Hey, everyone.
A couple months back, I discovered Powered by the Dark, a series of pbta hacks for Word of Darkness written by Holden Shearer. It got me really excited to play Mage for the first time, since I love the magic system and the setting in general, but never liked the rules.
I find it curious it’s not discussed more, specially considering the scope of the work. Has anyone here ever played those? What do you think about the hacks?
I don’t like to be negative, but they’re quite difficult to read, the moves are all flat blocks of text. The usual move layout format makes them dramatically more readable and easy to use. Also the playbooks are extremely spartan and user unfriendly. It’s making it very difficult to get traction reading the system.
I kinda feel these are more “mechanics conversions” than a usual PbtA hack. I find PbtA stuff tends to try to distill stuff more into the essence of the experience you’re trying to provide, whereas I feel these would play pretty much just like Trad WoD with a different resolution mechanic.
If I were inclined to play World of Darkness with a PbtA system I personally would reach for the massive World of Darkness supplement to Urban Shadows:
PbtA G+ Archives - John Layton and Tommy Rayburn’s massive WOD Supplement
It does cover all the major splats, though it switches between WoD and CofD. While I haven’t read both, it appears to be more a translation into PbtA than Holden’s approach, which I felt like does the bare minimum to slap some PbtA’ish mechanics over the existing texts & mechanics.