The flavour is free - looking past genre boxes with Fellowship

Years back our group found Fellowship, the best PbtA game we've played before or since. We played it a bunch and had a lot of fun with how versatile of a framework it provides. We used it for Star Wars, Transformers, Exalted and heck, even Warhammer 40k. Which is why it was a surpsise for us to hear some people bounce from it because it was "just generic fantasy" and not looking past the genre box they put the game in to see what it is trying to do underneath the surface.

But since we have a good deal of experience reflavouring RPGs to suit what we need, let's talk about the issue more broadly! Let's talk about how you can look past the game's exterior and possibly have more fun tailoring the game to your needs!

When an Elf is not an Elf - Fellowship's Playbooks

The main way Fellowship seems to have lead people astray is with some of its names. The game itself brings to mind the Fellowship of the Ring book, and if you look at its Playbooks you see such fantasy staples as Elf, Dwarf, Halfling, Orc, etc. You glance at the surface and think to yourself "yup, this sure is a generic fantasy game drawing from everyone's first fantasy book inspiration" and if you're not in the mood for playing fantasy you move on. But the looks can be deceiving!

So for example, let's look at the Elf Playbook. Here is most of what it can do:

Elf: Everyone can see what an elf is.

The Elven Core Moves is the baseline for the Playbook - the Elf can use magic to hide, see well, sense magic and send messages. It also can move without leaving a trail. The Elven Custom Moves further enhance these abilities and also gives them an option to be a performer.

On the surface it's pretty Tolkien-esque elf stuff. Wield a bow, climb some trees, attack unseen, etc. But we need to look past what the flavour and theming of the mechanics is and look at what you can actually do with this mechanical set!

Because you see, with the same set of mechanics you are not only describing Legolas, but also Solid Snake, the Predator and the hecking Batman. Any character that focuses on stealth and ranged attacks can easily slot into this Playbook. If you need to add some other character-specific doodad like Batman's wealth or gadgets you can do so with the Half-Elf Custom.

Sure looks like an Elf, even has pointy ears!

The same treatment can be applied to all the other Playbooks. Dwarves are characters that are tough and into clearing a path forward (like, say, a footbal quarterback), Halflings are sneaky tricksters that like fighting big things (like Antman), Orcs are people that fight with whatever they can kitbash together (like a LEGO Master Builder).

Heck, grab the right expansion and Playbooks for Fellowship and you can just straight up play Star Trek with it...

But this idea of reflavouring mechanics and character concepts doesn't just apply to games like Fellowship. We've done it elsewhere too!

Mechanics vs flavour - Blackstar and cybernetics in SWN

A while back we played a game of Stars Without Number called Blackstar. Midway through the game we wanted to make an introduce new combat character. The character was going to be a cool cybered-up mercenary, but then when we looked at the cybernetic loadouts available in the game we were rather underwhelmed. They were prohibitively expensive for a starting level character and not as cost efficient as just getting regular gear to do similar combat stuff (these things got addressed a bit in Cities Without Number years later).

But we found a clever workaround. All we wanted was for the character to be tough and be able to punch things really well, and what covered all of our needs were the Foci the characters could take - Ironhide and Unarmed Combatant. Thematically those are there to represent some kind of space shaolin monks or tough aliens, but there isn't really anything stopping you from saying those represent your character's cyberware. You get the mechanics you need and keep the flavour you wanted without having to deal with the cumbersome cybernetics system or getting any kind of mechanical advantage over a regular character.

Cybernetics? Nah, just Foci!

Conclusions

While you don't want to carelessly mess with game's mechanics while trying to make it fit the story you want to play, reflavouring existing mechanics to suit your needs works quite well with many games. When you're trying to customize a game like that, don't look at its aesthetical trappings, but instead at what the game wants to be mechanically.

And as for Fellowship, from what I've been hearing its third edition is currently in the works that might address some of the leading names for the Playbooks. Currently its Elf is the Star, Halfing is the Rascal, Dwarf is the Mountain, Orc is War Torn and so on.

So fingers crossed the game gets the recognition and accolades it deserves!

Flipping the narration on high-powered characters - Broken Worlds, Exalted vs World of Darkness and Batman

In RPGs players usually narrate what their character does and the GM narrates the world, the obstacles they face and how the NPCs act. But what if some powerful characters could flip that narrative on its head?

Years back my group and I played a game of Broken Worlds called Gangs of New Gloam. The system is set in the world of Kill Six Billion Demons and the PCs get to play some really powerful and competent characters (at least by standards of trad games like D&D).

You can be this cool!

One of our players played The Hunter playbook, which made them a legendary assassin. One of their powers stuck out to me in particular:

Mantra of Ovis, the Empty One

Name a character or location. If you spend a power

die, at some point before you next rest, you can tell

the GM that you’re there, very close to that character

or location, silently observing from a hidden perch.

You can’t tell anyone how you got there, not even

your GM - for that would be to reveal the Shadow

Arts.

It is at the same time simple, and yet very thematic and effective. Of course an assassin would easily find a way to get to their target while remaining hidden. Of course you don't need to ellaborate on how they got there since that would take away from the cool factor. But best of all, it also maintains the mystique by not even letting you explain how you got there, which was a part that really made it memorable!

In comparison, some time later I played a game of Exalted vs World of Darkness called Heaven for Everyone. It's a modern demigod game of PCs wielding ancient power and using it to wreck the old White Wolf setting. I played a Sidereal character that maxed out Stealth. Good spies in the setting would have maybe 6 dice, top level starting characters for most of the World of Darkness game would push things to 10 dice, this character had a resting stealth of 15, pushing it to 20 if needed be.

Stealth rating: Yes

During one of our missions the character needed to sneak in and out of a server room. Simple door, one person inside, but once you start describing the situation, it's hard to be a top level stealth character when an NPC only cracks open a door wide enough for them to stand in it, and then sits next to the door so you can't open it without knocking into them.

That kind of situation gave me an idea - what if at really high character competency, your script would flip and the player took control of the narration? What if you could turn Batman cool with it?

Henchmen are running, Batman appears out of nowhere and get them!

GM: You arrive at the mansion, it's guarded by a few patrols, the path brightly illuminated and everyone alert.
Player: I activate my Batman powers (roll stealth test and pass vs the guards). A lightning lights up the night sky and a glimpse of a silluette is seen jumping between the trees. The light flickers for a second and a dark figure appears behind one of the guards next to a balcony door. Someone yells to check the breakers and they can't hear the creek of the door as I get into the mansion.
GM: The inside corridors are patrolled by single armed guards. How do you get past them?
Player: (Rolls stealth vs the guards) One of the guards feel a cool breeze passing by them as if they felt a ghost. How do they react?
GM: They turn around and investigate!
Player: They turn around and see an eerily empty corridor. They deviate from their path and check out one of the rooms to look for intruders. What they don't notice is a shadowy figure taking advantage of that and sneaking right past the now open corridor from a turn they didn't expect.
GM: There is a single guard in the server room, looking at the monitors.
Player: (Rolls stealth vs the guard) It has been a long night for Bob. His kids kept him up all day and he can barely keep his eyes open. His big coffee mug has ran dry and he'll need the kick to keep up his shift. Whether he goes to fill it himself or gets someone else to do it, he's distracted enough for his system to get compromised without him even realising it.

That kind of narration melted away the player character's physicality and let them move as a cinematic force of nature. The rolls guaranteed the outcome, and letting the player narrate beyond their immediate character it allowed to set the scene for an epic stealth. If instead you tried narrating how the character moved through the space and how those actions were performed, it would move them to the mundane and step by step nature of things. Much less worthy of Ovis, the Empty One.

Of course, this kind of approach is not for every game. It's much more geared towards high-power / high-competency games where the PCs are a cut above people they confront. The ones where you can look at a situation and comfortably say the PC can dominate it without breaking a sweat so you can just go straight for the question of "How do you want to do it?" (like a few GMs do when their players roll a critical success).

Adjudicating different PCs differently - a look at Sidereals

In pretty much every RPG and beyond you want to treat everyone fairly. Everyone has to follow the same rules, the same judgements should apply to all the players and their characters and the GM should be impartial under normal circumstances. But what if there was a character class where that meta assumption shouldn't apply, as a feature?

Exalted is a game about playing capital H Heroes like Gilgamesh, Hercules, Sun Wukong, etc. There are many types of Exalted out there, from the peak human Solars that can punch through mountains, through elemental scion Dragonblooded that combine Avatar elemental bending with Romance of the Three Kingdoms, down to some out there concepts like golem Alchemicals that fight for communism and keeping their mechanical world alive.

Amongst all of them, we find Sidereals, the troubleshooters of Fate. They aren't very strong, their numbers are pitiful, and they have the most thankless job in the whole world - cleaning up everyone's messes and making sure the reality doesn't break down so there can be a next day. But they have one important trick up their sleeve to level the playing field - they cheat.

Sidereals, they be like that.

When they needed to disappear from history in order to be able to manipulate the entire world in order to save it, they broke an entire constellation to erase the memory of themselves from existance. When their power set wasn't enough to defeat their enemies, they developed magic kung fu powerful enough to kick people out of reality. When they couldn't overthrow the tyrants of the world, they turned their allies against them.

So I would posit the same ought to apply to how a GM would handle them in a game. This isn't to say they should have a carte blanche permission to fudge their dice or cheat at the actual game, but that the way you interpret the rules for them should be more leniant towards being bent in their direction.

This kind of approach is especially important when you take an important part of Sidereals' design into consideration - their power set is fixed and intentionally broken. The peak human Solar might have a Charm that lets them convince a crowd that they are speaking the truth and everyone will believe them through the sheer power of their charisma. Sidereals, since they broke one of the constellations that housed some of their power, don't have a Charm like that. Instead, they can only convince people that the truth they are saying is a lie. You never get a straightforward solution to a problem out of them.

Similarly, because their Charm set is fixed, they can't invent new powers. A Solar could decide that they want to be the best wingsuit glider out there and they can make new Charms around wingsuit gliders to help them assault some air temple, a Sidereal must rely only on the printed Charms in the book. So they would have to make do with being able to turn a mortal into a dragon and using them as a mount to try sneaking into an air temple.

Their sacred task of resolving troubles of destiny also encourages them to cheat their way through their jobs. Maybe a king of some land should've died but due to the snag in the Loom of Fate they survived a battle and now the Sidereal needs to ensure the king dies. But when they get to the place and realize the king is a little boy they might feel guilty about drowning them in a pond. So instead they can get them to abdicate their throne to their evil uncle who promptly gets an arrow to the head just after their coronation and everything is back as it should be.

So by the dint of the game encouraging the Sidereal characters to cheat, it wouldn't be an invalid approach for the GM to allow the characters to cheat within the system as well. A Solar having a Charm that lets them move instantly to anywhere they see could be stopped by the GM when they try to squeeze in through a crack in a mountain cave since they can't fit, while a Sidereal with the same Charm would be allowed to do it since obviously they could cloak themselves from reality for a split second and be at the destination they can see since that is the text of the Charm.

And it's not like other Exalted types don't have some game-breaking powers of their own. In an even fight a Solar will beat a Sidereal nine times out of ten since they get to throw raw numbers at anything they do. This isn't Munchkin where the players must pull a fast one over one another, it's more like Dune or Cosmic Encounter board games where everyone has some kind of powers that makes everyone go "Wait, you can do WHAT?". It would be an interesting and under-explored design space though to have character powers that come from being handled differently at the adjudication part of the game.

Conclusions

Exalted's Sidereals are a splat built around inherent limitations in their power sets and being encouraged to break the rules in order to succeed. As such, an interesting approach to handling them at the table might be to have the GM handle them differently from other PCs, letting them break some meta conventions of the game.