A twist on troupe play for PbtA…

A twist on troupe play for PbtA…

A twist on troupe play for PbtA…

Okay, so I’ve got King Arthur Pendragon, Ars Magica, and Game of Thrones running around in the back of my head. So a hack might go something like this: each player has 2 playbooks that fit together. One playbook represents the person (knight/noble/mage) that you are attached to (with appropriate moves) and the other playbook represents your relationship to that person (with appropriate moves). So, you might be the Queen’s steward or the knight’s wife or mage’s father. Each session you retire your character and switch out one (but not both) of your playbooks. Now maybe you’re the Queen’s sister or a different knight’s wife. This might be a way of telling those sprawling fantasyy epics about competing houses in a distributed way and changing one (but not both) playbooks each session means that every character is juxtaposed against some other character. What do we learn about the queen from her sister that’s different from what we learned from her steward? How are the two knights different as seen through the eyes of their wives?

13 thoughts on “A twist on troupe play for PbtA…”

  1. This sounds really cool. I’d love to try it.

    I’ve been wanting to do half-and-half modular playbook design for a while, ever since thinking about Tony Lower-Basch’s Masks in the context of AW games. My initial idea was a Battlestar Galactica style game, where one of your playbooks is your job and the other is your destiny. So: president / dying prophet, ace pilot / angel, pilot commander / political opposition head, chief engineer / Manchurian candidate robot, etc.

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