If you see errors in the text or have questions about the rules I’d love to hear about it. Nothing is final yet, although we’re pretty close. The art will get shuffled, quotes will get added, the Vedomaya move has been revised, a lot of very minor things.
If you see errors in the text or have questions about the rules I’d love to hear about it.
If you see errors in the text or have questions about the rules I’d love to hear about it.
Is KNVD an acceptable alternative to NKVD? If not, then page 26, under Dreamer.
(I’m not going to reply to each thing you find but we’ll assemble a list to give Sally prior to final edit to use as she sees fit, so thanks)
Seemed like some of the art pieces were reused in the KS draft, assuming one or the other was an intentional placeholder.
Marshall Miller yeah, place holders.
The text uses “Marina Roskova” throughout, though the spelling elsewhere online is “Raskova”. “Raskova” is used on pages 112, 113, and 139.
Any chance of seeing the revised Vedomaya move?
Pag 58 informal interview, remove the dot from the “On a miss” paragraph (in addition to the others I wrote about in the KS comments page, at pag. 47 I think)
This was mentioned in the Kickstarter comments but the formatting for the Act Up move on page 47 is a little odd. Should “Make some do what you want…” be a bullet point? And it seems the bullet point should be removed from on a miss description.
Beautiful book though, just loving it.
This is just an idea: instead of the classic glossary at the end of the book, put the description of all those Russian terms in sideboxes, near the word the first time it appears. I puzzled about Vedomaya word ’till I reached the end of the PDF :D
P. 39 says you choose medals left to right, implying that you must choose the medals in order. P. 41 says that Hero of the Soviet Union is only available if you already have three medals.
Adam D the HSU is furthest right on the character sheet, so both statements are correct!
Jason Eley
VEDOMAYA
When you are assigned to guard another plane’s wing, hold one. When that plane’s crew suffers a consequence, spend your hold to cover them and take it on yourself instead.
Andrea Parducci good idea, we’ll see. Space is tight. “vedomaya” is the feminine form of wingman, literally wing-woman, which I love.
Jason Morningstar Oh. There are a lot more than three previous medals named, so it is a bit confusing. I’m guessing not all the playbooks have all the medals.
Adam D every playbook has four medals, including the HSU and three others. None of them are the same progression.
Under Regard (page 31), the bonus is listed as “+1 Ongoing” in main body, but “+1 Forward” under the bit about bonuses stacking. I assume that “ongoing” is the correct version, since a one-time bonus doesn’t make a lot of sense here.
Ways to earn mission pool (pag. 42) it says that wayfind adds to mission pool, but in the moves description there is nothing about it.
Pg 105: under “how can I improve our odds?”, the option of using mission pool is mentioned twice. The bullet points under “What if the section has no PC in the rear seat?” appear to be addressing a slightly different question, possibly “What if we fail anyway?”, as with the Strike the Target section below. The rules don’t appear to address the question of a lack of any PC in the front seat or rear seat.
The Sparrow playbook gives the options of gnarled or manicured eyes- perhaps these crept in from a list of hand descriptors?
Gnarled eyes!
– The descriptions of the “Scrounge” and “Repair” moves differ between the rulebook and the handout, particularly with regard to taking harm from lack of sleep.
– The rules state when a Wheels Down test is required, but it wasn’t clear to me when that test must be made immediately (perhaps in enemy territory) and when it can be made upon returning to the airbase. Perhaps that’s intended to be the GM’s discretion, but if so it would be nice for that to be explicit. (The “planes” section on pg 96 could be read as meaning an immediate landing is required upon taking any damage, though I’m not certain that’s the intention with, say, a Wayfinding 7-9 result.)
– Speaking more generally, it would be good to have further worked examples of missions, and/or discussion of how to treat them as narrative exercises rather than merely a succession of moves. However, I appreciate that at this stage this is probably impractical- unless it’s already done!
Thanks for making the draft available- I hope this verbose last-minute nitpicking is more of a help than an irritation!
It is very helpful!
Great! I’ve got a handful of final thoughts; these are my remarks that I think are least likely to be useful (because they’re vague, overly demanding, and quite possibly just plain wrong), which is why I’ve saved them for last. Note that I’ve only read the text, not played the game, and perhaps the following points are self-evident in play.
– it would be good to have more guidance on how much activity to permit during the day (since this determines the vital question of the size of the mission pool). There’s material on the actual historical real-world schedule, but it would be nice to have guidance on translating that into game duration, quantities of moves etc (even if that guidance is just “lots of different possibilities can work”).
– there’s a few moves where it might help to have more guidance on the consequences of rolling a miss, either because it feels like there’s a possibility the miss might lack teeth (eyeball, reach out) or because it’s not clear how nasty a miss is meant to be (NKVD interview). I stress I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with the moves as such; it’s more that because eyeball and reach out have specific mechanical hit-consequences but open-ended narrative miss-consequences, it would be good to have a sense of how to handle the latter.
– it would be nice to have some specific examples of hard and soft GM moves, and perhaps examples of what would constitute doing things wrong in terms of excessive hardness or softness.
Is “Teach the mechanics in a concentric way.” listed twice intentionally? (p160)