Hello, rebels! I'm here on Mina's behalf to post the next playbook deep dive. Read on...

All rebels hold the void within themselves – its impossibilities give them power, and its cosmic autonomy lets them stand in opposition to society. Alongside the power and the confidence, however, the void brings hunger and isolation and a gradual disintegration of the self. All rebels hold the void within them, but three cannot escape what it has done to them.

Each of these playbooks deviates from the standard model in ways big and small – in some places they use the same mechanics for different goals, while in other places they have unique subsystems crafted to bring the playbook’s themes to your table.

Let’s start with the simplest of these weird creatures: The Inhuman. It’s pretty fitting that they’re the one most like the ‘standard’ rebels, because that’s what they’re trying to be – but that’s not how they started out. 

There are so many possible origins for an inhuman. Maybe they were a mundane animal who took a bite out of something inadvisable. Maybe they were an errant concept floating in the void that stumbled on an errant chunk of reality. Maybe they were dead – or at least, the living’s memories of the dead – that somehow clawed their way back to life. Either way, the void and world worked alchemy upon them and now they’re walking the world as a real human, for a given definition of real. 

Those different origins are the source of The Inhuman’s crew covenants. A void-spirit uses the power of The Moon to infuse the fight with dreams and nightmares, and make their own form a tool to be shaped and twisted. A mindless place, object or animal granted sentience by accidental magic brings the power of The Star – throwing themselves into self-definition with great enthusiasm and helping others realise all the things they could become. And a once-mundane human brought back from the grave or otherwise transformed by the void uses the power of Death to bring radical change to others’ lives and conduct strange surgery on their souls.

Then there’s the mundane role the Inhuman tries to adopt. This is where the playbook deviates from the standard mold – instead of the normal categories of Delinquent, Prodigal and Traitor, the inhuman uses these three:

And of course, your Role can shift over the course of the campaign – your Interloper might be forced into the closet and become a Pretender, or your Pretender might grow tired of the pretense and embrace their nature as a Lurker.

In the castle, their struggle to build a new life takes a back seat to the uncanny powers their origin grants them. They can channel the hunger of the void to give their attacks horrible bite, consume a denizen of the castle to gain temporary access to their abilities, shape-shift as the situation demands, and even act as a guide out of the castle and through the void towards somewhere far stranger – someone’s dreams, the place where the dead go, even the castle’s true heart. They can even reach out to the avatar’s enforcers, forming a bond with them and offering them freedom from their master. 

Sometimes, the things the system does to you aren’t the start of a cool origin story or inspirational, heart-tugging Lifetime movie – sometimes they just suck and don’t stop sucking and you somehow have to move on. That’s the case for The Captive. A while back something awful happened to them, something that left them comatose or dead or disappeared within the castle’s systems. They might not even know what happened to their body – but their mind still lingers, trapped in a prison floating in the void.

Captivity and restriction are the core themes of this playbook. Your castle form is all you have, and bears the scars of your struggle to survive. You don’t get to go back to the city after delving into a shard, but instead must return to your prison. And even when you get to visit the mundane world – carried along by another rebel – you’re chained to them and must work with all your might to move small objects or whisper into someone’s ear. Your crew covenant – The Shade – helps with this a little, letting you empower your host’s mundane actions and guide the other rebels through the castle, but at the end of the day you’re still going home to a cell.

Let’s talk about that prison. Firstly, your day-to-day concerns are so far from the norm that you use your own set of stress gauges. Instead of Blood, Lack, etc you must make do with these three:

As the captive’s player you get to define where you’re bound – within a powerful vassal’s shard, curled up in the hollow spaces between the castle’s shards, even floating free in the void. You get to say who’s chained up in there with you – maybe orphaned minions of a fallen vassal, a void-creature scavenging for scraps like vermin, or even emissaries of a neutral power indifferent to your war with the castle. As you start your game, your prison is pretty awful – uncomfortable climate, limited privacy, patrolling guards and hollow luxuries – but you can change that. Increasing your ranks with the World and Void won’t change your castle form, but instead will let you improve the prison – push back the guards, turn the cells into cosy and secure living spaces, make this place almost a home. But it takes a lot out of you to hold onto that power, and as soon as you let it go the punishments can come flooding back. There’s only one way to find true, lasting peace, and that’s to bring down the castle and set you all free.

So, what can you do to help the other rebels bring down the castle? A lot, as it turns out – staying in the void full-time has its perks, and each of your Shadow Moves gives you power in and out of the castle. Maybe you lean into the ghost theme, gaining the ability to pass intangibly through walls in the castle and float far away from your host in the city. Maybe you can help the other rebels Find Shelter by pulling them into a secret room their enemies can’t access, home to inhuman entities you can strike bargains with during downtime. Or maybe you summon a gate to your prison mid-combat so that your allies can shove your enemy through – but you’ll have to deal with your prison’s new occupant when the fight’s over.

Why rebel? Because it’s the only way you’ll ever escape.

The Inhuman was changed in some cosmic accident and the Captive was forced into their new state, but The Penitent willingly chose it. Like every vassal they were given a choice:  hurt others for their own benefit, or walk away. They chose the first option. 

They’d choose differently now, of course – they hit a breaking point, and switched sides to help the rebels – but the pain they caused and the privilege they won from it still remains. When you play a Penitent, it’s in order to play through their story of repentance, and to ask what it would take to become a better person. That’s one of the first questions you’ll ask the crew - they tell you what they need in order to trust you, and that becomes your crew covenant.

Firstly, though, there’s all the benefits you can bring to the fight. Where the other rebels begin the story with barely any supernatural power, you’re an old hand in this war (even if it was on the opposing side) – you start with between one and three void advances, and can take Shadow Moves from any other playbook. On top of that, you have three to five vassal moves – powerful replacements for the standard city-side moves. Maybe you don’t find information with Rebel Eyes, but instead Invade Privacy – forcing someone to tell you everything they know even as it hurts them. Or maybe you don’t Pass Beneath Notice because you’re Shameless, trusting that your reputation will protect you from the consequences of being seen. 

Each time you use one of these moves, though, it leaves a mark on your soul – a Stain that functions as a sixth stress gauge. At low levels it’s manageable, but as it accumulates it can trigger a lapse as you drift back towards the vassal mindset. Enough lapses and you’ll have nothing but vassal moves to lean on, eventually changing sides once more to serve the castle. On the other side of the coin, there’s penance marks - things you can do during the investigation to shed the vassal mindset. Treasure others, confront your past crimes and divest yourself of stolen power and you’ll gradually find yourself shredding vassal moves and eventually shift playbooks to be a full rebel.

So! We’ve covered the perennial outsiders, and the void’s progeny. Next week we’ll go into those rebels most concerned with actually building a movement in the city: the charismatic Icon, the compassionate Provider, and the canny Authority.