Welcome to Capes in the Dark 1.0!

Since the last update, there’s been lot’s of playtesting and lots of changes. A huge shoutout to all of my playtesters for helping me figure all this out!

The Setting

Capes now has a setting built into the document! The setting here gives you the ability to play in a fictional city called Point Peninsula, filled with 12 different teams all vying for power, and 36 different locations. If you want to get started playing ASAP, feel free to use this setting for your game: details around the characters and locations are left vague for you to fill in however matches your specific game. But, this whole setting is optional, and there are guidelines for creating your own setting if that’s something you want to do.

Non-Team Forces

Additional rules have been added for forces in the setting that are not teams but interact on the faction level. These are abstract enough to handle everything from a mundane police force to a group of demons attempting to invade the setting. Each force has a list of narrative descriptors that function both as a “health bar” and an explication of the powers afforded to each force. These are meant to be optionally added on to a setting if the game requires it, so feel free to use these if you see an opportunity in your game!

Allies and Rivals

Allies and Rivals are a really important facet of Capes. While the Rival system worked pretty well for the prior release, the rules around Allies were admittedly lacking. Now, you can track favors with allies, utilize random tables to prompt favors that an ally might ask of the player. Additionally, the abilities for rivals to act during the player downtime was expanded by giving each rival a collection of “tokens” to spend on various actions.

Public Appearance Rework

The Public Appearance downtime action was balanced in a way that made it incorrect to ever pursue. After a rework, making a Public Appearance allows you to adjust your team’s Esteem but also progresses a connection clock with the populace of the setting.

New Rules for PVP

Narrative games like Capes (and most other things in the PbtA lineage) don’t tend to handle player versus player combat well. To address situations where conflict arises between players characters, I added a Firebrands style minigame (in the same vein as the Faction Turn Minigames) so that player characters can fight without resorting to debating relative power strengths (though you could still do that if you want).

Conclusion

There were also a bunch of other small changes. Wording updates, clarifications, expansions, etc. Feel free to read the document to see how everything’s updated! I’m calling this the version 1.0 release because I wasn’t doing a good job of version tracking. So! We’re calling it here: this is version 1.0, and we’ll see where Capes looks as playtesting continues. Thanks so much for reading and playing!