whats in a playbook?
we’re back at it today with another dev diary as I continue to revise the ashcan for my Our Flag Means Death-inspired no-dice-no-masters ttrpg, beneath our own flag. This is the second of these short essays — in the last one, I got very focused on one extremely small element of the dandy’s playbook — and today we’ll be taking a step back to do a little bit of a broader overview of what goes into a playbook in beneath our own flag. full disclosure: this post is obviously outward-facing but I’m also writing it as a guide to myself, a framework for what each part of a playbook should be doing to help make sure they’re all up to snuff as I revise. If you’re writing supplemental stuff for beneath, congrats! This post should also be helpful for you.
Let's jump in.
In the original beneath our own flag ashcan, each playbook has ten parts: name, description, power/intimacy statement, look, ideal, origin, treasure, the playbook specific picklist, your questions, and a list of moves. last time I talked about wanting to bring the tips section back in, which means eleven, and I’m also thinking more about advancement — this is another thing I’d drafted in handwriting notes about this game and cut when I was making the jump to digital copy, but I do think I want to put it back in. That brings us to twelve parts per playbook, which feels like a good number.
I’m going to divide these twelve parts into two broad categories — hopefully you’ll see why. Those are our fixed elements: name, description, power/intimacy, tip, and movelist, and our “variable” elements: look, ideal, origin, treasure, specificity, question, and advancement. The divide here may be obvious — while fixed elements will appear in basically anyone’s play of a specific book, the variable ones are the things which may or may not (picklists and potential advancements over time). We might say that the fixed elements form the semistable core of a playbook — the central theme which is interpreted by players when they create characters. This is not suggest there’s no variation — in fact, a lot of character diversity comes in alternate interpretations of the same words — but it’s distinct from the malleable elements, which should be written in a more specifically evocative way (so that each “pick” of a list is a real character change in and of itself).
Starting with the fixed elements:
the name. It may seem silly to put too much thought into, but I do think there’s a lot that can be done by carefully selecting a name. In a sense it’s a called shot — the first thing a player is going to see and the framework through which they’re going to read the rest of the book. Logan (author of the great autobiographical game Logan) gave some very good feedback on a few of the names when I first released the ashcan (suggesting “The Disguisee” become “The Disguised” and remarking, more relevantly to my actual point, that “The Officer” might call to mind a veteran rather than a ship’s officer, which is something I want to address), but there was a lot that went into some of these even before that release: the legend began life as the captain (before I killed him off) and the dandy was at varying points the gentleman, the landed, and the fop before the name as it is now. A playbook’s name also serves a fundamentally aesthetic function, as an element of a game’s aural poetics — even if Logan hadn’t advised it, I probably would have changed the disguisee eventually because it just doesn’t ... sound very good.
the description. Should be a single sentence which contains the soul of your character. This is distinct from the thing we’re trying to do with the name — if we think of the name as a primer, the lens through which players are going to view the rest of the playbook, the description’s role is fundamentally structural, setting narrative bounds. The Dandy threw away a life of luxury to follow the call of the sea. The Legend has built a name for themself, a reputation increasingly divorced from the truth. These are structural statements about the direction a story is going, and contain the real “pitch” of the playbook.
power/intimacy. This is the tonal equivalent to the description’s plot directive. By this I mean: when we say that the Legend draws power from renown and showmanship but is intimate in a fragile and trembling way, we are answering the question “what kind of a person are they?” as opposed to the question “what are they doing?” (or “what is happening in their life?”). The power/intimacy statement establishes a tonal palette which players should use to guide their action — although it is less grounded than the description, it is also (or should be) more difficult to leave behind.
tip. I wrote more than enough about this last time, but I’ll say again here: similarly to the power/intimacy statement, or even the name, the two tips which change for each playbook should work to evoke a space in which a character should move, the landscape against which they appear. Frankly, I think you should consider writing the tip first (which is a very funny thing to say when I wrote six playbooks before deciding I was going to put one in, I know) but be very prepared to revise it should the core of the book shift as you write.
movelist. This seems like it would be an important one — but in a very real way it isn’t. Although the movelist will be the part of the playbook which we return to most often during play, it is also (in my experience, anyway) an element which comes pretty naturally once you have the rest hammered out. To write a good movelist all you have to do is hold that character in your mind and ask: how do they get in trouble? how do they open up to others? how can they help? Then pare back specific scenes into more broadly useful actions. One change I will say is coming to the movelist soon is: more moves. I want to put something which resembles a “lure” back in, and I want more specific ways to give tokens to other players (especially those who you’re opening up to in a non-romantic or non-holistic way).
This brings us to the end of the fixed things — the elements of the playbook which should evoke without specific requirement and allow for player choice in interpretation, rather than selection. I’ll say again — I think the “malleable” (you know, the more I use that word the less I like it, but I’m not going to bother fixing it now) elements operate in a very different way: through extreme specificity and choice over interpretation. That being said, the malleable elements are also the ones which need the most revision, so — please know that what’s currently in the book doesn’t necessarily match what I’m writing here. This is ideals. We’ll get there someday.
the look. If I had to liken the look to any fixed element, I might say it’s something like the power/intimacy of the malleables. I say this only because the look of a character, though often spurious in other games, really does do a lot of character establishment for many players. Looking back to famous historical or fictional pirates, we often distinguish them by things which were fundamentally look elements — Blackbeard, Calico Jack, Captain Hook, Long John Silver, these are all giants of the genre whose famous traits (beard, clothes, hook, crutch) are looks before all else. So each look element really does need to suggest something clear and specific, drawing from a different “type” of pirate if need be. The confluence of tropes is so much of what makes picklist-character creation interesting.
the ideal. I have a complicated relationship with alignment systems in games, I guess. My honest take is that, unless you’re playing a campaign where alignment is going to be a major topic, it’s almost always not that useful since player characters tend to get lost in that self-serving-hero to idealistic-hero gradient. But I also think that idealism is a really important element of the pirate genre. Look at Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, look at Our Flag Means Death, look at so many things — these are fundamentally stories about people with different ideas of how we should live and treat each other attempting to bring their disparate philosophies into being. There’s a historical element of this, of course — but I’m not going to take time here to argue for or against Nassau being like a proto-anarchist commune or anything. Rather, when it comes to writing the (generally semi-short) picklists for ideals in Beneath Our Own Flag my advice is: keep them fun, keep them specific, keep them petty (it’s always good when a picklist item really grounds you in the life of a character), and make sure they flow naturally from the genre you’re working with and the character you’re trying to evoke.
origin. If ideals are my take on the often abortive system of player alignment, then origin is a takeaway from the often overwritten world of player character backstory. I don’t have a ton to say here, except that it’s another place to play really nicely in genre — there’s no reason that the Knife, specifically, should have a link to religious upbringings, except that we have this really fun image of the holy-trained killer (usually Catholic in a protestant-assumed world, which we could read into and discuss, but we won’t) which runs from the western to pirate fiction, from adventure stories to thrillers. It’s there in Hitman, it’s there in Princess Bride, it’s everywhere — and one of my favorite things is to pull that genre in and reimagine it. Think about Jim’s revenge quest in Our Flag Means Death — the real direct antecedent to the religious knife.
The other thing, of course, is that hopefully having the origin picklist in here look the way it is will keep most players on similar footing when it comes to narrative buy-in and investment. We should begin ndnm games with a broadly blank backstory — since so much of what makes the system tick is a lack of gm-planning and a focus instead on in-game narrative generation. That’s more than I meant to write on the origin — I’ll shut up.
Ok one more thing — originally everyone was gonna have two playbooks where one was your role on the ship and another was your life beforehand, but I cut that idea pretty early, but I think it’s a good idea and I’ll definitely return to it eventually.
treasure. One of my favorite things in writing the ashcan of Beneath Our Own Flag was working on a kind of an interconnected world — a setting guide without a setting guide. This is something I think Wanderhome does really well, where figures like the Storm-King or the Slobbering God are referenced but left blank enough that they might be taken in very different ways by different campaigns. Thinking again about Logan’s feedback on the game — one of his biggest questions was whether the frequency of the overlaps in treasures was intentional and I’m glad to say that it is. I think it’s really interesting to think about a world which is populated by artifacts which have different degrees of pull and meaning to each of us — it adds more to a treasure hunt when we’re all on it together for very different reasons. So my advice here — and this is definitely something that needs tightening up in the book — is to think about what a treasure means, and what seeking it or throwing it away means for the playbook (or might mean, once somebody makes a character out of it).
specificity. What makes a class tick? The specific picklist for each class is another thing I borrowed directly from Wanderhome, and keeping things restricted here does interest me. I think these specificities should serve two roles — establishing a field on which your character is going to play (The Dandy has a relationship with life before the sea, and this is reflected in their specificity) and generating a whole lot of names and things, complications which can come up in play. This is what picklists do best — put names on the sheet, and ask us to answer what they are.
question. This is a game about building relationships, so the questions are pretty important, but they’re also interesting because it’s the one part of a playbook that the player character doesn’t have full authorial control over. Questions are asked of other people — they are our first required entry into a mutual space of storytelling — and as a result I think they’re an interesting example of picklist specificity. The more specific and peculiar you can make the questions, the more they’re going to build unique histories between disparate player characters, and despite the fact that there aren’t very many of them, the fact that they’ll be pulling both on everything we’ve decided so far and on the playbook of another player means that no two parties are going to answer even a very obvious question the same.
advancement. This is a harder element to cover because I (gasp) haven’t written it yet, but I’ll say quickly (and then be done here) that I think it’s really important to allow our characters an arc. There comes a time when we might retire. There comes a time when we might settle down. The sea thrives on stories of longing and incompletion — but these are stories given weight by the potential for satisfaction and contentment. So with that in mind: I want the advancements to be few and far between, but I want them to be substantial. I really like the advancement system in Wanderhome, but I’m also conscious that you can take a lot of advancements in that game and continue traveling, all the same. That’s not what I want here. Instead, I’m drawn to the advancement system from sasha’s the girlfriend of my girlfriend is my friend <3, which frames a single scene, once, as your powerful level-up and the end of an arc. I’m gonna try to do something like that, when I have the time — after all, there’s all these pesky references to your heart’s desire in beneath. Someone’s gotta find it eventually, right?
There we have it: a bible of sorts, a guide for myself and for anyone else who’s interested in how the playbooks in beneath our own flag work (or should work, anyway, when I’m done with them.) I wrote this this week on my lunch breaks instead of actually doing any editing, but I’m hopeful that this framework will help me bring all the playbooks up to scratch and beyond.
That’s all folks. Blogpost fin.
