First pass at a list of Action Ratings for Advanced DNGN FKRS / Dwindeltol.

This is really something I've been riffing on for awhile, so it's just a matter of tweeking what I've already done.

For a Long While now I've been working on a TTRPG I've been calling Capes in the Dark. It's about having super powers and trying to make your way in a city full of other people with super-powers. I've had a great time working on it, and I hope that someone has as much fun playing it sometime too!

https://seasidesepulchre.itch.io/capes-in-the-dark

I'm excited to be working on my weird space fantasy sports game Novacross once more! Imagine if you mashed up Haikyuu, Star Wars, and Shaman King. Exploring sports as ritual practice, commodification of faith, dying faiths, neopagan movements and a bunch of other stuff I'm so excited to dig into! We're starting with a Forged in the Dark base, but definitely mixing it up in interesting ways. Hopefully writing about it here will help me more actively engage with the design process outside of our design sessions.

To start, we wanted to make the sports matter, so Sniperserpent and I are considering adding an entire phase dedicated to the sports game, called Trials, alongside a more traditional mission phase called Intrigue. Currently considering either a Trial-Intrigue-Downtime, or a Trial-Downtime-Intrigue-Downtime model for the play cycle.

Another thing that I'm super excited about that we came to during our last design session when thinking of ways to introduce dramatic hooks into the Trials phase is Complications. In essence, it's a combination of entanglements and engagement rolls. Depending on how an engagement roll for a phase goes, the GM gets a number of Complications they can introduce to a phase at opportune moments. We're considering either a predetermined list, leaving it up to GM discretion, or a random table of sorts. Either way, we think this is a super exciting mechanic for the GM toolbox! Something akin to rival moves in Beam Saber. Also, I've never been a huge fan of entanglements as they exist in most FitD games. They feel a bit aimless. I get what they're there for, but at the same time, they can feel really bad from both the GM and player perspective.

Series Playsets!! they take the role of a Crew playbook, acting as not only that, but also premise/partial setting/variant rules.

my group's game (Shatterglass Millennium) is using On a Sea of Stars, the Series about mech pilots under a militaristic regime facing big space monsters trying to exterminate humanity. we've had to beat it with a wrench a little bit, but that's now Girl by Moonlight's fault - the game has to bend a little to work as the finale arc of our past three years of play in other systems.

we're loving it! my players don't have much magical girl genre familiarity, and we're still playing a lot slower than we would a more traditional FitD game, but the mechanics absolutely sing. the phases of play drive sessions that end up feeling just like a magical girl anime episode, and the focus on emotionality has given us some super unique scenes. what does it mean to Confess or Forgive as a mech pilot? we're having fun finding out, now five sessions in.

i'm super keen to do something with the Persona 5-y Series in the book, but there's other games for me to get to before i run a second GbM campaign.