I’m going to leave this sudden moment of “eureka!” here for someone with more aptitude for actual conversion, time, and foresight than I will ever have.
Convert Houses of the Blooded to Apocalypse World standard. Because Ven with guns are kind of interesting, and the Narrator/MC standards are amazingly similar: one plays to find out what all these people will do next.
Some of the playbooks would seem to have an obvious association with the various Houses, but this is only definitive at your own risk:
Brainer? Serpent.
Gunlugger? Wolf.
Hardholder? Elk.
Skinner? Fox…most definitely Fox.
Driver? Falcon.
Operator? Bear.
Dungeon World or City of Judas might be a better base model than AW proper, but I think this has a bit of potential! Also, since every time I’ve tried to launch Houses it’s been one Epic Fail after another, I’m wondering if AW might be more accessible to folks.
AW or AW: Dark Ages are definitely a good place to start. Houses is a lot less DW than it seems, only because HotB is specifically (according to Wick) built as the inverse of D&D.
And DW is D&D as PbtA, as I understand it, yes?
Yes, Dungeon World is very strongly D&D through the PbtA lens. It works very well for that kind of game: action, adventure, “dungeon crawling” kind of monster slaying.
Got it. So it’s not necessarily the model to run with. Okay–so noted. Thank you!
Why have I never heard of this Houses of the Blooded? Via Wikipedia, it sounds really cool. Have any of you played it? What did you think?
Henry de Veuve I don’t know how much you hope to promote generational play. Have you seen Legacy? It’s an AW post apocalyptic game that allows you to play generations of a family. Some other games that do this are Crusader Kings II (Computer game), and the AW hack No Country for Old Kobolds. I love the idea, though I’ve haven’t yet played any of those games.
The Houses of the Blooded setting seems cool, too. I may have to get that game.
Richard Robertson I’ve played HotB several times – it’s pretty phenomenal, in my opinion, but it does suffer from some problems. Primarily, it suffers from paperwork bloat as your noble grows in power, but that’s not enough to discourage play in my opinion. Its really fun! It has a great – and really PbtA style – way of generating scenarios: you declare what’s happening, and then get the players to fill in the rest of the details (“You’re at your cousin’s wedding, and she’s marrying this noble who owes you a tithe, and she’s taken you aside to ask you to forgive the debt! Now go!”)
The core game is good, but its a John Wick game… That means there’s like 5 pages of errata you’ll need to find and write into the book. If you get it, I recommend immediately buying Coronets but Never Crowns because of its wonderful example of play that doesn’t force all the PCs into one place together.
I’m not a huge fan or the Wilderness book, and we’re still waiting on a few other source books.
If you want to know more, please absolutely message me because I would love to talk to more people about this game!
AW:Dark Ages would be a really, really good model.
Richard, Houses is one of the coolest games I have in my library that I have yet to successfully launch as a GM or player (Ron Edwards’s Sorcerer is the other). And it was the generational thing as much as the sharing of creative input that made it go ‘click’ in my head.
Alfred, twist my arm!
Thanks, Michael. I’ll go poke about on the forums and see what I can find about AW:Dark Age. (Although the idea of a post-apoc HotB game…that has potential. Pissed off suaven causing the Maelstrom, anyone?)
Richard Robertson And of course I answered the wrong part of your question, didn’t I? (laughs) In all candor, I have no solid ideas on how to handle this part of it. I’ll check out Legacy, as per your suggestion.
One idea that came to mind was to treat the change in generations as one of those later unlockable benefits, with your first character retiring in safety and a new younger sibling or child taking their place, but that runs against the “time’s running out” feel that Houses is supposed to have.
Treating property management would be easy enough. Any landed ven, by definition, has a holding…but that might not work out so well in practice.
Id treat Lands like extremely simplistic Hardholds. Don’t detail a lot of anything:
have players circle 2 on a list of land-types, and say “as long as your governance is not threatened, your land supports your livelihood. You can produce any raw materials or worked goods appropriate to your domain. High quality or specialized goods will require special requests and making deals for materials.” Then have players pick from short lists of My Land Is Known For, and have it say things like “a puzzle house, tamed, full of secrets” and “an arena that attracts the the finest physical specimen (and egos) of ven” and “a dueling house who style is lauded and insulted across the lands.”
Characters wouldn’t have Bonds or History – they’d have Contracts. “You have promised to Wed this Ven. Tell them what you’re getting out of it, and they’ll demand a promise from you.” “You have sworn your foul, forbidden Love for this Ven. They will either return your feelings – or demand a promise to keep silent of your crimes.”
I think the game would riff on Monsterhearts’ strings (really a LOT from Monsterhearts) and let you burn Contracts to get the upper hand. Really, if we take some of Monsterhearts moves and modify the systems we get closer to Houses of the Blooded.
Shut someone down needs to become “Play the Insult Game” and should hand out conditions as normal, but maybe interlock with Hold Steady somehow since the point of the Insult Game is to not look like you care about it?
Turning Someone On works really well, but if we’re not using actual Strings (since the Ven are sociopaths?) it doesn’t jive quite as well with Contracts in the fiction. Something to think about.
I would make a Dueling move, but it would resemble Go Aggro (where you threaten to hurt someone if they don’t obey you). I mean, that is what a Duel is – give in and say I’m right or I’ll stab you. Go Aggro is the Dueling move, with options like “Give up Ground” and “Lose Face” instead of “They’ll admit you’re right, or take the blow.” Maybe work in details from Saga of the Icelanders’ duel move.
I don’t know that there would be any move to cover actual full blown battle since, in HotB, that is just everyone handing out mortal wounds and the point is murder is messy and ugly. That sounds like if more than two people fight the MC just decides how it plays out. Barring that, it would be more like Seize By Force but where everyone is getting loaded up with harm and there’s no way to lessen the blow.
And this is why I posted this in the wild, for feedback! Thanks for your comprehensive advice, Alfred!
That looks like a good way to handle lands. Keep it nice and abstract. Might even need an option for the landless…
Oh! Choose one of three: major lands (pick three types and two improvements, but have constant obligations to juggle), modest lands (pick two types and one improvement), or no lands (no obligations, no worries, no support…)
Duel as Goin’ Aggro sounds about right, with actual fighting (like orks! Horrors!) would be Seize by Force…and since the ven disdain the use of armor, it’s gonna be messy.
Armor as Moves would be a big deal, and would be a real choice for PCs to make since the Ven don’t otherwise wear armor. A Wolf move could be “The Best Defense…: while your sword is drawn, you have 1 armor” or the like. Foxes get the equivalent of “When Nearly Naked, 1 armor; when completely naked, 2 armor.” Maybe allow a faithful Ven to have the Hocus move about getting armor from the gods/suaven.
(Sidenote: I think Bears get an equivalent of the Fighter’s Bend Bars, Lift Gates move from DW, and definitely use the Maelstrom moves for Sorcery – they’re just weird enough to be perfect).
To have a vashna Spymaster playbook or not to have a vashna Spymaster playbook…that is the dilemma. Better to make that one a love letter from the Narrator, I imagine.
“The Senate desires that the following must be investigated this upcoming season…”
Alfred Rudzki Henry de Veuve Thanks for the awesome feedback! I just created a ‘to buy’ list, just so I could put Houses on it!
Richard Robertson Glad to help!
Alfred Rudzki Curses! Now the ideas are trickling through. If only I can figure out how to work Strength into the usual AW framework adequately! I’ve got the other five…and thanks to the Simple World hack, I have something resembling a framework to keep me from going off the rails on this.
So I’m thinking two ‘stereotypes’ per House, which gives us twelve playbooks, or maybe six stereotypes and leave House selection to the players. Decisions, decisions! Use of the House Aspect as the base playbook move for a given house, plus an adjustment to their Virtues, plus choice of one more. Or maybe two, if we assume that moves = aspects.
What about making the playbooks include the “opera archetypes” in the book, along with some options in the orbit of those archetypes – the ubiquitous Servant, you know? – and make the Houses sort of like a compendium class from Dungeon World or similar to Jonathan Walton’s expansion playbooks for Apocalypse World.
I was pondering the Opera approach last night. That could very well work! But, not being in possession of DW, I’m not quite sure how a compendium class works. Lemme research that…
A Compendium Class, or an Expansion Playbook, is basically 4 to 5 extra moves which you need fictional permission to use. So for example:
“BLOODED OF THE BEAR
When you are blooded into the House of the Bear and pledged your fealty to another, you may take ‘Bend Bars, Lift Gates’ the next time you advance.
[text for bend bars lift gates here]
Once you have taken Bend Bars, Lift Gates count the following moves as playbook moves whenever you advance.
[other Bear-themed moves here]”
Ahhhh. Gotcha. So, just to make sure I grok your concept, everyone would have a operatic role playbook and have one of these on top of that?
Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. It’s certainly one option if you want to leave the possibility of having Wolf Rakes or Bear Rakes or Fox Rakes and so on open.
OK. Consider that option added to my work in progress…thanks much!