Author: James Mullen

Just Heroes: Redoubled

In case you’re coming in late to this story, here’s a quick recap: Just Heroes is my superheroic hack for Apocalypse World and it’s been through a number of iterations since its inception. 

The last time we saw it (Just Heroes: Redrawn) I’d collapsed the double-playbook format, which covered the origin of your hero and the powers they had, into a standard single playbook  format. Well, as you might guess from the subtitle of the current draft, the double-playbook format is back, but now the origins have a little more content to them, rather than just being a check-list of cliches about your chosen origin.

The really interesting  thing I wanted to mention in this post is what happened to the superpower moves for the game: they got simple. Which is good. And… weird. Previously, the moves given for superpower styles were very mechanistic, with lots of bonuses to rolls or protection/exploitation of game resources like harm and Hx. It had tended towards that because of an explicit assumption I’d made in the hack: that if you were playing a certain type of super, it was a given that you had these basic powers that made them recognisable as a type. So, if you were a Speedster, then it was assumed that you were fast, whereas if you were a Tank, it was assumed that you were strong and so on.

For the Redoubled draft, I’ve deleted that assumption, so now you have to choose certain moves from your style-book in order to have those superpowers. This has lead me to be writing things like this tonight:

Grow: You can increase yourself to the size of a building.

That’s it: no bonuses, no in-game effects, just a narrative statement: you can increase yourself to the size of a building. What does it do in the game? Well, that depends on how you use it: I can think of a bunch of ways to use that move that allow you to do stuff that would get laughed out of the game if you said you were going to try them at human size.

So… some of the moves look odd, because they don’t specifically do a thing that means something within the mechanics of the game… but they do enable some special fictional positioning, which lets you narrate cool stuff you couldn’t do otherwise. It’s a shift away from my normal style for writing moves and its itching a little between my shoulder blades, but it could be the making of this superhero game.

‘hood: First Face-to-Face playtest

I finally got a chance to try out my urban inner city hack at Indiecon, though we only had 4 hours, so some processes were a bit rushed.

The four players looked through the playbooks available and all found a character type they wanted to play:

Ratboy, the Thief: typical scrawny teenage tearaway and nephew to…

Buzzkill Bill, the Fallen: a seriously bent copper taking a cut from whatever took place, he was also a casual customer of…

Nursey, the Feelgood: a small-time dealer with a penchant for parties, she also helped out…

Echo, the Blur: a face in the crowd who tended to fade into the background when not being directly observed.

Starting with a midnight arson attack at the local community centre, the stakes got raised when a reward was offered for information leading to an arrest; with the cops on every street asking questions, Ratboy and Echo tried hard to use their contacts and legwork to find the culprit and restore peace, but Bill knew he had to make sure it wasn’t a resident who got arrested, in case he lost the trust of the ‘hood. Meanwhile, Nursey realised she had blown her stash on a party, so had to go cap in hand to her own supplier, forgetting that she still owed him 2 Dough for the last batch (in other words, a couple of failed rolls in a row meant that she had her livelihood threatened and was taking heat).

It was a good satisfying session, with a slow burn that built up to the point where Bill was trying to get rid of the badly injured arsonist without leading his own force back to him, while Ratboy and Nursey had to cut and run on attempt to frame her supplier for the arson, leaving Nursey in the sight’s of a much bigger criminal…

There will be a few changes to the hack soon, most notably to the rules for heat and experience: I want to kick those up a notch and make them flow faster, to encourage players to take bigger risks for greater rewards.

Monster Force Terra

An idea I’ve been playing around with for a few years, playing giant monsters who battle it out in human cities around the world but might just be saving it in the process, took a big leap forward today. I’ve begun a very basic AW hack with some stripped down rules: there’s still a lot more to be done, but see what you think.

Just Heroes: Redrawn

I’ve come up with a much revised version of my superhero hack, taking on board feedback from playtesters and my own reservations about the game as it stood. I’m still not sure if this is the way forward or whether the separate Origin  and  _Style_ playsheets are the way to go, but I’m leaning towards the one-sheet version as it allows for faster character creation.