Returning to The Bloody Hands REBIRTH: "The Stone Crack'd"

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Five Pretty Big Changes to The Stone Crack'd

I think we are reaching a point where we can build up to the end game for The Bloody Hands. I finally feel like I have an idea of something suitably epic to finish up the whole campaign. Let's see how "The Stone Crack'd" ends, first.

Now that we are returning to The Stone Crack'd and playing out "the last great missions of Arden Ulet," I want to try out a few changes to help ramp up some things. The Bloody Hands has long been my "just try it out and see what happens" campaign and so I think a fitting tribute will be to try and push a few assumptions of mine around pretty hard.

Greatly Reduced Death Armor

It is pretty common in my games that some characters have "Death Armor" where they can't die — at least not until some phase is reached — and instead just lose the ability to control or really have a say in the scene until they have time to rest, get healed, and so forth. As of now, most characters are going to lose that Death Armor. The one exception will be Arden Ulet but it will still be fairly impactful on him.

Dropping Mythic for Gamemaster Apprentice Decks

I am a big fan of Mythic and will continue to use it otherwise but with the end of the series and the more nomadic nature of this particular arc, it could be fun to try out something new rather than try and link things to old established threads and such. I am kind of bad at using the Gamemaster Apprentice Decks so this can be good practice. In this case, I will use the Base Deck since there's a non-zero chance of a new Fantasy Deck coming out (they are currently working through 2nd editions). No real interrupt scenes or altered scenes but lots of scenes will have tossed in complications for the sheer joy of it. Threads show up when they make sense. Make it loud and make it proud, son.

Progress Tracks More General + Clocks

I will break down Progress Tracks to more generalized and I will assign them a die size (d8, d10, d12, etc). Tracks get successes and failures. If the track fills, roll the dice and score equal to or under the successes. Same if the track comes to a sudden stop. Failures eat the total at the end (so 5 successes + 3 failures fills a d8, etc).

Being a Bit Stricter on Tricube Rules

I tend to be a bit more lax on specific rules when playing solo just because it helps reduce the overhead. I also get into a habit of just winging a few things and ignoring more story-limiting options. Characters never roll 1-die even when it would make sense for them to be against type — helps that Guardians are generally meant to be capable at a lot of things — and Perks and Quirks do not get used enough. I want to try that.

Finally, Keeping Scenes a Bit Shorter/Punchier

The final part of this is related to my arc-recap for Eustace & Hitomi and the Case of the Rambler's Inn where I broke down various degrees of journaling vs mechanical play into five tiers and pointed out that the Tier 5 — a fairly fleshed if possibly crappy short story or novel style approach — is something I love to do but takes a bit out of me. In this case, I want to try something more like the cusp between Tier 3 and Tier 4. Some dialogue. Some action. Some setting. Sometimes brief. Sometimes a bit longer. What I might call the 50%-60% zone. The idea is that each scene will take me only about ten to fifteen minutes to play with some being shorter while maybe one or two key ones swing longer. Just kind of clamp down on a timer to make the "player phase" a bit more punchy.