Real people's stories are open-ended, which is what narratives try to get away from. You have to make shit up to get closure. But with magic, supernatural, and psychic phenomena, you can have all the reveals and confrontations and choices that normal boring life puts the lid on.

Not all art is by Claudia Cangini. Adrian did some too, & it's at this point in the book that I notice that he's noticed that Claudia often uses geometric patterns in her backgrounds (though not in this book!) and has started doing something similar in some of his own pieces.

There's 3 types of damage: harm, stress, & calamity. I remember there only being harm and calamity, and when you took damage you could mark either. Calamity was a lot like marks in Night Witches, and there were ways to unmark them. Now it seems closer to stress/trauma in Blades.

This is probably much better for long-term campaigns. At 5 harm you die, at 5 stress you mark a calamity, but you can choose to take stress instead of harm if you want.

Skipping ahead to the playbooks, I can see not all calamities are bad, and there's a variation on death moves in them, so you have a lot of power over how your character gets hurt.

The other moves (the non-universal ones that you only use at specific times) are appropriately themed for a group of misfits driving their spaceship around. They reference a few rules that haven't been explained but I'm no noob, I know what all this stuff is.

The Personal Project move is a combo: it's like the workspace rules from AW but set up as a countdown clock from Blades. There were clocks in AW too of course, and other PbtA games have them, but Blades made them way more popular and the influence here is obvious.

A bit of added administrative genius, though, is attaching an explicit timeframe to them. A Scene Project gets 1 tick added for every successful action that advances it, so it can take place across the course of a scene...

...while an Episode Project is similarly advanced by whole scenes related to it, and a Season Project is advanced by game sessions in which work on the project happened.

It's a really simple way of managing expectations and differentiating between say, building a warp gate onto your spaceship (takes several sessions) vs. hacking a really difficult database (which should happen in a single scene, but might be more than a single roll).

Yeah sure, you can set a timeframe ad hoc informally during play, but using explicit categories means you can have other rules that reference them. Like maybe building a mind laser is an episode project for the mad scientist character but a seasonal project for anyone else.

When you advance clocks, it's always by 1, & they range from 3 to 6 ticks total. I looked ahead & the Intellect playbook has a special move to increase it by +1. Damage is also fixed, so it makes sense to do this instead of make it variable (like Blades or by rolling for damage).

I kind of like the randomness of a damage die, so I worked out a project system that's like damage and hit points but in reverse. A project has a Resource Cost and you roll your Resource Die to invest resources in it. Once you hit the Resource Cost, the project is done.

Not everybody likes rolling for damage, but it's easy to write an optional fixed-number rule. I was a bit worried about some aspects of projects in a PbtA framework, but setting an explicit timeframe (limiting how often you contribute to a project) may solve some things for me.

This game has agendas and principles for players, not just GMs. This section tells you how to play a character in a way that means the game will support you. This is also a pretty good section for figuring out if the game is for you. Don't like this section? Don't play this game.

If I have any quibbles, it's that the PCs being part of a ship's crew isn't explicit in this section. It's explicit in chargen (& there's a separate playbook for the ship), but "Get entangled in the other Crew Members’ business" is all this section tells you to do in this regard.

Playbooks are called archetypes; there's 8 of them. You get a signature move (special ability) that is unique to your archetype, but in a departure from many other PbtA games, you don't start with any additional special moves, except for 1 background move (out of 2 options).

Honestly I kinda struggle with the options part of playbook design myself. Too few choices and every starting character feels the same, but "choose 3 moves" is a lot of decisions to make right away without having played your character at all.

For 1-shots I do pick 1 at start and 1 more halfway through & for campaign play, I've been doing "pick 1 now & 1 more anytime later" but usually people pick 2 right away and if they change their mind they just ask to switch one of their choices, instead of leaving 1 option open.

Hooks are probably the main unique aspect of Impulse Drive. They are like Burning Wheel's beliefs, instincts, and traits all rolled up into one, plus DW bonds -- with an emphasis on making trouble for your character (because that's what the game is about).

Hooks can be goals, flaws, connections, or whatever else you think is interesting about your character that you want to explore. When you use them to give yourself a disadvantage, you get experience points.

When I was playing, I remember my scoundrel character was in debt to the mob as one hook, and it wasn't coming up very much, so I thought I'd take the suitcase of money we had "acquired" and pay off the debt.

My plan was to narratively get rid of this hook, claim xp, & write a new one. But as we played the scene, a bar fight broke out, there was shooting & chaos, and a bad roll on my part meant I had to take damage. Stress wasn't a thing yet, so I marked a calamity instead of harm.

I chose the calamity (from a list on my sheet) where something valuable gets destroyed, & so the briefcase blocked the blaster shots & it rained burning bits of money. We managed to escape w/ 1 of the mobsters, went thru yet another chain of ridiculous hijinks & had a great time.

Unlike in fantasy murderhobo games, your gear is stored on your ship and you just choose X number of things when you go into the field, which is the best way to do it in this genre. You own a spaceship; pretty sure you can afford a few guns and wrenches.

When you're playing wanderers who have to carry all their gear around everywhere, it always leads to the players wanting to buy a horse and a cart so they can lug around the body of one of their dead characters in a jar of formaldehyde. And also their two dozen swords.

I will now look through the Impulse Drive archetypes and pick out a few details to talk about.

The bounty hunter archetype's signature move is that they get to declare that there are bounties on other characters. Because you have to check "bulletin boards" to use this move, it really encourages you to play a character that is always hustling.

It's not even that powerful an ability, mechanically, since turning someone in for the reward only gets you a +1 to the carouse move you (although actually a 10+ on that is a LOT better than a 7-9). But it definitely reinforces their place in the setting and the narrative.

The special moves you can buy with xp mostly give you more "bounty hunter" type options and are pretty flavourful, especially Steely Glare, which gives you the trope of being the intimidating badass while still allowing other characters a lot of agency.

Still, a couple special moves do fall into the most boring of benefits: the equivalent of a mechanical bonus to do something your were probably going to do anyway. In one sense though, it's like an extra stat bonus (because you can only get +1 to each stat once by spending xp).

Skipping ahead to the next archetype, The Infiltrator, I see there are more cool powers and fewer simple bonuses. Most of these moves are great: drones, poisons, that ninja smoke bomb thing, etc.

But one of them (Float Like a Butterfly) is like a blander version of the halfling fighter move from Dungeon World, so I might as well explain that whole thing now.

The Halfling Fighter move is you get +1 to defy danger when you describe your small size being useful, which prompts the player to actively describe one of the things that (presumably) got them excited about their character in the first place: their small size.

So the player is sharing descriptive fictional flavour with the whole group, instead of just getting "+1 to attack" or whatever. Note that this is prompting PLAYER action (description) and not CHARACTER action (defying danger).

So while it mostly looks like a rule that's just the dead weight of a mechanical bonus, it's actually one that incentivized a player to add something worthwhile to the fiction playing out in everybody's minds.

Problem is, at some point, this gets old. A few sessions worth of "I'm small so I get +1" and everybody gets it and nobody needs to hear it again. At that point, it really does become another boring +1.

So what does a mechanical bonus actually look like when it continues prompting a player to contribute interesting fictional content to the game over a longer period of time? Here's a few options, maybe you can think of more.

You could of course graduate the conditional +1 to a flat bonus to either a move or stat, that requires no additional description, as an advance, thus removing the content everyone is tired of hearing.

Or you could require the player choose a different aspect whose description gives the bonus after a certain amount of time has passed. Small size no longer gives you a +1, now it's your character's former life in the forest. Etc.

Or they have to be tied to something external that constantly changes. You're a bandit, so you get +1 to break the laws if you can explain why you think they are unjust. If the campaign moves around, the laws of the land change.

Say your character is charged with punishing a particular sin. If you can explain why an NPC has committed that sin, you can get a +1 bonus against them. Both of these make you describe your character's relationships with law and order and other people...

...in order to get the bonus, and is thus informed by both those specifics, but hopefully also by prior events in the campaign.

Returning to Impulse Drive, one special move from The Intellect archetype kind of does this. The Kovacs Paradigm says when your character rants about how "we're so fucked" and no one else is qualified, you get a bonus to the Share Expertise move.

So you have to be in a bad spot to begin with and then you acknowledge it, hype it up, and provide your (probably dangerous) solution, and then you get a bonus (which is more than just a +1, too).

It combines the reaction to variable circumstances with the player revealing stuff about their character, and probably there would also be some pressure from the group to vary things up and not overuse it (and it's a Reference, for people who like that sort of thing).

Anyway, this is not a perfectly solved problem I can just hand you the easy answers to, but it's something you might want to think about if you're interested in really detail-oriented ttrpg rules design.

The Intellect also has one of those "choose an expertise off the list and get a bonus when it is part of the fiction" for a signature move. Then for your background you either choose the ability to buy more with xp or **GASP** get an actual bonus for spouting technobabble!

And people complain it doesn't do anything!