Hi folks! I'm working on a PBTA fantasy game that's live on Kickstarter right now, so here it is!



HFA is a tabletop role-playing game about larger-than-life monsters and the dawn of civilization. HFA is the intersection between monstergirls, RPGs, and myth & legend. It will be delivered in color printed glory and instant PDF downloadability.

Heroines of the First Age is Powered by the Apocalypse, which focuses on the actions, reactions, and consequences of the things the players do in the game.

Inspirational Media: Utawarerumono, Nibelinglied, Maoyusha, Wintersun, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Monster Musume, Conan the Barbarian, Beowulf, Kobayashi chi no Maid Dragon, Black God's Kiss, Everyday Life with Monstergirls, The Iliad, 12 Beast, Enuma Elish, Monstress, Myth, & Legend.

Heroines of the First Age on Kickstarter

We've already hit several of our stretch and social goals, now we're working on expanding the game out to a new setting, this time scifi!



Come help us make HFARPG as awesome as possible!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/josephleebush/heroines-of-the-first-age?ref=cfow3x

Re: Advancement, I definitely see that it's not a super big deal in AW, because the Skill system is very close to flat. Part of what I've got for this hack is sort of more in the DW vein, where there's more linear advancement, room to grow your character from a weakling to a legendary hero (as per the usual Hero's Journey thing), so I expect advancement to be more attractive in this hack than it would in AW. On the other hand, if advancement IS in the player's hands, then they can use that to try to "catch up" to other PCs throughout the campaign by throwing themselves into the tragedy of their flaws.

With that assumption of advancement, I'm don't know if flaws alone are enough to produce useful amounts of XP, or if I should pull on AW's highlighted Skill and Hx system. I do like the idea of relationship scores, as much of the source material/mythology revolves around the relationships between characters and who they hate or love.

Re: Flaw design, yeah, I totally get you. And I still think that's the direction I'm leaning towards, where the flaw isn't really a boon to someone, it's something they either do or don't overcome through the course of the story, thus determining the outcome of whether the tale ends up being a tragedy or a comedy (working on the principle that a tragedy is when the hero succumbs to their flaws, and a comedy is when they overcome them, there may be better terminology for that, I'm not sure). Sort of a way to "Play to Find Out What Happens."

Pros of Flaw-Only XP: simple for players to remember/use. Completely absolves the GM of worrying about XP.

Cons: Forces flaws to be very, very foreground, once or twice or more per session. Potentially splits the group a lot for this reason. Removes the nice AW social/Hx angle.

I wonder what would happen if any attempt at using your Flaw move would mark XP. Clearly, you'd then be only interested in succeeding in all those rolls, because there's no more incentive to fail them than to succeed them.

Side note, what reasons are there to make the Flaw moves roll+stat? I guess the Suffer Harm move is roll+wound. Maybe most of them should be something like roll+(willpower or whatever)? Not that I have a willpower oriented stat, but I think that could be arranged.

But now, as I think about the structure of them, I'm reminded of the other direction I wanted to explore as well: the idea that maybe the Flaw is sort of a useful ability, but with potentially dangerous consequences, Like renaming Seduce/Manipulate to "Lust" with mostly the same abilities, except that misses tend to mean you get in trouble with someone about it. I guess this makes less sense with flaws like Cruelty and Pettiness, where it's not obvious what utility the would have for advancing a character's interests.

* What is the purpose of these rules in your game?
Here are things that I think this adds to this particular scenario.

• Heighten the tension with uncertainty in some situations.
• The setting and characters become richer for it.
• Introduces a concept analogous to Fate Core's Trouble Aspect.
• Opportunity for more conflict.
• Rules encode the themes of the game, and Moves can make a simple character element into a focal part of the game. This might be overstating things; it might be better to say I think it'd be weird to select a flaw and have the rules simply proscribe "alright, now roleplay that" when so many other elements are dealt with mechanicall, including things like sex, psychic harm,

* What is the relationship of the player to their character, and how do you want to change it?
You mean player character advocacy? Well, AW seems to straddle the fence on topic, allowing for players to both want their characters to succeed, but also enjoy getting into bad situations, so that's the way I intend to go for the moment. But now that you mention it, I think this probably does go a little more towards the narrativist side, my players will probably relish an extra opportunity to get into trouble.

The way I was envisioning these moves was inspired by the Harm move, which is sort of a thing that the player doesn't want to have to do (and in is hoping to roll the opposite way on than usual), but still provides interesting roleplaying consequences through mechanical action. I was also kind of inspired by a lot of the brainer moves that seem to offer a choice, do this risky thing, and maybe it will work, or maybe it will be turned against you. But this is why I'm asking the question of how to structure these Moves in the first place, because those Brainer moves are well-intentioned, the dangers are on the Miss side of the roll, unlike the Harm move.

* What kinds of flaws are you interested in exploring?
Phew, name one from a tragedy. My short list is:

- Vanity
- Hubris
- Lust
- Cruelty
- Envy
- Greed
- Pettiness
- Secret Keeper
- Idealist
- Impatience
- Always Too Late
- Pride
- Reckless
- Obsession
- Tsundere

These are the ones I think are likely to be most effective storytelling-wise.

Here's the deal though, this is also why I'm asking the question in the first place, would it be better to write a move for each of those (or integrate them as consequences of some other, positive move) or would it be better to have a "Succumb to Flaw" move that covers them all, using each as the flavor text for the move?