Winter Sale

In tandem with this update, Hello, World is now on sale! Go check it out!

Lots of little changes to Hello, World and a few big ones. Many of the little changes are in the Book, and related to tightening up formatting, and a continuation of the painful, painful process of standardizing font styles and fixing all of the little idiosyncratic bugs that pop up from doing so. Still not done with this but it's moving along!

Player Handouts

These have been overhauled. The handout pages on Character Creation and the Function Library have been temporarily removed (they'll come back soon). All of the information they had is within the HW Book file and much better explained there, so for now just look to the relevant sections of the book while these pages go under a visual overhaul pass.

The major change here is in the playbooks!

Depending on how familiar you were with the previous playbook version this may not look like a lot, but it actually prints much more cleanly and reads more smoothly. Font/background contrast has been upped a lot for the Special Ability and Items blocks, and a reorganization of the right column opened up space to revamp the Drift block.

Font nerds will be overjoyed (?) to hear that I'm finally starting to apply the HW style guide in a consistent manner (for those curious the three fonts in use are Bebas Neue Pro (Semi or Expanded as required) for the largest title fonts and smaller emphasis text alike, Corbel for body text, and Bastardus Sans for chapter and section headers).

Spot any changed text on the playbook above? This is a segue to...

Playbook Adjustments

Lots of Special Abilities ('SAs' for short) have been tuned or replaced to elevate lackluster options for Hello, World's playbooks and provide a richer space to realize character identities. Changes discussed below!

Breaker

• Reactive Defense has been removed, and replaced with Shock and Awe.
  • Reactive Defense was a classic example of a Special Ability that really did not say much about the character who took it: it was a rote mechanical boost that made a character take slightly less Stress damage while they already had Harm. This was... fine, but it is not up to the standards of Hello, World. Special Abilities generally should be able to pull weight as character-defining features: something that actually tells us more about your user (in addition to giving a bonus). Since the Breaker already had a glut of options for damage mitigation, and fewer that said interesting things about how Breakers actually do proactive things in World, I went back to the drawing board to draft Shock and Awe.

• Soul Edge has been modified so that you can now have a flirty weapon.
  • Hello, World has been lacking a critical feature for a long time, and that's the ability to have a sword possessed by the spirit of your boyfriend. This change addresses the issue.

• Volcano Buster has seen textual changes to the wording of it's "additional benefit" options.
  • Similar changes happened to the "When you push yourself...." SAs of several other playbooks. The goal overall is to provide stronger promptings that not only indicate the spirit of the playbooks in more certain terms, but also directly suggest how this line of SAs might affect the fiction and mechanics at the table. In this case, Volcano Buster now suggests both a more actionable outcome for the "shatter bonds or barriers" option (you get to 'act immediately' which creates a more specific context for the die roll you're about to make), as well as a more open-ended and weapon-derived second option, including some suggestions to provoke ideas.
  
  The Breaker playbook is meant to deliver a feeling almost like a character from an arcade fighting game (especially one in the style of Arc System Works, thinking of Guilty Gear or Granblue Fantasy Versus). They should be kinetic, and have options for over-the-top heavy metal industrialized violence. Shock and Awe and Volcano Buster specifically feature into this, giving opportunities for the Breaker to describe in loving detail how their sword (which is possessed) is cinematically revealed to also be a giant revolver with incendiary shells (!) that they then use to bloodlessly beat up their rival, incidentally laying waste to a small city block.

Capacitor

• Conduit reworked to fit the new rules for Authority.
  • Authority is a lot more streamlined then it used to be, and thankfully so is this Special Ability.
    

• Ignite reworked to explain itself better.
  • This ability is a lot of fun but it's not a completely easy concept to explain, as previous drafts have proven. I had to remove a somewhat niche edge case scenario but that streamlining makes it a much more logically-intuitive reading SA.

  
  

  

Filcher

• Lost Cycles has been reworked into a "option select" ability.
  • The original ability is still captured in the first option. The addition of the second option makes this a more interactive SA that can factor more convincingly into discussions of Position and Effect during social encounters. The Filcher previously lacked strong hooks into the social environment of World and I wanted a method for this playbook to do some crossover work. I'm really happy with most of the Filcher's kit, a modification to this SA to make it a more robust decision-making tool was all that seemed needed.
  
  

Roller

• No Changes. This playbook got a lot of loving care in the last update. There is some touched-up help text in the Book pdf.

Seeker

• Reflexes has been renamed Lightning Reflexes.
  • This ability is actually different from it's counterpart in Blades so naming it helps draw attention to that.
    

• The Hunt has replaced At Any Cost.
  
  • At Any Cost was a special ability that allowed the Seeker to Push Themselves while still taking a Daemon's Bargain on the same function roll. This SA was not very inspiring and didn't add a ton of personality to the playbook, and moreover has the capacity to create objectionable problems related to the way that Bargains arise at the social environment of the table. Bargains are a fun design space for SAs to operate within but I wasn't happy with this implementation. 
    
    
  • The Hunt, by contrast, helps gap-fill a valuable space in the Seeker's portfolio: something that actually helps them when they're seeking stuff! While it's benefits are mechanical, they're mechanical in a way that positively reinforces a personality archetype the Seeker wants to fulfill: the dusty bounty hunter marching resolutely from clue to clue to track their quarry. Simple SAs like this can be important because they are also instructive for the reader. The Hunt subtly informs the player a little bit about the mechanics that the fiction of this playbook is likely to lead to, even if it's not an SA they end up taking! The stress reduction offered for long-term project actions has the advantage of smoothing out the Seeker's action choices in downtime and letting them go further between "rest" cycles, which is a sub-theme carried in a number of other Seeker SAs that I wanted to advance further. 
  
  

Squawker

• Some subtle rewrites of SAs. No changes to the way they function, however.

• Don't You Remember Me? has been renamed Forget Me Not.
  • That's it, that's the tweet.
    
  

Wielder

• Compel has been renamed Command Script.
  • Compel is the legacy name of this version of the SA from Blades. After several revisions this SA is now totally distinct from Blades in both theme and mechanics, and a rename was appropriate to capture that.

• Fellow Outsider has been added.
  • The Wielder used to have only 7 SAs, one less then the other playbooks of World. Through the miracle of Moore's Law we were able to shrink some previously-bloated hardware requirements and find space to fit in a new SA for this playbook. Fellow Outsider is meant to serve as a juxtaposed counterpart to Command Script, showing off a different possible angle for the Wielder's relationship with the daemons of World... in this case as more of a willingly-helped ally. It implies a few different build types for Wielders that achieve similar results using different methods, which I like. The second part of this ability is a thing I've wanted to try out for Bargains for a long time, so it's here now as an experiment. Let me know how it works at your table!
  
  

• Reality Warper has been added, replacing Outsider (yes, a totally different move).
  
  • Outsider was always a little confusing as it referenced a resistance mechanic that might very rarely come into play, and granted immunity to a "supernatural fear"-like effect that felt short of being worth the cost of an SA. The entire SA just failed to do anything proactive for the player, and that's bad. I decided to strike it off the list and give the Wielder something it has thematically wanted for awhile, and that is an SA that covers use of Authority to change the reality of World. The bonus is small, but that can have big repercussions at the table over the course of a campaign. This SA is another experiment that I may come back to, especially if it feels too lackluster to advocate for itself. Let me know what you think!
  
  
  

• Void Mantra has been added, replacing... a previous SA which I've already forgotten.
  • Listen version control is hard.
    
    
  • Void Mantra is weird, it's just weird, I know. There's some synergy potential with Fellow Outsider, and it points to some maybe fun interactions at the table. You don't have to take it. But if you do take it, please tell me how it goes!
  
  

• Dream Hunter now grants potency to the Wielder's hunting pet only against daemons and process, no longer other users.
  • Users are powerful individuals, much like the PCs. It didn't quite make sense for the Wielder's pet to be preternaturally potent against them, instead it's potency has been rewritten to make it super effective against it's own kind, and process lackeys.