Hi everyone! Just started my first campaign of Band of Blades and we picked Shreya as our Chosen. We had a bit of confusion about the phrasing of her Book of Hours ability though. Here’s the text of her ability:
All Specialists start with two extra ranks of actions.
And here’s the additional explanation in the book:
These ranks are assigned during creation when you assign the rest of the
action ranks of your character. You may assign both ranks into the same
action, as long as you do not go over the maximum starting rank of a skill.
This applies to any Specialists you may pick up along the road as well (do
this when you first set up their playbooks). Shreya teaches lessons from her
many battles, and skills remembered from previous Chosen incarnations
and her human life as a general.
So the question is: does this ability apply to when you promote a character to become a Specialist. The phrasing of “Specialists you may pick up along the road” implies that it applies to Specialists gained as mission rewards, but maybe not to promotions. But that seems both strangely limited from a gameplay perspective and a bit inconsistent with the fiction of Shreya training the Legion.
Any thoughts? We already settled on a ruling, so it’s not super important, but I was curious for other opinions.
I personally would say Book of Hours applies when a character is promoted to a specialist. When a Soldier gets promoted, it seems like a new playbook is created, which to me sounds like a new Specialist is “started”.
Fictionally, I could see Shreya relaying the lessons and remembered skills to new Specialists because she has a very strategic, military-focused approach. It seems like she would consider Specialists as vitally important to carrying out her plans and therefore it’s important to her to give them extra training.
The vibe I get from her is that “rank and file” Rookies or Soldiers are a little more like tools needed to implement her strategy and a bit more expendable. The way I would frame it, Shreya doesn’t share the benefits of Book of Hours with non-Specialists because she doesn’t consider it to be an efficient use of her time.
I agree that this is a reasonable interpretation of the text, but I"m not sure that it’s clear cut. And it just seems so weird to me that it would apply at creation, and to Specialists gained as rewards, but not to promotions.