How much has this game been playtested? And how much has it been playtested by independent groups that the creator has not been a part of. Are there any good play reports or actual play sessions that people can recommend?
I’m thinking of buying this game but some comments have made me hesitant. Sometimes things seem great conceptually on paper and a designer is confident they work well before lots of independent playtesting is done. I’m concerned that this may be an issue and would love to see the game in action or get some feedback on areas where people think the game could be improved or rough spots where the game doesn’t work well as it should.
Critical feedback won’t necessarily prevent me from buying the game, but before I buy it, I want to know where the issues are. Thanks.
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.
While I've yet to get A NOCTURNE to my table, I've spent the past five years running a variety of other Forged in the Dark games, and I think this one stands head-and-shoulders above all the others except Songs for the Dusk. I think it avoids a lot of common pitfalls (cleaving too closely to Blades, having thin re-skins of that game's playbooks, etc), and all of the wholly-original stuff here is confident, compelling, and unique. I know several other designers who cite it as an inspiration for their own FitD work!
I'm finishing up a campaign now. It's been absolutely fantastic, and I highly recommend this game. There are some rough edges, but overall it is maybe my favorite FitD game. It is a staggeringly ambitious game that somehow manages to pull it off. If it worked half as well as it does, it would still be easily one of my favorite games.
These were some of the friction points for my group:
-The layout of the book wasn't always intuitive. For instance, the rules for spending extra time on downtime actions are in the Craft Systems: Coldsleep section rather than in the downtime section, and we never did track down rules for repairing ship harm.
-The logarithmic rules for Scale sometimes led to strange outcomes. E.g. it is better to steal two Scale 1 items with valuable minerals than to steal one Scale 2 item with valuable minerals, despite the Scale 2 item being an order of magnitude larger. (This is a fundamental stumbling block of scale mechanics not unique to A Nocturne; Apocalypse World has the same issue with gang sizes, for instance. And the log scale is a big part of what makes A Nocturne function so well, so I'll forgive some occasional awkwardness.)
-The first downtime was a lot. You need to know how long you are spending on each action, which means you need to know if you are travelling somewhere, and if so how fast, and whether you are going to hop out of coldsleep in the middle of the trip to do a ship score, and if so when. That's a lot of questions to answer all at once. No problem once you are used to it, but a bit overwhelming at the start.
-The ability Jury Rig drastically changes the resource economy, in a way we weren't quite expecting: being able to light-fab literally anything for free once per session just flat out removes one of the major money sinks, and means that manufacturing hypertech items feels a little too easy.
-Some of the rules around the light-fab can be a little confusing or inconsistent.
I want to be clear that these aren't necessarily design flaws, just things that my group in particular tripped over. They can all be easily handled with some common sense and minor houseruling if needed. And the payoff for doing so is amazing. Incredibly evocative playbooks, a fascinating setting, and a game that lets you act on a scale I've never seen before in an rpg while still feeling personal.
Group of experienced Blades players attempted to play this game after much recommendation online, but we found it riddled with foundational issues. Biggest one is the playbook abilities; we found them mostly incompatible with the final says ensured by the core system of Forged games, because of the specific wording. Many obviate the fiction at hand, or give guaranteed outcomes that overstep, instead of letting the game do its job. Maybe we misunderstood the intent (Forged, right??) but this one falls flat for us.
While the impressions are still fresh, can you elaborate on what you didn't like? What abilities obviate the fiction? What abilities give guaranteed outcomes that overstep the game?
I must've misspoke. I didn't mean to say obviate the fiction, so much as the judgment calls typically made by players and GM about said fiction.
In particular, we felt some abilities do too much, some not nearly enough, and some do oddly specific things. So we soldiered on using the vanilla abilities from Blades to get by for a couple sessions more. But yeah, that was our group's experience for the first few sessions.
I mean.. my point still stands though. Take your pick off the Broken playbook. Jury Rig, Pulling the Threads, Fractured Mind, the Carriage, and Interface all missed the mark. For starters. And that's not the only playbook..
We seem to be talking about different things. But I can understand the question. If a playbook ability renders the conversation in a Forged game null and void, or isn't compatible with the players getting their final says, and GMs getting theirs, then no - it didn't do its job. In short, this game left us questioning if we misread the tin.
I have updated the Google sheet stuff for 1.2 (fixed the pics for the Crafts and added the God-Machine sheet for the new Craft). Hopefully I haven't broken anything.
If anybody is up for a game via voice, Discord, and Foundry VTT (preferably some time around GMT 15:00 on Sundays) feel free to message me on Discord (my username is "forpenpaluse"). Maybe we'll be able to get a party going, maybe not. I'll GM.
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 :)
Hey! I doubt I'll have time to play it in the immediate future, but wanted to encourage you to keep going! Your touchstones match a whole bunch of my favourite media and RPG campaigns across many years. Keep it up!
This game looks very exciting! I've just done a first readthrough and I'm very interested. I did have one question though, the page on the Action Roll (p21) references a mechanic "Doing the Math" which I don't see discussed elsewhere in the game. How does this work?
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.
Ahh, that makes sense! The two places I found it were on the Empathy Scrubbers claims for the Dark Orb and Planet Splitter ships.
But now that it looks like you keep an eye on the comments here, maybe I can ask another question? I notice the Craft has an upgrade Armour, which makes crew aboard take less damage when the ship takes harm. And I see that the craft sheets have room for harm to be put on them. But I don't see any description of how the craft takes harm, what the impacts of harming the craft are, or how harm is transferred from the craft to those aboard. Did I miss something?
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.
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
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!
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 :)
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.
Hey I just bought the playest version when I probably really wanted to buy the v1.0. Is there a reason they are both on sale on the site without any cross posting? Are they the same product? If indeed v1.0 is more up to date, could you spot me a copy without it costing me another 15 Euro? Thanks! johnpowell6(at)gmail.com
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'd like to say what I'm hoping for in the full version is some more gm flavor text and such to help bring this unique setting to life. Reading the Counting to Infinity post helps but itd be nice to see more of that in the book, especially since this leans less on established scifi tropes than most games
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.
This game is super sweet. Filled with haunting writing and evocative art. The mechanics really support the tone and themes.
E.g. You can choose to have your character work on a long term project for a century while the rest of the crew sleeps off the trip between stars if you're willing to resist the psychological and physical harm.
Excellent work. I hope to see this in print someday.
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!
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How much has this game been playtested? And how much has it been playtested by independent groups that the creator has not been a part of. Are there any good play reports or actual play sessions that people can recommend?
I’m thinking of buying this game but some comments have made me hesitant. Sometimes things seem great conceptually on paper and a designer is confident they work well before lots of independent playtesting is done. I’m concerned that this may be an issue and would love to see the game in action or get some feedback on areas where people think the game could be improved or rough spots where the game doesn’t work well as it should.
Critical feedback won’t necessarily prevent me from buying the game, but before I buy it, I want to know where the issues are. Thanks.
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.
While I've yet to get A NOCTURNE to my table, I've spent the past five years running a variety of other Forged in the Dark games, and I think this one stands head-and-shoulders above all the others except Songs for the Dusk. I think it avoids a lot of common pitfalls (cleaving too closely to Blades, having thin re-skins of that game's playbooks, etc), and all of the wholly-original stuff here is confident, compelling, and unique. I know several other designers who cite it as an inspiration for their own FitD work!
I'm finishing up a campaign now. It's been absolutely fantastic, and I highly recommend this game. There are some rough edges, but overall it is maybe my favorite FitD game. It is a staggeringly ambitious game that somehow manages to pull it off. If it worked half as well as it does, it would still be easily one of my favorite games.
These were some of the friction points for my group:
-The layout of the book wasn't always intuitive. For instance, the rules for spending extra time on downtime actions are in the Craft Systems: Coldsleep section rather than in the downtime section, and we never did track down rules for repairing ship harm.
-The logarithmic rules for Scale sometimes led to strange outcomes. E.g. it is better to steal two Scale 1 items with valuable minerals than to steal one Scale 2 item with valuable minerals, despite the Scale 2 item being an order of magnitude larger. (This is a fundamental stumbling block of scale mechanics not unique to A Nocturne; Apocalypse World has the same issue with gang sizes, for instance. And the log scale is a big part of what makes A Nocturne function so well, so I'll forgive some occasional awkwardness.)
-The first downtime was a lot. You need to know how long you are spending on each action, which means you need to know if you are travelling somewhere, and if so how fast, and whether you are going to hop out of coldsleep in the middle of the trip to do a ship score, and if so when. That's a lot of questions to answer all at once. No problem once you are used to it, but a bit overwhelming at the start.
-The ability Jury Rig drastically changes the resource economy, in a way we weren't quite expecting: being able to light-fab literally anything for free once per session just flat out removes one of the major money sinks, and means that manufacturing hypertech items feels a little too easy.
-Some of the rules around the light-fab can be a little confusing or inconsistent.
I want to be clear that these aren't necessarily design flaws, just things that my group in particular tripped over. They can all be easily handled with some common sense and minor houseruling if needed. And the payoff for doing so is amazing. Incredibly evocative playbooks, a fascinating setting, and a game that lets you act on a scale I've never seen before in an rpg while still feeling personal.
Group of experienced Blades players attempted to play this game after much recommendation online, but we found it riddled with foundational issues. Biggest one is the playbook abilities; we found them mostly incompatible with the final says ensured by the core system of Forged games, because of the specific wording. Many obviate the fiction at hand, or give guaranteed outcomes that overstep, instead of letting the game do its job. Maybe we misunderstood the intent (Forged, right??) but this one falls flat for us.
While the impressions are still fresh, can you elaborate on what you didn't like? What abilities obviate the fiction? What abilities give guaranteed outcomes that overstep the game?
I must've misspoke. I didn't mean to say obviate the fiction, so much as the judgment calls typically made by players and GM about said fiction.
In particular, we felt some abilities do too much, some not nearly enough, and some do oddly specific things. So we soldiered on using the vanilla abilities from Blades to get by for a couple sessions more. But yeah, that was our group's experience for the first few sessions.
I mean.. my point still stands though. Take your pick off the Broken playbook. Jury Rig, Pulling the Threads, Fractured Mind, the Carriage, and Interface all missed the mark. For starters. And that's not the only playbook..
If a playbook ability does something, isn't that definitionally the game doing its job?
We seem to be talking about different things. But I can understand the question. If a playbook ability renders the conversation in a Forged game null and void, or isn't compatible with the players getting their final says, and GMs getting theirs, then no - it didn't do its job. In short, this game left us questioning if we misread the tin.
I have updated the Google sheet stuff for 1.2 (fixed the pics for the Crafts and added the God-Machine sheet for the new Craft). Hopefully I haven't broken anything.
If anybody is up for a game via voice, Discord, and Foundry VTT (preferably some time around GMT 15:00 on Sundays) feel free to message me on Discord (my username is "forpenpaluse"). Maybe we'll be able to get a party going, maybe not. I'll GM.
P.S. Tell me if you find any mistakes.
This is incredible, thank you so much for putting these tools together! This may even be something I use myself in future.
Is there any sort of community or Discord to talk about this in?
There is the Blades in the Dark discord server (https://discord.gg/tSAcCqXH), however my last LFG was largely ignored. So, this comment section looks like the only dedicated space.
I have put together a Google Sheet document along with some graphical Player Aids for 1.1. Maybe later I will update it for 1.2.
Are there any character sheets for online play? If not a roll20 module then a spreadsheet?
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 :)
Great! Hoping to get a game started with my group soon and would be terribly grateful.
Hey! I doubt I'll have time to play it in the immediate future, but wanted to encourage you to keep going! Your touchstones match a whole bunch of my favourite media and RPG campaigns across many years. Keep it up!
This game looks very exciting! I've just done a first readthrough and I'm very interested. I did have one question though, the page on the Action Roll (p21) references a mechanic "Doing the Math" which I don't see discussed elsewhere in the game. How does this work?
Oop I found it! It's on a couple of the ship sheets. It's just not ctrl-f able
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.
Ahh, that makes sense! The two places I found it were on the Empathy Scrubbers claims for the Dark Orb and Planet Splitter ships.
But now that it looks like you keep an eye on the comments here, maybe I can ask another question? I notice the Craft has an upgrade Armour, which makes crew aboard take less damage when the ship takes harm. And I see that the craft sheets have room for harm to be put on them. But I don't see any description of how the craft takes harm, what the impacts of harming the craft are, or how harm is transferred from the craft to those aboard. Did I miss something?
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.
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
This may be my dream sci-fi RPG. Any plans to eventually release a physical version? I'd Kickstart it for sure.
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!
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.
No plans on POD just yet, although I'd like to explore it in future once I have this release completed.
Progress update should be coming soon! Things got very mixed around and pushed back thru January, but watch this space.
Hey Calum, I'm getting ready to GM A Nocturne in a few weeks (I can't wait!) and I've come across a couple things.
First, a typo report: p.54, In the book, The Pilot's Red Leader ability is mistakenly called Reflexes.
Now then, my questions are about cost and scale of war-shells and armatures. I believe it says armatures cost 2+scale+edges-flaws Profit.
Is that right?
If so, is there a scale limit for armatures?
And finally, what is the scale of a war-shell?
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 :)
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.
Hey I just bought the playest version when I probably really wanted to buy the v1.0. Is there a reason they are both on sale on the site without any cross posting? Are they the same product? If indeed v1.0 is more up to date, could you spot me a copy without it costing me another 15 Euro? Thanks! johnpowell6(at)gmail.com
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'd like to say what I'm hoping for in the full version is some more gm flavor text and such to help bring this unique setting to life. Reading the Counting to Infinity post helps but itd be nice to see more of that in the book, especially since this leans less on established scifi tropes than most games
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 Calum, so happy to see all the progress. Any idea when you'll be offering print versions?
This game is super sweet. Filled with haunting writing and evocative art. The mechanics really support the tone and themes.
E.g. You can choose to have your character work on a long term project for a century while the rest of the crew sleeps off the trip between stars if you're willing to resist the psychological and physical harm.
Excellent work. I hope to see this in print someday.
This is such a great game! I wish I could find someone to play it with.
Can you please continue development of this? It looks like a very interesting idea, and I would love to run it some time.
Thanks,
-Ducanishah
Development is continuing apace on the latest version!
Good to hear, and do you have any advice for someone planning on DMing a game of this?
Thanks,
-Ducanishah
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!