomb: "+1d to Find and Restore on Site"

I'm guessing it's referring to such checks made inside the "Tomb."

3. Inversion Mastery: "Change the past with a Score"

This one just scares me, but at least it'll take a while before my crew would be able to get it. I'm just going to guess there's a much longer explanation than would fit inside the circle. Of course, it could just be fun having the crew fight cyber-Cthulhu as they do literal time travel by going into the Archives.

4. Message In A Bottle: "When you indulge [Futuresight] by describing an unforeseen complication that will soon affect the whole crew, you may clear 1 additional stress. Also a Mysterious Stranger will assist any one function roll you make - from now until you next indulge this recall."

Mechanically, this is easy for me to understand. It's not so easy for me to get what's going on from a narrative perspective. Is the Mysterious Stranger like your future self hitting World's "rewind almost everything" button and helping you out in the new timeline that results? That's the closest I can imagine without involving "actual" time travel.

5. Stable Loops: While paying the costs of any flashback, you may mark Memory as if it were stress. How do you close the loop?

Mechanically simple, but still confuses me on a narrative level. I'm kind of guessing that from a narrative perspective the Memory expense represents manually changing the past to accomplish the same meta-effect as a flashback.

In some of these cases, I'm just kind of tempted to say, "It's Archive Magic, let's not try to explain it and just get on with the game."

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Charles Simon3 years ago(+1)

These are some great ideas for the Revisionists. That example for the Inversion Lab is really good, and exactly the type of thing I would love to see players at the table use it for.

The Memory Tomb has a similar format to claims in the Black Hats and Dynasty which also provide a bonus to various functions while the players are taking action on their "home turf." It's up to you and the table to negotiate the exact prerequisites to get those bonuses, as they are deliberately written loose. Really the primary goal was to make the player's headquarters feel gradually more personalized and under their control (this is especially true for the Dynasty, which can rack up a lot of bonuses for fighting on home turf). This is important since the Entanglement table in downtime includes a few results that prompt a "home invasion" scenario where the crew's HQ or Claims can come under attack. In the specific example of the Memory Tomb, it might not exactly provided combat bonuses, but it's definitely good for research and information gathering... maybe that's something the crew might desperately need to do while under siege from an enemy? That could be a cool scene.

Message in a Bottle is definitely one of the most challenging special abilities for the reader in HW, but I think you've got the idea. It's deliberately nebulous, but the implication is that one of your crew (perhaps even a crew member not yet created?) is the Mysterious Stranger, from your future (or maybe a bad future, and they're trying to save you from it?). The Revisionists are full of this sort of thing, where the mechanical bonus is here for you to drape your own story over.

Stable Loops is exactly as you say in my imagination. It's a Flashback, except the cost is different because it's a Flashback you have not done yet. The memory cost may be the computational strain on the user of memorizing the scenario, the precise timestamps, and the exact circumstances which need to be altered in the future so they can seamlessly "save themselves" in the past. At the table, you might frame the scene as a kind of Flash-Forward, where the player narrates how an older version of their character goes back in time to help themselves in this present moment... but basically framed in the same way at the table as an ordinary flashback.

In general I knew for my recent update that the themes of HW can be a little esoteric, and so one of the goals was to throw in some actionable prompts for adventure lines and story hooks to help get everyone's imagination stirring. And yeah, the Revisionists are pretty crazy conceptually so they need the help most of all out of my existing crew types.

To that end, the Player Handouts section has score prompts now! These are towards the back of the PDF in the GM handouts area. Here's some examples from the Revisionists page (Black Hats and Dynasty also have their own tables, the Council will get one with my next update).

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