Two playbooks?!

The good Sheet

This is an update about playbooks actually, but it only makes sense to mention the very skeleton of any character first: the Character Sheet! Let's be completely honest here, I could have integrated it with the playbooks - which is actually what I did at first - but I figured that compartmentalizing would work better, if anything in terms of grouping up information about the same things on the same sheets.

I strongly encourage reading this one first, at least in the state the project is in right now, as the first page is actually the character creation process - including stuff for the GM to read and a disclaimer about how PbtA games work and what this specific one is trying to achieve! That's partly why it's there at the top of the devlog.

Also, the Sheet might reference things that aren't published yet. That's normal. I promise I'm cooking, but I can't publish everything at the same time - and most information is covered in one of the two types of playbooks anyway, so do read those afterwards!

Wait, TWO Playbooks?!

YES. Two playbooks. Of all the weird decision-making that went into making this thing, this has to be the most confusing one to anyone familiar with PbtA.

My reasoning is that, on the one hand, I want people to have a customized, game-appropriate storytelling device, the way most PbtA games do and that's their Impulse. Part origin story, part character motivation, the Impulse is the playbook that handles why you're even exploring the stars in the first place, and what your past brings to the table.

... on the other hand, I also wanted to give them specific tools to interact with the world in a way that isn't entirely abstracted away. Those tools manifested in the form of the Class playbooks. If the Impulse is the why, the Class is the how. This isn't restriction; it's permission. Permission to go completely overboard with magic, to punch gods and to build wonders. I feared that without tools that explicitly allow them to do grand things, PCs and GMs alike would shy away from them.

I might diminish the importance of the Class playbooks going forward, or even get rid of them entirely - expect the Impulse playbooks to fatten up a whole lot if I end up doing it.

Playbook previews

So of course now that I explained what those things were and why I felt that they were both equally important to include, I kinda sorta had to include examples, and what better way to showcase what I mean than with a background-heavy Impulse and a magic-heavy Class?

• The Technomancer is all about treating magic as code and tech as supernatural. They bring a whole lot of hacking and robot friendship to the table, and they're also the first example of how spellcasting will be handled in Dyson Spells!
• The Escaped Cultist is a victim that managed to break free from an abusive religious group. This, of course, means that the playbook should be handled with care; talk with your group, use safety tools, etc. before prompting a scarred survivor of abuse on your table.

Origins

As both the character creation process and the character sheet itself reference the Origins of a character, I felt like I had to include the first list of options. This looks bad, I know. This is feat bloat waiting to happen. I'm trying to think of a way to make a handful of generic effects that you can then customize with your group to showcase the specificity of your alien body, your past, your role in the galaxy, etc... and then including a few examples of each.

I'm tempted to let go of it entirely and let people define stuff as they want without the mechanics intruding... but on the other hand, I have an Origins sheet called "Privilege & Prejudice" that explores exactly what it means to be part of a discriminated minority, or how architecture can be hostile to wheelchair users, and other stuff like that, and I'd be annoyed to have to let it go. And I refuse to make "victim of racism" an Impulse as this is not something that should be de facto defining - you can very well be just some guy who wanna explore space and still be marginalized. Though maybe that kind of nuance means that I should avoid putting narrative mechanics on it at all...?

This is also the place where I say that I'm slowly realizing there's a direct conflict between "society interacts with you in a specific way" and "you're exploring uncharted territory where there is no unified society to speak of". But hey, good news: conciliating those two is a problem for future me!

Changelog

• "Ponder" was rubbing me the wrong way, so I reformatted it to "Analyze", a Book-exclusive Core Move.
• Wonderfully, this allowed for Magyck, the Occult Move, to feature on the Core Move sheet - elegantly bringing all of them together!
• Savvy changed to Moxie. It's just a name change I swear.

Thanks to Ours, his feedback was very valuable!