Winter Sale

In tandem with this update, Hello, World is now on sale! Go check it out!

Lots of little changes to Hello, World and a few big ones. Many of the little changes are in the Book, and related to tightening up formatting, and a continuation of the painful, painful process of standardizing font styles and fixing all of the little idiosyncratic bugs that pop up from doing so. Still not done with this but it's moving along!

Player Handouts

These have been overhauled. The handout pages on Character Creation and the Function Library have been temporarily removed (they'll come back soon). All of the information they had is within the HW Book file and much better explained there, so for now just look to the relevant sections of the book while these pages go under a visual overhaul pass.

The major change here is in the playbooks!

Depending on how familiar you were with the previous playbook version this may not look like a lot, but it actually prints much more cleanly and reads more smoothly. Font/background contrast has been upped a lot for the Special Ability and Items blocks, and a reorganization of the right column opened up space to revamp the Drift block.

Font nerds will be overjoyed (?) to hear that I'm finally starting to apply the HW style guide in a consistent manner (for those curious the three fonts in use are Bebas Neue Pro (Semi or Expanded as required) for the largest title fonts and smaller emphasis text alike, Corbel for body text, and Bastardus Sans for chapter and section headers).

Spot any changed text on the playbook above? This is a segue to...

Playbook Adjustments

Lots of Special Abilities ('SAs' for short) have been tuned or replaced to elevate lackluster options for Hello, World's playbooks and provide a richer space to realize character identities. Changes discussed below!

Breaker

• Reactive Defense has been removed, and replaced with Shock and Awe.
  • Reactive Defense was a classic example of a Special Ability that really did not say much about the character who took it: it was a rote mechanical boost that made a character take slightly less Stress damage while they already had Harm. This was... fine, but it is not up to the standards of Hello, World. Special Abilities generally should be able to pull weight as character-defining features: something that actually tells us more about your user (in addition to giving a bonus). Since the Breaker already had a glut of options for damage mitigation, and fewer that said interesting things about how Breakers actually do proactive things in World, I went back to the drawing board to draft Shock and Awe.

• Soul Edge has been modified so that you can now have a flirty weapon.
  • Hello, World has been lacking a critical feature for a long time, and that's the ability to have a sword possessed by the spirit of your boyfriend. This change addresses the issue.

• Volcano Buster has seen textual changes to the wording of it's "additional benefit" options.
  • Similar changes happened to the "When you push yourself...." SAs of several other playbooks. The goal overall is to provide stronger promptings that not only indicate the spirit of the playbooks in more certain terms, but also directly suggest how this line of SAs might affect the fiction and mechanics at the table. In this case, Volcano Buster now suggests both a more actionable outcome for the "shatter bonds or barriers" option (you get to 'act immediately' which creates a more specific context for the die roll you're about to make), as well as a more open-ended and weapon-derived second option, including some suggestions to provoke ideas.
  
  The Breaker playbook is meant to deliver a feeling almost like a character from an arcade fighting game (especially one in the style of Arc System Works, thinking of Guilty Gear or Granblue Fantasy Versus). They should be kinetic, and have options for over-the-top heavy metal industrialized violence. Shock and Awe and Volcano Buster specifically feature into this, giving opportunities for the Breaker to describe in loving detail how their sword (which is possessed) is cinematically revealed to also be a giant revolver with incendiary shells (!) that they then use to bloodlessly beat up their rival, incidentally laying waste to a small city block.

Capacitor

• Conduit reworked to fit the new rules for Authority.
  • Authority is a lot more streamlined then it used to be, and thankfully so is this Special Ability.
    

Filcher

Roller

• No Changes. This playbook got a lot of loving care in the last update. There is some touched-up help text in the Book pdf.

Seeker

• Reflexes has been renamed Lightning Reflexes.
  • This ability is actually different from it's counterpart in Blades so naming it helps draw attention to that.
    

Squawker

• Some subtle rewrites of SAs. No changes to the way they function, however.

Wielder

• Compel has been renamed Command Script.
  • Compel is the legacy name of this version of the SA from Blades. After several revisions this SA is now totally distinct from Blades in both theme and mechanics, and a rename was appropriate to capture that.

• Dream Hunter now grants potency to the Wielder's hunting pet only against daemons and process, no longer other users.
  • Users are powerful individuals, much like the PCs. It didn't quite make sense for the Wielder's pet to be preternaturally potent against them, instead it's potency has been rewritten to make it super effective against it's own kind, and process lackeys.