That's awesome!

You seem like you have a good handle on the needs the Radio has by virtue of being the Radio, which is probably half the job of doing a proper playbook. Your Hx should reflect that relationship. Like...

One of them is your most loyal viewer - tell that player Hx+3.
You get your food and drink from one of them on the rare occassion you leave your hideout - tell that player Hx+1.
Everyone else, they know the voice but not the man behind it. Hx-1.


Next thing is what the world wants from the Radio. Is he employed for the information he provides? Hunted for it? Mostly ignored? That's the other half of Hx questions.

I'm not sure the lack of move-based ways to get new antenas is that big of a deal. To begin with, four is plenty. If you want to get more, you engage the fiction roughly the same way a savvyhead does when he wants to get a new workspace - he goes out into the world and gets it in whatever way the MC decides that should go.

As for Hx... I hate Hx as a mechanic but love the questions. They're the one way you get to establish a certain relationship tone between the character, some of the other PC's, and the world at large before gameplay even begins.

Though, for that stuff, you need to get a good handle on the central concept - what's the most important thing for the guy? That he's newsman, a psychic freak, or a loner survivor?

Well what badness happens when your brain to the maelstorm is always open? The playbook itself doesn't really give us a clue. If I am to MC the maelstorm like I usually do, Broadcast signal would pretty much mean that this and all of the other playbooks that get 'infected' are unplayable at all. Am I to pull my punches? What does always keeping my mind open to the maelstorm even mean - as MC I know what to do when a player flubbs a open your brain roll. On this thing that's happening here, I need guidance.

It seems like you went around the playbooks and took every cool thing you could find. Which is neat, but you could fill several playbooks with this stuff!

Weird+3 - the usual way to go about this is to put a move or an advance for this. Not a problem in itself, though. Only gets eyebrows raised when we see some of the moves the dude could be getting.

Psionic battlemage - It leaps out at you, doesn't it? I could do without Weird being turned into a direct violence stat. You kind of need it so all of your psychic weapons could be useful instead of just clutter, though. Which makes me think that you maybe need to rethink the way you use your psychic weapons in the first place.

Focus the Transmission/Open the door - oh my god. You know what a failed augury roll does to the 'workspace'? And here you have a move that not only takes away the Savvyhead's and Hocus's little thing (which is thematically appropriate for the playbook, at least), but, instead of being a move that threatens the one thing that makes a playbook special (Savvyhead's workspace, Hocus's followers), threatens other player characters instead.

S-harm - serious deal, Angel/Quarantine lose being special, just a bit. S-harm is supposed to be rare, and goes to the playbooks that care about people not dying. I sincerely dount this dude is one of them.

Implanted - serious deal, how is anyone supposed to disarm you? Kinda cool on its lonesome, but kind of exacerbates some of the problems already present.

Lifting the telekinetic projectile - weaponized telekinesis! Cool, unique and maybe what the whole playbook should have been about. Slips in the whole "I can move objects with my mind" thing way too silently, though.

Psi-harm - okay, maybe, I don't know. Aren't those rules, fictionally, only for people who haven't experienced the maelstorm before?

Hellsteed - okay, so, conceivably, this guy could take a move from another playbook in one advance and go +2 on all of his basic stats.

So, this is how many playbooks this one is better than or equal to in one of their "I am a special snowflake" areas:

Brainer, Gunlugger, Savvyhead, Hocus, Angel, Quarantine, Grotesque, Driver.

If you pull out the offending bits, what you're left with is pretty cool:

Infectious maelstorm that maybe changes around your basic moves (still needs clearer direction for the MC on how to react to it, as well as a NPC version).

Telekinesis - I would *love* to play a telekinetic character in AW. But maybe the way to go is a bunch of moves that put a different spin on it (like the Brainer's moves put a new spin on telepathy powers) instead of gear?

Focus the maelstorm/Open the door - I like one implication of that move, and that is the fact that you can use *your own body* as a basis for augury rolls. That's the same kind of risk the savvyhead or hocus face, amped up to 11! The move would be one of the coolest I've ever seen if that was the only thing it did.


So you've got cool ideas and you know your way around the existing playbooks. What you haven't done, as far as I can tell, is think how the kind of person represented in your playbook fits into the world - the Brainer is an outcast creep, the Gunlugger is a grenade launcher for hire, the Battlebabe is a violent person everybody's drooling over. The Transmitter, though? It'd seem weird if this guy had stopped at anything short of world domination before chargen even begins (Not that Psychic Overlord isn't a legit fictional position to occupy - there just need to be ways to challenge that position later).

Those things go without saying as far as I can tell!

So, here's my take on what's worth doing as a playbook - first off, it has to be something that hasn't been done before. Which is harder than it seems! The first-generation AW playbooks do a pretty good job of covering the bases and it's hard to squeeze in a basic concept that's not already covered by one of them in some way.

As far as I can tell, there are two ways to go about finding space for new playbooks - look for game mechanics gap you can fill or try and create a second generation playbook, one which assumes familiarity with first generation playbooks and adds a serious twist unique to that one playbook that changes how we approach the Apocalypse.

So, gaps in game mechanics! Let me try to explain this by an example - the Skinner. Of the original playbooks, it was the only Hot-based playbook. What this meant was that, via the choose-a-move-from-another-playbook, the game mechanics space a Skinner could explore would be pretty limited - there was a move you could take from the Battlebabe, and maybe some moves to your non-core-stat that other playbooks could be doing better, and that's pretty much it.

So the Maestro'D takes that game mechanics gap and fills it - now, across it and the Skinner, there is a whole range of Hot moves that you can take, broadening the possible game mechanic-y combinations characters could take. But note - the Maestro'D doesn't really change the rules of the game - what's on that playbook is mostly a combination of things that are on other playbooks and not much more. Whether the Maestro'D is in or not is not a game-changer.

For example, my own playbook, the Abacus, attempts to be one other such gap-filling playbook. I figured that, between the Battlebabe and the Operator, there aren't really enough Cool-based moves to play around with a character. So I took a look at the possible descriptors of 'cool' and tried to find one that isn't covered by the existing playbooks. I found one, 'cool=rational', and built a playbook around that, best I could.

When you're doing a gap-filling playbook, your main job is to respect the space you're working in, I think. Which means a bunch of little things that I only kinda-sorta feel, but here are a few I can actually verbalize. First, your moves have to be ones other playbooks could take - it's easy to make rules that are only usable by your character (see early iteration of the Metal Beast/Juggernaut, for example) or make the coolest move on your playbook also be the coolest move on an already existing playbook (any fighter-type playbook with a reskin of NTBFW, I'm looking at you).

Second, your moves should respect the stat that they're based on. This one's more of a taste thing, but here's two opinions of varying agreeability. First one is... if you make a straight manipulation move that's based on Hard, it's a mistake -  not because you can't make fictional sense of it (rugged, strong-willed people=sexy, why not?), but because it messes with the mechanical stat economy somewhat, allowing a Hard person be good anything from violence to facing danger to gathering information to being sexy. (There's a workaround, of course! Weird playbooks don't get to roll Weird to seize by force, but they can get a bunch of conditional violence moves, so you could do a conditional Hard manipulation move with different requirements or outcomes to a straight manipulation roll).

The second thing, for me at least, are Sharp-based playbooks that allow an option of +3 Sharp and a whole lot of awesome moves, anything from violence (roll +sharp to seize by force!) to social (+sharp to seduce!) to special-effect, on top of the thing that the basic sharp moves are about - giving every other moves bonuses.. Giving Sharp cool moves doesn't respect it's place amongst the stats - it's a meta-stat that gives bonuses to other moves, and it works great as that. That's the reason the first generation Sharp playbooks don't get cool sharp moves and get cool gear instead to balance it out. Sharp as a stat isn't a doing-things stat, it's a setup-a-move stat.

So filling gaps with playbooks is hard! You have to see a gap, which there aren't that many of to begin with, plus you have to fill it without breaking the overall balance of the stats.

The other option is to forget about most of that stuff and just go as wild as you can. Basically, instead of trying to work within the limitations set out by first generation playbooks, you take them as a given and bolt on something entirely different, making a good and proper second generation playbook. Look at the Quarantine's psi-harm rule, or the thing that allows him to answer questions about the Apocalypse, or the Touchstone's thing that allows him to walk among the people, respected and loved by default (I don't have the Grotesque, but my guess is it does a similar thing). These playbooks are game-changers, you include them and what what the Apocalype is about becomes different.

If you do one of these, you need to go bog crazy with your inspirations (living incarnation of the maelstorm! Alien overlords here to see you through the mess you made!), and then enforce them in your writeup either through special rules (psi-harm), gear (your symbol is...), or writeup (when you walk among the people). That can be easy or hard, depending.

I don't know if there're lessons to be learned about this type of playbook - each one of them is supposed to be unique, conceptually and mechanically, after all.

Now the problem with these is that any of these playbooks, just by virtue of what they are, is that they are show-stealers and the game will eventually revolve around them, one way or another. So what you do is build in dependencies on other characters - that's why the Quarantine has the advice move and starts out alone, instead of knowing all she needs to know and being surrounded by a powerful infrastructure ready to support her. Make them needy and dependant, and they'll naturally try to rope in whatever other players they can into their future, to fun results.

So yes! Working within first generation playbooks and respecting the limitations or working outside of them and respecting them as-is and bolting on something new and cool on instead.

And... There's also the Faceless, which isn't really a snugly fit for this way of splitting things up. Don't have anything to say about how it works or why, though.

Well, doesn't really matter. Either the threat side of the NPC hasn't really surfaced yet, in which case who cares? Or the player is interested in the NPC precisely because it is such a cool threat, in which case you can bet that the new PC will be a better threat for the other ones than your NPC ever was.

If there is some specific, weird, unknown nature that the NPC had before PC-ification, feel free to give the new PC a special move. Doesn't need to be anything too fancy.

Cannibal - when you see blood or exposed human meat, you're under fire from your hunger - lose it and you can't do anything but pursue this tasty morsel in your sights.


As a general rule, say yes as often as you can, and think of how to resolve it afterwards.

There is nothing stopping you, and it is verified fun. Or at least, I did it and liked it when I did.

Oh man. Can we talk new playbook theory here? Like, the stuff that we think makes the difference between a playbook that's okay and a playbook that's good?