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

Other RPG material

• The Expanse
• Stars Without Number
• The Sci-Fi Character Kit by Roll & Play

Procedure#

Input material is the playbooks and a list of special abilities. For each playbook I declared four archetypes, each archetype was assigned their special ability. Additionally, I defined four archetype pairings and one special ability to be suitable for both types. I went through this in several loops until I found the list good enough for playtesting.

From the raw material I automatically created the playbook chapters for book and website. Moreover I created cards (very rough layout but with the plan to improve this later on) and tables of special abilities. Cards were sorted by playbook, while the tables were sorted by types of special abilities.

Eventually, I added text passages for the playbooks:

• catchphrase
• description
• XP trigger condition
• incentives
• inspiration

Technically, this is a large YAML document of around 2000 lines. Its main parts are the list of special abilities and the list of playbooks. The secondary parts are instructions on how to build the different output types and the categorization of the special abilities:

ability_categories:
  - &bonus
    shortname: Bonus
    code: C
    color: OliveGreen
  [...]

abilities:
  # Boss 'b
  - &inspire
    name: "Inspire"
    description: When you lead a team action...
    addendum: You act as a good example...
    category: *bonus
    playbook: "Boss"
  [...]

data:
  [...]

  - name: Boss
    weight: 2
    catchphrase: The perfect guide or leader
    description: [...]
    xp_trigger: [...]
    incentives: [...]
    inspirations: [...]
    primary: Affect
    secondary: Survey
    archetypes:
      - name: Aristocrat
        points: |-
          Operate +1,
          Tolerate +2,
          Trick +1.
        ability: Affluent
      [...]
    special_abilities:
      - <<: *inspire
      - <<: *affluent
      - <<: *horsetrade
      - <<: *lead
      - <<: *organize
      - <<: *self_discipline
      - <<: *vengeful
      - <<: *subterfuge
  [...]

[...]
...

With this data structure I could easily compare similar entries like all the catchphrase to have a somehow unified feeling. Also the tables of special ability subgroups allowed a similar unification and a rough estimate if the descriptions would create imbalance.

Playbooks#

• 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. Hence, the new name Philantrope. 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”.

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#

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

For Pounce & Pandemonium I chose the following categories

• Bonus: a conditional bonus
• Buy Narration: gain a narrative bonus for a mechanical disadvantage
• Cybernetics: future’s equivalent to magic
• Downtime: enhancements available during downtime
• Equipment: special equipment options
• Narrative: a pure narrative bonus
• Push: push yourself to get a bonus
• Special Armor: use special armor to resist specific consequences
• Stress Handling: more stress or abilities to reduce stress
• Trade: mechanical bonus for a mechanical disadvantage
• XP Trigger: additional XP triggers

Technically, this is just one long list, players can choose from - this is where the “Veteran” special ability is intended for. The playbooks, however, offer a certain subset to the players that fit to the way I find suitable. Fighting and strength is best put to the Killer, while stealth and disguise is suitable for the Masque. All playbooks should have at least one special ability of each type of: Narrative/Buy Narration, Downtime, Equipment, Special Armor. Unfortunately, I didn’t find enough Equipment options. Please note, that this attributions might be apparent but are purely a helper for designing.

Elaboration#

Starting with a list of playbooks and a list of special abilities and then combining them sounds quite linear. The actual process is more formed like a pretzel. Collecting some ideas for the playbooks, naming archetypes, hopping back to the special abilities, … It took me several loops and also some kind of restart to distribute special abilities in a ways that I found the resulting playbooks “complete”. The different ways of displaying playbooks and special abilities helped me quite a lot, in particular the “cards”.

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