itch.io

Hello! There's a couple of things going on here.

First, it was a deliberate decision not to have "good magic" within the setting. Have a sort of divine, holy energy takes away from part of the mood and feeling. If you know there's some divine, godly authority on your side, the horror can be taken away a bit.

In addition, I wanted to avoid keeping it too culture-specific: to not be overtly christian, or jewish or the like. Even in a fantasy setting, it very often just ends up being "Christian, but not", and I wanted to make sure there was flexibility there. The decision here was to make it so the undead-turning tool could basically be "anything" to some extent. You might have a holy symbol with a soul bound to it, or a magical soul, or the like.

Finally, the Scholar was always intended as the sort of "priest class". In a lot of vampire media, the priest is one who fights with knowledge - they know about garlic, mythology, and the like. In the original novel, Van Helsing is an educated man of science, but this is often adapted. The Hugh Jackman Van Helsing movie has a gadgeteer priest, and there's lots of overlap between the exorcist archetype and characters like Hellboy's Professor Broom or Lovecraft's Doctor Armitage.

Thank you for your support and kind words, it really means a lot!

Page 76 has some guidelines on roughly how strong monsters should be, in terms of harm, damage, and the like. Compared to playbooks, monsters tend to have a lot more variation - for a game about mysteries and weird, scary things, you want some different effects each time so things don't become stale. As such, I never made a strict list of powers that were repeated across monsters, like I would for a heroic fantasy game. For any new weirder powers, my biggest suggestion would be to see if there are any monsters with a similar effect and go from there - or also see about substituting in similar spells from the PC spell lists, as some monsters do.

Thank you for the praise!

Letting players just directly pick whatever abilities they want - and not having to worry about adding up a +1 here and a +2 there to get appropriate totals - has always been a big thing to me, and I feel it can really make even complicated systems a lot easier. I'm glad others appreciate it, too!

Thank you!

There's no specific discord, unfortunately - I had tried to run one before, but there just wasn't a lot of interest.

There's no current template for playbooks, but I've had enough people ask I can see about editing a word document one together, with some playbook design advice, and hopefully getting that out within the next week. For now, you're freely available to reference anything from the book, or make material compatible with the book, as long as you're not using the art or extended sections of text (so feel free to sell or give away your own playbooks on itch, but don't do something like copy all the playbooks into a brand new game).

The best way to contact me for talk about translation and other works is at dragonchild12@gmail.com , and I'd be happy to talk it over via email!

Thanks for the catch! I checked and it was just those two - they've been updated now.

Yes! We've actually got a pretty significant update coming. After a few playtests, we found the original version lacked a strong identity, but there was a lot of interest in a version with GMless play as an option. We've revamped some stuff, to allow adventures to be run totally GMless - you still CAN GM the system, but it won't be required. We're hoping to have the new version soon, with 6 races (and 24 classes!) shortly, as well as two GMless adventures to go with it, and more to come after.

Thank you for the praise! I really appreciate it!

https://karrius.itch.io/highwinds

No, thank you for catching that! I'll fix that right up and double check all the others.

- My hope was that players would be adults and share unity cooperatively. I'll probably  include some lines about how you should agree as a group how unity is spent.

I think beyond just one play being greedy, some players are just naturally very, very reluctant to use up resources, especially from a group resource pool.

- I do plan on re-examining how healing works in an upbeat world full of magic. I also don't want to upset the balance of the system so I'm being a bit careful about it.

It might have been just the type of game I ran, but I keep having problems in my Blades game where players just don't have time to actually do downtime stuff, because they have to keep up with healing and stress reduction, which feels like a really cool aspect is being pushed aside.

- Effect, positioning, and scale with regard to Big Things is already something I'm stumbling my way through actually. You can see it in the Mage's "Explosion!" special ability. I don't know what the answer is yet but it's on my radar for sure. That being said, I would prefer the solution to be simple and scalable. I think part of it will be just encouraging GMs look at and use encounter clocks in a particular way. I've run a few sessions of Scum & Villainy with Giant Space Monsters that worked out pretty good with clever use of clocks.

Honestly, just saying "This is a 4-clock health monster, each effect is +1 tick" would help a lot. Guidelines on that is something I've constantly struggled with running Blades, it never felt like I was doing it "right" or in a real satisfying way. Even when a player asks to "Fight as well as a small gang" against a master assassin, it's not really clear what that should *mean*.

Random catch re-reading: The mage has an ability called "artificer", would it make sense to call it "Enchanter" or something similiar, so it doesn't share a name with a playbook?

Hi! This game seems pretty neat, and I just had some thoughts reading it:

-Am I correct in assuming that a "rotating cast" is less of an expectation as it is with Blades in the Dark, where characters can be expected to be jailed or killed?

-Would some mechanic to prevent one player from "hogging" unity make sense? What if you could only spend it from another? An affiliate spending 2 unity to avoid a 3 harm dragon's breath is OK... an Aegis spending it to deflect the dragon's breath on the affiliate is way cooler!

-The Aegis really seems to be starving for load, especially if armor costs load, to the point where Walking Arsenal seems near mandatory.

-It would be cool to see a bit more flexibility in some of the equipment options. Imagine an Affiliate who's dressed in knightly garb with their sword, or a priest carrying a holy weapon. The Tactician and Whisper also seem to lack any real weapon, although I think it's intended more are added?

-Are you changing up any of the downtime resting/healing rules at all? They've consistently been one of the most frustrating parts about Blades, and may not be as appropriate for a game that from what I can tell isn't meant to feel as gritty and hopeless as Blades.

-Likewise, I'd be interested in seeing a re-examining of effect and positioning: blades doesn't handle big monsters well, I don't think. Band of Blades makes some strides here, but it's one of the biggest places I feel like there's been room for improvement, and really important if there are dragons and stuff.

Overall, it looks very cool and I'm excited to see what comes next!

Would such a thing be possible in the future? I think it would be useful for things like "X will be developed when funding reaches this goal", or the like, especially for PWYW titles.

Is there a way to set a funding goal without a sale? Maybe I'm just having trouble seeing the option, but I'd like to add a funding goal to a project with no minimum price - just to show customers they're participating in helping make the game possible in a more direct, visible way.