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Jama
@Jama

Popped open my Armour Astir PDF to read a bit more about the B-Plot move after hearing it mentioned on Friends at the Table, and maaaaan, what a cool mechanic.

You get a 3 points of a resource you can spend, 1-for-1 on the following.

  • Give another player confidence on their next move, but complicate things for yourself.
  • Deny an actor from appearing during the Sortie—they’re busy, possibly with the same thing as you.
  • Spend some time and frame a Downtime Scene.
  • Cut away from the Sortie during a moment when time is precious, giving everyone room to think.

Confidence lets you treat every 1 on the roll as a 6, so that's Extremely good, because it helps keep the bottom from falling out on an important roll.

Keeping an actor could keep specific reinforcements from arriving during an escape or a rival is kept at bay when they would overwhelm the main group.

A Downtime Scene during a mission is incredibly cool. These are things like listening to conversations, healing, and gathering resources, which can advance your long term projects or turn the tide for your faction.

  • And the last one is to just relieve some tension to give the group in the "main" part of the mission some breath. It's literally a cutaway during a tense moment to leave the audience on a suspension point.

Very Very Cool, IMO


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in reply to @Jama's post:

Posted in my Discord, so the shadowrun group could see it, and gave an example of how the big EVO Raid could have been split into a Sortie and B Plot, and the benefits of it. Super cool.

I truly think players don't realize how cool and powerful this is when they read the game. You can do anything with these. You can have the homies out just out doing mundane shit. I have been waiting for a support character player that has been willing to just tell me: this is what the b-plot is and not wait for me to give them the right hooks for it. It's so powerful. It's also the entire reason why I wrote The Mole.

Getting a downtime scene during a mission just jumps right out to me. That's so HUGE and interesting! Being able to draw in opponents and all the other stuff, it's just so narratively cool as hell.

Picked up Armour Astir in a charity itch bundle recently, also listening to PALISADE. Can’t wait to put together (or join) a group to play it, this game is sick as shit. There’s a lot of PbtA out there but I can’t say there’s many others that excite me the same way.

I'm always a bit fascinated by games that blend fantasy and sci-fi stuff, which is why I always enjoy reading things like Shadowrun (Not the rules themselves, this has been a chore to run), Numenera, and now Armour Astir. It's cool to see how each game handles the hybridizing of tech and magic.

I think I had a weird hangup for a long time like “fantasy is (Indulgent) X and SciFi is (Serious) Y” and somewhere between re-reading Dune, discovering FatT and reading Armour Astir it kinda clicked that whatever hangup I had before shouldn’t mean a damn thing and you can just blend this stuff however you want so long as it has internal consistency and you’re having fun or saying something worthwhile with it.

It’s like that old Asimov quote about magic = sufficiently advanced tech, and Armour Astir’s rule text really lets you flex it to fit the aesthetic/lore/tech choices of your own campaign.