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Oops all Flying Circus 1.3


Right yes completely forgot. It's been up for a while now, but there final PDF version of the game, 1.3, is now on Itch and you can play it!

Here's the changelog!


Core Mechanical Changes

  • Dogfight! has had a new section added which gives NPC aircraft a reason to attack from above or dive to escape the PCs. No more taking a triplane and fighting level for your whole career!
  • NPCs now have a simplified set of Vital Parts and consequences for being hit in them, which should simplify running them for the GM and increase consistency for players.
  • You can no longer hit choose to target guns with your crits unless you’re in that weapon’s firing arc, which makes it harder to simply knock NPCs out of the fight without doing anything dangerous.
  • Changed Long Haul to prevent eternal boring rerolling: it has a distinct sense of progression now.
  • Vice rules have been revised in accordance with feedback: they’ll slow the game down a lot less now, and players are now much more incentivized to pick up each other’s Vices and stick together for the pub crawl.
  • The Mastery passives no longer require a bunch of bullshit math, but are instead simple, fixed buffs to attack.
  • Engines now take a fixed 1d5 Wear when struck by attacks, which means you can no longer just use your engine as a repository for all the crits you don’t want.
  • The effects of Stability and the way Recover works is different now. Your stability is more a measure of how bad your spin is than how easy it is to avoid (ie: how long it takes to recover), and the spins are more consistent in effect, which is both more interesting in gameplay and more in line with our experiences in flight sims.
    • In other words, do not fly low. You will regret it now.
  • Power changes with altitude has been simplified and standardized to match the actual abilities of the aircraft in the game. 
    • Introduced the concept of Power Reduction to clean up the math.
    • You no longer need a degree in mathomatry to ascend above 9500 feet.
  • Patch Fix has been rewritten to be more exciting, dynamic, and risky.
  • Added clarification for boarding actions to Wingwalk. Not only are there now rules for how to do it, but it’s been made properly scary.
  • Negotiate is a 2d10 roll again, which makes the math more consistent and lets you weigh the odds better.
    • Fixers have had their bonus adjusted to match.
  • Evade Danger has been tweaked: it now is much clearer how it works, and how it interacts with melee attacks from NPCs.

Weapons

  • Self Loading Rifle made Unreliable on the ground
  • The HRC has been made slightly less murdery.
  • The SMG (air use) has been nerfed. They now carry half the ammo and take -3 past Knife range.
  • Scatterguns now do only 3 Shot Dice at Knife, which should tone down some of the really silly scattergun-based builds. They also cannot use Special Ammo or Masteries: they are dead simple weapons and should be treated that way.
  • Clarification of Precision Rifles and Damage-adding ammunition.
  • Total rewrite of Mechanical Action guns which makes them very high risk, high reward, which will make them more distinct from upcoming Rotary Action guns and plays more into existing gameplay loops instead of just making them alternate sync gears.
  • Pneumatic weapons can’t fire if the engine stops.
  • Heat Ray adjustment. Now uses Charges equal to weapon cost, only crits crew on a natural 20 as per other weapons. AP drops by 1.
  • Some improvements to air-to-air rocket effects for rocket types, and you now add +Hard!

Playbooks

Believer

  • Believer tweaks for better tonal integration and to make the class feel less adversarial.
    • This includes tweaks to the cover move, intimacy move, and replacement of Lie Detector with a new move that’s more introspective.
    • A whole new set of Convictions makes it clearer what tone the Believer is aiming for and should make them a lot friendlier to have in your game.
  • Adjustments to Idealist have given the Believer a full narrative arc: you can eventually learn to settle comfortably into beliefs you find empowering and affirming. It’ll take some work though.
  • Their Intimacy Move has been overhauled to not feel like self-sabotage.

Farmer

  • The Farmer can only use It’s Working once per routine. No making all your planes free!
  • You now suffer tunnel vision when you use use One in a Million, which means you have to be a little more selective about when and how you use it.

Witch

  • Magic has had a slight rule tweak: the negative consequences of a failed spell are now laid out before the spell is cast. This has a hugely positive effect on the game, as leveling appropriately proportional penalties for huge spells no longer feels like a cruel surprise.
  • Witch’s broom has a stall speed of 0, and this is now explicit. There was also some stat clarification and slight nerf to the Boost.
  • The Witch can now put their Wild to work with Woods-Wise to explore.
  • Some clarification for the selection of Focuses in the commentary of the Witch’s Bonded move, which should lead to more narrative meaning and less grabbing random things and making them focuses in the heat of the moment.
  • Casting with blood now properly affects the Focus and not just yourself.

Fisher

  • Fisher moves have some language clarifications and refinements. No more human sacrifices!

Worker

  • It’s now a heck of a lot clearer what There For You does, and it’s become a lot better as a result.

Student

  • Clarifications in the Stress triggers.

Skyborn

  • Additions to the Swashbuckle and Free as a Bird mechanics allow the Skyborn to still be a wingsuit-using, aircraft-boarding dashing rogue even in light of the harsher boarding rules.

Survivor

  • The move Of Two Minds has had its effects on Advancement rebalanced.

Aircraft

  • Complete rebalancing of all aircraft. Almost everything had changes, so this is just the highlights. Most noticeably, a lot more fighters have Turn Bleed 1 where they once had Turn Bleed 2.
  • There’s been overhauls to the plane builder. You can now assign weapons and functions to crew positions instead of just having to guess, plus a bunch of tweaks for building Storm Divers planes. Finally, the builder will now tell you when you use parts which aren’t from the appropriate Era you’re building in!
  • The Living Grove is now a much more effective fighter.
  • The Braun Model VJ is now as blindingly fast as it always deserved to be.
  • The KW-S4 is vastly improved, and comes in energy fighter and turn fighter versions.
  • The Bahadur has finally settled on a final gun configuration.
  • Sitting in the front seat of the MIG J-83 is now the death sentence it was always meant to be, but at least you can see out better.
  • The von Morgen Vampyr is way better: turns out the original had a problem where there were still wires on its wings for no reason.
  • The Volksfestung and Mammut both have internal bomb bays now.
  •  The L&L Kessel IIb has a bit more firepower now. Still very slow.

Small Stuff

  • An automatic glossary has been added, so you can easily jump around the PDF for specific things.
  • Added some clarifications to how to use the fill the air will bullets GM move.
  • Rewrote the air monster profiles to use multiple speed values, like the ones in Horror of the Heights, in order to cut down bookkeeping.
  • Clarified Jam mechanics when firing multiple weapons.
  • Aircraft now have increased Turn Bleed while carrying bombs (Page 46).
  • Added support for engines being used as electrical generators.
  • Structure crits can only be chosen by the target, never the shooter.
  • Trained Gremlins interact with the new Patch Fix in a hilarious way.
  • Clarified move exchanges interaction with Stress.
  • The Ambush Predator mastery has been nerfed. Finally.
  • The way Copilots and Bombardiers work has been adjusted to make more sense and to work at all under the rules.

Non-Gameplay Changes

  • The reference sheets now cover ground moves!
  • Typo Hunting! We caught an unbelievable amount of typos. At least a billion.
  • Clarification hunting! A bunch of unclear rules were clarified in substantial ways.

Files

FlyingCircus_V1_3_Airplanes.pdf 14 MB
Mar 15, 2021
FlyingCircus_V1_3_Cards.pdf 417 kB
Mar 15, 2021
FlyingCircus_V1_3_CoreBook.pdf 74 MB
Mar 15, 2021
FlyingCircus_V1_3_Playbooks.pdf 2 MB
Mar 15, 2021

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