Welcome to the final playbook design blog! Assuming I don't write any more, anyway. Our last playbook to examine is the Firebrand!

Design Story: If you've been reading along, then you don't need me to reiterate my basic method in any detail, so I'll cut to the chase - a lot of my playbook design starts by looking for either open mechanical space or fictional space, and ideally both. When I started thinking about the playbook that would become the Firebrand, I had a pretty clear mechanical space I knew I wanted to explore. But our design story starts a little earlier than that!

Flashback to about six months ago - my friends and I are gearing up for our first game of Girl by Moonlight, and I'm meeting with my friend to talk about the design and what we think about it. We're digging into the playbooks and what we find exciting about them (or don't). When we get to the Guardian, I reveal that I'm not very interested in it. He's surprised - "but it's so you!" he said (or something to that effect).

He's not wrong - I love to play characters with strong beliefs and to be a steadfast bastion for my allies. The fiction of the Guardian is pretty cool (although I have some thoughts)! But the mechanics and abilities of the playbook fell flat for me! Let's start with those, then.

The central mechanic for the Guardian, its starting ability, establishes a code that you must follow; you're allowed to strike one thing from the list, but everything else is forbidden to you. Importantly, the list is cool! It's only four items, but they're punchy, and strong enough that even if one jumps out to you as the one you'll take off, the remaining three are heavy enough that you might have second thoughts. It's cool to have some friction push against your agency as a player, I think, particularly when that friction is self-inflicted.

The problem is that the only "mechanical" thing this code does for you is it grants you a single xp at the end of a session if you didn't break your code. I'm not so zealous that I begrudge every use of xp as "incentive"; I think it can be a trap, like how I usually feel with fitd xp procedure, where it can feel like I'm being punished for not playing my playbook "correctly" when I answer "no" to the xp questions (though I do think that offering xp for doing cool stuff can be fun), In addition, xp for following your code seems like kind of the opposite of what I imagine xp to be. If you're rigorously adhering to your code, are you growing? What are you learning or experiencing? Do you have second thoughts, doubts of any kind? I think those kinds of questions are fun, and are definitely left open by the playbook - but tying your character behavior to in-game rewards is laying that trap from before - instead of engaging with the implications of the code you're incentivized to simply adhere to it. (I'm reminded of Zedeck Siew's criticism of being rewarded for being "good". This isn't exactly the same thing - the code has ethical implications, but doesn't by itself necessitate ethical reckoning - but to paraphrase the quote "following the code for rewards is just optimal play.") The other thing is that, like, it kind of sends the wrong message; the temptation should be to break your code, right? The dark side is alluring in its ease - why have a code at all if you want to do it anyway? 

Alright, that's a chunky paragraph of my problems with the code. The other abilities are fine, if a little straightforward! Definitely my favorite is Righteous: "When you confront a deadly foe, they are humbled by your bravery. When you forgive a humbled foe, take +1d on your roll." This is great! You'll notice that I copied this structure for the Rising Star. What I love about this ability is that "humbled" is a great mirror of what's likely to happen to the Guardian, who's forbidden to ask for help (hopefully, the structure of the Rising Star's move leads to a similar parallel). A huge chunk of their moves interact with protect rolls, harm consequences, or recovery rolls - only two of their abilities don't reference those mechanics. This is a little narrow in my opinion, but it definitely gives the Guardian an identity. Their transcendent abilities are among the least magical / establish some of the least fiction. I'm of two minds on this - on the one hand, I definitely can chafe against some of the assertions of other playbooks, so leaving this one so open gives a lot of room for player interpretation, which I like. On the other hand - they're not very inspiring to me! They don't feel like cool/badass guardian powers; definitely none of them read as exciting to me as Righteous does.

Ok, so I've got a bone to pick with the Guardian. Luckily for me, I have access to publishing software, so I can do something about it. But what? I had a mechanical space I was interested in exploring - I wanted to see if you could do anything more with promises.

Promises are really neat - I think they're just about one of my favorite ways to handle a "bonds" mechanic, but the thing I often hear about them (and similar mechanics) is that they don't prompt or provoke interesting play. This is definitely my experience with the Calling questions from Heart, for example - they're mostly nice little ways to jump into playing and gloss over the gang getting together. I think that if that's the only purpose they serve, that's fine! But as a piece of text that lives on your character sheet, I think it would be exciting if it did more. GbM's promises are positioned in such a way that they really do make me invested in coming up with a good answer, and because they're promises, I have an easier time keeping them in the forefront of my mind, or using them to re/contextualize what just happened between characters. But the only thing mechanically they get you is xp for playing into them! Boring!

This is not the first time I've had this thought - you can check out The Turncloak for my attempt at a dungeon world playbook that uses bonds as weapons, or The Heart for a masks playbook that turns the relationships section into messy friend group drama. But I wanted to see if I could do something with promises that kept them as living things in the fiction (and not dull dice bonuses). What if instead of a "code," a guardian-like character just had a list of promises that they "couldn't" break?

That was the spark for the Firebrand, and it pretty immediately suggested a character archetype slightly askew from the Guardian; someone who's not so much bound to a code of conduct as they are to a cause, who's a fierce protector of their friends because of their shared purpose, not an isolating code. But of course, if you should, for any reason, doubt that your friends are joined in solidarity, what will you do? Which promises matter most?

The central mechanical identity immediately presented itself, which is - what do you do with someone who breaks their promises? Well, a Guardian might ultimately forgive them (particularly if the experience was humbling). A Firebrand never could. That direction opened up a lot of fun and exciting fictional ground to work with! I think their abilities wound up feeling interesting to me, even when they boil down to +1d's or etc, because of their grounding in things like promises or who's forgivable and who isn't.

Mechanical Considerations: Since promises continue to not have very much of a mechanical import, the big "mechanical" question on my mind was "how many promises is too many?" Should the Firebrand have a move that makes promises? More than one? What is an acceptable effect (or price) for making a promise?

Ultimately, I decide that while it's fun to imagine the Firebrand having to track an ever growing list of promises, that I didn't want to encourage an explosive growth of promises. Instead, we can mess a little with the starting promise set up (so the Firebrand makes one promise to the whole team, so no matter how big it is, they're always promised to each other member). There is one ability that makes new promises (particularly to foes), and the Firebrand has to make a new promise to whoever pulls them out of eclipse, both of which felt very in-theme and ways for players to lean into the drama, without winding up with pages and pages of text to be responsible for.

Most of what I've been talking about in the "mechanical considerations" part is how to make sure that all of these rules are "in band" with the original text - that is, that nothing feels under- or over- "powered". Maybe I'll delve into that topic another time - but this time, I didn't have really any "powerlevel" concerns with the Firebrand! I think they're probably less powerful than the Guardian, but not dramatically so. Instead, the big thing on my mind was making sure that they felt mechanically distinct, while still leaning into some of the same fictional space. In the end, I'm not 100% sure it comes off that way - the Firebrand has no text about protecting or recovery rolls (although that might be a direction the Firebrand pursues, based on the promise/s they make to the team). They can kind of function like a "tank" in that they can make themselves the center of attention/demand things of their foes, which is something you'd expect of a guardian, although it's not something that the Guardian playbook really engages in. Ultimately, I'm not too disappointed if the similarities don't feel too strong - it's more important to me that it avoids feeling like a copy, and I think it performs pretty well on this axis!

Assorted Inspirations: Once again I have to give mechanical inspiration to Briar Sovereign and Armour Astir! In AA:A, you can put other characters in your "hooks" - which then the GM uses to hook you. One of the questions that the game's question-asking move offers is "where do my hooks pull me?" I think that's brilliant. I'm a big fan of giving players questions (or making questions a  big tool that players have). I riffed off that idea for one of the Firebrand's Gather Info q's - "What do my promises demand?"  Some of the core conceit is me working through Magpie Games' Scion playbook in Masks, which lets you declare foes irredeemable to take away influence, a move I always thought was cool but never felt quite right in use to me. Karlach is in here too (by way of Dungeon World's Immolator) for the final "mundane" special ability.

Favorite Text: I do continue to be a little tickled that declaring someone to be unforgiveable means that you can't use the Forgive action! I think the move text I wouldn't be able to resist grabbing, if I were playing the Firebrand, is probably Heart's Vow - "When you transcend, reaffirm one of your promises with a teammate, even a broken promise, and split three links with each other between the two of you." That's what it's all about, imo!

And that's the four playbooks! I'm getting a little more playtesting in, and then I'll be publishing the first update to the series playset is my guess. Depending on how I'm feeling about it, I might write up a little design blog about it, or I might need to wait a little longer while I work out some stuff. Thanks for reading!