Playbooks#

Pounce & Pandemonium shall be a setting of hard sci-fi. It is not intended to support any kind of magic or psionics. It needs to be about travelling in space, about meeting isolated cultures and about the power following the money.

Inspiration#

It draws inspiration from several works of fiction. Here’s an incomplete list.

Books:

• The Alliance-Union Series by C.J. Cherryh
• The Expanse by S.A. Corey (as well as the corresponding TV series)
• The Culture Cycle by Iain Banks
• Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Trilogy

TV Series and Movies:

• Firefly
• Farscape
• Blade Runner
• Odysseus 31
• Captain Future
• Saber Rider

First draft#

• The Pilot: Obsessed with space and the expansion
• The Boss: Happy with the status quo - as long as they have power
• The Killer: In case of doubt deal damage
• The Grease Monkey: Machines are the better humans.
• The Masque: Do you know who you are*
• The Charity: Sharing is caring.
• The Curious: We could never learn more than now!

As an example this is the mindmap drawn for “The masque”:

mindmap
  root((The Masque))
      Skills
        Artist
        Stealth
        Attractive
        Current Affairs
        Burglar
      Examples
        Shepherd Book - Firefly
        Chiana - Farscape
      Keywords
        Social
        Perfomer
        Stealthy
      Types
        Agent
        Socialite
        Star
        Thief
      Fringer

It turned out later “The Masque” in particular was too diffuse. I put in all ideas about people living on the fringe of society. That cluster came so big, that I wanted to separate them and have one more playbook “The Fringer”.

Other playbooks gained more definition like The Charity. I found that term might lean towards healing, but also towards teamwork, protection, empathy and contacts. The Grease Monkey can subsume all personalities to be found in a 21st century fablab - or their professional counterparts.

Here is a picture of my notebook when working on the playbooks:

The right page collects my design notes for “The Boss”. On the left page I wrote down some abstraction for special abilities.

Special abilities fall into four categories (the table and the list afterwards are extracted from Forging in the Dark by David Rourke):

Subtypes are

• A1: Do something usually impossible or difficult
• A2: access to things (tools, ingredients) otherwise not possible
• B1: Use special armor
• B2: Special action when pushing yourself
• C1: Bonus on specific activity
• C2: Increased load
• C3: Reduce harm in special circumstances
• C4: Special downtime activity or bonus on downtime activity
• C5: Turn 1-3 to 4/5 conditionally
• C6: Reduced cost of flashbacks
• D1: Bonus in exchange of malus
• D2: Reduce penalties from harm
• D3: +1 stress
• D4: Bonus when leading group action.

The first two playboks were the Boss and the Charity. To get a feeling I started with the Boss which was almost to easy - actually a bossy type is quite common. I struggled with the Carity. Mainly because the archetypes and the playbook title “Charity” were not going together well. Eventually the “Charity” stayed with additions in the description to make the impetus clear, while the archetype “Fixer” had to make place for a “Facilitator”.

While this might seem like fiddling over words, Forged in the Dark is just about that. It shall enable a quick access to the game. A few words shall give you an idea of how to play a character. Lessons learned with regard to this phrase are collected in the “Changes after first play-testing”.

Playbook template#

Descriptions in Forged in the Dark rulebooks follow a distinct scheme

# Name

Aspects of the playbook

Paragraph with a short description

**When you play a <NAME> you earn XP when you ...** Incentives, exemplary situations

*Questions, Inspirations, Suggestions why you are as you are*

## Starting attributes

Two primary attributes

4 archetypes
- +4 action ratings therof not the main attribute
- 1 special ability

## Special abilities

## Friend and embedment in the world

## Special items