itch.io

Thanks so much! This is absolutely intended for James Bond-inspired play, and was directly drawn from my experiences of watching the classic Bond movies with my mum.

I don't have much advice for playing in Foundry, as I've little experience with it myself outside of playing in a few Pathfinder 2e games using it, but as far as I know the basic FitD/progress clock tools should serve you well - Spies is hyper-compressed, but is at heart not far off from base Blades, so anything you'd normally do in Foundry re: running Blades or similar should be good.

Hey, thanks so much! So, to answer your questions:

1. The amount of span cleared by spending time resting is based on the magnitude of that time, in a similar fashion to how you calculate how much span to mark in the first place when travelling, so ideally the player should state up front how much time they're choosing to rest for (resting just being anything that's not a stressful action-packed thing or doing actual time-travel, your table's preference naturally as to the bounds of that, and what the PC might need to go about doing in order to get that rest time). So if they chose to rest for a few days, they'd clear 3 span, a few weeks to clear 4, etc. - this means there is kind of an upper limit to how much span can be cleared in one go, since apart from being able to time travel, we can generally assume the person has a normal human lifespan (unless they somehow have access to wacky future lifespan-enhancement drugs or whatever, naturally).

I had one session I ran where the player had just had their character go a few weeks into the past within the same general location in order to set up a chain of events, so once they'd done what they needed to do, they just elected to lie low and wait out the intervening time in order to clear 4 span rather than time-travelling directly back to the "present" of the campaign.

2. The way I run it, they'd absolutely get that weirding right away, and roll over by 6 boxes, as you said. They can go as far in space and time as they want, within the bounds of the magnitude table, it's just gonna get way more dangerous for 'em.

Hey again! Sorry, horribly horribly late to this I know, but I got hit by a tonne of work stuff and so on around the end of October/start of November and then I started moving away from using Twitter as much and all of this slipped my mind, so here are some answers to your questions there:

1. No advancement rules right now, but I'm looking into it! I like the idea you forward here about goal-based rewards.

2. No specific looting rules right now - I might fold this in with pillaging in some fashion. Speaking of which, you also asked about how to determine terrain, especially outside of using the Battlefield Generator, and right now there's nothing beyond that, so that's another thing I'm looking into for the next update.

3. When two formations are locked, the current idea is to just have them both roll as often as is required based on when the spotlight comes back around to them, as managed by the GM. So generally you'll have them do their rolls, cycle through the rest of the action happening elsewhere on the battlefield, and then check back in with them again, unless anything else happens to interrupt that flow of course.

4. The intention with Command vs. Conduct is a matter of scale - tbh the wording right now is a bit vague, so thanks for flagging this, gonna tighten up the wording in the next version I reckon.

Since I'm not using twitter as much these days, and I've decided to actually add a proper support email to my itch profile, if you have any more questions or the like drop me an email! thysane at gmail dot com is the address.

I don't have any particular plans around any next version, but I also haven't had the chance yet to check out the Deep Cuts myself, so who knows!

Yep, I've got a clean version here somewhere. Per the comments below I'm going to be putting together a separate sheets pdf for the downloads, so I can include one there.

tbh I had not thought to do separate sheets since this started as a much smaller document, I may do this very soon and add it to the downloads!

Hey! Didn't see these 'til now, not sure why they didn't turn up in my mentions. I'll take a look and get you some answers once I get a chance to formulate my thoughts, Free Company is indeed an unwieldy beast right now

Very cool, this is incredible work! If you have any questions about the Free Company rules specifically, I'd recommend my Twitter probably, if you're unable to comment/message on Patreon

Hey there! Perfectly understandable. For my part as the designer, I've playtested A Nocturne many times through a mix of one-shots and multiple lengthy campaigns. The game was in development for several years, beginning in the early days when Blades in the Dark was only just out and there was still the Blades Google+ community, so I've had plenty of time to go back and forth over the design to make sure it's doing what I want it to be doing. However, I know mileage may vary, and I know of a couple different groups who've given me feedback, so I'll let folks chime in here with their thoughts.

This is incredible, thank you so much for putting these tools together! This may even be something I use myself in future.

It's something I'm certainly considering! Watch this space.

Thanks for the catch! Yeah, this is something that managed to survive just due to some oversight on my part, considering where the information is kept. I'm still puzzling out what to replace it with, but gonna be doing some work on it this month I think so you should see an update soon.

I still have a roll20 sheet from a few years ago that was developed during the Google+ days, but it's woefully out of date version-wise and now a little buggy after some updates to the roll20 API as far as I can tell. Also it requires a premium account 'cos it's literally just a bundle of code dropped into the custom sheet setup.

 I am however going to be doing a small update to A NOCTURNE soon to correct some spelling mistakes, rules inconsistencies, etc. that've been caught in testing and proofreading, and with that update I'm going to see if I can put together some handy Google Sheets, because I too am currently doing 100% of my gaming online and know how handy these things are :)

Yeah, a lot of the harm stuff as per the craft itself is very implied right now, i.e. you might take it as consequences for craft-related actions like getting a 1-3 or 4/5 on a craft maneuver action for instance. and then acting through the craft means you take the penalties related to that harm, sort of like when you act yourself with harm. And the idea was that, when the craft takes harm, the crew also takes some level of harm. S'pose it is something to elucidate on in future, and tbh I'm still in active playtest when it comes to a lot of these very specific bits and pieces.

oooooooooh good catch! Doing the Math is actually... an ancient mechanic that's mostly been excised. I'd thought I'd scrubbed all reference to it from the book, like effacing the name of a hated pharaoh, but I guess I've still got some chiseling to do.

Still plugging away! Deep in the How To Play and GM advice mines right now, not to mention proofreading and some extra playtesting, but I'm aiming to have it out before the year is done at the very latest

EDIT: Also I must pick up Inhibitor Phase lol

No concrete plans right now, just because it is a rather complex affair compared to producing a digital product, but I'm not going to discount the possibility!

Progress update should be coming soon! Things got very mixed around and pushed back thru January, but watch this space.

No plans on POD just yet, although I'd like to explore it in future once I have this release completed.

Work is moving along on it, although slower than I'd like. I recently did a big once-over of all the playbooks and suchlike, and am currently in the process of writing up the GM and player advice sections. I'll then likely be working on adding some additional art, and proof-reading the hell out of it! Year's end release is looking somewhat unlikely at this point, but I'll likely be putting out a general progress update in December regardless.

Oh wow, good catch on Red Leader! I swear, I keep coming across typos, although I suppose it's inevitable when you end up writing a book this size.

Yep, the base cost of an armature is 2 Profit, plus Scale #, plus the number of edges, minus the number of flaws. I suppose there's no technical limit to the Scale of armatures rules-as-written at the moment, but my notional limit is essentially craft-scale, if you can muster that much Profit (and have the space within your existing craft to build such an armature, of course). This is definitely something I want to write into the book, or at least delineate my thinking on - remember, you're using the light-fab to build the armature, and the light-fab is embedded within the craft, so the craft's Scale itself limits the size of object you can print using it.

The scale of a war-shell is Scale 1 - remember, the maximum Scale of an object contained within another object is the Scale # of the other object -1, so things like war-shells, small fighters, etc. are generally going to be around Scale 1 so they can contain Scale 0 human meat-bags.

Hope that answers your questions, and good luck with the game! Let me know how it goes :)

Gonna be honest, I've mostly got my head down writing up the nuts and bolts chapters for all the basic mechanics at the moment, but I feel you! The game is definitely light on flavour text. I'm certainly going to be taking a look at this going forward.

Hey! Sorry for the late reply. So, if you purchased A NOCTURNE here, you should have access through itch to the current, most up to date version, v1.0. The itch page still has "play-test" in the URL simply because a lot of existing pages have linked to it and I don't want to break those links. As far as I'm aware, there shouldn't be two separate pages for the play-test and full version at the moment?

I'm working on it right now, as it happens! It's coming along well, although as you can imagine it's a lot of grunt work. Probably still a few months out at the earliest, but getting there.

I'm definitely thinking of coming back to it at some point! Lots of irons in the fire right now, but it's on my to do list.

Hey there all! I'm Calum (he/him), and I've been running games for just over a decade now, and designing them (at first tentatively) for about half of that. I'm currently deep into the process of working on A NOCTURNE, my Forged in the Dark game about transhuman space bastards, interstellar warfare, entropy, and the horrors of hyper-capitalism. I'm also working on my as-yet nowhere-to-be-found rpg Free Company, where you play as mercenaries in late-14th century Italy, a project which is ballooning into something huge and unwieldy and oddly Traveller-like, and probably won't see the light of day for a while.

As you can probably tell, I love running and playing (and designing for) player-driven sandbox games.

I just last week put out Abkronos, which is a World of Dungeons-derived game based on the old Continuum RPG! It's about travelling in time and space to mess up history and rebel against a time-travelling society that refuses to interfere, with weird and horrifying consequences. It's also just 3 slim pages and designed for quick deployment for one-shots (although there are some mechanics in there that can facilitate multi-session play). It's got me jazzed about making more mini-games while I work on my bigger ongoing projects.

Hey! Not right now, but I've been meaning to wrap my head around making epub documents for a while, so I'm not discounting the possibility.

Yes, I'm definitely on board with all of this, sounds great! I do love a good detailed, editable generator, and I've already gotten such good use out of the online version alone. Looking forward to this.

I will say that the rules (and thus some of the GMing assumptions) are changing a little in the latest version, but core Apocalypse World et al.  guidelines apply to GMing, since that's my preferred style, what I'm aiming for with the game, and what the game its kind of based on (John Harper's Blades in the Dark) does best: 1) Start with a bang, but let things go where they'll go after that. 2) Fiction first! Let everything, including rolls, dangers, challenges, Scale, etc. flow from the conversation you and the rest of the players are having at the table. 3) Have some basic prep (a cluster ready to go, maybe with some ideas for dangers, opportunities, or factions jotted down), but don't go too far before play begins - you don't know where play will take you, so run with it! Check in with your prep after every session or couple of sessions to make sure you're keeping things straight or to embellish stuff/push the pieces around as needed. Don't spend too long on this. Roll dice to figure stuff out if needed. Rinse, repeat. 4) As always, be a fan of the player characters, and play your NPCs  like you're taking joyrides in stolen cars.

The game as is on this page isn't the friendliest game to run or play, but that should be remedied in the next version. Lots of changes to come!

Development is continuing apace on the latest version!