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Based on the Apocalypse World engine, Night Witches is a game about the airwomen of the historical 588th Night Bombers, an all-female regiment of the Red Army in WW2. By night, you'll be flying slow, rickety biplanes to harass Nazi positions; by day, trying to deal with life in the Soviet military without getting dragged off by the secret police.

Fair warning 1: Night Witches is very definitely designed for campaign play. I want to speed things up a bit by having people prepare characters beforehand; I can talk you through it and provide character sheets if you don't have the book. I've played the recommended one-shot scenario a few times too many, so I think I'm just going to start y'all out as fresh-faced recruits in flight school.

Fair warning 2: Night Witches is a game about surviving in - or, more likely, being crushed by - a deeply hostile world that puts unreasonable demands on you. Institutional sexism is a major part of that. This is a game about awesome women kicking ass, but it's also a game about getting ground under the patriarchy's heel.

Sara and I will take two of those slots! w00t.

Let us know any time about characters; we do not have the book.

Woo! It'll be good to see you.

Ooooo! I'd like to take one of those slots please! I haven't yet had a chance to play Night Witches, but have GREAT enthusiasm to do so.

I've got the book. Anything special I need to know about creating a character?

Good to have you on board!

Nothing special. Just go through the normal character-creation process and stop before the asking-one-another questions stage. Don't take any Advances.

The obvious thing about pre-making characters is that you have time to do some research if you feel like it. This is particularly useful if you want to make characters whose ethnicity is something other than the Russian default - that's the main thing I've seen people struggle with in pick-up games.

Once you know what your Nature and Role is, post here so that other players can see what we've already got. Not that there's anything wrong with having two Ravens or two Leaders - it's not as though we're going to get in trouble because nobody wanted to be the cleric and now we can't heal - but it helps for personality differentiation. (Also, a game with three Hawks, two Adventurers and two Leaders is likely to feel very different from a game with three Sparrows, two Misanthropes and two Dreamers, and if that sort of thing happens it'd help for me to know in advance.)

So far we have a Hawk / Protector and a Sparrow / Adventurer, if that helps anyone.

I'm interested! I've played other PbtA games but never Night Witches, so I'll try to track down the book and do some chargen in the next couple weeks.

JustusGS wrote:I'm interested! I've played other PbtA games but never Night Witches, so I'll try to track down the book and do some chargen in the next couple weeks.

Is this a Maybe or a Yes?

That's a yes!

I did some web searching, and found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noor_Inayat_Khan, whose life I am cribbing from. Same original story, except her family didn't move out of Russia before WWI, though some of them probably have since then. She still believes, as she was quoted there, "I wish some Indians would win high military distinction in this war. If one or two could do something in the Allied service which was very brave and which everybody admired it would help to make a bridge between the English people and the Indians."

Nature: Sparrow

Rank: Sergeant, 0 Skill, 2 Guts, -1 Luck.

Look&Background: Female, ill-fitting uniform, beautiful, expressive eyes, home town (St. Petersburg, if that's OK, otherwise I can have her moved since her birth to Moscow). Given her real-life counterpart's background, I would pick that she writes to her baby brother Hidayat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidayat_Inayat_Khan); if I have to pick from this list instead, I'll go with 'herself'.

Role: Adventurer