A NOCTURNE

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.

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

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.

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!

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 :)