I decided to take a crack at my own hack of The Man playbook.

I decided to take a crack at my own hack of The Man playbook.

I decided to take a crack at my own hack of The Man playbook. It’s powered by my use of the Moonlighting move from Apocalypse World to abstract out the work of running a farm and dealing with the web of community obligations the settlers found themselves in.

I owe Keith Stetson thanks and apologies for appropriating parts of his own hack of the man, specifically the farm details and the A Man’s Domain move. And also for letting me rant to him a bit at Dreamation 2016.

Since it looks somewhat likely I’ll get to run SotI this weekend, I welcome any commentary on this people are generous enough to provide; I’m hoping to get an alpha test in during the session.

28 thoughts on “I decided to take a crack at my own hack of The Man playbook.”

  2. That seems much more fun to play, and integrates The Man into the community well.

    For Master of the Hearth : If you can’t, you should be able to take on a serious debt (probably to your Goði) as an optional condition, if someone is willing to float you. No Goði wants their people to starve. But if you can’t pay that debt, you are going to be enslaved (skuldathrældómr) until you pay it off. You can also sell your children into skuldathrældómr.

  3. Good point, Jason Morningstar ; as it turns out I was just reading yesterday about hreppr, the local community insurance that farmers paid into. I’ll think about modifying it so that the MC or the player can choose a variety of bad options 🙂

  7. At first glance this looks much better than my original (and clearly clumsy) take. I wish I could go back and just switch them out!

    The phrasing is a bit odd to me in the improvements, like, if I have a herb garden I should be able to exchange medicines for silver by trading them, or am I spending silver to harvest and craft medicines from the resources in the garden. But that’s a superficial confusion. Great work!

  8. Wow I…wow…thanks Gregor! (And Jason, and everyone!)

    Regarding “exchange”, I think we might read that both ways–you have the capability to sell those things, or to spend the silver to get them. (Here, as elsewhere, using silver as a substitute for supplies and effort expended.)

    I’ve made a few light edits (notably defining impoverishment as the loss of at least the amount of silver you could have profited by) to give some more churn to the economy, and adapting Jason’s suggestion to the Master of the Hearth move.

    How I’m going to fit this on a single page as a playbook is an open question but I have at least 15 hours before tomorrow’s game, so future Cat can worry about that 🙂

  13. Well, sure, I’m going to try and layout something cruddy in Word for my game tomorrow 🙂

    (I know, Word sucks but I have yet to teach myself a better layout program and by this point I’m an old hand at it.)

  16. I’m glad you found our work useful! (Matthew Aaron and Brendan Conway also worked on the book). The utter silence it was met with made me think it was roundly disliked.

    I like the things you’ve done to try to tie the Man to the community more. Even with our playbook there was the tendency for the Man to hunker down in his homestead and let the world come to him – or not.

  19. Kalysto de la vacuité Yeah, I agree (and after ignoring G+ for 40 minutes to try my own quick n dirty layout–serves me right), the best way is to have the obligations and farm on a second sheet plus a space to draw a map. This will allow the man to feel central to the community of PCs…which, really, he should be 🙂

  21. Jason Morningstar Thank you so much, that’s a tremendously nice thing you’re doing! And I’ll have my own crummy version* ready for tomorrow, I think.

    *Not entirely crummy; I’m pretty good at mimicking things. You know, like the Operator, or Keith Stetson , it seems.

  26. Jason Morningstar : your honor is most definitely not in question; thank you for this wonderful translation of my little hack.

    Seriously everyone, you’re all awesome! 🙂

  27. Catherine Ramen

    , congratulations on such a nice playbook. My group already like it more than the original one, and we are planning to use it on our next game. Some things I didn’t understand or think could be improved/clarified:

    1) There seems to be options in the different sections that are linked. Ie: If you pick the “you owe someone else for you homestead” at first page, does that mean you must also choose “paying debts” in the second page ? Is this intended ?

    2) some options don’t see to mesh well with the others within some sections. Ie: a thermal spring sounds more like a natural feature than an “improvement”, no ?; the “your homestead is unfinished or needs repairs” doesn’t seem to follow the logic of the other options in the section on 1st page (“your land it hard to protect”, “a neighbor covets your lands”, etc). I would move the thermal spring to a natural feature, and cut off the “homestead repairs” for something new.

    3) having a homestead improvement for free at start sounds too easy. There are already a handful obligations that give bits and handfuls of silver for the Man to acquire. The way it is, It doesn’t sound that hard to get the necessary silver to survive winter. Perhaps moving the improvements list below the “improve your homestead” obligation and forcing the player to pick it (and the potential catastrophe that comes for trying to build it ) would be better.

    4) The feast-giver move sounds weak. Perhaps getting bonds to be used in the feast, instead of questions, would be better, as bonds can have more uses.

    5) your Reputation condition says “every time you meet an important person”, when the correct should be “when yo meet an important person FOR THE FIRST TIME”, right ?

    6) you Raid obligation feels too rewarding (even if the catastrophe is equally bad). It seems like it could obfuscate the Huscarl Viking move (which rewards just a few bits, or a handful, of silver).

    7) perhaps allowing the Man to resolve and swap obligations at will in the start of every session is better than conditioning it to a 10+ roll. Otherwise I fear certain obligations may not always make sense in the current fictional situation.

    That’s it. Please don’t think I’m bashing the playbook. I hope my points help you improve even more your (already fantastic) playbook. Congratulations again. 😉

  28. Another question that came up: Would you allow other characters to add their silver for helping the Man in winter (for paying up the “A Man Hearth” move) ? I think doing that would make it, again, kinda easy, as various role books start with handfuls of silver or have easy ways to acquire silver (Huscarl Viking, Godi Master of Blot, Woman Runng the House). Perhaps an idea would be stating that only the Man have silver equivalent to food by default, and thus the other roles would have to first convert their silver in food by trading/bartering, which would be something limited by the established fiction (perhaps the neighboring families don’t have many food to sell).

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