songs for the dusk, my science-fantasy tabletop RPG about building a better future, releases in five days. my last post was about the community you build in play; this one is about the crews that your characters will be a part of!
crews are a pretty standard part of forged in the dark games, so i won't spend too much time explaining what they are: your crew gets its own sheet, it can advance the same way your characters can, etc. some notably-specific crew mechanics in songs are:
- crews have access to a shared resource called harmony, which can be consumed for bonus dice or to fuel certain character abilities, and which is built through success in desperate situations or while working together
- community foundations, which i briefly mentioned in the last post, provide crew benefits in addition to serving your fiction (bonus dice for the starting roll on certain mission types, stat bonuses while making rolls on-site, etc.)
- crew specialties, which represent an area of focus and each come with a custom starting foundation that'll help you get more done in your zone of expertise.
let's talk about what these might look like for a crew of augurs, perhaps one of the most popular playtest crews i've seen yet!
Every mystery a blessing; every theory an exaltation.
augurs are scientists and explorers. their areas of expertise are:
- hazardous exploration, about mapping out dangerous terrain; your starting foundation is a set of exosuits to survive underwater, in radiation-heavy environments, and more
- transcendent forces, about studying the strange new forces that underlie the physical world; your starting foundation is a set of magnifiers that exaggerate natural phenomena for study
- ruins and history, about delving into broken cities and studying lost technologies. your starting foundation is a set of compasses that allow you to keep perfect track of your crewmates' locations.
this is, i hope, a fun way to distinguish crews of the same type and give them a chance to diverge. augur special abilities include extra time to tackle old case files, bonus experience for keeping certain secrets, a telepathic link, and more. these, in combination with experienced advances (which allow you to pull an ability from an alternate crew), community-building, and starting foundations, do a lot to separate one augur crew from the next.
still, there's also four other crew types: rangers (scouts and defenders), silvers (infiltrators and smugglers), magpies (engineers and scavengers), and couriers (hardy transporters). starting foundations for these crews range from an orbital mapping satellite to a pair of small teleporters to clothes that can reweave themselves on the fly. they've got a decent variety of abilities too (though admittedly augurs' crew abilities are the most magical, which i imagine contributes to their popularity.) developing interesting crews was one of the toughest parts of songs, and most of them have been through several iterations, but i think they've all landed in a strong and evocative place.
