Month: January 2025

Dark Heresy playtest

So, we ended up playing some more Dark Heresy this week. It involved the daring acolytes trying to escape from a collapsing mine while being gassed by inflexible authorities and trying not to be eaten by a river of daemonic slugs, so I feel that at the very least the “grimdark” was firmly in place…

This was the first session with the new version of the rules, and I do think it went a lot more smoothly. The success chances are rather unforgiving, but that might be on point – possibly it helps with the feeling of a hostile universe where your skills are only moderately helpful? Not sure.

I do think that there’s a problem with the stat increase Advances, though. See, I’ve streamlined everything so that there are certain Advances that just says, basically, “you get +1 to such-and-such stat.” Which is nice and simple… but it also kind of makes those Advances sort of overpowered. I mean, in the original game only the first increases to your core stats cost 100 XP apiece, everything else costs 250 XP or more, so there is some incentive to instead choose the skills or talents that cost less. Without that price hike, there’s really very little sane reason to not take stat increase Advances as long as you have any at all that are available.

One possible solution would be to take out the stat increase Advances and instead make characters start with +1 in their core stats, +0 in their non-core stats, and -1 in their weak stats, and that pretty much just keep it like that. Maybe let them take stat increases after their first 10 or 20 Advances or something. Of course, then we don’t get that aforementioned feeling of all your traits being equally useless, so if we want that one that’s bad.

But we’ll see how I feel after another bunch of sessions.

Other things to work on: the corruption rules. They’re going to become relevant sooner than I thought, since two of the players are now heading into corrupted territory. Also, I need to expand the World Moves and Chaos Moves (for Imperial Worlds and Nurgle, respectively, for this particular scenario – the others can wait) and add some more granularity to them.

Mummy downtime

Okay. Okay. I admit it. I have to change the downtime rules in my Mummy: the Resurrection port. I still think the idea behind them is sound – they’re mechanics for when the party settles in for a few days to learn new spells, do surveillance, work on projects, whatever.

The problem is that the PbtA gameplay loop makes it very hard to create a natural time to take a few days off. PbtA encourages you to keep throwing stuff at the players, to prevent those endless, boring moments when the plot can’t progress because the players are failing to do X, Y or Z that would lead to the next setpiece. In PbtA, if the players just sit around doing nothing, then the GM springs a GM move on them that forces them to take some kind of action. That’s a good thing – in fact, it’s a great thing. But it does mean that the action never really comes to a natural halt. The players never want to stop for several days, because there’s always something they need to deal with today.

Still, I think most of this can be solved by making downtime represent, say, half an hour instead of several days; not enough time for the shit to really hit the fan for lack of player attention. While I’m at it, I might as well make it so that rituals must be cast as downtime moves; that ties the two paces of the game into the magic system neatly. It does mean that mummies now heal downright scarily fast, but fine, fine – they can literally reconstitute themselves from a single speck of ash when resurrecting, it isn’t too far-fetched that they heal pretty fast the rest of the time too, just not to the point of wounds closing instantly the way they do for werewolves.

It still bugs me, though. Shouldn’t there be some way to make characters take breaks, even in PbtA? Dungeon World has “making camp” rules, I’m not sure why that works – yes, it’s an inherent part of standard fantasy, but urban fantasy (especially the sort that involves caster types) surely has “time to run to the library and look stuff up!” as an equally natural ingredient. So why do players never want to do that?

Oh well.

I’ve also started sketching on a Pendragon port. Which is also going to have downtime moves, because that’s a big part of the game. If I can’t figure out a way to get the players to return to their manors for the winter there, it may just be hopeless… Anyway, my starting point is to use the thirteen Trait pairs – Energetic/Lazy, Valorous/Cowardly, Trusting/Suspicious, etc – as the basis for all moves, making what sort of person you are matter more than your training (which will be more or less the same for all characters, after all – they’re all knights!). I’ll get back to you with any developments.