More and more Palisade announcements are coming out and while watching the Roll+Bond streams I'm just feeling like I want to close out a WIP I was playing around with in January. I'm not settled on a name rn (I previously had it down as The Instrument and now The Manual) but it's basically the Martial Pilot as opposed to Armor Astir's standard magical Channelers.
So, writing this playbook has felt a lot easier than writing the Baccentian Guide because I'm working within a pretty well explored archetype. For example I can start looking from stories of knights dueling for honour to the Spartans from Halo as material to ponder for 8 advances. Writing fan playbooks for Armor Astir has got me into the place where I think "what are four things that I would immediately want to center if I picked this up" and then write down two different moves to center those things. Advancing in Armor Astir doesn't necessarily mean you're always taking an advance from your playbook, so I am comfortable to write out some moves that are focused on particular themes. If dueling isn't your channelers thing, there are still 7/8 moves to work with. My first run at the Baccentian Guide was a larger struggle, and it took me 2 years of off and on reflection, as well as a playtest with just a retooled core move to really understand what was crawling around inside of me that I wanted to put into the playbook. That 2e that's on my itch page happened because I eventually wrote out the 8 points I wanted to make with the playbook and wrote abilities centering them.
So what's the point of this? Well I wrote a playbook and it was hard because I was making sense of climate grief and now this one is easy because frankly, I just have to read and watch stories about cool warriors and reflect on them a little. I have developed some ideas that help structure any future playbooks I want to write, and to boot here's a link to this draft I am talking about