Which PbtA setting lends itself best to a darker Men-in-Black/Fringe style game – group of Agents vs inexplicable supernatural darkness? I feel like MotW would work well, but you’d have to throw out a lot of playbooks (or reskin then). What about Urban Shadows? I don’t own it, but I thought it was more werewolves and vampires than the sort of “weird fiction” bits I’d like.
Which PbtA setting lends itself best to a darker Men-in-Black/Fringe style game – group of Agents vs inexplicable…
Which PbtA setting lends itself best to a darker Men-in-Black/Fringe style game – group of Agents vs inexplicable…
Monster of the Week should be the closest thing.
Yeah, MotW is probably closest to what you want. Unless you want to build something yourself.
If you feel like MotW requires too much reskinning and such, there is the possibility of tremulus. I know many PbtA fans don’t really care much for some of its stuff. That said
Tremulus has ways of going crazy in addition to getting ripped to shreds, its about inexplicable supernatural darkness, and its plethora of playbooks are all fairly mundane. It would be an absolute cinch — and I’ve thought about it before — to run a pretty grounded investigation scenario using a few of those books as specialists in certain fields (a medical examiner, the token psychic, the investigator, that kind of primetime television ensemble).
(EDIT: i just corrected a bunch of typos; sorry, out of it today)
Most of the playbooks for Urban Shadows have people playing monsters, which may not work terribly well for what you are going for.
Yeargh. I’m giving you_so much_ side eye right now Alfred Rudzki.
That being said, it could work. Though my feeling is by the time you fix all of the bugs in tremulus you might as well have written your own PbtA hack. 😛
Gimme dat sweet side-eye, Chris Stone-Bush! I can take it! Honestly, I don’t buy much of the “tremulus is full of bugs” talk, so much as I figure the game is just less PbtA than all its siblings. And some people want that!
Until more genre-specific hacks come along, Tremulus will remain my choice for mundanes trying to handle bloody grim weird procedurals 🙂
Alfred Rudzki I’m not sure I’d want something that investigation heavy. If I did, GUMSHOE would probably be my goto. Come to think of it, Night’s Black Agents may fit pretty well (the only one I don’t yet own)
If you want MIB/Fringe versus horrors, and you <3 GUMSHOE, then I imagine Esoterrorists is really what you want -- that said, the Vampire/Monster rules in NBA would be my go-to choice for making Outer Dark Entities.
EDIT: Also, hell yeah GUMSHOE.
Tremulus was the first horror-esque PBTA I looked at before moving on to MOTW (and ultimately offering to help publish its revised edition). My problems with it weren’t that it wasn’t PBTA enough, it was the inconsistency in it, and a feeling like it didn’t actually agree with itself enough to fully function without patch work.
At any rate, acknowledging all that bias, MOTW is a pretty solid fit for what you’re after; the only tuning that I think you really need to do is being selective about which play books you put in front of your players, and rephrasing the fiction around Use Magic and Big Magic to be more about using weird science and fringe or alien tech rather than magic. But mechanically it would all function pretty much the same.
Fred Hicks Could you give an example of inconsistencies in Tremulus? I was thinking of buying it, but this makes me wonder.
It’s been a couple years now, so my recollections are likely faulty in the details but I recall looking at a playbook at one point and realizing it was gonna be near impossible to figure out how one of its moves worked. I don’t recall the exact details of why that impression stuck, but it might have involved the healing mechanics not working like the move thought they did, or similar.
Ah, here’s where I discussed some of my confusions before ultimately bailing on using the game. https://plus.google.com/+FredHicks/posts/cfsDDgGxWg1
You can reskin monstrous as non-supernatural types…the soldier who’s gone a bit out there, for instance.
I am looking to start two MotW campaigns. One is a supernatural version of X-Com and the other is more like a Heroes version of X-Com with the characters building up into the secret organization but start as a collection of people that have discovered something is up.
My suggestion is to bar Playbooks like The Monstrous, The Summoned, The Divine, and The Spell-Slinger until late game tech discoveries allow for mutation/bio-mod/cybernetics and so on
The Expert, The Spooky, The Changeling and The Initiate would be on the limited list. They’d represent psychics and/or scientists or results of alien experiments.
Luke Green The Chosen immediately came to mind as non-functional. I feel like, for it to work, I’d have to have a lot of duplicate playbooks. Which might actually be neat and emphasize the cookie-cutter agent “cog in a machine” sort of thing. Expert, Professional, Wronged, and Spooky might make a good set of agents.
Chosen also can be a product of biological modification…the fate and apocalypse issues of the Chosen and Summoned can be quite easily reskinned
Not the same direction you’re looking at but here’s the thought I did for reworking MotW into the Divine Blood setting:
http://thrythlind.blogspot.jp/2015/08/reskinning-monster-of-week-for-divine.html
And this is how I’m organizing the playbooks for my alien invasion campaign:
Definitely Allowed at Start
The Action Scientist
The Crooked
The Flake
The Hard Case
The Mundane
The Snoop
The Wronged
Convince me to be
The Changeling (you are at least part alien/or an experiment)
The Chosen (genetically altered)
The Exile (this would be someone whose been in stasis a long time)
The Expert (working knowledge of alien tech/psychics/weird stuff)
The Professional (but your agency to start isn’t in the know)
The Spooky (blatantly obvious psychic abilities)
Not until much later in the series
The Constructed
The Divine
The Initiate (no access to secret societies to start)
The Monstrous
The Spell-Slinger
The Summoned
Fred Hicks Thanks
I have had a similar thought about doing something Delta Green-ish using PbtA and felt like maybe using MotW with some restrictions on playbooks and maybe grafting on either the Tremulus sanity system or something similar. I am not sure how this would work… but I guess I am saying maybe there is some good in Tremulus to be salvaged when needed?