no dice rpg - core book

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The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the author, nor be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

No DiceThe Core Book

by

Leo Stableford & Suzanne Jordan

Illustrated by Justin Wyatt

Leo's Dedication

It is only fitting that my dedication should be to Ian, who entertained many hours of conversation about plots, writing, entertainment and culture and has

been unfortunate, or fortunate, enough to miss the birth of No Dice first hand. I hope he'll spread the good word down under.

Justin's Dedication

For my Mum and Dad for their continual support and encouragement. Without my father`s artistic genes, none of this would be possible.

And for Damian, Glen, Mark and Simon, my original gaming buddies - the reason I am still gaming today.

Sue's Dedication

This one is for my kids, Abby and Jasmine.

A Brief Note About The Free PDF

In case you weren't aware the No Dice Core Book is now, and will always be, available as a freely downloadable PDF. Not only is it freely downloadable it's freely distributable, freely copyable, freely say-how-cool-it-is-and-recommend- others-download-it-or-get-a-copy-from-you-able.

We wrote this book because we believe that Role Playing is the best hobby in the world. It brings people together, it lights up their imagination, it gives them a little taste of abilities they can't really have, it allows them to succeed in deeds of heroism people rarely have a chance to perform. We also think that it should be an affordable hobby.

But we can only live up to our own standards if those people who are interested in the product and who like the product tell other people about it, involve them, and get No Dice out there being played in game groups. We want to give you the tools to play great games and, further, to make your own great games too.

So if you liked the PDF, if you bought the book, please get other people involved. Even if you know they're going to look at the PDF and no more. We're going to go on the record and say we don't care about piracy. If you're that much of a douche that you're going to enjoy our stuff while not actually rewarding us for our work then go ahead. We're not going to lose sleep over those people and we don't consider their patronage to be worth much of anything.

What we do need is for the large majority of our audience who are honest and support our mission to hear about it and buy our product. Then everyone will be a winner.

Thanks for reading,

Leo, Sue & JustinThe No Dice Team

Table Of ContentsPreface 1

Introduction 5

No Dice Games 18

Player's Guide 22

Characters 27

Host's Guide 37

The Vanilla System 62

Stats 66

Randomisers 79

Plots 87

Non Player Characters (NPCs) 116

Scenarios 122

Traveller's Rest 123

Revelation Point 142

Treasure Of The Caesars 164

Supplement: The Thirty Six Dramatic Situations For Players 193

Supplement: The Thirty Six Dramatic Situations For Hosts 217

♦ No Dice - Core Rulebook ♠

Preface

This core book seeks to cater for people who may previously have had no interest in Role Playing Games. Because of this, more experienced gamers may be tempted to skip sections to get to the good stuff (leaving all the noobs to wonder what counts as "the good stuff").

The problem with this is that the core book isn't just a repository for rules. I'm going to try to convey an approach to gaming that, while it is not new, has never really been written down. If we were going to get intellectual about this I would say that No Dice is an RPG that is also a philosophy regarding RPGs.

This isn't meant to be an intellectual burden so we'll leave it at that.

Meet The Author(And Some Thank Yous)

If I were you I might *not* be thinking: just who the hell are you to be telling me how to Role Play? If you are, wow, aggressive! Even if I didn't have anger management issues, I might wonder where all this new stuff is coming from.

I've read a bunch of role playing manuals. I love role playing manuals, particularly the ones that describe worlds and settings and characters; rules-heavy ones not so much, as you shall learn. I would rather read such a manual than any other type of book. Once I have read and taken in the manuals I tend to file them away, forget most of the rules and wonder whether anyone wants to play a game with that setting.

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♣ Pure Role Playing ♥

Not that things were always this way.

When I was getting towards nine years of age in the early eighties Dungeons & Dragons was just starting to show up on the radar as a hobby in the UK. Through various means I got hold of the rule books and the old style polyhedral dice that you had to colour in with a white crayon. I also looked at other systems like the old Middle Earth Role Playing game, Paranoia and minor paperback role playing games like Maelstrom and Monster Horrorshow.

If you asked me now about the rules to any of these games I wouldn't actually

be able to tell you much. The Monster Horrorshow used a mechanic called "The Absolutely Anything Table" which, well, you can probably guess what it did.

Back then I was desperate to play one of these games but I couldn't find a group. Whenever I did find a group all they wanted to do was roll dice and move pieces around on maps. That wasn't the type of experience I wanted. I wanted to be a participant in a story. I wanted to play a role.

I know what you're thinking, and I did. I studied acting, I went to acting school but I didn't just do acting because at heart I wasn't an actor. I studied Drama & Education which teaches you a lot about improvisation and rolling with the punches. My study there wasn't meant to prepare me to teach drama or to educate actors. It was all about how to present a narrative illusion, techniques to help normal people engage in this kind of play for their entertainment.

And it didn't stop there.

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I actually went to college to study media and made a few films but I'm not a film maker either. I've written novels, and will write more, but I'm not strictly speaking a novelist. I've designed out computer games (I am a programmer by day) but I don't want to make a computer game.

I am a role player, a story teller, someone who wanted to share a fiction game with the world. Those friends of mine who enjoy this pursuit number among them some people who would take an opportunity to role play like this before considering any other way of spending time.

Some of these friends have helped me enormously in the development of this very game. One of them is my wonderful partner, a woman who wouldn't play Dungeons & Dragons unless you paid her a hefty sum. She is the one that proved to me Role Playing as a hobby could have a broader appeal than it currently does. So in a way this book is kind of her fault.

As a team all at No Dice need to thank John, Matt, Owen and Ben who have

played a bunch of No Dice. In its earlier days we also played some much clunkier versions (back when there were some dice) with Mike, Nick, Kath, Dave, Kenton, Clive and a bunch of others. Special mentions go to JC; whose game weekends gave us a first crop of willing testers; and super story-based GM Alex who, while he has never partaken in early No Dice, has a healthy disrespect for crunch getting in the way of a role playing session (even so the running time of his games are legendary but only because of their epic sweep).

Finally thanks go to all of the players who've helped to test the system, offered help, suggestions, feedback, food and drink throughout the process, Justin, Sue and myself are all glad to know you.

These happy few would rather role play than watch a movie, they would rather role play than go out to a restaurant, or bungee jump, or engage in any other activity or distraction. These folk will roll a dice and play a board game but will freely admit they'd rather be role playing, with an

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emphasis on the "role". The game that my closest friends and I have been looking for has fewer rules than most other games. It helps the players play their character in situations as diverse as fighting, to finding the dirt on a politician, to having tea with the Queen. It introduces people to strange worlds filled with compelling detail. It would be a game that would be a head on collision between the imagination required to read a book and the freedom of thought allowed in a great movie.

The world didn't have that kind of game exactly, many near misses but the cigar has gone unclaimed. So I'm taking my shot at inventing one. Not to say I haven't played in exactly the kinds of game I enjoy taking part in

but such games have never been formalised. Usually a story game is another kind of game that has been altered or "hacked" to make it rules-lite. We all turn up, clutching our dice bags and we play the game the way we want to play it. Everyone rolls their dice a few times though, in supplication to the gods of role playing who demand such things.

On With The Show

No Dice is the product of a history in love with role playing, movies, acting, writing and, most of all, great stories. We all hope you enjoy trying to tune in to No Dice and wish you exciting and engaging adventures with your players. Let's learn about the No Dice way of doing things, shall we?

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Introduction

Welcome to a very different role playing experience.

No Dice is not just a new role playing game, it's a new type of role playing game. This book contains everything you will need to run a No Dice game (except maybe a pack of playing cards, but you can do without one in a pinch). The advice in this book will guide you from the point where all you have is thin air right through to the point everyone's asking where to get hold of a copy of this awesome game.

The game is a Role Playing Game (AKA RPG) but if you're expecting wizards, goblins and trolls then you might be in for a surprise. This game is about whatever you want it to be about. It doesn't require swathes of free time as a satisfactory No Dice adventure could happen over an afternoon or an evening.Each game will consist of a group of

players and someone to chair the adventure, this person has the role of Host. If it is you Hosting a game then you will be in charge of introducing your players to new worlds, strange characters and dramatic situations. If No Dice was a board game the players would be the pieces and the Host would be everything else, the board, the chance cards, the fake money and, er, the dice, except there are no dice, remember?

Anyway...

Whereas each player in the game will be in charge of their character the Host is in charge of the rest of the game world. The Host is there to cater to the expectations the players have for their experience. That doesn't mean the players will get everything the way they want for their characters, rather it means the players will trust you to be impartial. Being the Host is something

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of a responsibility but don't worry, with a little coaching I know you'll be fine.

When the experienced role players see the next subtitle they may be tempted to look for the exit from this part of the show. I know it's tempting to leave the inexperienced behind to see Roleplaying 101 by themselves. To those people, have a read, it might explain a few things about the rest of the book to you that will help you decide if you're still interested or not.

Roleplaying 101

These days most game designers seem to assume that their readers will just know what role playing is and where it came from. I designed this game, with the help of my wonderful testing elves, to be an RPG with a more broad based appeal. Because of this I'm going back and reviewing where Role Playing has come from so that the past can form a basis for moving forward.

I wanted No Dice to offer an alternative to some of the routes the

traditional hobby has taken. I think I can offer some solutions to some of the problems current systems have but I can't really describe any solutions without describing some of the problems. That's where a little crash course in Role Playing history comes in.

The thing is, you're probably at more of an advantage with No Dice if you don't know exactly what role playing is, or historically has been. A long time gamer might be tempted to draw a line between a murder mystery party and a good old hack and slash slice of Dungeons & Dragons. A heavy line, in ultra bold permanent marker, that shows the workmen where to put the huge brick wall.

Trust me the murder mystery party enthusiasts are busy drawing that same line. I would imagine neither side realise that the line connects them rather than separating them. See, it turns out they've drawn it the wrong way. They should be standing at either end of it not on either side of it. It isn't really a line, more a scale.

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Your "hardcore" roleplayer has a name for a murder mystery party and that name is LARP, this is an acronym for "Live Action Roleplay". I think that people who enjoy a murder mystery dinner party not only have no idea they are role playing but might deny the fact if it came up in conversation.

Just to muddy the waters even further there are another group of people, known to role players but not murder mystery evening organisers, called LARPers who are the ambassadors for the concrete hobby of LARPing. They're the ones standing very close to the wall on the role playing side.There tend to be two main subclasses of LARPer: Vampire LARPers and Fantasy Combat LARPers, although there are many more sub genres. Vampire LARPs tend towards the Role Playing end of the scale and Fantasy Combat LARPs... well...

You see, there are these dudes called reenactors, groups like The Sealed Knot get together and, well, reenact historical events. Is this role playing? On our imaginary scale with the

legendary Brick Wall of Role Playing halfway along they stand behind the Murder Mystery party mob looking off towards the even more remote world of acting.

Well, now we're getting into a whole new area of confusion. See, if you are reenacting a battle you know ahead of time whether you're destined to be covered in mud, blood and glory or reviled as the infamous losers of history.

Similarly, if you find yourself in the

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shoes of King Duncan in Macbeth, probably best to cancel any long term plans. Also, there's no room for witty ad libs in an interpretation of the bard. But role playing is not acting. Knowing who's going to win ahead of time doesn't make you a reenactor any more than it makes you a professional wrestler (actually they only find out during the match who's supposed to win, but this is a detail).

The fact is, if you ask the question “what is roleplaying?” then unless you have blinkers on the number of things that could satisfy the requirement is huge. If you then go on to ask who participates then I would guess roughly a third of humanity consciously participates in some form of role playing and the other two thirds... well, daydreaming you're a rock star is role playing of a sort...

So, now that I've thoroughly confused you as to the nature of what I'm about to ask you to do let me clarify. When I talk about role playing I am talking about a group of people coming together to participate in an act of

communal storytelling. The exact nature of this meeting has many similarities (and sometimes directly correlates with) the hobby known as table top role playing, with the bonus that by default the top of no table is actually necessary during No Dice. You can probably tell that this is the effect of having No Dice, the tops of tables being excellent locations for the rolling of platonic solids covered in numbers.

I want to be quite plain on one thing, this game is about the story. Many similar games are about, well, fighting really and if you like your stories to be about fighting then those are the games for you; actually, this could be the game for you too, there's no prohibition on fighting in a No Dice game but it's just one of a number of No Dice options.

If you would like a story that might possibly be about something other than fighting then you're definitely in the right place. This book will have an air of familiarity to the traditional table top role player but although they'll recognise the places they may not agree

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with the décor.

No Dice is an option, not a prescription, not a lifestyle choice and not a panacea for all ills. It's just something a bit different that attempts to give a context to a richer experience for people who have role played before and a new and exciting experience for those who haven't.

Before we get down to it, though, maybe I should draw the line between the old style RPG and this weirdo upstart in some greater detail, just so we all know where we stand.

Where Role Playing Came From

Table top role playing was born in the form of one Gary Gygax on July 27 1938. Not that anyone knew that role playing had been born at that time in the form of that individual. Not even Mr Gygax himself was aware of the bizarrely world altering destiny that awaited him.

By the time Gygax was fifteen he had begun playing miniature based war games. These games are still played

today and, as LARPs are the result of taking much of the number crunching, dice and table tops out of role playing, so wargames are what you do with what you took out to make the LARP.

Wargames live on rules. They attempt to simulate a theatre of war and a battle between sides and emphasise tactics and precision statistic measuring to model war situations. Gygax loved this hobby and in his early twenties set up an International Federation of Wargamers and began to write rules for simulating medieval combat, this being a particular hobby of his.

Wargamers love accuracy, they love history, they love statistics, they love... well they love wargaming. Dice are perfect as measurement tools for statistics in a wargame because there's no arguing with the results. You roll two ten sided dice and you will get a percentage readout that is exact. Dice are a number cruncher's paradise.

In the 70s Gygax with a couple of business partners set up Tactical Studies Rules (Later TSR Inc.) which was the company that was to produce the first

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known Role Playing Game, Dungeons & Dragons. The formula of Dungeons & Dragons is straightforward and easily described. It's like a wargame except each player, rather than having an army has an individual character, each character is an adventurer who wanders into a "Dungeon" (or enchanted forest, weird cave, strange castle etc.) to hunt for treasure and "Dragons" (or orcs, or dark elves, or mountain lions, or vorpal bunnies etc.).

The monsters guard the treasure and the treasure helps you buy new stuff which is better at killing the monsters. This means the character can wander into more dangerous settings facing more exotic beasts and collecting greater treasure. There was also a second currency in D&D known as "Experience". Your character was represented by a number of statistics and as you defeated more monsters and solved puzzles and evaded traps you gained experience points. These points would upgrade your character's very being with awesomeness that also helped in the bigger dungeons with the

more exotic monsters.

D&D is still played today, it is enormously popular (although much complained about). Gygax went on to a career of falling out with people who he let onto his D&D gravy train; getting death threats from people who wanted to blame his world of fantasy for their poor parenting skills; and tweaking out his original idea in various ways which sometimes escaped legal proceedings from his former colleagues and sometimes didn't.

Everything you read in this book only exists because of this arcane and maths heavy quasi-wargame that owed more than a little to the imaginings of JRR Tolkien. If it hadn't been for Gygax no one would even know what role playing was, it may not even have become a term for excruciating business simulation training exercises or seedy activities involving leather and whips.

There's something about the phrase that appeals to our psyche, even if the idea of Dungeons & Dragons isn't our

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cup of tea, "role playing"... well, "role playing" sounds fun. Sure, it sounds fun. It sounded fun to me when I was a boy, but wow there were a lot of rules, and I never liked maths and Conan was not my reading material of choice.

You know what I used to love?

Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure books. I used to love the idea that I was, indeed, choosing my own adventure. These books were a fad, now amply satisfied in the realms of computer games. But if you chose to assume you won all the fights and just enjoyed the story they were the prototype for No Dice, particularly Choose Your Own Adventure.

Weirdly, Fighting Fantasy spawned a D&D style role playing game, why? Because unlike CYOA Fighting Fantasy had, well, fighting in it and as everyone has known right up until today table top roleplaying is about fighting. Oh, and let's not forget the dice! Sure just a few 6 sided ones, not even enough to make it look like a proper RPG but more than Choose Your Own Adventure for sure. And of course lots

and lots of wonderful dice is exactly what Role Playing Games are all about, the more sides, the better.

Sigh.

You see, here is the problem at the heart of the current hobby. Some of the people who were attracted to RPGs by the use of the phrase "Role Playing" became somewhat disgruntled with the lack of opportunity to, well, play roles. I include myself in this number.

I, along with these others were unhappy with the idea that "Growth and Development" seemed to mean "Improved ability to slaughter things". We wanted to go a bit further. We wanted to actually explore a character, with a history, and their own agenda. We wanted to walk a mile in another man's shoes. We, well, we wanted to play some roles.

When people first began putting the role into role play they had to contend with a subculture entirely consisting of D&D players. This old guard were perfectly happy navigating their dwarven fighter through the Caverns

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of Thrung to face a final confrontation with the Death Hydra Lich of Upper Tooting. As D&D spawned in the fields of the wargamer they couldn't see a reason why a character might be more than a killing machine or what experience could be used for if it wasn't for defeating the enemy.

Thus it was that early breakaways used words like "diceless" and "story based" like bombs to cause an intellectual guerilla war on the idea that violence was all role playing could describe. Systems that dealt with the issue of basing a game around factors other than wholesale slaughter in different ways with varying degrees of success.

Some just suggested that you, you know, get out of the dungeon and go to a few parties and stuff before ladling on a heavy dose of the "this is the combat system" which took up a third of the book. Others suggested that combat be short-handed and that there were plenty of other military situations which might be explored. In all cases there is some element of the player vs. force x. Actually, this isn't quite true.

There are a few, very few, fringe games that do attempt to do something entirely different.

This genuinely pioneering minority of games are now circulated in a kind of cellar dweller underground of story-obsessed gamers. Essentially the core of the hobby, historically, has been that if you want to make money then you have to provide combat, maps, miniatures all that jazz.

I have yet to encounter a roleplaying game that does not give a disproportionate amount of time over to what happens if your player gets involved in some sort of a ruck. The amount of time spent describing, the enemy, the weapons, the personnel is always disproportionate to the amount of time spent describing, the character, the role, the freedom of expression.

Game designers seem unable to let go of the crutch of combat (a device used by an injured hero to defeat the Giant Bacteria of Gularb...).So What's The Big Problem?

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I don't believe that there's no market for a game that favours storytelling over slaughter. Hell, if you're reading this you are at least alive to the possibility that role playing may have more to offer. Many people in the world would disagree. So, the question that's begging to be asked is: Why?

The answer to this is both complicated and simple. Here's the simple bit, if you think about these issues a little then you'll probably uncover the complicated part about it.

1) Role playing involves spending your free time

I am a very lucky man. When I started role playing properly I joined a group of people who could be adaptable, who gamed in big lumps once a month instead of small lumps every week and could cope with someone not being able to make the odd session. Hence I didn't get guilted into spending time when I really wanted to be doing something else instead of role playing and, besides, the demands on my time weren't outrageous to begin with.

This is not the case for many role players. The traditional model of role playing sets out that one should role play with a regular group once a week and that although you may skip from adventure to adventure or even system to system you should be doing so for the foreseeable, no time off for good behaviour.

This means that the vast majority of people simply don't have time to role play even if they wanted to. I only discovered this when I tried to set up my group and everyone was haggling over the fact that Tuesdays were out and Thursdays were optimum. The notion of taking *gasp* one Saturday every 4-6 weeks hadn't occurred to anyone. As it happens some of the group have gone on to feed the monkey every week in a separate adventure but a few still maintain the once a month rule. This is good and provides a variety for the hardcore addicts.

2) You are expected to maintain a consistent alter ego

A lot of role playing rewards play with character based bonuses that help a

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character evolve over time. These days everyone's quite familiar with the concept of having an alter ego from the world of online social networking but for the longest time it's been seen as something a little bit... dirty. There's also the question of what happens if you only want to take on a role for the evening.

3) Role playing makes copious use of dice and some maths

I can count the number of role playing games I know of that don't use any dice (that I didn't invent) on the fingers of one hand. The point is that everyone feels comfortable when there's some concrete arbitration to help mitigate the tough breaks your character may experience in a story.

The only problem with this is that the more dice and numbers are involved in this process the more "tough break" is equivalent to "honkin' great monster". There simply aren't the numbers to deal with "your brother just got eaten before you had (quantifiable) time to do much of anything". Role playing

games that deal with unquantifiable data are fine, but you have to accept that you won't need dice, or a sheet of numbers. You might just need you.

Why No Dice Is Different

I bought a second hand game book not so long ago that described a game in which, once we started playing, we discovered many of the numbers were just a distraction. After a while the character sheets were left behind unused and unloved. People kept track of their characters by being their characters. We used a simple arbitration device for matters of chance, a deck of cards, and we never missed either the dice or the sheets.

The role playing game itself evolved away from the sourcebook I had bought and is now a No Dice creation of its own. One day you too may experience the wonder of this world, but the core of No Dice is about you and your players and having your own adventures in your own worlds. In these worlds you may encounter honkin' great monsters or you may

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encounter tricky moral dilemmas or you may solve crimes by solving fiendish riddles. The choice in No Dice is entirely up to you.

This book is a support and a sourcebook for ideas. There will be more detailed No Dice variants available to play a particular game in the No Dice mould but the idea is that you get creative and that is what this book aims to support you in. I don't just mean in creating a world, although I will certainly be helping you with that, but also with the ideas of genre, conventions,

dramatic situations, plot construction.

You may get the feeling that I am reacting specifically against a certain set of ideas in the text. I hope I have explained in this introduction exactly what those ideas are. I am not excluding ideas of combat and partisan political structures but I will be according them only as much airtime as other ideas, maybe even less. I want, specifically, to cater for situations that have not hitherto been catered for.

I want you to drop the dice, move away from the table top and, if you're really getting into it now, sinking to your knees, throwing your hands up into the air and crying:

"Why? Why can't we all just... get along?"

Too soon? Okay, maybe after you've read a bit further.

Book Overview

No Dice Games - The book's going to start with a basic look at the ways in which a No Dice game should run and

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what the players and the Host should expect from the experience.

Player's Guide - A section follows for the players, this should also be read by the Host.

Characters - Essentially a player only need to know about characters, and then only if they're getting into a long term No Dice game. This section provides everything such a player could need to know from the outset.

Host's Guide - This section takes up the rest of the book. The core No Dice book is mainly for Hosts, if you want to be a player then this will just be mind numbingly tedious to read through. Give it a miss.

The Vanilla No Dice System - If you're the kind of person who's itching to skip to this section and cover yourself in lovely rules be prepared to be underwhelmed.

Stats - No Dice also has no stats, well, none by default. That doesn't mean it

won't tell you how to, er, roll your own.

Randomisers - By which we could mean dice, but we don't. Dice have been done. This is about other ways to introduce random resolution into your No Dice experience. There are some subtle hints throughout the book as to the preferred method.

Plots - No Dice has no default setting, your players could be pixies or cyborgs, humans or gods, this section will tickle your imagination centres and get you thinking about the story you'd like to Host.

Non Player Characters - As Host the cast of the entire game world is you. It is best that you are therefore prepared with notes on those characters your player is most likely to encounter. This section tells you how.

Samples - Just a push in the right direction with some little adventures that attempt to communicate some of the versatility No Dice has to offer.

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No Dice Games

The Experience

If you are a seasoned role player you may have flicked through the book and looked for the rules for No Dice. You may even have read through the "Vanilla Rules" section and figured "that can't be it". Well, I'm sorry, yeah it is. Here's the why.

I once played a role playing game based upon a popular cult SF television series. The show is one of the best regarded Science Fiction television shows of the past decade and has a rabid fan base. The rhapsodic critical appraise of just what made the show so unique and special was hyperbolic even for a field filled with hyperbole. I'll bet the people who wrote the RPG made their money back, just.

Thing is, although the crossover

audience on such a product was high; although the show's fans would love nothing better than to have adventures in the world of the show; the RPG is not that popular. Why? Well, in my opinion, it's because it doesn't feel like you're in the show when you're playing the game. It feels like you're playing one of a dozen other RPGs with a funny moustache. The major problem, as far as I could tell, was the rules.

You had six or seven attributes like Strength, Charisma, Dexterity etc. (Although obviously not those because those are D&D attributes.) You had some Life Points or whatever, you had some various themed skills and some "Drama Points" which, er, you could spend to turn tragedy to triumph and you earned by being, er, story focused, I think.

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The point is the character sheet and the things that resolved conflict didn't add to the atmosphere. As they didn't add to it, they necessarily obstructed it, hence they subtracted from it. The rules actually stopped the game feeling like the show. The GM was hindered by the things that were supposed to help them out.

The problem wasn't that the rules were complicated, or fussy, or arcane, the problem was that they were boring. There is a wild west game that has a horror twist where magic is achieved by playing a hand of poker against the GM. Well, if I might just interject, yee-haw, that's atmosphere. A+ to those game designers. It's little individual flourishes that help make a game stand out like that.

When we talk about specific No Dice games in rules supplements I'm going to offer up a whole number of themed rules to help create the atmosphere you want. But I'm not going to start out with any more than the very basic of the basics. Because the less rules I fill your head with, the more things you can think of to increase the atmosphere

in your own games. In the meanwhile the parts of the Hosting guide that deal with rules will concentrate more on getting the Host to design their own. That's the way No Dice believes it should be.

Playing

Although I'm going to describe how to play the game in more detail in the Player's Guide, and how to Host in the Host's Guide I thought it might be relevant to set you up for the experience.

If you have role-played before then a lot of what happens in a No Dice game should feel familiar. A group of people sit together, the Host chairs the story and the rest of you contribute your character's ideas and reactions. Occasionally you may need to make a test using some kind of randomiser (usually a pack of cards) to see whether your character is capable of a particular action.

In the best games I have ever played you become enthralled with the plot, involved with your character and

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engrossed in the unfolding story. Once you are done with a session you want to do it again as soon as possible. In the worst there may be some times when you want to die rather than carry on.

The hallmark difference I have noted is that bad games start to wander into the land of rules examination and number crunching. This is where I always get lost and want to fall asleep over the pile of rule books and calculators. Role play that is based on story, by contrast, may sometimes be a little slow but it's always enjoyable.

So I hope that your Host can keep the numbers, the dice and the crunch away from your table (and maybe even keep the table away from your game). No Dice is the first game that wants to help the Host do just that.

Hosting

Successful Hosting is one of the most rewarding experiences humankind has invented to date. I have written stories, and dabbled in film making, radio broadcast and a number of other creative endeavours with variable success. Nothing is so satisfying as running a good role play. For a start players will always do things that you can't predict, they will send the story spinning in unexpected directions, they will see things you missed and bring out hidden layers in the scenario. Watching players slowly get drawn in, argue, discuss, plan, and generally engage with the world and characters you have created is a fantastic feeling.

Not to say such rewards come easily. Hosts have to do a lot of work. Even if you are only planning to run a basic one off with one of the scenarios presented in the core book you will have some preparation to do. You will have to read and prepare the materials. You will have to obtain the player sheets, make sure you have cards in,

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round up a posse of players and make sure you have enough finger food in.

Being Host means you run the show but unfortunately it means you actually have to, well, run the show.

Never mind all this preamble. Let's get on with the main event. The rest of the

book is divided into two sections. A short section for players and a honking huge section for Hosts. Then there are three example scenarios and two supplements. If you are to be Hosting read all of the above. Players just need to read whichever bits of the Player's Guide and Player's Supplement are relevant to them.

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Player's Guide

So, you want to play No Dice?

Okay, so maybe it's more like you are amenable to playing No Dice and your friend begged you to take part so they could Host (whatever that means) and you figured "how bad could it be? after all they promised it wasn't Dungeons & Dragons". Well, good news. This isn't Dungeons & Dragons. Bad news, your friend may still suck at Hosting. Give them a break, they're probably new at it. Reading this could give you some ways of helping them suck less, so pay attention.

The fact they handed you this guide is a good indication that they're trying the best that they can to do the job of Host properly. If you've been to No Dice evenings that sucked in the past and no one ever gave you this guide to read, now you know.

So as a player what can you expect from a No Dice experience? It kinda depends. Are you going along for a one time hit or have you decided to dip your toes in the murky waters of the campaign and you'll see how it goes? Either way there are certain things you should expect and this guide aims to tell you what they are.

This introduction to being a No Dice player is here to prepare you for what should be one of the most fun things you've ever taken part in. If it falls short it's one of the few activities I'd suggest you try again, if you've played five No Dice games and still never had fun I'm willing to concede this game may not be for you, otherwise... well, prepare for it to invade your life, but in a good way.

You, as the player, are about to step into a new pair of shoes. You are about

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to become someone else. Other role playing games promise this but then deliver the package of someone who can pull off cool martial arts moves at the roll of 6 or better but who is still basically, well, you. No Dice is actually going to try to give you the tools to look at life a different way through a different set of eyes.

Probably there will be cool things about your character, like they really are great at martial arts or they can shoot laser beams from their eyes, but those are just added bonuses. What's really different about these people is that they have different life circumstances, tricky problems to confront and different things they want to make them happy.

It could be you're only going to play this person for one time only, and there are distinct advantages to that set up which I shall describe below. But it could be that you will be expected to craft a character who will take part in many adventures and will maybe appear to take on a life of their own.

Don't worry, you'll have help in this.

That's what the Host is for. The Host has taken on a big job. They're learning about the world your character lives in, they're learning about the dangers they face and the people who live there. They're learning history and they're learning about the present. They're learning how to describe to you the ups and downs of your character's journey, not just your character either but that of all the people playing this game of No Dice.

The Host has taken on a mighty responsibility. The responsibility of keeping a handful of people engrossed and entertained in a story that exists only on a few bits of paper and in the group's imagination. You have to do your bit to contribute but the Host is the anchor that should tie the story world together.

So it could be that they need a little help. Just remember that as you begin your adventure.

The first good sign that they know how to Host effectively is that you are reading this introduction. The second good sign will be if they have let you

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know that the game will take some time to set up. About an hour in a one off scenario, about one whole session in a longer campaign. They may also have handed you a character sheet and a short guide to some basics about the game you will be playing. If they have done all of this then the signs are they're on the right road. So the check list is:

this guide

information about the set up

extra hand outs specific to the game

If they have not handed you the other two then ask them why not. There's no reason to tie them to a chair and shine a light in their face until they crack under the pressure but there's no harm in checking out that they've not simply forgotten. Hosts have a lot to think about.

When you arrive at the game the set up should take place and then the game proper will begin. If the Host seems eager to just get on with it ask them about the set up. Let's be clear, the

game will be better if it's run properly. It might sound dull to sit around talking about the generalities of what you're about to do but in actual fact you are having a conversation about a fun shared activity you should both enjoy.

Some Hosts will worry that people don't want to talk in a one on one situation about their character. Let's be clear, you will have made this character in a campaign, let them know you are itching to talk about them. In a one off the GM will probably have given you a choice of some available characters in shorthand, you've plumped for one that sounds fun, and now you just need a little five minute clarification to know what kinds of things are on your mind as the game begins.

All this stuff is designed to give you and the Host a flying start to this adventure. If you don't do it you might find that after a brief period in which things seem to be a little slow you will warm up to it. But sometimes buzz kills like confusion can, well, kill the buzz.It will also help if the Host tells you a

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little bit about the kinds of things he expects your characters to do in the current adventure. An important factor is how physical activity is going to impact your character. If there is magic how does it work? Could you find a pacifist solution to the game's problems? Or will you be expected to just battle through? If you decide to be an ass to people will it likely come back to haunt you? Or is the game relatively consequence free? If you know all this going in you are not likely to make a mistake which makes your character pay through the remainder of the game.

Maybe your Host has sound reasons for leaving some of this stuff out. If so they should fill you in. If not, well, this might still be okay, but you can't be as sure as you can with a Host who's prepared.

The Art of Role Playing

So far you're probably either scared of looking like an idiot doing this or you're thinking it's going to be dead easy and sort of fun.

Neither of these attitudes is wholly appropriate but if you're a little nervous about this then you're probably doing better. Let me explain why.

Role playing is not as easy as many people think. You're not supposed to be an Oscar wining actor but it does take some care and attention to get your part right.

The most important thing to remember is that, whatever the story, you are not the hero. You are a hero, sure, but it's a team effort. Sure, you probably want to do your best at portraying your character but you shouldn't be an ass about it.

Most people over estimate how much they have to do to portray a character's character trait. In movies a “character establishing moment” is just that. You realise all eyes are on you, you say or do the thing that defines your character, you move on.

I saw a game in which a player portraying an annoying and mischievous but brilliant engineer

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badgered another character to let him tinker with that character's weapon for fully two minutes. This left the other player personally irritated about the incident and won nobody any friends. If you want to have a character moment make it a moment. You are there to share the limelight with the other players not to dominate it and certainly not to give the other players a hard time.

The way to do this is to watch what you're saying and doing just a tiny bit more than you feel you should have to. It might be a bit funny to do at first but when everyone's complimenting you on your awesome role play it will be

well worth it.

Some Hosts will want to sort out with players beforehand how much inter-player strife is to be expected. This is a good thing. If you know another player doesn't want their character on the blunt end of your character's short temper come up with a character concept that means your character will dish it out to everyone except player x. It's not your right to make someone else's No Dice experience less pleasant.

Okay, so enough with the serious, if you're only doing a one off, that's it, you can go, have fun you crazy kid. You can skim through the character stuff, it won't hurt, you might even be amused or pick up some ideas. It's not essential though.

If you're in for a short campaign or a full blown saga you're going to want to delve deeply into the character section, make sure you know a bit about the kind of game you're playing first, though, you don't want to bring a Shaolin Master to a gun fight, after all...

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Characters

One off or Campaign?

This seems like a redundant question, but I know a few of you one off people will have snuck in here, so I'm going to put down a few things for one off players before we start. Although generally speaking the Host will create the cast of characters available in a one off it is possible that if you're an old hand at this No Dice stuff maybe they've left it up to you to create your own.

I think the major difference you should bear in mind between wearing someone's skin for one evening compared to a couple of month's worth of evenings is that in the one off environment you can afford to make a radical departure from the norm. You could be a complete jackass, or someone dysfunctional in the extreme,

a lunatic or a villain. You're only playing this character once, so you have some freedoms. I'll discuss this in more detail later on. For now let's assume you're taking on a longer term character, let's run through a few bits.

Love Your Character

If you're going to be playing your character for any length of time this is the most important thing about character creation. Your character should be someone not only that you're comfortable to play, but you need to like them, a lot. You're going to be portraying them for a good while.

So when you think of your character concept ask yourself, seriously, why you like this person you're undertaking to play in the game. There'd better be a solid reason as well. I've seen long haul

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characters fade away because players were keen on them for five minutes and then they got bored or frustrated. I've also seen people find their characters extremely difficult to play. You have to find that angle that makes your character playable by you.

NB: This is a completely separate issue from making them likeable to other people. Completely separate.

Making A Character Interesting...

Most players I've ever come across find this the easiest thing. After all they wouldn't have thought of the character if they didn't find them interesting. Interesting and playable are not the same thing. Hamlet, for example, is all kinds of interesting, easy to play? Not so much. Similarly King Lear. I know these are characters in plays but the theory remains the same.

Is your character young or old? Or in between. A youthful character will have to live within the confines of their own naivety, if you are new to the game world you may find this easy to

convey. Older characters are often nuanced and experienced, they can present problems. Any character between the ages of about 23 and 48 falls into a "zone of meh" where their age only has a small effect on how others perceive them.

The Zone of Meh is where one would place a man or woman between the ages of 23 and 48 who weighs around nine stone (three or four more if male) is about 5'4 (6'0 if male) was brought up by a mother and father with a sibling who was older or younger by about three years, who lived in one place until they were about twenty and then went on to some sort of trade they still work in today.

I'm not suggesting this any kind of an average, I can count the number of people this tedious that I know without running out of fingers. The point is this kind of person has never had anything interesting happen to them at all. Even this is kind of interesting in itself. Someone who appears to have this kind of background might be suspected of covering up the truth, whatever that

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truth may turn out to be.

The point is if you stick to the Zone of Meh but add in a few bits of interest like, the individual was extremely intelligent and became a highly qualified academic at a young age, or the person was brought up by one parent, was an only child, this only adds limited interest and the Zone of Meh continues.

You have to keep adding things to your character until something interesting happens, until they have a hook, a personality trait that you like and that will be an interesting thing to portray on a week by week basis.

Maybe you've made a sports star, fit, athletic, beautiful, popular but she lost her younger brother in a tragic accident when she was twelve and he was nine. She blames her own lack of action during the accident and this is what has driven her to become an Olympian. She is protective of the weak and those younger than herself, in addition she has difficulty becoming emotionally attached to people because of her fear of losing them.

Now, that's an interesting character.

...And Lovable...

What makes a character likeable in fiction is directly at odds with what makes people likeable in reality. In fiction heroes are capable and strong, in reality when we interact with peers we tend to like people we feel are less intelligent than us and maybe weaker. These statements are, of course, generalisations, exceptions always prove the general rules. However what this should tell you is that what may make a character lovable in fiction may not necessarily make them likeable in a group environment.

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You should think about what makes your character strong, and therefore interesting first, but then think about what makes them weak, and therefore lovable. If everyone hates your character you're going to have a tougher time portraying them every week. Ironically, things you may throw in imagining they will make the character likeable may actually make them dangerous, or untrustworthy.

Let's take our female Olympian. She loved her little brother and her own mode of relating to other people kind of got trapped at that stage when she lost him. She is goofy, funny, she will assume control in a gentle way but she just can't have an adult conversation. If she's facing off against someone she sees as an opponent she'll be cool. Ask her to commit to a relationship and she'll go to pieces. If this is your character you have to put that across.

If that's not your personality you might find it a little tricky to live in those shoes. So when you start role playing maybe it would be best to stick close to home. Find something you think you

can put across. Talk it through with the Host. If you do your best and you have fun that's all anyone can ask. Save the tricky role playing for when you've got a bit under your belt.

But in all cases you want the character's strength, what makes them interesting and capable, and their weakness, what makes them lovable and part of the team.

..But Flawed...

Out of both strengths and weaknesses come flaws. How you portray your character's flaws will make or break your role playing. Maybe you're just along for the ride; news flash, being along for the ride is a flaw if everyone else is trying to accomplish something. Or maybe you're keen but your character just has some priority that's not selfless or even particularly nice.

Our Olympian, for example. We've already discussed that she's witty, athletic and fun to be around, she's the kind of person who you don't mind giving up leadership to. But on the flip

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side she's scared stiff of being alone, she's flippant and sometimes her tongue's a little too sharp for her own good. These are flaws. Playing them genuinely is what good role play is all about.

It's also more than likely that our Olympian is competitive as hell, a sore loser but a gracious winner. Playing this straight and sticking to it could land the team in trouble, or it could mean she goes the extra mile just to get a result.

In the end it's up to the Host to reward good role playing, but if you did a good job it's kind of its own reward. Doing some good role playing really gives you a better experience and makes the hobby worthwhile.

... With Convincing Passions...

What we've talked about so far is all long term stuff, the foundations of a character. That's all good to know and is going to help with the way the character presents themselves to the other players. However, there's a minute to minute problem of what the

character's going to be worried about next. What's on their mind in the moment.

A character's passion could be as prosaic as chasing after their next meal or snack, or it could be as complex as worrying about their relatives, partner or children all the time. It could be, probably would be, a mixture of these survival instincts and the wider concerns.

You have to think about your character on a normal day. What's their usual concern. Who are their friends? How many do they have? Do they live with their family? If not, how often do they see their relatives? What do they do on a work day? What are their hobbies? How worried are they about food? Do they have a special diet? Or are they just hungry all the time? What about physical comfort? Is that important to them? How do they relate to strangers? How do they feel in a crowd?

All of these factors, these drives, desires, hungers and passions make the character what they are on a moment by moment basis. How do they deal

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with problems? Do they let everyone know they're feeling inconvenienced? If so are they vocal and whiny or are they a martyr on certain topics?

Part of your job as a player is to communicate to everyone else how your character is. When you start playing you aren't there any more, now your character is taking centre stage. How similar or dissimilar that character is to you is up to you and what you show the other players.

There's a technique to be used here for making sure you'll always be thinking of something for your character to say. First of all we're going to give the character three situations, when they're around total strangers or people they don't know that well; when they're around friends and acquaintances they see and talk to regularly; and finally when they're with people they trust with their lives (if any).

For each of those situations we are then going to jot down three topics of conversation the character deems

appropriate. You may not know all three for all three levels right away, this is a signal you haven't quite got to know your character yet. Go through the other parts, their history, their demeanour, their fears, their flaws and see if you can add in a little something that will fill in the blanks.

These general topics of conversation need to be quite broad-based. You might make a character and think always talking about the weather is a good idea for people that character doesn't know well. This is fine, but it's also quite obvious.

Maybe you could try something even less specific like "talk about the current environment", if it makes the character feel comfortable praise it, otherwise complain. Other good topics include "the character's current pet project", "the character's close family", "the character's concerns about their own health" any kind of small talk subject that doesn't expose too much but at the same time will tell other players a lot about your character's demeanour.

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Deciding ahead of time that in any given situation your character's priorities for conversation with strangers are: number one: feeling comfortable in their environment; number two: knowing when they're going to be left to their own devices again; and number three: being able to stay in touch with their partner via their mobile phone, in that order, should help you tell people about your character without dropping out of role.

...And Sympathetic Fears

At the other end of the scale your character has to want to avoid something. Everyone is afraid, all that matters is what they're afraid of and how they deal with it. Some people are willing to swallow their fear and press on. Some will find the urge to run overwhelming. Some will just try to avoid dealing with the things they find unpleasant. Really how your character reacts to their fears and what those fears are is up to you. This is where you start to leave the realms of being a player and enter the murky waters of art.

One of the things dice fans love is that you can't argue with a die roll. The arbitration of numbers is absolute. You may feel that faced with the Unspeakable Horror your character would swallow their fear and fight on but a failure to roll well on a Willpower test will have you running for the hills whether you want to or not.

There is a safety blanket aspect to such tests. If the dice say it then a bum note cannot be struck. I would prefer to think that if you were really all that involved with portraying yeller bellied Carl Taylor then when he sees the Horror it will be a point of pride that you make him turn and run. That's the character after all.

In the end playing your character shouldn't be a matter of trying to win. You can't win a story, you can only see what happens next. As a character player your priority should be to play the character, irrespective of what you yourself would normally do.

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Being Evil

Which brings us on to a hitherto touchy subject. There's an old saying in the acting profession that it's more fun to play a villain than a good guy. It's certainly easier to chew up scenery and villains chew scenery better than anyone else. But is it really all that much fun to be the villain?

I used to be an actor, for my sins. I always believed that acting out the villain's role would be "fun", until I actually got to do it. If you're going to be an honest villain, if you're going to act up a storm, if you are to chew the scenery like the best of them then you have to burrow down and understand the heart of the villain. And trust me, that's not a good place to live.

The "Villain's Campaign" is like a mythical grail of role playing. Wouldn't it just be great to all be evil? To not care a fig what anyone else thought? Wouldn't it be liberating to be bad? Well, depends. What old style role players usually find is that the campaign falls apart pretty quickly

when all the characters are despicable. Also it causes fractious behaviour within the group. When everyone's letting their twisted egos off the chain it can get ugly quickly.

I would always advise against being a villain in any campaign. It just makes you upset and angry, after all you will lose because you're evil and you're supposed to. If you don't lose it'll make things seem, well, wrong.

But in a one off, there may be some license to it. It's a single night. If it leaves a bad taste in your mouth well you're not being forced to take another swig.

I would say that role playing bad people is probably one for the very experienced and possibly best avoided if one can think of a more morally commendable scenario to play through.

Okay Maybe Not EVIL

Playing someone who's deeply flawed on the other hand, I mean really deeply flawed. That is more like it. Again it's a

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challenge for the more experienced player but taking the road to redemption, that could be deeply moving. Feeling yourself warp from irritant to hero, that could be a rewarding path. It's just a difficult one.

In the beginning it's probably best to make someone generally okay who has their moments of not being so okay. You can take on something bigger as time goes by.

Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

No Dice is a game where I hope you've got the impression that playing your part is the same as winning and ignoring your character in order to indulge a power fantasy or day dream is

losing. Generally speaking the Host will be advised to let things ride wherever possible. All the randomness in a given game will be to enhance mood not to slap wrists or enforce too many limits.

You, as a player, should want to feel the roughs and the smooths, you should want to put playing the character ahead of taking the easy route. This game stands or falls on your participation in the intended spirit. That means everyone Host, Players, Household Pets, Innocent Bystanders, everyone gets enough rope to hang themselves.

I'm telling the Host to give everyone greater latitude to do what they want with their characters but trust me I'm giving them enough ways to hose down troublemakers that you probably want to stay away from getting cute.

Contrast Is Good

Once you've played one character for a few weeks you'll probably start to find they're too jolly and not cool enough, or too cool and not benevolent enough, or too benevolent and not smart

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enough. The grass is perpetually greener on someone else's character sheet and this is the way things should be. Because if we played the same characters all the time we'd never learn anything, right?

We'd never learn why people sometimes think it's "too quiet". We'd never learn how to respond to enquiry as to whether we were a god. We'd never learn what our characters would do in a riot with a loaded shotgun. We just would plain stop having fun.

So when you get a chance to play

someone new in a new world in a new game think about who you've already been. Think about whether it might not be time to try something altogether different. Most of all, though, when you create a character for a No Dice world, love them, cherish them, nurture them and HAVE FUN!

NOTE: For an even more in depth character creation experience check out the appendix: "The Thirty Six Dramatic Situations for Players". Ask your Host if they think having a thumb through would be appropriate.

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Host's Guide

If you are thinking of Hosting a No Dice game, congratulations! You have taken the first step into a wider world of fun and adventure. If, on the other hand, you are just hanging around wondering how you can get invited to a No Dice game Hosted by some one else, well, good luck with that.

The fact is, you're the one reading the core book. This means the prime candidate for Hosting is going to be that charming, intelligent, enterprising person who greets you from every mirror.

You may think you're just not keen enough on the idea to run your own party but if you're looking at this volume you're keener than all the people who aren't. Sorry, looks like you're going to be the Host.

In the old world of role playing your

job was known as Game Master or GM. People tried to give it other names, in D&D for example you were the Dungeon Master, and people still know this term as it was the first. It didn't stick, the minute a game came along no part of which was located inside a Dungeon it was toast. Other people have tried titles as simple as Narrator or as tortured as Werewizard (seriously) but overall people refer to the person running the game for the other characters as the GM.

So why have I decided to mess with the established order? Well, the most important reason is that back in the old days the GM saw the game as a two sided contest with him (usually him) on one side and the players on the other if the players died the GM won, otherwise the GM lost. (Don't ask me, I'm just the messenger.)

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Host is a deliberate attempt to undermine this attitude before it begins. GMs of the sort I just described are rare these days, partially because the hobby has shrunk in popularity (I wonder why) and partially because people just don't want those people GMing for them.

So the person who runs the No Dice evening is known as the Host. If you are the Host it is your job to welcome your players and to give them a fun ride. The reason for the word Host is because it is your job not just to take care of providing the game but to take care of the well being of those who are playing the game.

The fact is a role playing game is not like a movie, or a book, or even something you play via a computer which calls itself a role playing game. All other forms of pure entertainment have some sort of distancing technique. Either you are a passive audience member, or you are playing a board games with very strictly defined rules that separate you from normal reality or you are interacting via the proxy

device of a computer or games console.

None of these situations can be considered sufficiently like real life to cause genuine mental distress. Even so I've seen arguments among people playing Trivial Pursuits or Monopoly that beggar belief. Can you imagine how much worse things would be if people actually genuinely cared about the fate of their pieces in those games?

I may have made this sound like you're going to be undertaking an activity similar to bear taming. It's really not. People will be fine, but you just have to be a Host to them. You have to take care of them. Then everyone will have the best time they've ever had. Trust me.

All this is what makes No Dice as a game different to any game you've played before and that includes other role playing games.

A No Dice adventure includes sections devoted to parts of the experience that are not really parts of the main game. These sections will help you, the Host,

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make yourself into a better Host for your players and, in addition, will set up your players to play a better game.

What this entails rather depends on how much No Dice you're expecting to play with your players. If it's just an evening's worth then this set up should consume no more than 40-60 minutes of your time depending on the number of players. If you're going for a longer session i.e. a short campaign or a long saga, you're going to need to spend a bit more time setting things up. How much longer depends on what kind of game you're playing: one the players might know all about before they arrive, or one that you're going to have to introduce them to.

On the subject of numbers the minimum number of people you would probably want in a No Dice role play is 3, a Host and two players. There is a practice known as "Lone Wolfing" where it's just host and a player but these have a very different feel to playing any other type of game. Part of the experience is to have contrasting opinions about the best path through the game and just riffing off the Host's

characters doesn't provide that.

I find I don't really like running a game for more than 6 players but it kind of depends on the players. I would say that usually 3-7 people makes a No Dice adventure. You'll find that above three players the amount of time you will spend playing the adventure will escalate dramatically, for just two, the adventure will fly by. My optimum number of players is three for a one off, but again, your mileage may vary.

When we're addressing the topic of length I'm going to start with advice about the simplest kind of No Dice scenario and work my way up to a saga and add in more detail about what's expected as we go.

The Six Million Dollar Question

Is, of course, what the hell have I let myself in for? I think the number one thing that you have to remember is not that you are in charge of creating a universe and populating it with detailed people, items, animals etc.

For a start there will, in the fullness of

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time, be expansion packs for No Dice that explicitly add to the contents of this core book. If you're feeling a bit braver you might start to think about a "hack" of an existing RPG into something a bit less, er, Dice-y, who knows, you may find that someone has already done the work for you.

Even if you are in charge of everything there is one important fact that it will help you to remember. You are not in charge of anything except creating a convincing illusion. You will have to

develop skills in thinking on your feet, sure, but this is often in contrast to having to consult a stack of notes every time someone asks a question. Your notes should be easily understood at a glance, so you will have to learn to take notes in such a way that you can consult them quickly.

In the end though, if your illusory game world is convincing and you're showing your players a good time then what does anything else matter?

Once you've got over that fact return to the name of your role in the game. You are the Host. It is up to you to look after your players and make them happy. This is why you are no longer referred to as the Game Master. You are not Master of the Game you are a Host who gives the players what they want.

What they should want is an entertaining and dramatic experience so whenever you are called upon to deliver bad news you must do it as resolutely as telling them about their successes. That is your responsibility.

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The Bare Minimum

Okay, if you are really in a hurry to try this out and don't want to plough through any more of the book than you already have here is the absolute bare minimum of things you need to read from the rest of the book to run a No Dice evening:

The Vanilla Rules

Traveller's Rest (The First Example Scenario)

Most one-off scenarios contain anything upwards of the vanilla rules that you need within them anyway and notes which will give you all the information you need to Host. Once you've prepared that much then you'll be ready for Traveller's Rest, further one-off scenarios written by the No Dice team are similarly helpful, we obviously can't speak for any you get from the wider community.

If you want to get a bit more in-depth then I would recommend that the next thing you do is read the rest of this Host's guide. After that don't worry

about all the stuff about stats, randomisers, plots and Non-Player Characters. If you have skipped from the introduction and first chapter straight to the Host's Guide then I would recommend that you read the Player's Guide as well, a Host should understand what it is the players are told.

It is also recommended that you make available the first section of the Player's Guide to your players. One off players using pre-generated characters don't need to see the section about characters.

If you're after any more than that then it's a slippery slope. If you do want to gradually slide into further involvement with the hobby then you could graduate your involvement by first of all asking players to create their own characters (which will involve checking the characters before the one-off), then maybe writing your own one off with pre-generated characters, then maybe writing something that fits across a few episodes before finally taking on a whole campaign.

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A Herculean Task (Volunteers Only)

If you're just going to use No Dice to run the occasional RP party then that's cool. In fact a large part of what the system was designed for, some people don't have a lot of time for getting their head into RP so to be able to just freestyle it more or less is going to be a boon.

For those of you that really want to get into the No Dice frame of mind however, I want to provide you with resources to get yourself oriented. In the full No Dice experience, a campaign where the players choose their roles and you plan an epic narrative journey you will need to be organised. A No Dice campaign ideally consists of the following stages:

Create/Research Campaign Setting

Plan Campaign

The Introductory Q&A

The Lone Wolf/Character Creation Process

6-8 Campaign Episodes

If you could meticulously plan your entire campaign in 6-8 episode blocks that would be super, but in the real world a vague idea that it would run x number of blocks will suffice.

Essentially playing the most extended game you can play should take about two to three months worth of episodes. The more comfortable period you have in between the Introductory Q&A and the first episode the more time you will allow for players to create their characters. Obviously you don't want this process to stretch into months but a month to six weeks would be a comfortable amount of time for new No Dicers to read the Player's Guide and any Supplements you may want to give them.

There are obviously ways of running No Dice between "the full on" and "the ultra light" but it's up to your discretion as to how much you do or don't do. The only guide I would give you is always to remember that you are The Host, do what you consider enough to make sure your players are having a fun time.

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The One Off

If you're running a one off then you're going to want to keep your set up simple. The most basic type of one off set up that exists is the haunted house story. The reason for this is that characters are just characters with no special powers and people understand the set up instinctively. The sample scenario "Traveller's Rest" is included in the examples at the end of the book.

Any departure from this needs to be simply explained. Another popular type of simple game is the slasher flick game, although you may have more opulent surroundings, more violence and more exotic events in such a game it doesn't depart too far from the classic haunted house. Another example scenario, "Revelation Point" is included in the book.

After that you want to try to make the one offs as generic as possible. We all love things that are a bit different, like a Space Opera epic in a universe with six alien races battling for control of an unstable federation, or something like that, here's the problem, such a set up

takes a long time to explain. A long time. And we've only got the one session so explanation of that setting needs to remain at a minimum.

With a longer campaign people have the time to explore their options and find the rhythm of a wider world. In one off world that's not going to happen. If you wanted some cool wrinkle on an old idea then you need to explain it up front or find some really clever way of working it into the main gameplay session. If you are going to run a campaign then you could make that more complicated but then subsequently run a one off in the same world. This would mitigate the need for an overlong set up entirely.

Basically, it would be best to pick a genre, be really clear about that genre, and not suddenly spring any extras on a group of people who are just getting used to being a particular character for a single session. In the beginning it might be best to keep things simple and as people get used to the game ramp up the complexity of what you're asking them to do.

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Let's be plain about one thing, role playing, the actual playing, is a skill. People who have been role playing for a while can become better at it. They sink into the fiction more quickly and play their characters with more confidence. This kind of skill takes time to accrue, and introducing a new system can even set back highly skilled players. As Host it will be your responsibility to gauge the experience of your players and tailor their experience accordingly.

And Beyond...

If you're running anything longer than a one off you're going to want to introduce a set up session. Even if you are playing a No Dice game with a Player's Guide which you can dole out to your team before you begin as Host you are inevitably going to know more about what you have in mind than the players do. It might be best to run a Q&A beforehand so everyone's straight on what's expected.

This is a significant departure from RP set ups of yore when the audience

either knew what to expect or had to be sold the concept before they'd even sit down. GMs in the past needed to boil the game down into a handy phrase or sentence and pitch that. The problem with these colourful bon mots was that they left some room for interpretation on both sides. Even if people buy into a game in theory they may find the Host's interpretation of the phrase and their own differ dramatically let's look at a few examples and see if you can spot the swathes of grey area they expose.

Dungeons & Dragons - Go into dungeons and er, slay dragons (among other things)Vampire: The Masquerade - Vie for undead power in a web of political intrigue Cyberpunk - Hack dystopia and do it wearing mirror shades. Over The Edge - Question your own sanity and that of others as the fruit of the Western world's freakiest cheese dreams converge on a single weird sovereign island. Feng Shui - Hong Kong Phooey action spectacular with HK cinema tricks,

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flips and mythology. Mutants & Masterminds - Superhero fun of the purest kind, throw a car at a supervillain today! Call of Cthulhu - Stare into the abyss and feel the abyss stare straight back into you.

I'm not going to go into exactly how people can get the wrong end of the stick about these scenarios but trust me they can. Vampire can devolve into a slugfest, Feng Shui can become hung up on dice, and a D&D Dungeon Master can get a little too handy with the traps and hard monsters. People can sign on for an adventure and end up with a grind or an overwhelming tide of impossible odds.

As the Host of No Dice it is your job to take the temperature of the player's expectations before you even go down that road. You as Host get to say whether we're playing cops and robbers or ten little space marines, it's up to the players to then tell you what they expect from the experience and then it's your job to make that happen.

Example Q&A

In this example Q&A our Host introduces a space game to his players Alex, Bob and Charlie.

Host: Okay guys, I'm looking to run a space opera game that I've called Stellar Adventure. It's sort of an attempt to mix up gritty space opera with a kind of swashbuckling feel.

Bob: What, like Star Wars?

Host: Actually, only a bit. Whereas Star Wars has some aspects of a swashbuckler it's really more of a high fantasy in space, like Lord of the Rings with space ships. This would be far more Pirates of the Caribbean in space.

Alex: So pirates then?

Host: Okay, not pirates as such. More that instead of busting out the laser rifles and just opening up a gun battle, people would use swords like rapiers. Actually bladed weapons. I saw this idea about people having high impact shields on so lasers and bullets can't hit them but a sword travels slowly

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enough to penetrate the barrier. Charlie: Isn't that from Dune?

Host: Essentially, yeah. Not that everyone has one of these impact shields but most people do so swordplay and melee combat are much more widespread. Also there will be a bunch of space dogfighting. I was thinking of taking that out but in the end it seems to make a nice compliment to the melee combat.

Alex: So basically it's going to be a bunch of interstellar war?

Host: I did want some combat in this game but as usual it's going to be about story and action, your characters will be involved in pressurised action sequences but it won't necessarily be an unending run of combat.

Bob: So what else is going on?

Host: Okay, so the set up is that the humanity in the game has created three factions in the galaxy of the story. There are alien life forms but none are sentient, or at least no sentient aliens

have been discovered and the galaxy is 50% mapped.

Alex: Is there a chance for an intelligent alien life encounter?

Host: I'm not planning on making it the focus. The three factions, the Republic, the Empire and the Combine are not really that bothered about intelligent alien life. In fact many of the big wigs would view such encounters as threatening rather than as an opportunity.

Alex: So you're not just planning on making it an alien war?

Host: I wanted to make it more about the interactions between humans who are both capable, as in acrobatic, combat ready, witty, intelligent but not entirely trustworthy. Everyone has an agenda, everybody wants something for themselves and they might not be entirely honest about their objectives with their fellows. Charlie: So what about these three factions.

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Host: Right, I wanted three different political structures. The very long term history of this civilisation is that they all come from the same root but over time have diversified. The two largest factions are the Republic and the Empire. The Republic is a large group of systems that have a parliamentary structure. The Empire is kind of a joke term for a group of systems which is in constant and dangerous civil war. The Empire is governed by tribal warlords and it is their fractious nature that stops them growing. The Combine are a group of systems in which government has, essentially been bought by interstellar corporations.

Bob: it all sounds kind of grim.

Host: It's not so bad, the power structures are quite diffuse and hence everywhere is fairly liberal. The Combine is the most restrictive, they like their planets and stations to stay "on message" from a brand values position. The Republic tries to be all things to all people but has some problems with bureaucratic and administrative corruption, the Empire is a patchwork of hell holes and extremely iffy systems run by fiercely independent and possibly insane megalomaniacs. Having said all that, the average private citizen just keeps their heads down and gets on with it.

Alex: So what kinds of characters are there?

And so on. As you can see the Q&A is really a chance for players to start to think about the kinds of adventures they'd like to have in the world the Host has created. By going through this set up process people find it easier to ease into the game when it arrives. Some GMs already do this before a game but it's always been an ad hoc arrangement, not a formalised part of

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the process.

Once you have run the Q&A it is time for the players to go away and make up characters who live in the world the Host has created. These should be discussed on an individual basis before play begins. You may want to make the first session half Q&A and half character discussion, or you may want to devote two sessions to set up, or you might leave a gap between the first session and the beginning of the story so you can have a one on one with each of your players.

The important thing to remember is that it's you, as the Host, listening to what they, as the players, would like to get out of the experience. Once everyone's happy it's time to begin.

Preparing the Player

When you start to build your campaign you might wonder how to fill it with exciting, relevant content and new twists on old stories. You might worry that your stories would be clichéd and your players would be bored. There's no way to completely avoid a less than

successful game, it happens, but you can try to ensure that you have prepared enough to minimise your risks and that's all you can do.

The first thing you have to do as Host is engage with your players before you even begin. In the case of a campaign you will be introducing the game world in a start up session and then taking each player on a "Lone Wolf" a mini session that helps firm up the player's back story.

If you have given them the Player's Guide and the Player's Thirty Six Situations Supplement then when you sit down to Lone Wolf you will hopefully have a player before you who is ready with an idea for a character and the story in which they are embroiled. If this is the case then you just have to tidy up the details and your ready to go. Some players will need more working with than others but if you take care of this simple preparation then when you actually come to play you should find the game developing a lot more smoothly.

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The Lone Wolf

"Lone Wolfing" is a practice in which a single Host and a single player role play. The practice has a totally different feel to group role play and introduces an individual crafting dynamic that should help a player get to grips with their character before bringing them out in a group game.

I usually start the player's lone wolf by describing the average life of a person who lives in the character's cultural surroundings. This should take no more than five minutes. Once I have given a broad overview of this average I ask the player at what point their character's life diverged from that average.

The answer could be that it didn't particularly. If the player is insistent that at the outset of the game they have not had one day different from all the other people they know and live with then let them run with that. Otherwise ask them to describe what happened when their life changed.

This life changing event should be role played very lightly. Fix on a key point

and ask the player how they reacted to it. And ask them how their life went after that incident.

Example: One player I was lone wolfing said that his life changed when he miraculously escaped poisoning from the arrow of a hostile race whilst he was caught up in an attack on a harbour near his home. A poisonous spider bite, usually fatal, was the antidote to the poison on the arrow head of the invaders. His character had always been strong, a fighter, now he believed he had been blessed by the gods and had been given his unusually strong constitution to fight his people's mysterious invaders.

He chose a background thereafter where his people, a race of warriors, held him in high esteem. I said to him, then, that before he left home, whilst he was growing to an age where he would be allowed to leave on his quest to fight his enemy he would be a favoured son in the town. This would make the circumstances of his life easier and attract a lot of female attention.

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The next key point was how his character dealt with that female interaction. The player was a little non-plussed. Although the result was natural given his character's macho and high societal status he said his character didn't really know what to do about women.

At this point I decided to let fate take a hand, he made a draw. As it happened he got a fairly ill-starred draw for matters of emotion so I said that although there was no one woman he really liked there were two he had a fondness for. One was the alpha female of the village who was smart and pretty and seemed to like him because he was important. The other was a tomboy she warrior type, frowned upon by the people but when he fell under the poison arrow she had cared for him when it seemed he might die.

He chose the warrior woman and we supposed that his character thereafter ignored all the other women but flirted, cautiously with this fighting woman. Eventually her agenda became clear. She had saved his life because he

was the strongest male fighter in the village, and exchange for her gift of care she wanted him to fight her, in secret to see who was better.

She was fast and she was agile so she won the sparring match easily, leaving the poor fellow dumbfounded and confused. Again I wanted to see how events would turn for him and again he was unfortunate. Knowing that her people would never accept a fighting woman this girl stowed away on a cargo vessel and left him behind. Although his character heard of her leaving he never got a chance to talk to her properly after the fight.

So that was when his character decided to make the move and go on a voyage to find the enemy, maybe hoping, somewhere in his heart, that he would find out what happened to the only girl, the only warrior, who could best him in single combat.

As you can see from that one Lone Wolf the Player's character found not one, but two personal arcs that I as Host could bring into the role play. His

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quest to find and defeat his enemies was the main story but underlying this is his unresolved business with the warrior maiden. The latter situation I had the option of effectively sitting on until I felt that it was time to give his character some stage time.

The two draws I described in the example were the only two draws the player made at all during his lone wolf, the session itself lasted about forty minutes. This, I would imagine is about typical. You shouldn't be hitting the player with a dozen conflicts and you're not about taking him or her on a three hour epic journey. What you are trying to accomplish is a greater understanding of the opportunities that character has in stories for both of you.

Managing A Session

So how will a session run? This guide for Hosts includes a wealth of information about setting up a story world but once you're actually, you know, playing the game how will it run?

The Warm Up

One thing that all role playing groups experience is some inter-player friction out of character. The fact is people in a story get attached to their characters, they want to play them to the best of their ability. Unfortunately one man's dramatic flair is another man's annoying quirk. Tension can build up and people can swing from having a great time to having a rubbish time and eventually, unless this is well managed, the game falls apart.

Taking the bull by the horns our group has worked through several of these issues and come up with a boilerplate solution. This may sound like a bit of an odd way to do things at first, particularly if you've been role playing for a while but trust me it takes the pinch out of those situations that can ruin a game group so for the sake of everyone's good time do it!

At the outset of each session you will have a warm up in which you, as Host, ask each player three important questions.

1) How is their character feeling at this

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stage in the adventure. Even if it's the beginning of the adventure they should have lone wolfed to a particular point so they should always have something to say, besides it's not an opportunity for a huge cathartic monologue it's just a sentence or two. You, as Host, should be monitoring the “temperature” of this response. Is Dave really enthusiastic and clear about his character objectives? Or is he very vague? Does Bob sound well up for a session tonight or is he sounding a bit tired?

Taking the temperature this way is a good start but then you're going to move on to get more specific.

2) As a player do they feel they want to be challenged and forced to play a main role this session or would they like to sit back and just drink in the atmosphere, taking more of a back seat role? This performs two jobs for you. It helps you identify people who may get restless if you're not giving them big moments every twenty minutes and also those people who are quite happy to be left alone to observe. As a Host it's always a concern that someone might be bored or feel neglected, if you

know what level of participation they're expecting you can spend an appropriate amount of time working with each player.

This also allows the players to know how everyone else is approaching this episode. Sometimes a player who's trying to be unobtrusive can find themselves “helped” into the limelight by a well meaning fellow player. This is frustrating for everyone. At least if everyone knows Steve wants to keep his head down this week when he offers to guard the spaceship no one will helpfully suggest that he comes along to help them trade with the tribe of Space Amazons.

3) Finally ask each player how they feel about being involved in inter-character aggro this week. Getting involved in a fight with a Host controlled story character is to be expected but sometimes players like to have issues between each other. It's great drama and it actually can make the story better. But people can take such arguments and incidents to heart.

If a player complains that it's just “not

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realistic” to have them forced to not be combative with another player's character just remind them that the game is meant to be fun for everyone and if Paul's Chinese martial artist rail worker doesn't want to have continual mudslinging matches with Gail's hard as nails gunslinger then he shouldn't have to.

This little moment at the beginning of the session provides information for you as the Host as to what's going on and what kinds of things you should be striving to provide this session. They allow players to understand what other players want out of the session and they also help everyone focus on the story for this week's adventure. Once everyone's got their game head on it's time to actually do some role-playing.

The Role Play

There are a number of different approaches and a number of different suggested styles but the thing I have noticed is that play progresses in a number of discrete jumps which are managed by you. If you manage them

well then players will experience the adventure as a smooth ride. It is something you will grow into the more you Host.

Basically it works like this:

You describe an event that occurs within the sight of one or several of the players.

You ask them how their character would react to this event.

You role play the results of the event.

You tell them when the event's effects have started to die down.

You move on to the next event.

Of course there are subtle variations in exactly how this happens and that's what we'll look at next.

It's very tempting, and totally in keeping with the roots of the hobby, that you as Host imagine that every fresh event follows hot on the heels of the next event making a chain of events that construct the story. In this way

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each episode may be separate in time but the actual episodes themselves take place over a shorter time with each incident taking place in a direct chronological sequence.

Although there is an instinctive drift towards this it is incredibly limiting. Remember each play session is at least 3-4 hours in length. Sometimes you haven't got enough story in one incident to stretch 3-4 hours so you start to warp the incident. You might find that all of a sudden a short encounter with an archaeologist at a café becomes a car chase through the streets of Berlin followed by a tense struggle to cross a madman's country estate pursued by guard dogs and, in the latter stages, crocodiles.

Not to say that this isn't, in theory, an excellent idea for one episode but if it happens every session... Well, it could start to wear a bit thin that the players can't seem to get to the fridge without a sword fight. So how does one cope with a more variable pacing requirement? It's something that requires a little handling but what you as Host need to

do is make a timeline of things that would happen if the players didn't exist. These are events that would take place anyway that lead to the conclusion of a story that has no heroes.

The very first incident the players see (this does not have to be the first one on the timeline) is where the players enter the story. Let them interfere with your timeline until they run out of ideas. If the time their investigations would take run over into the next incident then have it pile in to complicate things, otherwise you just make sure no one has any more ideas before simply saying.

"Some time passes in which you regroup and then you begin to notice..." and then whatever the physical effects of the following incident are. If the players are in pretty poor shape after the last incident you might want to use re grouping time to make them feel a bit better, give them a sense of time passing. Otherwise a simple bridging sentence is all that's required.

What I've just said may seem

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incredibly dumb and obvious but until very recently the issue of what to do when players run out of story mid-session has been a thorny one indeed. When I first encountered it the idea of the bridging sentence didn't occur to me and before you know it the players were up to their necks in ravenous tigers, embarrassing as the game was set in France.

The secret of the bridging sentence is that you really have to sell it. If you sound like you know what you're about 95% of player niggles will melt like snow in a furnace. Whether or not you actually are as confident as you appear, another issue altogether.

So having dealt with the 95% of niggle that may arise let us turn our attention to that tricky 5% of times when confusion is not abated with the application of a confident attitude.

The Fiat Featurefiat noun 1 an official command; a decree. 2 a formal authorization for some procedure.

Chambers English Dictionary

There's a concept in Role Playing that is inviolate and also it is a pretty good idea. So good that it comes to No Dice untainted by any change or addition. I present it here so any host can send any niggly player here to see it in black and white and thus it shall ever be.

The Rule of Host Fiat

In any dispute the Host's opinion is the only one that matters, their adjudication is final.

This is because as Host you have no interest in whether players get their way or not you are just running the game. Right?

You see, any problem I've ever encountered with this idea of Host Fiat is when the Host thinks they are the evil spirit of mean and tries to punish the characters for having the blad faced cheek to exist.

You, as Host, are there to arbitrate. I always like to take the position that I am generally for the players, if they feel good, I feel good. but if they fail I

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will enforce it. Because if I didn't, who would?

That's the whole triumph and tragedy of being the Host, and that's why you get the fiat.

'Nuff said.

How To Hose

Even after all that though, you will sometimes come across someone who just doesn't get it. You've handed them the Player's Guide, you've been through the introduction to your world, you've done all you can and still all they want to do with their character is rule the world with the power of awesome.

Let's get this straight. You should be playing this game in a group, you should be trying to play this as a team, even the Host is a special kind of team member. This isn't the Jim Bob the Awesome's Ego Massage Society.

Jim Bob may not have got the memo, however.

So what is to be done about Jim Bob? The man who wants the super strong, mega handsome, invulnerable and sexy superhero character about whom no one can say anything ill? (This is not something people generally cook up in such an obvious form but basically if it looks like they're trying to break the game by making their character all types of wonderful for no cost be wary.) Well, there are a number of approaches to this scenario but if Jim Bob wants this what I say... well, what I say is...

Give it to him. Give it to him all he wants and just a little more. Give it to him until he says he's had enough and then give him a whole extra helping. If he leaves it on his plate put it in the fridge and serve it up to him from the microwave tomorrow morning.

Do not try to argue the point. Do not tell Jim Bob to play nice. Do not pick holes. Do not criticise. Listen to what he says he wants and just give it to him. Exactly what he wants. No more. Don't twist it out of shape. Be impartial. For one last time of telling: Give him what he requested with no bells and

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whistles. If you try and mess with it he will know and he will complain and whine and bring everyone down. So just give the man what he asked for.

All old school GMs know one thing. If you have given the players a genie and three wishes then they better be damn careful what those three wishes are, because all wishes can be misinterpreted somehow. As Host you are like a genie of the imagination. It is your job to provide the players with their character wishes. If one of the players wishes to be Awesome Guy then that is what you must provide.

You see, the problem with being Awesome Guy, the Awesomest guy with the power of Awesome in the known universe, is that he has problems created by his own Awesomeness.

For starters he is responsible. As the most Awesome person in all of creation he is responsible for all the worst things that befall humanity. After all, none are as awesome as he. If he doesn't want to rescue people from a

flood or an earthquake well, hell, he's just a cad and a bounder. Who would use their awesome so selectively?

Also, there's the Gunfighter syndrome. Claim to be the best and there's always someone who wants to prove you wrong somehow. Proclaiming yourself awesome just means someone else will race to proclaim you a menace. That's the way life goes.

The Host's weapon is this. Nothing is ever all good or all bad. It doesn't matter how bulletproof Jim Bob thinks

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Awesome Guy is, the fact is there are down sides to every situation.

All you need to do is accept what Jim Bob wants and then work out what the down sides are.

Heck he may whinge about it afterwards but at that point it's really no longer your problem.

Getting The Design Right

As a Host you're going to have to get to know people quite well. You have to design your scenarios and run your scenarios for your party. This isn't a deep process, people are often quite willing to express what will entertain them. Your job is to make sure you deliver. After that it's just down to degrees of talent and that's always less important than the sweat of doing the groundwork. Make sure you have planned your scenario (or acquainted yourself with it) to an appropriate degree for your party. Make sure that if you can't prepare one aspect you have doubly prepared others to make up for it. No one can, or needs to, get it 100% right

but you need to make sure your bases are covered. The bases in question include:

Know your players

Have you done the thing where you assess their expectations of your scenario before you go in? Have you asked them what kinds of thing they'd like to do before you even wrote your own? Have you played with any of these players before? Will you be able to rely on them to fill in for gaps in your own knowledge? Have you got character sheets for the players? Are they clear or will you have to explain anything?

Know your scenario

Do you know not only who the non player characters you'll have to play are but what they'll know about what's going on, what will they tell to whom? What will the characters in your scenario respond well to? What will they respond badly to? What about the places you've created? Do you know what's in those places? Do you know what problems and complications

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various environments will introduce? Do you have maps? Are you going to share them with your players? Is there anything about the set up that you really need to explain up front?

Know your rules

Have you decided which rules you're going to use for this scenario? Do all the players know the rules? If not, are you well versed in them enough to explain them? Have you thought about whether you're using the absolute minimum number of rules possible?

If you've thought about all these things, even if you are playing with brand new players you've never met, or you're trialling a risky scenario, then you should be okay. I wouldn't recommend trying brand new material on a crowd who haven't partaken before but all things are possible if you're absolutely confident you can brazen it out.

Nobody Told You No

This is the final and most important

thing to remember. The only "no" in No Dice is the one in the name of the game and even that's a joke. If you're wondering just whether you can get away with outrageous gimmick x or risky innovation y the only limit is if you're not confident you can pull x or y off yet. I am telling you now, if you really want to do it and take the risk go ahead. Yes. It's okay.

Any rule, any character, location, event is just a suggestion, a source. You want to run the pirate adventure but make it about space pirates, heck, do the customisation and go the hell ahead. You want to make the space opera more satirical and introduce loads of contemporary and relevant characters and situations then that's fine. It depends on whether you think it'll play for your group and whether you'll be able to do it convincingly.

Gimmick Sparingly

I actually quite liked it when RPGs of yore suggested funny hats, props, gimmicks and sound effects to spice up a session. Partially I think I liked it

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because I used to act and it made Role Playing a bit more like acting. Mostly I think it's because I'm a sucker for gimmicks. Hence inventing a gimmick-free RP system in which every extra rule will be a new gimmick.

So when I now advise you to avoid extra gimmicks in your role play if you can take it in that spirit. Just as unnecessary rules undermine the enjoyment of a good game so stupid false noses yank engrossed players out of the No Dice experience. At the end of the day nobody told you no, but I'm just advising against under all normal circumstances.

The only small exception to this is the addition of music. Back when you'd have to keep scrambling for the tape deck, or repeating the same CD perpetually I would have said that the benefit wasn't worth the cost. However with the advent of digital music players I would support the use of non-intrusive low level ambient

soundscapes.

Anything that won't distract people with lyrics or yank them out of the experience is fine. So instrumental pieces and ambient sounds are fine, as long as you have enough variety to only cycle through once every two or three hours.

I would point out here that the music thing is a tiny flavour of seasoning on what should be a robust role playing dish. It's a nice to have but the role play should not suffer from its absence. If you're spending more time planning the soundtrack than the actual scenario you're in danger.

Finally...

Not every adventure you run will be a 100% glowing success but even a mediocre role play is more entertaining that most other forms of entertainment. Just do your best, have fun and hopefully everyone else will have fun too.

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The Vanilla System

Like everything else in this book the system presented here is a suggestion. The first thing you'll probably notice is that it includes no reference to stats on a character sheet. This is because, in its most basic form a No Dice character is a verbal construction. Numeric scores may be suggested for specific games but the vanilla system does not take this into account.

So here it is.

The System

Take a pack of cards and introduce one joker. Shuffle the cards. Whenever a conflict is in need of resolution the player draws a single card.

So what is the player testing against? Well it's a difficulty score that, generally speaking would be between 1

and 10. Where does this number come from? The Host makes it up.

Gauging Difficulty

It seems like a simple thing but often when the question of a conflicted action comes up you, as Host, may be a bit stumped as to what difficulty score to set for the conflicted action. So here's a check list of actions to take to mentally set the difficulty before the draw.

The basic conflict in nature is of something a person either will manage or they won't this is equivalent to flipping a coin and getting heads. The chances of heads or tails coming up are more or less equal.

To simulate a coin toss in No Dice with a card draw you could, therefore set the

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difficulty at 5 i.e. a draw of 5 or below, or a Jack is a fail, a draw of 6 or above or Queen is pass.

Now quickly ask yourself, is the test you're asking them to make that difficult? Or will they be lucky to succeed? Or unlucky to fail?

The 50-50 mechanic is an anchor. It's easier to set the goalpost width once one goalpost is in the ground to provide contrast and perspective. If you are always asking yourself how different this conflict is from a 50-50 conflict you'll be on the right track for fairness.

Degrees Of Success

Of course there are 12 possible conclusive results from every No Dice draw. It's always been the habit of myself and my players that a Queen is not just a raw success but a success with style, a Jack is not just a failure but a proper botch job. If the numbers from 1 to 10 are not just to be lines in the sand you might want to consider the idea of multiple outcomes from a single draw.

For example Kim wants to search a room for evidence of a gangster's involvement in a crime she and her party are investigating. She is turning over the gangster's apartment. Although you decide that she'll get a clue of some nature on a draw of 4 or better to get the real conclusive goods she needs a 9 or 10. She draws a seven so as Host you give her more than the basics but maybe leave out some vital piece of information that would seal the gangster's fate for good and all.

This is entirely up to your discrimination as Host. To be honest it's not always appropriate to offer

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degrees of success. When Marco is trying to shoulder barge a door he will either bust the door off its hinges or he will not. There's no degrees of success here.

Card draws are a storytelling aid, not an administration process. They give clues to you as the Host how to pitch someone's success or failure given all the information you have to hand.

Evaluating a Draw

Aces are low, 10s are high, Jacks are knaves and thus signify an automatic failure of the tests, Queens represent lady luck and therefore indicate an immediate success on the test. Kings are kept by the player and traded for redraws on future tests. When a king is drawn it is placed into the possession of the player who drew it and the test continues with a redraw.

After any card that is not a King has been drawn and evaluated it is placed into a discard pile. When the Joker is drawn the discards and Joker are immediately placed back into the pack

and the pack is shuffled. The test then continues as the player draws the top card from the freshly shuffled deck.

The end.

No muss, no fuss. If you feel that the revelation of these rules was something of an anti-climax don't worry, the game is meant to be the exciting part. If you feel the rules are the exciting part this may not be the game system for you.

On a more serious note this vanilla system is serviceable and will certainly work in "Traveller's Rest" the first example game included in this book. The intention of the vanilla system is that it forms a core into which further rules can be added for flavour as setting and atmosphere dictates. I didn't want the rules from games to infect one another and I also wanted the stripped down option for any No Dice game to be rapidly understood and always available.

As a Host, you may never pick up on the extra rules included in future games, I don't think any No Dice

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adventure would actually suffer from using vanilla as opposed to specific rules. But some people like more and some people like less so there will be more rules to follow by the adventure or by the system.

As a Host you should be focused on your player's desires for the upcoming adventure not on some mechanic or other that may or may not resolve some obscure situation to everyone's satisfaction. Well, that's my opinion anyway.

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Stats A NOTE ABOUT THE FOLLOWING SECTIONS

It is possible that you are just scared witless at the prospect of coming up with your own home grown RPG in which case you may want to skip forward to the scenarios section. If you're looking to run one of the included scenarios then they contain any further rules you need right there. These sections are purely for those who want to go "deeper" into the No Dice System Creation and want a few suggestions.

As you were.

The Game

To help "keep score" of your game, the thing that fundamentally puts the G in RPG is a juggling of (ew) statistics or "stats". Stats are not the nicest thing about Role Playing, in fact they may be what puts many people off the experience. If you salt your game with a few well chosen stats, however, it adds a little to the fun. Stats also give players hard anchors by which to build up a mental picture of their characters. So this section aims to guide you in getting your stat stew filled with

savoury flavour chunks that describe characters in a tangible way without becoming watered down, tedious number soup.

Stats vs. Scores

Let's be really quick here in pointing out the difference between a stat and a score. The core of it is that a stat will be used with a randomiser, a score won't. You might make a one off game where you give everyone a rating out of five on psychic ability (1/5 being the lowest 5/5 being super psychic).

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If during the game you plan on testing things like "the team can only see the ghost if their psychic rating is 3 or above" then you have a score. The number flat out tells you what the player can or can't do, you're using the number to short hand some absolute.

If, on the other hand you say something like "draw a card and add your psychic rating" knowing that if the player gets 6 or over they can see the ghost you are giving them a basic psychic stat which helps when testing but is not the last word.

Scores can also just be a way for people to visualise where their character stands in relation to everyone else so Bob knows he's the least psychic and Alice knows she's more psychic than Chad but less psychic than Dorothy. This, of course, only applies if everyone knows what everyone else's score is.

It might be that even the light discussion of numbers fills you with dread and it is for those people that we present the first question.

To Stat or Not to Stat?

The answer to this opening query is generally quite simple and can be summed up in the following recommendation:

If you can cope without a particular rule, well, you go ahead and just cope without it now, you hear?

There are three types of rules in RP world. The type you have to have for those tricky situations that need arbitration. The type that reinforce the atmosphere of the RP world you have created and unnecessary fiddly rules that get in the way of the experience.

Let's look at the latter. Almost all rules fall into this category. If it's not vital and it doesn't add flavour it's one of that last type. Most games ever written seem to consist almost wholly of rules of that type. One particular well known game I have the rulebook for dedicates about five or six large pages to combat rules I have never read. The game is not a combat game. All the other rules are pretty flexible and easily understood. The combat rules on the

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other hand...

Remember folks, D&D was essentially the wargame gone board, with a little bit of RP thrown in, in fact, it pretty much still is. A No Dice RP intends to get as far away from this as possible and a vital part of that is tossing most of the stats out of the window. With that in mind let's look at the types of stats you might have in a no dice game.

Hard Stats

The one universal stat in almost every role playing game is the Hit Point. Hit Points represent the number of serious physical shocks the player can take before being rendered unconscious (not dead, it gets fiddly thereafter as to when it is a character "dies"). This is, of course, because most RP games hitherto have had a hefty portion of physical combat, or are intended to have same.

In No Dice this is not necessarily the case. Even so, you may have a scenario set in a hazardous environment like outer space, the Antarctic or an urban

warzone. In these cases you will want to give some indication of exactly how much punishment someone can take before they're out for the count. As you will see Revelation Point, the slasher movie example included in this book, takes its own unique look at the concept of Hit Points. Like I said before nothing is prohibited except things that make the game suck.

Hit Points are an excellent example of what I call a "Hard Stat". A hard stat is like a baseline, it may change over time but on a given day it describes the average of that aspect of the character. The other example I can think of which is pretty universal is "Luck/Fate", often used as a way to persuade a GM to be kinder than a card draw would indicate they should be in dire straits.

Of course, your adventure may not require physical peril. I would say this situation will crop up mostly in one offs, in longer term adventures the chance of no physical peril and no need for luck is slim indeed (although not impossible).

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What you really have to decide is what can't you do without and I'll show you how whilst I run through examples of other "hard" stats.

Most RP systems flesh out Life and Luck with descriptions of the character's make up in three main areas, Body, Mind and Spirit. Many focus on physical attributes for obvious reasons. And in this we can see the inherent problem here.

Thinking just about the aspects of someone's physical appearance we could talk about their health, their physical strength, their physical fitness, their suppleness, their reaction time, their constitution, their relative beauty within their society.

All of these are described in stats like Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Speed, Vitality, Sinew, Attractiveness, Deftness. Even this leaves out some things like being fiddle fingered, or having unusually large lung capacity or other things that are usually relegated to the rank of "skills".

Some stats overlap the physical with

the spiritual: Charisma, Willpower, Fellowship. The overlaps are not limited to Physical/Spiritual as Physical/Mental stats like Perceptiveness will attest. In the realm of the mind we have stats like Intelligence, Analysis, Focus. In Spirit we might have some concept of spiritual purity or natural aptitude at magic or propensity for madness (AKA Sanity).

The question becomes not only how do you describe a character but also how do you stop describing them? The problem is, the more you give to the god of detail the more you take away from the god of fun and simplicity. The more you give to the god of simplicity the more situations have no hard and fast solutions.

Stats are a balancing act. Hence the question of whether you can do without them. It depends on the game, of course, but the more you can do away with, I tend to find, the better.

A brief word about bonuses

Sometimes you can hide horrendous

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hard stat stacks by having a simplified "uber" score like "Body" with "sub stats" that add advantages in certain situations called "Bonuses". Just remember, drilling down this way more than two layers is likely to make complexity and complexity is the enemy of good times.

So having a character who has a basic Body score of 4 (out of 10) might then have a profile of subscores in Strength (-2), Dexterity (1), Reaction Speed (0), Beauty (1), Constitution (0) and Vitality (1)... What you do with such scores is up to you and will be dealt

with in the section of randomisers. I'd say that if you make it any more complex than that, you're asking for trouble.

Points

Any game needs some way of keeping score. Are the players winning or losing? RP is different in some ways in that there can be a number of scores which allow the character to feel they are winning in different ways but the basic situation is the same. Let's examine some ways that we are keeping score in an RP game.

Life

Remember the HP? Well they are a scorekeeping method. The most important way that players know they're "winning" is that their character is still alive. If they are badly injured they might be worried but an alive character is always better than a dead character.

Money

Is a character loaded or not? In many

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games the only reason to accumulate money is to then spend it on weapons. Even so, the cash value of a player's arsenal will indicate how much money they have previously spent on acquisition.

Experience

The more experience a character has the more wonderful that character's portfolio of skills and abilities will be. Experience totals are accumulative but all "purchased" upgrades need to aggregate to less than the experience total at all times (or you can just "spend" points like money thus your experience is like a bank account with which you buy stuff and then the figure goes down).

Sanity

The only other major scoring mechanism I can think of is when a player tries to keep a Sanity score. This tends to be a bit of a weird way to keep score as it goes up and down. Generally (although not always) the saner you are the better, but you might, if you are particularly sane "burn" sanity to

achieve an end and employ a method of acquiring more later on (counselling, a stay in an asylum?).

The scoring mechanics won't really bother you unless you're creating a long-term adventure. Over time characters will seek improvement to their skills. Players regard this as their "reward" for good, consistent role play. Often the increments to a character's hard stats and "Skills" are purchased in the mythical currency of "experience".

In D&D you needed gold and XP (Experience Points) to make an awesome killing machine. There's nothing essentially wrong with expressing progress as an advance in both experience and currency, the fact that the things you could buy with experience were generally more useful than those you could buy with the cash was also nice. I see no reason to change this dynamic in a long term game.

Sometimes, particularly when it is knowledge and social bargaining that are at stake in a game, you don't need an actual "experience" stat at all, you just need to keep playing to become

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better. In other cases you will need some kind of points system and it is this that we shall take a look at next.

Increments

So if you are running an incrementally scoring game how are you going to ladle out the spoils? Some games like to keep numbers low making one experience point or one gold piece worth a whole bunch. Others ladle on the scores like the players are playing Space Invaders but keep the value of each unit low.

I prefer the former method, it's simpler. Also if you need 1000 experience points to buy anything of any value why not just make every point worth 1000? 500 points is, after all, worth nothing as you can't buy anything with it. In the end, again, the choice is yours.

The other question is when do people acquire XP and when do they spend them? Money is easy, if a player has money they can spend it. However, if the players are halfway up a mountain and someone wants to cash in pending

experience for new skills there and then, how is the Host to decide?

Sometimes it's appropriate to just allow characters to accumulate XP on a session by session basis and spend them there and then or hoard them for a few sessions until the time comes to go on an experience blow out.

If you wanted a way of making experience expenditure something that could happen in game you could make certain experiences or places into experience exchanges. New scientific research linking sleep to learning could make it a viable mechanic to exchange experience as characters sleep. You could make certain locations, like computer terminals, gyms and safe houses into experience spending places, like computer games often do.

In then end, as with anything else the choice is yours. As you read more No Dice material you will see how I deal with these issues and maybe this will help you come up with your own preferred method.

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Descriptors

Let's be clear about this. Sometimes words make a terrible muddle out of things that previously seemed simple. Let's take a look at the word "speed". Say you made a game where characters had a speed stat, what does it actually express. Well, it could express how fast they move, or it could express their reaction time. These things are not the same at all. And fast reaction time, while we're at it, doesn't presuppose dexterity. You might be as supple as a plank of wood but still react quickly.

It could be a muddle.

So just be careful what you call stats, it might be best when introducing players to the character sheet to clarify what stats mean. This will also encourage you to have less stats as the "explain the descriptors" Q&A is liable to be one of the low points of any No Dice game.

Opening Up Possibility

The idea of any stat is not, in fact to define and limit a character. Anyone with half a brain could guess that

Mickey the Pirate might be okay at cutlass waving but will suck at piloting an Apache helicopter gunship, whereas Barbara the air force pilot will have the reverse innate abilities.

Your stats should point out to the players avenues for exploration of their abilities that aren't suggested in a bio or character note. For example did you know Barbara was 2 points less psychic than Mickey? No. Well, now you do. Stats will encourage people to use them if they exist. If they don't exist the players are pretty much on their own with regards for cunning plans about what to do next. Use this to your advantage. The more stats you make the more can get lost on the sheet.

The less you have the more of a particular type of problem solving your team are likely to attempt. If your game is meant to be magical veer towards magical stats, if martial arts then combat stats are appropriate. While we're on the topic of what's appropriate let's take a moment to take a more detailed look at the Character Sheet.

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Character Sheets

Back in the early days of role playing the character sheet was an awesome beast indeed. Awesome in the sense that it filled you with awe. Possibly, then, dreadful as well seeing as it also filled a lot of people with dread.

The character sheet stretched across the two sides of paper it came on covered in small boxes labelled with stat names. This beast was a confused and nightmarish jumble that expressed a range of information from how long your character took to tie his shoelaces to his tendency towards lactose intolerance.

Over time some games have attempted to cut this down a little but the core of it remains the same. Some games have little text fields to write tiny histories of your character. You can also record goals, fears, personality quirks. There has been much work done in softening the sheet from a stat fest to something a little more descriptive.

Well, it shouldn't surprise you by now

that I would recommend that character sheets take another step toward the soft.

The character sheet performs two tasks. One is, indeed, to record the "score" so far. Remember the scoring mechanism is what will add a main focus to the game's events. The other, more neglected aspect, is providing space to giving a character a jumping off point into the campaign.

It might even, in some cases, be better to assign these different tasks to different sheets of paper. Over the course of a longer adventure what the character started off as shouldn't be what the character will remain. In a one off you could probably devote half of a sheet to the scoring mechanism and the other half to a potted character bio.

The cardinal recommendation when it comes to character sheets is: when it begins to resemble a government tax rebate claim form, you've probably overdone it with the stats. There's nothing wrong with leaving a healthy

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section for player notes. If the players don't need it there's an even chance your scenario is dull.

So we've essentially gutted the old way of doing things. We've tossed out most of the stats and left acres of note space on a character sheet that has four or five numbers and a couple of paragraphs of text upon it. Now, if you're a regular gamer, you're wondering what happens when there's some kind of a conflict? How do we decide stuff. Well, we're about to get into a whole section on randomisers but before that let's talk about how No Dice views the nature of "conflict".

Conflicts Or Complications?

Let's start this bit by clearing something up. In a story conflict and complication are two very different things. Conflict is a dramatic construct of personal dilemma that pulls people into the story, complication is inconvenience for the main characters in a story that acts like a seasoning upon the story, too much and the story will drag, too little and the heroes seem to have too easy a ride.

To illustrate let's take the adventures of Jim the Fugitive Vet. Jim has just escaped from the ever vigilant gaze of Special Agent McMisinformed and stumbled into a farmhouse he thought deserted. Unfortunately the farmhouse has two occupants. A farmer and his guard dog. Jim meets the dog first and kicks it hard, injuring the dog. Only then is he confronted by the farmer, holding his hunting rifle up to the hapless vet's chest.

The fact the farmer is now very angry at Jim and may turn him over to the law is a complication, the fact that the reason for this is Jim's hasty action in kicking the dog is conflict. Ironically, had Jim not kicked the dog he would have no angry farmer but he would also have no way to ingratiate himself with said farmer. Looks like Jim had better get to fixing the dog then. Only when it comes to Jim's using his vet abilities can we understand what role players mean by conflict (as opposed to "fighting").

In role playing terms a "conflict" is a very simple thing. The player wants their character to do something, it's not

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an easy thing to do, so there is a conflict between the character's desires and their abilities that needs resolving.

In many role play systems until you get into the minutiae of combat the process for resolving non-combative conflicts tends towards being so light some GMs tend to ignore it. Unfortunately some GMs don't. Lets return to our example of Jim the vet. Jim knows animal medicine and has a percentage skill in this of 63%. During the course of his adventure Jim injures a dog belonging to a farmer who could help Jim out or leave him to swing in the wind. Jim reasons if he helps the farmer's dog then the farmer will be grateful enough to be forgiving.

To see if Jim can fix the dog the GM in a regular RP has two choices. One is that Jim, being a vet, and having no particular time pressure upon him, will know how to diagnose and treat a sick dog, or at least advise on treatment. The other is that Jim's years at vet school will be subject to an animal care test. This test will usually consist of rolling two ten sided dice (D10) one for

the tens and one for the units. Jim does this and gets 68. It's over his score and so he fails to treat the dog.

There are a few problems with this scenario. What, exactly, for example, does the test mean? Is it about Jim's actual skill? The condition of the dog? And if he can do nothing does this mean he doesn't even have a clue what's wrong with the dog?

The fact is the test is not realistic. The animal care skill, it could be argued, would only need testing if Jim is caring for animals on a strict time limit or under unusual stress. The rest of the time merely having the skill should suffice.

Then of course we wouldn't need any dice... oh.

Stat heavy RPGs tend to concentrate on physical combat on the basis that we can simulate the actions of a highly skilled kung fu master using some numbers and a set of dice far more accurately than we can express the nuance of advanced medical skill. Who

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knows whether this is, in fact, the truth.

As GMs we might be up at night worrying about this sort of thing. As Hosts we don't care.

Let's not forget, the point of a No Dice game is fun. Worrying about whether Jim's medical skill is realistic given the percentage rating of his animal care skill is about as much fun as breaking a limb.

If Jim's a vet and Bonzo's a dog not a gryphon then his skills are probably

good. If Bonzo's a dog but Jim's got to save him in the next fifteen minutes or Bonzo will die; if Bonzo's a gryphon; if people are shooting at Jim whilst he treats Bonzo, then we might need to resolve a conflict referring to some kind of stat, but otherwise let it fly.

Just Play

If it's at all an option I would heartily recommend just not having any numbers at all in your player materials. It is possible, and your players will thank you for the convenience. Or at least they won't curse you for turning your session into number jugglers united.

The past trend of having statistics to describe everything on the character sheet seems to have been about two things:

1) Giving an illusion of choice whilst actually imposing inconvenient limits2) Presuming that people can't tell a bum story note.

If Jim the vet tries to play a Piano Concerto without any piano lessons

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and rolls a 2 on his 3% natural musical skill does that make his victory any more convincing? Jim's just not a pianist, he's a vet and no statistical anomaly is going to change that. People can smell someone getting away with murder worse than bottom gas in a lift.

If what someone wants to do doesn't interfere with the story it is your job as a Host to accommodate that. Then you only have to start randomising when even you can't tell if someone would be able to do something or not.

Making Randomisation Interesting

Like it or not, these situations will occasionally occur. Some RPG

designers messing with the concept of "Diceless" have said, if you're not going to be rolling 80% of the time then maybe everything should be down to that fiat thing we talked about at the head of the Host section. The problem with this is that not having any challenge where it's needed begins to introduce the feeling that this is all arbitrary.

Arbitrary results are no fun. They're even less fun than randomising too often. So with heavy heart we have to concede that sometimes our complications need resolution by lady luck, with that in mind we turn, at last to the business of randomisers.

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Randomisers

No Dice? Well What About Cards?

When I was thinking of a name for this role-playing system a number of options sprung to mind. Eventually I settled on "No Dice" because it wasn't about a game that was diceless. It wasn't even about having a particular randomiser at all. It was about rejecting dice as randomisers specifically because they've been done. If you can't bear to be parted from your cubes and other polyhedra then go ahead and come up with some dice-ful rules to the system.

I, on the other hand, will stick by my randomiser of choice. This being the humble playing card. Way back when I started tinkering around with systems I picked up on the fact that there weren't that many playing card based systems. I played one game that used them and thought they were kind of cool.

So when I began in on No Dice in earnest cards were high on my agenda. I've run a few one offs with cards instead of dice and, to be honest, the experience is mind blowing. Cards, I have no hesitation in saying are superior to dice in just about every way. Let's see how.

Cards vs Dice

At this point You might be asking what's the problem? Both cards and dice are means of generating a random number so why not just stick to pulling out a few dice and getting people to roll a few random numbers?

Before you do I would just like to put in a few words for the humble playing card.

1) Playing Cards have a greater subtlety than dice - It doesn't matter how many

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sides your platonic solid has a 5 is just a 5. In a deck of cards 5 could be of two colours (red or black) or four suits (spades, clubs, hearts, diamonds). You can just use the 5 as a five but the colour or suit could also indicate something about the particular 5 that has been drawn.

2) Playing cards also come with court cards - These could be wild effects, having augmentation properties or indicating automatic successes or failures. People who have been using dice for the past 25 years are so desperate for something like this they've even started inventing funny dice to account for these effects. I'm not joking.

3) Playing cards come with a greater number of interpretations out of the box - I mean come on there's 10 numerics and three courts per suit. And jokers. To simulate even half of the functionality here with dice you'd have to start messing with the dark arts of d10s and from there it's a polyhedral slippery slope. There's an old saying in role playing that the moment you start

messing around with d20s you are lost to the dark side forever. Actually I just made that last part up but I'm sure there should be an old saying about that.

4) Dice need tables, cards only need hands - Let's not forget, dice need a surface to bounce off so that they can reveal their secrets. A player can sit on a couch in a room with no table and pull cards from a deck he is holding in his hands and it's all good. With dice he'd have to be forever hunching down to roll them on the floor.

Basically, I am recommending a card based system over a dice based one but, whatever floats your boat. The essential point of your conflict resolution method is that it should be pretty intuitive. To which end here are some intuitive ways of measuring.

Numbers

The unavoidable thing here is that your random chance will be expressed as a number. When you test you will do some light mathematics and end up

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with a number. This will be compared to some other number and success or failure will thus be determined. Here are some popular past ways this has been done.

Have a measure of difficulty expressed as a number and make the player exceed that number with a combination of attribute plus card draw. Advantages: Super easy to understand, Disadvantages: Boring.

Have the player's attribute score be how many randomiser chances they get e.g. a score of 1 indicates one chance, a score of 3 indicates 3 chances, you then compare the score drawn against the difficulty rating of the task. Advantages: Pretty easy to understand, increases player's abilities exponentially. Disadvantages: increases player's abilities exponentially.

Make the randomisers thrown/drawn into a pool and have a target value across the range e.g. the player draws four

cards and is trying to reach a target of five on all four he draws 2, 3, A, 5 and so that makes one success. In these systems 1 is often counted as a botch and 6 is counted as a "special" success. Advantages: Pretty easy to understand, flattens the probabilities nicely. Disadvantages: Very flat and takes some counting to know how successful you've been, also as a GM who has applied this system in the past I can say that the difference between 1 success, 2 successes and 3 successes isn't all that clear to me even now.

These are all systems that work for dice but I've not even mentioned any of the special things about cards. So let's consider the humble card's advantages and how they can nudge your story in strange new directions.

Suits

This is one thing dice can't do. A 6 in a deck of cards could just be a six, but it

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also possesses a suit and suit could have significant. A six of diamonds could be very different from a six of clubs. Whenever I think about card suits, because I have some knowledge of the Tarot, I always think of the suits' Tarot associations i.e.:

Spades - Intellect

Hearts - Emotion

Clubs - Spiritual Growth

Diamonds - Wealth

These interpretions are approximate to a scholar of the Tarot, but we're hosting a game not a Tarot evening. You may note that the four categories decribed here present all sorts of possibilities for bonuses and plot effects. Anything that will give you, as the Host, a break in interpreting what a result means has to be a good thing.

Suits could have also denote effects on plot, characters, world events (e.g. weather) or treasures. While we're on the topic don't forget that cards come in two colours the actual suit might be

irrelevant, but you might make red and black cards mean different things.

Court Cards

This is where cards really start to take off into a whole different stratosphere when compared to dice. No other randomiser has extra elements built in the way a pack of cards does. Here you have three cards per suit that essentially have no numeric value. They are "special" cards. They could mean something or nothing. You can even remove them if you feel they're unnecessary.

What About Aces?

In the dice days 1 was either great (on testing systems that went low) or disastrous (on the other hand). Cards have tended to indicate there is something special about one. It's called the Ace. Ace is always good, isn't it? It's rarely a presage of disaster.

One of the distinct problems of dice based systems is that once they're used to the system anyone can tell from a

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roll what kind of result they've achieved. Cards allow for more flexibility in this case.

Jokers

Just when you thought a single randomiser couldn't get any more cool along comes a card without a numeric value or a suit. A card that essentially represents a kind of "all bets are off" concept.

The power and versatility of the joker card is exemplified by how the card itself has stepped out of the deck and into unrelated games like quizzes. The Joker symbolises that some extraordinary game event has been introduced. Whether you harness this power for your own adventures is up to you.

Multiple Decks

If you take the humble die, add a further die what do you have? Well, two dice essentially.

Take a pack of cards and add a second deck of cards and you could have a

couple of things. The most basic of these is that you have one really big deck of cards. To think of a more exciting example, you could buy two packs of cards which are of different brands. Then you have two different decks. You could use one for straight numeric randomising and the other as a kind of chance deck.

I'm sure the possibilities for multi-deck games don't stop there but I'm going to finish up extolling the virtues of the playing card now and move on.I hope that this section has so far opened your eyes up to the power of card decks as a randomiser in role playing. I'm going to round out the chapter by going really nuts and discussing further paraphernalia that you could use to enhance mood and make randomisation interesting in your games.

Resource Counters

One thing that has been fun on occasion is to use counters or beads to represent some resource such as sanity or experience. The practice of actually having a pile and spending the pile

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gives an intuitive idea of how a character is doing. It can be fiddly, however so beware.

The Joy of Nothing

I've played a couple of games in developing this book that had no more that character descriptions as their system. The games in question were very enjoyable and suffered no detriment for being completely freeform. The cards were used in a version of the "vanilla" No Dice system but the draws were interpreted raw with no bonuses. It's not a method that will work in every situation, best for one offs and best where characters will not be

expected to do specialised challenge tasks. Even so, consider just freeing yourself of all numbers, if you can get away with it.

Other Randomisers

Dominos - Have two numbers per block, that must be useful for something, right?

Coins - or small discs with symbols and numbers on them. Draw your randomiser from a bag.

Spinning Tops - With a number of sides and a number to each side, means a dice like randomiser with only 5 values can be produced.

Other... - I'm sure there are more. Like I said a while back, nobody's telling you no.

The Randomiser Problem

There's something you just can't get around. Most randomisers require, to greater or lesser degrees, some interruption in the gameplay to

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operate. Dice are certainly not innocent of this as the process of shaking, hunching and rolling the dice is distracting enough, let alone when one pings off a drinks glass and shoots under the sofa.

I've experimented with various means of randomisation and none are utterly unintrusive but the least intrusive? Well, you've probably guessed what I'm going to advocate by now. he fact is

shooting a steely Hosting glare at one of the players and commanding "Do me a draw", where they pull one straight out of a pack in their hand is as instantaneous as you can get.I know this is turning into a treatise on what's so great about card decks but let me assure you the testing elves have gone so nuts for this stuff that they've begun hacking other systems to use cards with them instead of dice.

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Plots

If you're doing it right then there should be no such thing as a "typical" No Dice evening. However just because there is no one thing that could be said to typify the No Dice experience does not mean that there aren't some tried and tested recipes for giving players an interesting role play session.

The first thing I want to get right away from is the idea that what we are doing is making a plot that involves the players being given a "mission" which they will then fulfil by going through a number of steps you have laid out for them in order. Even if your game is mission based there is nothing that turns a player off more than feeling that they are "on rails".

The Sandbox

Thankfully the wonderful world of

videogame design can give us a good analog here. The sandbox is a game design structure that says the designer is there to provide an open world of possibility for the player. Sandbox games started out as things like Sim City and The Sims where there was no actual plot per se players filled empty worlds with bespoke creations and developed their own internal worlds.

Fast forward a few years and a company called Rockstar produced a game called Grand Theft Auto III. No one really knew what to expect from this when it first arrived but it quickly set down a design paradigm that has come to dominate video game design. In GTA III the player was set down in a 3D world called Liberty City and allowed to wander around either following the plot or, essentially, playing around with the world

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environment to fulfil various tasks. These tasks included activities such as driving vehicles up carefully arranged ramps to complete "unique stunts", collecting carefully hidden "packages" or engaging in mini games that simulated sports or other activities (such as becoming a taxi driver).

This meant that, to a certain degree, the player decided what goals they wanted to fulfil in the game in what order. In the world of video game design it was a big deal as previously the accent had been on a linear progression of "levels" to reach an end win state.

In role playing, weirdly, sandbox would have been the assumed mode of play but the original concept of "experience points" actually rendered role playing games, and particularly the granddaddy of them all D&D, into tabletop computer games. The aim of each monster bash was to "level up" to go and bash a bigger monster.

I think part of this has to be because game designers worried more about solving the universal problem of players in rucks than they did about guiding their GMs in the ways of plot design. I'm not ladling out the blame here, these games were designed by game designers not novelists, I'm just pointing out that when it came to plots the advice has been somewhat focused on the end product than a graded journey.

In No Dice I want to give the Host a quick lesson in thinking through plots and plot construction and to do this I want to first of all pick up on something game designers can get their head round and work backwards from there.

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Win Conditions

In game design a "win condition" is a state of play where one of the participants has "won". In games like chess one person wins and the other loses when a check mate is declared (or some other final condition is met). In role playing it is possible for everyone to win. The Host wins the minute someone says they enjoyed the game and when is everyone doing it again, the players...

Well now, there's the thing. What do players want? The more game focused player may want to feel that they have somehow become "better" at the game. Other people may simply want to have been entertained. Others may want to feel they have got to know their character and the characters of others a little better.

What your players want out of No Dice in order to have "won" is frankly between you and them. It tends to be the case that the players want to engage with the world you have created and will probably expect that you have laced the world with a story that

contains puzzles, challenges, dramatic situations and intrigue. You as the Host want to pull your players into the story, motivate the characters to heroic deeds and shepherd them through the game until the story comes to a conclusion.

That conclusion is the win condition.

RPG stories have a strange feature in that game time will progress whether the players are doing well or not. In the end the session will come to a close and if at that time the players have not got to grips with the game to a certain extent the game itself will not care.

This puts the game into a very strange position. You as the Host will know how time will pass and what is going on in the game. You know what end result is waiting in the wings to emerge. But will the players get the idea in time?

Well, in order to ensure that they do and gaming satisfaction is achieved pay close attention to this section as we learn how to build an adventure.

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Where to begin?

If you've ever read a novel or watched a movie the question may well have occurred to you of where a person would even start to write such a story. If you are sitting down to write your own No Dice adventure you may be asking yourself this question with slightly more anguish than you ever have previously.

Let's take a breath for a moment and calm down.

I'm here to help you. The help I offer is quick and dirty but it's as effective as hell. Further No Dice product will inevitably add to this initial dose of advice but these first few tips should get you a nice plot structure without too much hassle.

I don't know whether handing out writing secrets is liable to have me thrown out of the Writer's Circle or whatever. To be honest, even if it does, I don't care. I'm about to pull on my luchador's mask and show you some of the wiring under the board when it

comes to engineering a story.

First Question...

How long is your overall story going to be? You're going to have to reproduce the process described below for each and every episode of the adventure you're running. Only stupid TV executives with dollar signs in their eyes believe that all things should be ultimately open ended. The best stories know where they're going. They have a beautifully paced beginning, middle and end. This is known as an arc.

In any adventure your arc may be short and sweet, stretch across a few episodes or be planned as a saga stretching across many months of play. Whichever way you're going each session will need to contain what you can think of as an "episode". Each episode will culminate with some dramatic situation being revealed and, if you are planning a long adventure, the early episodes will want to build towards your final reveal.

I would also suggest that should you

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wish to engineer a huge saga or chronicle that you split it down into "seasons" of six to eight episodes because variety is the spice of life and someone else always has their eye on the Hosting chair.

Six to Eight Episodes

This section only applies to multi-episodic No Dice adventures. One timers may move along.

An average No Dice session can last between three and eight hours. That's the equivalent of five or six episodes of any given dramatic television series without advertisements. At their longest "seasons" of television dramas last about twenty four episodes. In four sessions your players will have been playing as long as it would take to watch an entire season of a television drama.

Also you, as Host, are going to have to come up with a series of entertaining episodes for your players to play through. Even if you are planning a role play saga to rival War and Peace you will not be able to just play the

whole thing through from end to end. After a while players will be hungering for resolution, even if it is just the conclusion to an act.

You may have a very clear idea of what will happen in your saga, or just the vague impressions of the beginning situation and where the story will end up. You don't have to know everything right away. Just plan out six to eight episodes and then relax, run something else, give the players a break. In the end they'll thank you for endless variety and stimulation even if, when they think back on the saga that too was rich and rewarding.

Plot Construction

What you should find, particularly when designing something episodic in nature like a No Dice scenario, is that plots become something like boxes. All stories have one plot, but within that one plot there are usually smaller plots which revolve around the central plot and comment upon it, adding depth to the characters and themes.

So, and I don't ask this question in the

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spirit of sarcasm, what is a plot? It's hard to pin down the concept, mumbling "I dunno, it's just like what happens in the story" with a half-hearted shrug isn't satisfactory. It is, however, half correct. "Plot" is just a way of shorthanding "dramatic conflict".

It is no coincidence that plot also means an area or point. Plots are conflicts that are supposed to contain some sort of point. An incident by itself is not a story: "The bike rolled to a stop once it reached the bottom of the hill." is an event, but it is not a plot. A plot attempts to resolve a conflicting situation: "Dave's final left hook proved too much for Edward and he fell to the floor, out cold." is both an event and a plot.

A plot sets us up to want the answer to a number of questions, not least what's the deal between Edward and Dave? You could, were you particularly inquisitive, ask a bunch of questions about the errant bike but there's a chance none of the answers will be interesting. If we hear some dude hit

another dude that is somewhat interesting no matter what our feelings on the subject of mano a mano single combat.

If you're going to be ultra-conservative in your definition then a plot can be defined as equilibrium-event-equilibrium. This is not helpful. Just tweak it out a little though to become false equilibrium-event-equilibrium and we have a truth about stories. At the beginning all the characters think things are okay but because the events of the story are going to happen the players can presume things are really not okay.

It is only by going through the events of the plot that a true state of "being okay" is reached. When the characters began their tale everything was "not okay" they just didn't realise it.

As interesting as this may or may not be it's not going to help us get some notes down. Now we understand that a plot is basically "something interesting that happens in a story", without a plot a story is not really a story, something

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interesting happening out of context begs us to find out the story but is not a story by itself.

There are a huge number of classifications for story systems. I've looked at the very most basic story construction to help us define what a plot is. Any system that gives you only one, two or three basic plots is going to be somewhat limited.

One of the most compelling systems I've ever come across is the idea that there are seven basic plots. I heard this years ago with reference to movies but the internet seems to have expunged all record of the Hollywood system from history. There are, however other plot categorisation systems and many of them suggest seven is a good number for types of plot. The one I find most useful is related by Christopher Booker in a book called (wait for it) “The Seven Basic Plots” and he states these are:

Overcoming The Monster - e.g. St. George and the Dragon

Rags To Riches - e.g. Aladdin

The Quest - e.g. Lord of the

Rings

Voyage And Return - e.g. The Odyssey

Comedy - This doesn't just mean something which makes one laugh it is a story in which people change their identity in order to initiate the story's events. Donnie Brasco, therefore, would technically count as a comedy because it details the activities of an undercover law enforcement official, although it could also fall under Overcoming the Monster (the monster being gang crime) and The Quest.

Tragedy - Any story with a downbeat ending although specifically one where that ending is occasioned by some flaw in the main character(s).

Rebirth - A radical reinvention of the characters takes place due to some encounter that could be termed a death, or a period in limbo, these stories are somewhat unusual.

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As you can see four out of the seven are enormously popular and easily referenced. The others range from hard to define (although wouldn't a comedic RPG plot be fun given the definition?) to overly difficult to imagine as an RPG. Maybe someone would want to play a tragic figure in an RPG but I doubt it would be many player's first choice, not least because it would be extremely difficult. As for "Rebirth", that's all very well but as the hub of the story is the evolution of a person's very soul unless you can guarantee this for the players I think it will have to be relegated to the status of unexpected by-product.

So we're left with five basic plots that are do-able. You might be depressed to note that three of those five are repeated over and over again in RPGs. Don't worry. At this stage we are just trying to resolve options. The actual business of playing an RPG doesn't revolve around the events of a plot.

The core of any RPG is the playing out of dramatic situations. To this end two Appendices are included in this guide.

Both deal with the thirty six dramatic situations described by French author Georges Polti. One Appendix is for players but should also be read by Hosts, the other one is further notes for the Host. there's more explanation in the relevant appendix.

For now let's move along. Once you have decided the overarching plot du jour is, for example, a “defeating the monster” with a side helping of “situation 36” you will want to get out of the abstract end of the pool and head for the most excellent water slides of genre.

Genre

In case you don't know, a good working definition of genre would be the sections in a fiction library, movie hire shop or book store. So broadly speaking "Crime", "SF", "Horror", "Fantasy", "Thriller", "Romance" etc.

There is a certain school of thought that says that all genre settings are just set dressing, the mechanisms of drama remain the same irrespective. To a

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certain degree this is true. You can rescue the princess for real in High Fantasy. Don't think that just because she's an Industrialist's Daughter and you get to the Evil Corporation's Moon Base in your Dread Cruiser doesn't mean you're still not rescuing the same princess.

Genre has a subtle effect on situation, however. It changes the kind of expectations your audience (in this case the players) have. This is not without reason as you shall see from the annotations below. Particular settings

are particularly apt for particular themes. If you set your adventures in the wrong place and time they may get muddled or go off in directions that you don't like.

So in this summary of popular genres I shall highlight what kinds of theme those genres are associated with and further themes or modifications introduced by the sub-genres of that main genre. The list is not exhaustive, nor is it intended to be; like everything else in this section it is intended as a source book to guide and suggest. There are exceptions to every rule and your killer idea is more important than my rule of thumb.

The Examples

In the course of this section I point to a few works of fiction, cinema or television drama that exemplify what I am talking about. If you are not familiar with the examples then it means one of two things:

a) if you really are attracted to the rest of the genre description but have never looked at the example cited then you

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really need to. I have picked only works which are archetypes of what they represent. Hosts need to take in a lot of ideas, Hosts need to go looking for those ideas. Hosts need to immerse themselves in these cultural items. That's where all their own ideas come from. Besides if you are attracted to the genre concept and you haven't seen the example I set you are depriving yourself of a treat.

b) if, on the other hand, you are just confused by my description and don't like the sound of it anyway you probably won't be great at Hosting a campaign in that genre. There may be a reason you've never seen Blade Runner or read Lord of the Rings, it could be it's just not your thing. In which case it's probably best not to make a rod for your own back creating a game set in a world you don't enjoy spending time in.

So bear this in mind as we take a look through the number of genre settings available to you.

Fantasy

Fantasy stories often discuss the concept of "magic" as a hypothetical force, the consequences of magic existing and ways in which magic could work. They also love heroics, the idea of destiny, the ideals of virtue, the nature of ultimate good and evil, epic sweep, grand ideas. Because of this Fantasy has always been a home for role players.

For many current role players the activity is a form of wish fulfilment in which heroics are easier than than they are in real life. Fantasy is the ideal platform for this.

High Fantasy

All the notes for fantasy as a whole apply here to the power of ten. The genre is used and much beloved a lot not just by role players but by fiction readers.

Comic Fantasy

The kind of antithesis to po-faced High Fantasy, comic fantasy talks about the

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same high themes but it seeks to subvert our views about them. Just read some of Terry Pratchett's Discworld and you'll get the idea. You'd be wrong to think this wasn't like "serious" fantasy though it is just the opposite of it. Comic fantasy takes a cynical view of concepts like "Ultimate Good", "Ultimate Evil", "Kindly Spirits" and "Evil Demons".

Contemporary Fantasy

Anything set in the here and now is likely to be reflective. When you're playing a game set in the far future or in a fantasy realm you have to look outwards because the world is new to you. Space and future games are about the totally unfamiliar, games set in a past, or past-like world force you to look beyond yourself because they have different rules to the world you inhabit but you can read about the past and the things to expect from it in history books.

If your game is set in a world similar to our own then you can expect the individual will be important. The world is just the world as we know it

but the player has taken on a new role in that world and that is the subject of the game. When a game blends the things of High Fantasy and the things of modern life, therefore, it is in an attempt to get us to re-examine our world. The mainstays of High Fantasy are high concepts and putting them in a modern world makes us think about how high concept blends with the mundane.

Contemporary fantasy can be funny, but it can also be spiritual, it's one of my favourite genres and I think deservedly so because the point of role playing is to bring the real world into a new focus and make it strange again like it was when we were young.

Spiritual Fantasy

This is the highest of high fantasy a lot of the stuff about the nature of heroism either doesn't apply here or heroism and virtue are examined in relation to one another. Spiritual Fantasy presumes some religious context is the literal truth, in the Western world that could mean that God, His choirs of angels, Satan and his horde of demons

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are all real. A fantasy that supposed Heaven, Hell and Purgatory were laid out as described in Dante's Divine Comedy would be a spiritual fantasy as indeed the Divine Comedy itself was a Spiritual Fantasy.

Spiritual and comic fantasy in fiction are often vehicles for satire. This is because satire is often a cynic's view on morality and as fantasy fiction as a whole tends to deal with high ideals it makes a usually quite tight form of humour much broader. If you happen to want to run a role play that mocks current political and social trends using a fantasy setting may be a way to make the experience actively funnier and broader than some sardonic dystopian nightmare.

SF

Science Fiction is like Fantasy's colder sibling. It not only divorces us from our own context to a degree but it does not even have the reassuring quality of history. These are not things as they have ever been but entirely new ground. Is it any wonder that SF games

have a tendency to be somewhat downbeat? Weirdly stories of the far future sometimes fare better than stories of the near future but many an author concerned about the way the world seemed to be going has looked into the darkest of futures or imagined the strangest of scientific discoveries.

SF pushes people to look inside because it tells us we are alone. The world moves forward and although it is different we are the same. Heroism is far more difficult in SF, some gamers love it because it's more gritty than fantasy. In fantasy ideals can be realised, in SF ideals are there to be perverted, twisted and broken.

Dystopia

There are a huge number of post apocalyptic or bleak futuristic stories that presuppose humanity is on its way to a totalitarian surveillance society. These stories examine whether a reasonable soul will triumph or be crushed in such surroundings. The tendency errs on the side of crushed.

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Irrespective, in a role play a dark future setting like the worlds of Robocop, Blade Runner or even Nineteen Eighty Four are going to make players introspective. Harsher role play is perhaps presumed to be more acceptable.

If you want to have a player accidentally brutalise or kill a non player character and then have to live with the consequences a setting such as this is ideal to sucker them into their unacceptable behaviour (of course the idea of No Dice is to be a Host and give people a good ride so be sure they're ready to accept the fact they might accidentally commit a morally reprehensible act if they role play as if they're in Robocop).

Bug hunt

This is a more gentle form of SF from the point of view of the players. This is mostly because it is not really an SF story in the strictest sense of the term. As hunting of real animals has become less morally acceptable in our society so stories about such hunting are also seen to be somewhat gauche. Hunting of

hypothetical animals, however, is fine. Just remember that these stories are about the prey and the prey is a reflection of the hunter.

It's a good yarn and could equally well be a fantasy story about killing a dragon or hunting the great beast of the sea. It usually ends up being about aliens or alien killing machines these days so I include it in the SF genre by popularity.

Space Opera

The most unusual of SF genres in that it backs onto fantasy. Space Opera can either just be fantasy with SF trappings, like Star Wars, or it can be a kind of gritty fantasy like Farscape or Firefly.

What space opera has the potential to do is exemplified by something like Joss Whedon's Firefly. The scale is epic, space is vast and this means stories about long journeys and difficult quests through dangerous ground are easy to set in space.

The personal issues are far truer to SF though. Heroism can be mistaken or

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buried in misunderstanding and social convention. Just look at all the different types of character in Firefly and Serenity to understand how complex the personalities are. The setting invites you to explore a new world, a new universe even, but the people are just people with flaws and confused agendas and misapplied priorities.

This is a difficult genre to get right if you're going to attempt to mix it this way. The Star Wars approach of just

setting a fantasy in space is much easier. The problem is that people love space opera of the latter kind far more. So if you can crack it you'll have one happy group on your hands!

Superheroes

Another "favourite in theory" Superhero games have a reputation for being somewhat disappointing. In a way Superhero stories are, like Space Opera, fantasy in SF clothing. The story in Superhero sagas is vital. Each character must have a personal arc. If you examine Superhero origin stories you will see they always gained their powers in a situation of not understanding their own personal power.

For example Peter Parker was brought up to be a responsible and honest man by his Uncle Ben. In theory he was Spider Man before the radioactive spider even bit him, the spider just gave him the tools to do the job.

The reason Spider Man is such an enormously popular super hero

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(amongst other factors) is that his story exemplifies what a good super hero story should be. The story is not about having sweet powers with which one can mush super villains' faces into the concrete, that's a by-product. A super hero story is about how someone mundane and bland copes with the responsibility of gaining unusual powers that allow them to help others or to harm them.

Weird

Alternative dimensions, time travel, cloning, SF has a branch called speculative fiction that asks questions about the very nature of reality itself. When things start to get really strange in a piece of fiction the accent subtly shifts once more to the hero engaged upon these bizarre adventures.

The point of such stories is inevitably to examine the strangest parts of a character's internal landscape. The stories tend to be quite intellectual, when reality is suspect you only have your own conscious mind to fall back on.

It is always important to examine each player's character description and history in a game involving time travel, alternative realities, other dimensions or associated weirdness. What you are looking for are hooks upon which you can introduce personal weirdness for each character. Dead parents, childhood enemies, any trauma basically, will give you ideas for strange characters who are, or appear to be, people from a character's memories. Even if you never name them as such and they look like gigantic blue giraffes you can make these non-player characters fulfil a role that will make the player question their own identity and that is the core of such stories.

Horror

Horror is a great genre for role playing as exemplified by the fact that telling ghost stories verbally over a campfire is still a recognised activity, ghost walks in older towns and cities in the UK are also popular.

Horror is a genre that asks the audience, by way of the characters, to contemplate death itself. How this

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death manifests is different depending on the flavour of horror you are writing and it does introduce a different dynamic but largely horror games are fun precisely because they are so easy to run and play. It is theoretically possible that players in a Horror game wouldn't even need proper characters they could just be themselves.

Slasher

Slasher horror relies on fear of other people, strangers, foreigners, people who are different from us. It's a pretty basic kind of storytelling experience as it basically taps into all those subconscious fears people have about strangers and scales them up. Don't expect much reflective consideration on the human condition in these games, this is survival at its purest.The strangers are always equipped with quite horrible weapons as much designed to inflict torture and pain as death upon the protagonists. You will rarely find a clean bullet wound in a slasher story. Machetes, hooks, razor wire and fire are all the tools of the

slasher villain or villains.

Even if there are a number of slasher enemies they will always have some hideously twisted grand guignol leader at their head, this figurehead is the summation of the very fears the slasher story is trying to tap into.

Baroque

By which I refer to the tradition of Lovecraftian horror which basically states that the universe is bigger and uglier than any human is capable of understanding.

Ultimately knowledge breeds insanity. Gods don't care about you. Alien beings want to hijack your biological matter for food or unnatural procreation. Scientists meddle with powerful forces they do not understand. People end up going insane, a lot. Baroque horror should always batter people with obscure fields of investigation, lunatics and reminders that we all die alone in a universe that doesn't care.

Baroque horror is so ridiculously

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depressing and terrible it actually starts to become fun. The secret to giving people a fine baroque horror experience is to ladle it on, if you pull back too far you risk disturbing and unsettling people. This is the rule of thumb, if players are really looking to have something get under their skin pull back and go for "creeping horror" if you want it all to be a bit of a laugh have people go insane and rip their own eyes out every ten minutes.

Supernatural

By which I mean vampires, werewolves and spirits who are not the remnants of past tragedy (for which see "Ghost Stories"). These take the fear of the other present in Slasher stories and blend in a spiritual aspect. These stories focus on depravity, corruption, curses and the nature of evil. As with weird SF comb through the player character histories for clues.

Ghost Stories

Ghosts, as in the psychic remnants of past tragedy, are there to remind the protagonist in a story that features

them of the weight of past events. Until the past is put right the future cannot be allowed to continue. These stories can be cathartic but in their execution they are perhaps the most disturbingly resonant of all, they make a person question the world even as they provide thrilling drama.

Action

Action is not so much a genre as a grab bag of elements that can be added to a scenario to give it flavour. Whereas previously the setting actually tells you something about the type of story and how it should be executed the action settings are concerned with a character in a setting.

The same rules apply in terms of time, if the setting is the past there is both familiarity and a degree of comfort, if the present focus on the individual, if the future the setting is likely to alienate. One thing's for certain, stick to the tropes of these genres if you pick them or else the game risks losing atmosphere.

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Mystery

Your good old British Murder or Detective Procedural story. To be quite honest if you are going for this you may as well buy one of those Murder Mystery Dinner kits or write your own. The genre as a whole is sort of like a dramatic puzzle presentation. If you love this then the No Dice guide will help you write your own but there are plenty of commercially available products which will support you in running a mystery role play with no dice to a far greater degree of precision.

Espionage

The rules for espionage are the same for any "mission based" set up like Police Procedural or Special Operations keep the pace up and stick to the genre conventions. To varying degrees these stories talk about conflicting agendas and people who won't tell the whole truth unless the players can coax it out of them.

Danger in mission based games is not just from the general atmosphere of

mistrust and of fighting a war but also in the concern that screwing up now will have consequences down the line. So a single session on one mission will remove about half the dramatic tension.

Bizarrely in the case of intelligence level espionage games it is best to dwell on a mission execution plan, describe briefly any SNAFUs the team encounter in execution and then spend relatively more time on the fallout. If you watch any spy movie you will find the amount of time spent on describing the mission is disproportionately small when compared with that spent on set up and fall out.

In a more cop based game the execution will be important because what people say and do whilst improvising in the moment can be important so follow the procedure closely.

The biggest mistake one can make with a Special Operations game is to dwell on the operation. The only exception to this is when the operation is going to

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change scope while in progress. If you have set the team up to rescue two hostages but on the insertion they discover that the hostages are actually the enemies and the danger is from a third source entirely then the mission becomes the game.

On the other hand if the mission just is "the mission" let them do it quickly. Only after their characters have smugly returned to the extraction point do you uncover how the mission's parameters may not have been fully explained to the team because they are "just grunts". This is more what special operations stories are about than the straight execution of a mission that should be well within the character's abilities.

Don't forget to be liberal with technology and toys. Many spy games make the D&D mistake of restricting access to cool toys on entry, ignoring the fact that cool toys and effortless mayhem are the stock in trade of these adventures.

Pulp

This includes a whole number of things

from some SF adventure to Detective/Noir to Steampunk. The key to getting these genres right is the old standby "turn everything up to 11". Pulp stories are designed to lay things on thick. Don't let storytelling suffer but just make everything a bit bigger than it might be if you were going for a realistic tone.

War

I've never actually experienced a war time RPG before. I have no doubt that such things exist. The fact that anything can happen and no one is to be trusted, along with the focus on military operations and combat would suggest that a war game (as in a game about war, not a wargame which is all about dice and real ale) could be quite exciting.

Western

Westerns in fiction are a bit of a forgotten genre, they occasionally make a Western style film but people are not generally as in love with the concept of cowboys as they once were. In Role Playing, however, there has

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blossomed an affection for the Western when crossed with other genres, particularly ones involving magic. The reason for this is simple. Westerns are like a grubby space opera. The Western milieu is about wide open spaces and glorious isolation, they are also about brutality and survival in a lawless world. Space is sterile, even when your spaceship is grubby space remains the blank and deadly darkness it always has been. The joy of a Western is partly in the beauty of nature and the enduring qualities of the human spirit evident in a Western hero.

No surprise then that Firefly/Serenity was one of the most loved SF TV shows of the early 2000s. It combined space and the Western in a manner that had only rarely been attempted previously. One piece of advice to simulate the Western environment. Life should be hard, resources scarce, justice and crime equally brutal, no one should catch a break. This is what Westerns are all about.

Martial Arts

A genre often attempted, with variable results. You would think that, being centred upon the idea of melee combat, martial arts stories would be a shoe in for role playing systems. And you would be right. They have been pulled off with varying degrees of success.

The big hold up is the over application of combat systems. The whole point of martial arts heroes is that they can fight. Also the rules make it easy to avoid describing a fight and part of the object of martial arts is to be dazzled by the mechanics of the fight itself.

The last thing is more subtle and easily missed, heroes of a martial arts spectacular shouldn't want to fight. The core of martial arts stories are the twin pillars of spirituality and violence. Make sure the players understand this principle and act according to their character. In addition though make sure your villains have enough moxie to keep prodding the tiger even after the tiger has done everything in its power to disengage.

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What gives the Act II fight real power is that the same fight almost happened in Act I but didn't.Swashbuckling

From Musketeers to Monte Cristo, from Pirates to Pimpernels swashbuckling stories are really political fantasies that dare to ask the question "What if the only choice available to a good man was to break the law"? Not that every swashbuckler is a good person but the concept of lawlessness is essential to swashbuckling.

Of course There's a particular set dressing to these things, Robin Hood, The Three Musketeers, Pirates of the Carribean; all feature swords, mercenaries, treasure, outrageous romance, matters of honour and craven, selfish villainy.

The French have always had a healthy disrespect for authority so it probably comes as no surprise that many of the finest swashbuckling adventures come from French ideas, the Scarlet Pimpernel, The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo. The core of the

idea is that the good may be lawless and the lawful can be evil. Bear this in mind when approaching the swashbuckler genre.

It is worth noting that if you move the swashbuckling genre away from its setting it ceases to be thought of as swashbuckling. Many modern action movies employ the same ideas but without swords, panache and a period setting it seems to lose the feel of the swashbuckler.

Mix It Up!

Of course many outrageously successful stories in the modern world don't stick to one genre or another. I've already mentioned Firefly/Serenity, but there's also the Matrix which mixes martial arts into an SF setting and Underworld which combined action with a supernatural story.

When To Stay Traditional

There's no hard and fast rule about this but sometimes something needs no particular modification to run successfully. The example scenario

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"Revelation Point" mixes slasher conventions with a small dose of the supernatural but this is not exactly ground breaking. It is still one of the most fun scenarios I have ever run and is numbered among those scenarios I have written where players come back to me saying fondly how frickin' great it was.

Other than that you should just watch out for concepts that are just fundamentally incompatible, the High Fantasy Western, for example, is probably going to end up either being a High Fantasy with Western elements or a Western with Dwarves and Magic. If you're cool with just taking set dressing from a known genre then that's to be celebrated, but don't end up frustrated because you can't reconcile two contradictory moods.

Using Setting As A Backdrop

Having said that, kitting out one genre with the trappings of another is a cool way to add a twist or a flavour to a genre that you may feel is tired and in need of refreshing. An espionage story which takes place in a world where

vampires and werewolves mingle with humanity, and are even hired as operatives would still be an espionage story but it would just have a twist that might drive your players into a frenzy of excitement.

How to structure your plot

So you have some situations and a cool setting. How do you mould these into an acceptable plot? We've already covered the suggested length of a "season" and the need to have one main situation per episode but how should this play out? How do we deal with a one-shot also?

The End

Here's the golden rule for you. Always have an endgame up your sleeve. In Murder Mystery stories it's the moment when all the suspects are gathered at the behest of the detective in the library at the end. Obviously, you're going to be far more subtle about it than that but the theory remains sound.

You need to know what kinds of end

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result the players might get to from the beginning. You can't totally know what situation they'll have got themselves into when the endgame begins to happen but you can know what that end game is. Will the world end? Will the villain escape? Will evil have a moment to triumph? Will the monster kick their lily white butts?

One of my less successful adventures had an endgame where a gigantic mutant hybrid wolf monkey (or “wonkey”) burst free from its shackles and the players had to defeat both it and its master in a frenzy of martial arts mayhem. The players committed to the mayhem but, unfortunately, large swathes of the plot had sailed past them so they didn't really know why it was they were fighting. Oops.

Still, they enjoyed the fight.

Sometimes time plays against us, the only thing that would play against us worse is petering out into a nondescript failure to really resolve anything.

Timing

Whether you are running a one shot or a season every session will ideally have some concept of timing. The best way to do this is to have an idea of when you want to finish the session and an event that will provide initiate your endgame between 90 and 120 minutes before the end. In some games this could be a disastrous event such as the beginning of a self-destruct process or the eventual collapse of a building, it could be an enemy forcing a final confrontation.

In one shots this will help manage time effectively, in seasons it's not so essential. The issue of timing really only applies when you're less confident in running the adventure.

Free Play

If you have no particular finish time, great players, a cool adventure and are having fun with it just let events unfold. I have found myself getting into a session only to discover that it was time to finish up and we were only halfway through what we were doing.

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There's absolutely nothing wrong with this, if everyone's having a good time it's rather to be applauded.

Episodic

In mission based games the game can go through a preset tree of missions. In a "season" you might give your operatives three missions per episode that conclude with a piece of the overall puzzle and plot being revealed. It is possible to do this in a more subtle way with non mission games where

you invite the players to address a set number of situations in the game or in each episode of the game.

Event Driven

Leading on from this you might plan a number of timed events which should take place during the game, so some development crops up roughly every hour or two hours of play. This keeps the plot driving forward but be careful that people don't just end up feeling lost and confused.

Look At Possibilities

Before you even sit down to write an adventure you should have roughed out its world, talked to the players about their characters and expectations and made some notes. When you actually come down to the planning stage you should already have a number of exciting possibilities to draw on for inspiration. Now's the time to get inspired. Crack open your notes and get moving.

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An Inciting Incident

There's always, and I mean always, a few moments around the beginning of an RP that no one's quite sure what to do or how to do it. These will be your least proud Hosting moments as you wonder if the game's going to fall apart on the launch pad. Relax. This is just the equivalent of the first two pages of any novel you might read when you haven't quite got into the reading rhythm yet.

I've tried a few ways to get around this the most obvious being to have a prepared prologue written which is supposed to set the mood. Generally the most effective thing to do is to pick a player and tell them where their character is and what they're doing, or, if all the characters are in the same place doing the same thing address your remarks to the room and then ask the vital question:

What are you going to do?

As soon as the players can participate the magic starts to work. This preamble

can chug along merrily for a few minutes and indeed it should because this is the time that players are getting used to being in the game. As soon as they are feeling comfortable that's when you hit them with the first incident.

Again if they are together then you can tell all of them what this incident is and allow them all to react as they wish. If they are starting the game in separate places with the plan being to draw them together through the action then each character must be engaged in a separate way. Players could receive a visitor, or see something odd, or receive a message, or they could just be going about their daily routine when they run into some form of complication. This first complication is a chance for the players to show how their character deals with complications. As the complication continues details of your plot should start to emerge.

Basically each event should play naturally into another. Always have a Plan B in case players take an unusual

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approach to the problems presented you hadn't originally planned for but essentially you just keep things rolling along until you feel the session needs a bit of a shot in the arm.

Create Some Doubt

If you have used the dramatic situations from the appendix in creating your plot you should see that there are two sides to every story. Even if you are running a rescue mission you can introduce another party claiming to be on the same mission and claiming the players' employers are misleading them about their intentions. In some cases agents of the villain can try to persuade the players that the villain is only misunderstood. In some cases they may be right.

An essential part of playing a role is that a player has to come up against a tough decision about the course their character is taking. It has to be a dramatic choice and making it will set something about that character to play from their on in.

Rescuing an innocent child from an

oncoming train is a no brainer no matter what the fall out. But what if the child were a middle-aged business man who had previously been quite unpleasant and rude to the player?

Probably if there's no reason why not even rude people deserve a break but what if the player knows that to display unusual powers in this situation may get them killed? Will the player preserve their secret and hence their life or will they do the honourable thing? Choices like that make or break the game.

You must be the moral barometer of these situations. If you cannot call the choice a tough call then the players probably won't either.

Gain an overview

When all is said and done the outcome of an adventure is a pretty easy thing to plan. The players may gain a prize for which they have been working, a villain may have been brought to justice, an enemy defeated, the characters will have their life and their health. The questions that have to be

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asked are few when setting up the overall plot:

Is there a villain? Do they have access to enough

resources to make them an enemy with employee forces of some kind?

If they're so villainous, why so? i.e. what are they doing that's evil?

If they're not technically evil they could still be an opponent to the player's goals.

Is there a prize to be won? Why is the prize so valuable?

Once you have settled these aspects in your mind you should go on to consider who has a stake in the prize, or who will be your allies and enemies in defeating a villain.

Interested Parties

This is where you fall back on your situations. All your other non-player characters will fall on a scale of whether they are broadly speaking "goodies" or whether they are "baddies"

with a vast number of people probably falling into some neutral ground where they haven't picked a side.

The really interesting people fall into two categories. Those people who are near the middle and those people who appear to be the opposite of what they actually are. Both give scope for dramatic conflict and bring up issues of persuasion and trust. Some people will, obviously, have to be what they say they are.

A handy thought here is the traditional Greek meaning of the term "Comedy". These days a comedy is a drama that will attempt to raise a smile. In the Greek sense comedy is a drama in which the identities of the participants are not certain or have not been resolved yet. The comedy is the sequence of events which leads to the true identities of the characters being revealed.

This definition should apply to almost every adventure you run in some way. If your adventure is about how Jack Awesome and the League of Splendid

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put one in the eye of Mortimer Awful and the Tribe of Yuck which simply consists of people bopping members of the Tribe of Yuck in the nose until a showdown with Mortimer it's going to be pretty dull. If your characters can trust everyone in a white hat, mistrust everyone in a black hat and be sure all grey hats would fall on the white side if pressed into making a decision life becomes boring pretty quickly.

Basically think deeply about how the characters you as Host will be portraying will come across to the players and what possibilities they offer dramatically, this should help you build up a longer plot than "Players must defeat X or Players must obtain Y".

You'll see plenty of examples of how this works in the example adventures and soon you should be well on the way to inventing your own compelling yarn for the players to become embroiled in.

Keep Notes!

One final thing, whether you are running a one off or a campaign keep a comprehensive set of notes. You might have to come up with a character name off the cuff or remember vital details you're making up on the spur of the moment. Your notes should be your saviour.

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Non Player Characters (NPCs) NPCs are the characters you, as Host, will have to portray during the game. Every adventure should have a few sprinkled in there, this last Host section is here to give you some pointers in NPC creation and running. There's quite a lot of information about creating characters in the Player's Guide and in the Appendices all this chapter tries to do is rescale the task for the one participant in the game who has to portray an unusually large number of characters. You.

Actual Characters

There will be a shortlist of characters you are going to introduce into the story. The main ones you should probably note down in some detail. Then there'll be a supporting cast who are mentioned in less detail and then there are possible characters the players

may or may not encounter who should just be sketched down.

Try to keep the main characters down to a level you feel comfortable with. Don't plan out a cast of thousands unless you really want to spend months writing a campaign. Apart from anything else players can only take in a certain amount of information, more than eight supporting cast members and you'll begin to lose people unless you are very cunning.

How much work you do to define a character is going to depend on how "important" they are to the plot, all character notes will start the same but at some point you will just stop writing more notes and break away. This breaking away process will happen sooner and sooner the less important your NPCs become.

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Avoid The Sage

Before we go into my technique for creating NPCs one word of advice. Many people think it's great to put swathes of information in the mouths of "sage" characters. These characters are like surrogates for you in the adventure. The problem is that if the players feel that there is a character in the game who has all the answers but is being deliberately obtuse they'll get frustrated quickly.

When it comes to in-game knowledge always restrict what it is an NPC knows specifically in your notes. If a character seems to know so much they could have just sorted the whole mess out themselves that's a sage, lose them or scale down their knowledge.

The “Friendly” Problem

As GM it is your job to do two things with respect to NPCs. One, make them convincing and two make them less awesome than the player's characters so the players get the full benefit of the fantasy.

So when you're doing villains or neutral characters that's fine. Sidekicks are often not a problem also. It's when you have some character who's also supposed to be of a level with the players and is friendly that you get a problem.

If you dial them down too far they just look rubbish, make them too awesome and the players start to resent them. It's a real balancing act. For the purposes of role play, therefore, treat instances of characters like this to a strict minimum. You've got enough to be worrying about without making heroes who stand shoulder to shoulder with the players but actually are ineffective seem like a worthwhile cast addition.

Character Sketching

Okay so you'll need four things to make any character to work. These are:

A name

A role in the story (and indeed in their life)

Some things they like to talk to

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strangers about

Some things they know about the story

The last may well be "nothing" in the case of minor characters. But "nothing" could include general world information and, to be fair, if the characters are trying to find the "Happy Roller" Tavern a random peasant may well know that, it's a murky world of "general knowledge" which can be caught under the umbrella term of "nothing".

Similarly their role in the story may be "Wandering Peasant" but the peasant maybe a farmer, a beggar, a poor craftsman or a monk. All of these will suggest things for point three so give everyone a role in life and then, if they are there for some specific reason in the story upgrade them.

It might even be appropriate to make lists of possible roles for the world of the game and you can pick one role for each random stranger approached. Trust me you can never have too many

swiftly available reference cheat sheets.

(Actually this is a lie. As soon as you spend more time rifling through your notes than being Host you've crossed the threshold a while back. Try and keep reference sheets to four sides of A4 or Letter size paper.)

On which subject, it's always handy to have a list of random names you can put together in case of someone asking "Ho there good burgher what do they call you back home?" (Players do stuff like this all the time, it's annoying.)

From the other three things you should have some idea of a top three topics of conversation these characters like to dwell upon with strangers. Make a quick decision about how chatty they are on a scale of 1-10 and there you go limitless numbers of random cast members.

Stepping it Up

Once you've roughed out all your characters like this the next stage is to decide how much information they

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have that will contribute to the overall story. Characters with particularly vital pieces of information should be your next priority. The chances are that your players will, at least, be able to reason out who the most important characters in the story are and they'll be spending a lot of their time talking to those characters.

You want to decide things like, how bribable are they? Do they respond better to honey or vinegar? What are their opinions of the general situation outlined in the adventure?

Anything aside from this and you can fall back on your basic notes for winging it. If the character is really important you might want to start thinking about their upbringing and life history but these are more the kinds of things that are important to players. Remember you're not there to present a detailed epic you're there to give the convincing illusion of a detailed epic.

Back To The Players

Once you've Lone Wolfed your player's

characters up to the point where they enter your campaign you should have had a few ideas for NPCs that are, in some way, personal to them.

Don't forget to jot down some notes for these characters and maybe even go back through and insert them into your episode notes. Characters who arise as a result of these sessions may have an impact on NPCs you've already written.

For example, you may have imagined a character who was part of an army the players are pitted against who deserted and started trying to undermine the army he used to serve with guerilla tactics. Then it turns out that one of your characters had this unhappy love affair where the girl disappeared around the world to "find herself" when the affair ended. A way to introduce some tension into the dynamic between the rebel leader and the party is to have them first run into the player character's ex and have her reveal that she is now in a relationship with the rebel.

Without this tension your rebel leader

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could just be tossed into the "good bloke" box and the scenario rolls on. But the fact that he is involved with one of the other character's ex-girlfriends instantly makes things complicated, in a good way.

Always try to make everything fit together. In real life, despite the reputed six degrees of separation, everyone does not tend to know everyone else. In a story it works the other way around as it's a great way to ramp up the dramatic tension.

This is a very important point. The major NPCs, in fact all the people your players encounter should, in fact, be there to tell the player characters something about themselves. This sounds absurd and egotistical, like the whole world of the game is just some sort of bizarre “Truman Show”.

In actual fact, if you think about it, what else are the players supposed to do with their time? Life's too short for supporting characters who tell the players nothing about their own role. The hothead needs to be needled. The

moral crusader needs to be tempted. The man of peace needs to be pushed into war. You haven't got time to way lay the romantic fool with a pointless quest for turnips that has nothing to do with anything. Unless, of course, that's the whole point.

A Final Note

Many of the very oldest RPGs described enemies, even major ones, in terms of how able they were to kill you. They described non-enemies in terms of what service they could be to you. They described allies in terms of what they could do to help you and what they would ask in return.

As time went by RPGs started to include more detailed notes on characters. To date I have never seen one that actually compacted characters into a thumbnail that would allow a GM to freestyle just about any conversation the players might like to have off the top of their head. I hope this chapter has helped you to move ahead with this.

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Not that it is an easy thing to achieve, it will take some work on your part to pull off a convincing NPC every time but the key to the small talk is to never run out. If you feel someone's going to have to be around for a while with a chatty NPC you just need to make a list of reasonable small talk subjects for that NPC and make sure that character's got a solid opinion on all of them.

Of course some NPCs just don't like to talk at all, some are business like, some are just nervous around people, some maintain stubborn silence. In the end a chatty NPC is just more seasoning to

the brew. You might even end up engineering such encounters to lighten the mood and, of course, to deepen the atmosphere.

Examples of NPC profiles can be found in the example campaigns. I think that you will, by this time, have taken as much talking to as a person can take so now it is time to interact. Browse the notes, call some friends, make some character sheets and while you're shuffling the deck you can try to remember exactly where it is you left your dice bag anyway.

Have fun!

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Scenarios

The example scenarios in this section are designed to give you a few hints as to how to construct your own No Dice adventures. Each scenario broadly speaking goes in the following order:

Introduction Additional Rules List of Playable Characters Set Up Notes for the Players Character Overview Annotated Map Running The Game

Any Resources are presented full page for ease of producing hard copies. If a map is included it is purely intended to give the Host an idea of major locations. This is the wrong place for scale models and lead figures. Sometimes maps can be given out as props but they're never intended as game boards.

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Traveller's Rest

Traveller's Rest sums up the archetypal Vanilla No Dice game. I have included an additional rule to make one thing plainer but apart from that I've left it pure and untouched. The scenario is a haunted house caper in which the players are all students from a University Parapsychology department.

It has a long sandbox time to allow people to wander round uncovering clues which will help them in the final encounter. There are two endings, one for if the players comprehensively fail to accomplish anything and one for if they crack the mystery of Traveller's Rest.The adventure is designed to run in a single 3-5 hour session.

Additional Rules

The game uses the Vanilla No Dice Rules with the following addition.

Using Advantages and Disadvantages:

If possible the Host should keep a crib sheet of each character's advantages and disadvantages. When having a character make a test, look to see if they have an advantage or disadvantage in the area where they're making a test. If they have an advantage make it easier, if they have a disadvantage make it harder.

Example: Penny needs to make a test of Pete's ability to tell a lie, the Host looks at Pete's advantages and disadvantages and sees Pete is charming, so she lowers the expected difficulty by one.

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Playable Characters (5)

Rupert James Clifford-Jones - A PhD StudentCatherine Martin - A student, amateur witchRonnie Caine - A student, highly dedicated to his study.Conrad White - A student, highly dedicated to beer.Jana Denton - The Professor's Daughter

Player Set Up

The game begins as the minibus filled with parapsychology equipment and students pulls up to the front of an old house "Traveller's Rest". The house is nestled in woods down a long winding lane. The front garden is accessed via a tall, forbidding gate and surrounded by a high wall. A gently sloping hill leads away from the back of the house down into the heart of the woods.

It is known that a previous party of senior parapsychology students under the guidance of the only other PhD

student, Hugo Bailey, went missing. Because of this the Head of Parapsychology at Pimston University, Jeffrey Denton, has decided to lead this investigation himself. The junior class are to stay the night at Traveller's Rest and try to work out what is going on there.

Map Notes

Exterior

1) The front garden. The plant beds contain many herbs. Someone with herbalist knowledge could probably cook up some simple healing potions from the ingredients here. Anything further would require some pretty specific instructions on the part of the player as to what their character was trying to do; in addition the character must have some idea what they're doing check their advantages. The van is out here but by the time the team may have thought to use it for escape they will either be trapped in the garden or the house.

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Rupert James "Jamie" Clifford-Jones

Known to everyone but the prof as Jamie, Rupert knows that this whole thing is a con job. Well, it must be, mustn't it? The Professor has provided paper after paper proving that the very idea of a ghost is ridiculous. The ancient fraudster running this operation may have the others fooled but that senility schtick is a crock.

While the kids are busy playing "Ghostbusters" Rupert and the prof will get to the bottom of this and find out where the last party disappered off to. This whole incident has, at least, allowed Rupert to get some brownie points with the Prof, which should come in handy when it came to getting his thesis approved. Not that there was much of a problem in that department anyway. Now if only he could explain to the prof that he prefers to be called "Jamie" then that would make Rupert's life about perfect.

Advantages

Knows how the equipment worksRichOrganisedCleverHandsomeCharming (to people he considers worthy)

Disadvantages

HaughtyNarrow MindedSelf ObsessedAuthoritarian

Possessions

Mobile Phone, Wallet, Money, Keys for the Mini Bus, Some items of expensive bling (proper Rolex watch, two white gold signet rings and a white gold neck chain carrying a Celtic Knot charm.)

Catherine "Cat" Martin

Cat is really beginning to wish she'd never taken this place at Pimston. Professor Denton is the most closed-minded and fusty idiot she's ever met in her life. Not that Cat would be much different if it weren't for the fact that she can sense the dead. She'd like to think that she'd be a bit more open-minded though.

The fact that she cannot know whether she would or not is the only thing that's keeping her on this course at the moment. Carrying salt to purify everything and a small book of spells that use common household goods isn't so dippy when you've used them to clear cancerous psychic energies. Once you've felt the atmosphere lift like fog being burned by the sun you don't so much believe in this stuff as rely upon it.

Of course, one cannot forget that all this experience is personal, some people seem to be completely immune to the energies beyond. Cat just didn't realise that some of these people would find jobs in University Parapsychology Departments.

Advantages

Psychically SensitiveKnowledge of Herbalism and basic WitchcraftIndependentObservantTrustworthy

Disadvantages

Unable to control psychic signalMoodyOutsiderMistrustful

Possessions

Mobile Phone, Wallet, Money, Keys, Bag of Salt, Various items of silver jewellery all designed to carry basic warding ability, packet of cigarettes, zippo lighter, spell journal, bag of crystals.

Crystal Guide

Cat has the following crystals in her bag.

Amethyst – General Cleansing and Protection, very luckyCarnelian – Clears thoughts, helps in focusing. Aids with the hearing sense.Tiger's Eye – Heavy Protection, stops all deceit and dishonesty in othersClear Quartz – Harmonises, Purifies, Focuses, acts as a receptor for psychic ability. Aids visions.Rose Quartz – Increases the friendliness of others. A general purpose protection not as heavy duty as the Tiger's Eye

Ronnie Caine

Ronnie is happy to be involved in this kind of field work. It's more exciting than a lot of other things he could be doing with his time. Ronnie has always felt that there is more to the world than what you could apprehend with the five senses and a slide rule. He's fascinated with the problem of how things that are inherently hard to be known could be known or understood.

He is a little dismayed to note that the course he worked so hard to enrol on seems to spend so much energy debunking claims of psychic phenomena and not enough, in his opinion, understanding why these phenomena exist at all.

Advantages

LearnedQuick StudyExcellent Research SkillsSome experience with monitoring equipmentOpen MindedMild Psychic Sensitivity

Disadvantages

QuietWeakHates conflict

Possessions

Mobile Phone, Keys, Money, Wallet, Leatherman "Multi-Tool" Key Ring, Three occult study books.

Conrad White

Conrad has a bag packed with ghost simulation gear. He only came onto this course because he thought it would be fun to laugh at the ghost busters and weirdos. He's actually been quite pleased that the course seems to be erring on the side of disproving all this ghosts nonsense.

He sees this as an ideal opportunity to have a laugh, he has a roll of fishing twine, a couple of noise boxes and some awesome rubber party masks in his bag. If his oddball compatriots want a night in the spookhouse Conrad is more than happy to oblige.

The key character note here is that Conrad's come away for the night with 40 cigarettes, a lighter and a can of deodorant. This is what he considers to be "overnight supplies".

Advantages

AthleticPopularHandsomeStrongSmarter than he looks

Disadvantages

No psychic abilityBrashRudeLazySelfishLoves himself way too much

Possessions

Keys, Wallet, Money, Mobile Phone, Three Noise Boxes, Two Novelty rubber masks, roll of fishing twine, two packets of cigarettes, Skull and Crossbones zippo lighter, can of deodorant.

Jana Denton

How inconsiderate is it of a dad to program this kind of snoozefest on the weekend his daughter's coming to visit? He's promised pizza, and a telly with DVDs, and that Conrad boy's quite cute actually. Still a cute university boy is no competition for a night with a bottle of cheap wine from Claire's mum's wine cupboard (as they're both fifteen) and a make-over session, is it?

Jana is determined to have as bad a time as it is possible to have on this jaunt. She could care less about ghosts and stuff, she wants her pizza, a film starring Matthew McConnaughey and she wants Conrad to pay her a compliment of some kind. Then she wants to be left alone with her mobile and an open line to Claire.

Advantages

Psychically BulletproofPretty

Disadvantages

StupidSelfishLazyPetulant

Possessions

Mobile phone with no credit, house keys, a five pound note

Traveller's Rest – Basement & Ground Floor

Traveller's Rest –1st Floor & Attic

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2)The back yard is a short space of grass leading to the entrance to the woods. Anyone exploring the woods will be assailed by the succubi (see "Running The Game") and then rescued by Viktor. Whether they get bitten by the succubi is up to you as the Host.

Lower Floor

1)The lounge is a huge room fitted out with antique furniture, dusty knick knacks and home to a roaring fire. The team will set up their base station here.

2) The hall leads to the kitchen, dining room and lounge, it also offers access to the upper floor under the stairs is basement access for which Mavis has the key. When night falls Viktor uses magic to seal everyone inside the house. When it is not night the front door leads out to the front garden.

3) The dining room contains a large dining table where Mavis and Albert serve the guests their evening meal of soup followed by a spaghetti bolognese.

The kitchen has one unusual feature. The fridge will occasionally reveal its

contents as a chocolate cake. This cake may be removed, eaten, enjoyed and the fridge may still produce another. When the fridge is not in "cake mode" it just contains the usual things you'd expect to find in a fridge. Whether the fridge is in cake mode or not is at the whim of the Host.

Upper Floor

1)The Guest bedroom. This is a plain and unremarkable twin guest bedroom. Where Professor Denton has set up camp. The room still contains his personal effects. The professor's effects include a mobile phone which has about six minutes charge for talking left in it.

2) The bathroom. This is an unremarkable bathroom. There are a few first aid supplies in the cabinet over the sink. The mirror has a trace of psychic energy in it. A skilled psychic can pick up the repeated phrase: "I came back, my love, but oh, but oh, the darkness followed". Mildly psychic people will think that the person they are looking at in the mirror doesn't look like them.

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No Dice - Core Rulebook ♦ ♠

3) Mavis' Bedroom. This room is lousy with bad energy, particularly flowing from the back room. Mavis has the key to the back room. There is nothing of particular interest in the bedroom. Its décor is a pink and talc-scented domestic nightmare.

4) The Back Room. It has some features that suggest it may have been a child's nursery furnished some time in the mid eighties. Only half the walls are papered with alphabet block and teddy bear wallpaper, there is no cot or any other furniture in the room. There is a ladder up to the attic space here. Anyone with a psychic talent will be unable to cross the room its energy is so rotten. The demon's portal is here.

The Basement

1) Ante room - This is a utility room under the stairs. It has a variety of tools and utility stuff in it to the Host's whim. The locked door leads to the other cellar room. Albert has the key.2) The basement room - This room is completely empty except for a ritual space defined between the floor and the ceiling. Oh yes, and a slab, which

houses the remains of a human corpse under a thin sheet. This is the earthly remains of Albert, who is in fact a bizarre shadow-ghost whose spirit now haunts Traveller's Rest.

It is possible, although incredibly difficult, for someone with access to occult texts to find out that this space is supposed to be for the purposes of resurrection. If whoever has the texts also has Viktor's diary the two may be cross-referenced to make the decipherment task easier.

The Attic

A gigantic window looks out on the back yard. There are a few effects here that indicate that the attic room has an occupant: an easy chair angled to look out over the woods, a desk and chair, a small cot bed. There is no indication anyone eats here, this may be noticed only if someone asks the question. The desk contains Viktor's Diary. After sun set Viktor will have left his nest to protect Mavis.

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Running The Game

NPCs

Mavis

Mavis is, in every way, the key to the events at Traveller's Rest. The problem is she's madder than a basket of frogs on acid. Here's how to play her; details as to why you are playing her this way are available in "The Backstory".

She is mostly comforted by adhering to her own plan, which in the case of this evening is: feed everyone and then wander around listening to the sane people discuss things until they disappear or are slaughtered mercilessly.

Unfortunately Mavis's ignorant bliss is interrupted by frequent bouts of lucidity which last roughly 10-15 seconds. Whatever sense her tortured sanity wishes to utter must come out in these seconds, this sane part is always watching, recording, calculating what to put into the next 10-15 second window.

Things that send Mavis backward are: any hint of unpleasantness or carnage, the presence of Viktor and people making efforts to get her to focus. The madness of Mavis shifts and wheels like the weather, she cannot be forced into lucidity and efforts to do so just push her further into loops of inconsequential thought. These loops usually focus on the key word or concept the lucid part of her is thinking of trying to communicate next but the concept is immediately free-associated into something to do with domesticity.

The sane part of Mavis is a little scared by Viktor but the broken part of her sees the hulking Dhampir as her only child.

Mavis wants everyone to have a good meal, a pleasant taste of something nice (chocolate cake?) a cup of tea and a nice sit down. She hates dust but this is okay because she likes dusting. She also thinks the house is knee deep in dust despite the fact that it is eerily dust-free, the reason for this is that "evil" in Mavis sane corner translates as "dust" to the rest of Mavis. And the house is steeped in evil.

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Finally, before Mavis was mad she was a wicked good practitioner of the occult and a top-notch herbalist. She maintains her herb garden and abilities to make remedies for just about everything from pure muscle memory. She will not discuss occult practice even though, or perhaps because, she knows it so well.

Albert

Albert was Mavis's husband. Now he is manifest as a butler who lives to enact Mavis's fantasies of domestic servitude and also as a tortured shadow of himself visible to psychics in the bathroom mirror.

The tangible butler part of Albert serves food and if talked to will ask how he may serve. He will slowly but surely fulfil any domestic request made of him.The part of Albert in the mirror can only talk about the darkness that follows him and it would take an astute psychic to even get the whole message. People who just have a little ESP know there's something wrong with their reflection in that mirror but would

never be able to say what.

Viktor

Viktor is a huge, gnarly, brutal Dhampir. To protect the occupants of the house from the Children of the Night in the woods he seals the house with powerful magick.

His powers of domination against non-psychics are absolute. If people manage

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to get out he sees it as his job to return them to the house as quickly as possible.

Aside from this he checks in from time to time ensuring that Mavis is okay. He feels responsible for Mavis but only cursorily wishes to protect the other living occupants of Traveller's Rest

Prof Denton

Refuses to believe anything supernatural. Superior. Condescending. Will make a point of calling Jamie "Rupert" several times in the first ten minutes of the game before disappearing.

Greg Matthews

Greg is a beefy posh rugby player that Viktor brings in to the house bleeding from a neck wound. His arrival heralds the midway point of the adventure. He refuses treatment from Mavis and that's when he becomes possessed by a demon (see Events).

Events

The game essentially runs on a series of timed events. At the start of the game it's about thirty minutes from dusk. Both Professor Denton and Mavis want to get the students inside before dusk but for different reasons. Once they are inside the prof instructs the students to set up the base in the lounge whilst he takes his things upstairs. That is the last time until the end of the adventure that any of the players will see Prof Denton.

Generally speaking players are quite happy to wander about for a bit. It's always a good idea to see if you can get someone to wander out the back, get someone else involved in the chocolate cake/fridge problem and everyone else can talk to Mavis and Albert. If anyone should wander upstairs probably best not to make a great deal out of Prof Denton's disappearance, the players will make enough out of it themselves.

After a bit dinner is served. Once dinner is over really weird stuff should start happening. Start playing with reality, giving people (psychic and non) visions. Hopefully they will have discovered that all is not too well and will have begun their own schemes.

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Eventually it might be time to tempt Conrad out the back to see how he copes with succubi, then, if things appear to be dragging, introduce Greg.

Greg gives everyone a few moments to fuss over his neck wound, refuses a truly rancid combination of poultice and tea from Mavis (which would have effectively cleansed the succubic infection from his system) and sinks rapidly through delirium into a state where he suddenly awakes, refreshed, and possessed by the house demon.

At this stage he will herd players through the house to his portal and away from the basement. The demon cannot actually harm the players but he can make them think they will be harmed. If the players get sucked through the portal they will end up in the demon's insanity dimension. Here the demon will offer the hapless travellers a bargain, kill Mavis and go free.

The demon really has no intention of setting the players free and unless they weaken the demon using the prescribed route Viktor is powerless to

help them. The demon is charming, can dominate all the players and will eventually twist everyone's minds to feed its own soul. The demon is basically bad news.

The Backstory

Okay, so by now you're probably wondering what's going on in this madhouse. Here is the full story in neat chronological order:

Mavis and Albert move into Traveller's Rest. They plan to run a guest house facility to supplement Albert's income and have a child together.

2) In short order three succubi, pursued by the Dhampir Viktor arrive at Traveller's Rest and kill Albert before Viktor arrives. Viktor saves Mavis but Albert dies. The Succubi escape into the woods. Viktor vows to kill the succubi before he moves on, he hides in the Traveller's Rest attic. Mavis is afraid of him and does not know he is there.

3) As time goes by several guests at Traveller's Rest are consumed by the

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succubi, the guest house gains a reputation as a place of dark deeds and murder. Mavis continues to live off the proceeds of Albert's life insurance. She pays to have Albert's corpse retrieved from the cemetery and brought to her.

4) Mavis becomes obsessed with the occult and seeks to resurrect Albert. She eventually performs a ceremony in the basement that should have brought Albert back.

Unfortunately Mavis's frail sanity and the negative energy of the succubus murders allows a demon out into the house it is trapped between the sanctified cellar space and the equally sanctified Dhampir's nest in the attic. Bound to the house it relies on eating the souls of guests as Mavis protects her own soul and Viktor is not consumable.

With the demon comes about one millionth of Albert which gets trapped behind the bathroom mirror (uncovered reflective surfaces suck in unprotected souls, Mavis had thought to cover all other mirrors in the house but forgot this one).

As an amusement the demon creates a memory doppelganger of Albert that is programmed with some of Mavis memories of his nature but behaves totally in accord with Mavis own lunacy. The servile but stoic Albert helps reassure and communicate with guests, thus baiting the trap for the demon.

The demon also bolsters the succubi, making it harder for Viktor to defeat them. Viktor's magic is strong enough to seal the doors after sundown but the demon occasionally defeats the magick on the property allowing people out via the back door into the woods.

At this point Viktor does his best to rescue these people but sometimes they fall victim to the succubi. Mavis can prevent demonic infection spreading in the early stages but if they don't take her poultice and detox tea they can fall prey to the demon.

The situation continues. Students from Pimston visit, they are claimed by the demon, Prof Denton brings the party to the house.

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Supernatural Elements

Succubi

Although the modus operandi of the succubi is vampiric they are in fact minor demons. Think full on brides of Dracula. They bite the neck injecting venom which weakens the mind for occupation by a demon. If they continue to feed the human dies.

When players are in the wood they will run past, naked and screaming to lure the player and when isolated will stand, still naked, looking bashful and vulnerable until approached at which point they whip out massive sharp teeth and attack. Viktor can repel them but the demon has given them intangible forms so they can easily escape when attacked.

Dhampir

Viktor is the child of a human mother and a vampiric father. He needs blood (or a particularly foul herbal tea) to survive but he has no vulnerability to sunlight. He can defeat any demon given flesh but has no power against

intangibles. A demon must be manifest for him to kill it. Mavis gives him herbal tea to keep him sane.

Demon

An intangible malignant presence. It is kept within a columnar space stretching up through the fridge to the back room upstairs. Its influence can be felt in small ways throughout Traveller's Rest.

It feeds on confusion, pain and fear which it generates by playing mind games with its victims. While intangible it can pull people through into a dimension it has created for feeding. Inside this dimension people are unaware that they are not in reality until looping commences. The only way out for them would be for someone to kill the demon.

Crystals

Cat has a small bag of crystals in her possession. Each crystal has a specific use known to Cat. For reference the crystals included are:

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Amethyst – General Cleansing and Protection, very lucky

Carnelian – Clears thoughts, helps in focusing. Aids with the hearing sense.

Tiger's Eye – Heavy Protection, stops all deceit and dishonesty in other.

Clear Quartz – Harmonises, Purifies, Focuses, acts as a receptor for psychic ability. Aids visions.

Rose Quartz – Increases the friendliness of others. A general purpose protection not as heavy duty as the Tiger's Eye

Endings

Possible outcomes are:

1) The really bad ending - Players are suckered into the demon deal. The demon traps everyone including Mavis in a dimension of lunacy defeats Viktor and destroys the world.

2) The slightly bad ending - Players refuse the demon deal but are trapped in a lunacy dimension where they

endlessly loop through a day in a house where Mavis and Albert look after a creepy baby Viktor, at night slaughter in the shape of the Succubi descends. As the players die they re-experience pulling up in the minibus to start the day again. There is no escape for the players.

3) The good ending - The players sensibly dispose of Albert's remains, most importantly they must ritually burn the bones in a ceremonial and respectful fashion. If they salt the bones first to purify them that will help meaning even a half hearted burning ceremony would work. If they don't salt the bones they have to be properly respectful in the burning or they will have burned their only solution to no effect.

Proper disposal releases the Albert in the mirror and also the doppelganger. This also cuts the demon off from its portal power source, it will manifest as a big scary monster. Viktor then kills it, and goes off to mop up the succubi. Mavis becomes lucid accepting her husband has gone and everyone lives in a metaphorical land of sunshine and

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unicorns.

If the demon is inside Greg when the party release Albert (in which case they will be locked in the cellar room with Greg furiously attacking the stout metal door and one of them will at least be seriously injured) then Greg will literally explode as the intangible demon becomes tangible. Greg's a lost cause, unfortunately.

When the demon becomes tangible all the people it ever trapped are released from its dimension. They appear in the back room upstairs. There are about sixty of them and they come wandering into the house out of a grey mist in the wall that adjoins Mavis's Bedroom. If the door is locked the first people out will have to relocate to the attic.

One More Thing...

There's a bunch of explanation and story rules in Mavis and as Host you want to understand the set up quite thoroughly. The most important thing to remember is not to worry about people "getting" the story. In a haunted

house story people want an experience not an explanation.

I swear when I played this game with my partner Hosting (she's the author of the game) we ended up in the time loop at the end and we never found out thing one about the story. We didn't care. The situation was fascinating and had plenty of crazy role play hooks, that's the point. Just let your players have fun don't push them to achieve.

At the end of the day Traveller's Rest is a spookhouse story. You want to see how this depressing world view plays out in a story watch Rob Zombie's "House of 1000 Corpses", the protagonists in that story don't find out anything about the nightmare they're thrust into until way too late, doesn't make it less entertaining.

Let the characters play the roles for three to five hours. If they "win" fine. But the real way you win this game is to have a blast doing it. This is the key to No Dice Hosting and this adventure scenario is the perfect example of this principle.

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Revelation Point

Revelation Point is a scenario that takes one step forward from Traveller's Rest, the archetypal No Dice haunted house game. Revelation Point is a game based upon the "slasher" genre of horror movie and the additional rules are there to help the players picture themselves in the parts of the protagonists of a slasher movie.

The adventure should take no more than 5 hours to run with half an hour set up. The maximum number of players running with the additional rules in this scenario is 5, if you lose the "one player/two characters" rule you can go up to ten (but I wouldn't recommend ten). Besides the idea of the rule is that you can make the NPCed character act like a classic slasher movie moron in every scene that the player isn't in control. This is a slasher movie, it must have a body

count, a body count is provided by people behaving in idiotic ways.

The players are a group of people, mostly college students, who have come to the deserted town of Revelation Point on a cold, dark winter's night. At first it appears that their presence is accidental, as the midnight hour approaches it begins to look more like they were herded here. It will take every ounce of survival instinct they possess to escape alive.

Don't worry about sticking to these notes canonically. They're like nudges in the right direction. The essential balancing act will be between grue and tension. I found to alternate between a bloodbath action scene and a tense sneaking/planning scene worked quite well. Make sure your players understand one of their characters is

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likely to die.

Additional Rules

The game uses the Vanilla No Dice Rules with the following additions.

One player/Two characters

Each player can only play one of two characters per scene, the other character will be NPCed for that scene. The idea is to keep as many of your characters alive and in some sort of shape as possible.

As Host it is up to you to give the players an opportunity to swap characters every half hour to forty-five minutes. Changing character is not mandatory.

Hearts are Blessed/Spades are Cursed

As it says, when a draw is made any heart draw has a positive spin even if it fails. Any spade draw has a negative spin, even when it succeeds.

Examples: Dave takes a swing at a wendigo with his chainsaw and draws to see how much damage it does. He

draws a two of hearts which means the chainsaw grazes the chest of the wendigo causing it to leap back mostly unharmed, thankfully, however, it does take the head off another wendigo Dave hadn't even noticed.

Kevin makes a leap between two buildings which are quite far apart over a horde of ravening wendigos. He draws a nine of spades and sails comfortably over the heads of the hungry cannibalistic mutants. However he overshoots the edge of the roof slightly and ends up twisting his ankle on the roof at the other side which will slow him down until the pain subsides.

The "Pain" Chart

Rather than allocate individual hit points every major character in Revelation Point has a Pain Chart detailing five hits to each individual part of the body.

For each of the first three points of damage to any one area the character also gets a point of adrenaline, up to a maximum of 20, that makes them faster and stronger when controlled by the

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player at a rate of a +1 advantage for every five adrenaline slots filled. BUT it also makes them more stupid and less aware of further damage when controlled by the Host which manifests as a -1 to checks for every five slots filled.

In terms of damage to individual parts of the body the fourth and fifth points of damage are where the character really starts to flag.

A character with four points of damage on an area loses use of that area and will need medical attention to make a full recovery. A character with five points of damage on an area is effectively maimed in that area and will never fully recover.

The most important area to guard is the head. Four hits to the head renders a character unconscious, five will put them in a coma. The head, however, can recover a little over time, giving it an extra three points of damage, represented by the recovery spaces next to the head on the character sheet. If a character receives a head wound then after about half an hour has passed in

the game (as in within the roleplay, say they hole up in a building and spend some time patching themselves up, use your Hostly discretion) they will "heal" moving a wound across into a recovery space and emptying the wound space.

If they lose all five head wound spaces within half an hour then they will have to wait one full hour before the recovery kicks in. If they have used two recovery spaces when they receive the fifth head wound they will miss being in a coma but will be out for several hours. most likely till after the events of the game have concluded. The chances of them waking up dead are high.

Using Advantages and Disadvantages

If possible the Host should keep a crib sheet of each character's advantages and disadvantages. When a character makes a test look to see if they have an advantage or disadvantage in the area where they're making a test. If they have an advantage make it easier, Otherwise make it harder.

Example: Penny needs to make a test of

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Pete's ability to tell a lie, the Host looks at Pete's advantages and disadvantages and sees he is charming, so he lowers the expected difficulty by one.

Playable Characters (5-10)

Make sure you stick to these character pairings as these combinations have been designed to not have incompatible back story information.

Chad Morgan - Didi's boyfriend / Greg McAuliffe - Scout's older brother.Pete Baker - Scout's boyfriend / Didi Lamont - Chad's girlfriendScout McAuliffe - Pete's girlfriends / Flea Morgan - Chad's younger brotherOfficer Kinney - A police officer / Jamie Peltzer - Scout's friendVeronica Kaye - A nurse / Pip Gunnarson - A lost teenage girl

Player Set Up

It all started because Jamie asked Scout if she knew anyone who could drop her home to Hartford from their place at Harvard University for Thanksgiving. As it happened Greg was taking his

beat up old RV back to NYC and had already got a couple to chip in for gas on a trip back to NYC: Chad and Didi.

The bonus for Greg was that Chad promised to pay double if there was a ride home for his little brother, Flea, who'd been visiting as well. The RV was so big that he still had a place left

even after Scout had persuaded her boyfriend Pete to join them all. So Jamie hopped in the bus and away they all went.

Greg was very proud that he maintained the RV himself and knew every nut and bolt. So when it broke in the middle of nowhere that came as a complete surprise. Never mind, hey. There must be a garage around here somewhere, right?

Map Overview

This portion of the scenario relates to this map of Revelation Point. There are two versions a version with numbers

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Greg Mcauliffe

Greg doesn't really know anyone on the bus except for his sister and Chad. When it comes to Chad he only knows that the guy's an MIT man like himself, they've never really spoken.

Greg's very proud of his bus and is particularly glad to have an opportunity to make it work. He's always been interested in motor vehicles and motors in general. He's always tinkering with a number of personal projects.

He's glad that Scout followed him up to Cambridge to attend Harvard because it means it's easier for him to look out for her. He was more anxious while he was doing his first couple of years at MIT and Scout was still working her way through high school.

He is a little suspicious of Pete and is not sure that the guy is right for his sister.

He's secretly quite glad that Scout got Jamie onto the bus because he thinks she's cute.

Advantages

Good MechanicScientific (Engineering)Quick StudyPretty AthleticNot Easily Horrified

Disadvantages

ShyGeeky

Wound Chart

Head [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] Recoveries [ ] [ ] [ ]Nose [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Mouth [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Chest [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Stomach [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Groin [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] Left RightEars [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Eyes [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Shoulder [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Arm [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Hand [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Thigh [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Leg [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Foot [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]

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Scout McAuliffe

Scout's always been grateful that she had an older brother blazing a trail for her in the outside world. It's not that she's exactly meek or scared but Greg's always been there for her and she's kind of got used to it. When she first moved to Cambridge she didn't know if the connection the pair of them had growing up would still be there but just recently Greg's been taking part in a lot more joint activities with her and her friends.

She's concerned, actually that Greg doesn't seem to have many friends of his own. She hopes that he will find a chance on this trip to bond a little with Chad. Scout's noticed recently that Pete's been a little off and she's not sure why. Just last night they ended up in a massive argument about the fact that she'd invited Jamie to take the last place in the bus. Pete seems to have some kind of a problem with Jamie but she's not sure what.

Advantages

Excellent StudentFriendlyGood SaleswomanAthletic

Disadvantages

Poor judge of characterSheltered

Wound Chart


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Jamie Peltzer

If Jamie had known when she asked Scout that the lift she would be offered would be one in a bus with Scout's older brother and Pete Baker she probably wouldn't have bothered. Not that she cares that much about Greg, he seems kind of nice, nerdy like her. But Pete's a real problem.

A couple of months ago when Scout was in bed with a cold Jamie ran into Pete out and about trying it on with anything in a skirt. She decided to keep out of it but then he saw her. He had threatened her and then tried it on with her as well. He'd always seemed a nice guy before but the problem seems to be when he's hanging around with his swim team cronies and drinking too much cheap beer he turns into a chauvinist caricature.

Jamie still hates herself for not telling Scout all about the incident at the time but as it recedes into the past it somehow seems less important. She still hates Pete though, but she tries to keep it civil for Scout's sake. When she arrived first thing before they set out on this trip she noticed Flea poking about the bus looking shifty.

Advantages

Quick on the uptakeGood enduranceExcellent judge of characterImaginitiveStrong Willed

Disadvantages

GeekyAwkwardNot the most athleticShort sighted

Wound ChartHead [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] Recoveries [ ] [ ] [ ]Nose [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Mouth [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Chest [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Stomach [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Groin [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] Left RightEars [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Eyes [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Shoulder [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Arm [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Hand [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Thigh [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Leg [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Foot [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]

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Pete Baker

Pete was actually looking forward to this road trip until Scout dropped the bomb that bitch Jamie was going to be on board with them. Jamie's had it in for Pete since forever and is determined to spoil things between Scout and Pete. Just because Pete likes to party, apparently.

Okay so sometimes he gets a little familiar with the ladies but it's all in fun, Scout is a grown woman and she knows that a man like Pete can't be restricted. At the first opportunity Pete would get Scout to scrape off Jamie exactly the same way Jamie's trying to get rid of him. Of course, there's also the factor that Jamie could very well be hot for Pete and he wouldn't blame her. Pete's got no illusions, he's a catch.

That's why it burns him up when eggheads like Greg and Chad look down their nose at him. Not that he'd be the first to pick a fight with his girlfriend's brother of course, but that kid, Chad's brother, he looks like a loser, if he gets the opportunity maybe he'll rag on the kid a bit. Pete's longing for a situation where he can take charge and prove his awesomeness to all the gathered masses.

Advantages

ConfidentHighly athletic (Boxer)CharmingPopular

Disadvantages

BrashArrogantImpetuousShort tempered

Wound Chart


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Chad Morgan

Chad couldn't be more grateful to have a place for Didi and himself on Greg's NYC bus if he tried. He's so broke that it was getting embarrassing and he hasn't quite got round to sharing his misfortune with Didi yet. Thing is his Poker system really sould have worked out a lot better than it did and it's ended up with Chad almost penniless.

This is probably not the news that Didi wants to hear, especially as they're supposed to be saving for their wedding. Instead of which he's stumping up gas money, mooching off his weedhead little brother and trying to put on like he's got the money. Who knows how he's going to sort this all out.

Advantages

Maths BrainPretty AthleticResourcefulGood TalkerRadiates Trustworthiness

Disadvantages

ImpulsiveLacks Risk Assessment SkillsSecretiveHighly Strung

Wound ChartHead [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] Recoveries [ ] [ ] [ ]Nose [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Mouth [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Chest [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Stomach [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Groin [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] Left RightEars [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Eyes [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Shoulder [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Arm [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Hand [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Thigh [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Leg [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]Foot [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]

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Didi Lamont

Didi really admires Chad for his prudence. She knows he's been working hard at his maths course and saving so diligently so that they can get married and for this she absolutely hero worships him. In any troublesome situation she turns to Chad, her hero. She doesn't share the feelings for Flea, which is probably a good thing. But actually she doesn't even see how that scrawny criminal could even be related to her precious man.

He's kind of creepy actually, she saw him hanging around the back of Greg's van before they all came out. Probably looking to deal weed in the shade of the back of the bus. She likes Scout, thinks Jamie's a geek and Pete's a jock asshole... oh, did I mention Didi's rather judgemental.

Advantages

Extremely FriendlyWell LikedGood StudentResourcefulFighter

Disadvantages

Easily freaked outJudgementalQuite weak

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Flea Morgan

Dude, Massachusetts is such a shit hole. That's Flea's abiding opinion after a fortnight staying on his brother's couch. The big nerd seems to have become three or four times more uptight just by being here. The place is, however, filled with rich kids away from home who want to get high in a Cypress Hill stylee and that suits Flea real good. He's made a tidy bundle in the last fortnight Chad seems to have zeroed in on that too.

Making Flea spend loads of money like it's some kind of punishment. Still he really likes that Jamie girl, she's got full on geek hip and it's a look he digs. She's already proven herself to him by turning down a doobie. Flea doesn't smoke that shit, it's for selling and she seems sensible too.

Unlike this Greg chump who's driving the bus. Flea can tell by the smell of the underside of the van and the slight tick in the motor that this thing's going to clap out soon, maybe even before they get back to NY. Still anything that lets him avoid seeing the old man is a good thing. And he'd love a chance to show his true colours to Jamie.

Advantages

Super cunningGift of the gabSavant with motorsAthletic and clean living

Disadvantages

UnprepossessingUncharismaticScrawnyShy

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Officer Kinney

This Tom Kinney can do without.

Revelation Point is a creepy place, although he prefers it to Lincoln Falls which may as well be called Stepford. He's followed Pip Gunnarson's trail this far and he's not stopping now. There's all sorts of stories about people disappearing up here and those are just the clean stories about the woodsmen of Revelation Point.

Stories are just stories but still country folk are touchy and not used to outsiders. Tom Kinney's going to have to be extra specially nice to anyone he sees up here.

Advantages

Commands RespectDecent MarksmanUnflappableStrong

Disadvantages

Likes things normalAuthoritarian

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Veronica Kaye

Sister Ronnie curses the fact that she's always been a soft touch. She never suspected a nice old lady like that would have tricked her but here she is, caught in a cell who knows where, hurting, scared, exhausted and she's sure that somewhere in the darkness outside her box she can hear two sounds; the breathing of someone watching and the crying of someone as deep in despair as she is.

Advantages

StrongCunningMedically TrainedFast RunnerNot Squeamish

Disadvantages

Prone to depressionCold mannerSomewhat gullible

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Pip Gunnarson

She wasn't going back to that bitch stepmother of hers. That had been Pip's only thought as she ran and ran.

There'd been a cop on her tail and she'd been prepared to do just about anything to lose him, even get this lost herself. Out in the woods she'd been sure someone was following her and she'd known she was right when she seemed to blink and then from hiking along the road she was in a small dirty metal box. Pip had been caught by someone or something and the stories she'd always heard about Revelation Point were true.

Advantages

SurvivorAble to size up situations quicklyExcellent judge of characterEasily inspires sympathy

Disadvantages

Pathologically SuspiciousPoor liarRun down

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Wendigo Scoretrack

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Papa Hardesty

Wound Chart


Hos t

Refe ren ce

4

5

6

7 21

3

8


relating to the following overview for Hosts only and an unnumbered version for photocopying and issuing to the players should they find one of the copies placed at various locations throughout the town. Part of the atmosphere of the game is the feeling of being lost. So the map should not just be doled out. It's dark and none of the players have ever been here before. Unless they find a map no point of reference should be given.

Notes

1) The RV breaks down outside Neal Elementary at sundown. The characters in the RV have 5-10 minutes to decide on a plan before Pip (or some other random scruffy NPC if all parts are taken) comes running up the road dirty, beaten and scratched. She will try to tell the RV gang to get the hell out, which they can't do, obviously before legging it on the road out of town.

After she has gone the first wendigo children gather in the shadows. Players will have to make a draw of 6 to know

they're there and 9 to see something tangible.

The elementary school is open but derelict. Towards the rear of the single storey building is a canteen and an industrial kitchen with a lockable door. The players can buy some time here but after about forty minutes the wendigos will set fire to the building to smoke them out. The kitchen has a drainage cover leading to a small drain that anyone scoring less than four on a draw will be too claustrophobic to enter.

There is a fire axe on the kitchen wall. When the team open the kitchen door three wendigos will attack with sickles. If an NPC opens the kitchen door they will receive a significant wound in the first strike. Once the fire axe is used the wendigos will scatter, running out of the front.

There are more wendigos in the front yard. In fact by the time the party manage to escape the wendigos should be making their presence felt everywhere. See "Running The Game"

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for further details.

2) Hansen Hardware is accessible to hardy housebreakers. Behind the street is a drainage ditch about 20 feet deep that leads to an entrance to Revelation Point's sewer system. This is full of wendigos so players would be best to avoid. Any captured team members will be dragged into the sewage system and eventually brought to the psyche ward cells in the Danziger Memorial Hospital (see 3).

Hansen Hardware shares its roof space with the shop next door, a bridal shop,

there is a thin stud wall separating the two. It's much easier to break into the bridal shop than the Hardware store direct.

Inside are all manner of goodies, be generous; garden tools of all sorts, leaf burners, insecticide bombs. Only be restrictive in how much you let the players carry. The leaf burners have three or four good burns in them, no player can carry more than four gas grenades. A chainsaw is forever, of course.

There is no weaponry for sale here but there is a sawn off and twelve cartridges behind the counter.

3) The Hospital is where the wendigos leave victims they wish to keep alive for breeding purposes. That makes this the start point for Pip and Veronica in the game. It might be cool to start the game with Pip waking up in her cell and discovering that Ronnie is in an adjacent cell. Then rapidly cutting back to Neal Elementary.

The wendigos don't really like interiors

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so there will only be two or three around at any time inside. The psyche ward is towards the rear on the top floor. There's a door with rooftop access next to the isolation ward. All the nurse's stations and the pharmacy have painkillers and bandages available.

If the party do venture onto the roof then about twenty wendigos will be straight on them. There's a water tank and a generator full of fuel up there.

4) Hardesty Park is a major wendigo hangout. They love the nature, the trees, the dark, the smell of scared teenagers. This place is a really bad place to go. Lots of running should follow some initial cat and mouse.

If you want to be really horrible lead the players to a shallow grave where the bodies of the wendigos mothers are left, half chewed to rot away. Giving birth to a wendigo child sours the meat and kills the mother in labour.

5) The town square is big and open. Late at night it's a bad place to go although slightly better than being

trapped in the rat runs around the residential areas in town.

6) The Sheriff's Office gives access to the map (complete with hand written guides), there's also two pump actions, 24 cartridges a police issue automatic and 50 rounds for it. Police files relate the arrest of Papa Hardesty in 1973, after that all records mysteriously cease.

7) The Town Hall has little of value except some history of how the town was founded by the Hardesty Mining dynasty, a dog-eared local history paperback describes how the Owackwee Indians who lived in the mountains believed the woods to be home to wendigos, bestial superhumans who feed on the flesh of regular people.

8) The Garage contains a slightly broken but serviceable truck that one of the mechanically able lads could probably fix in short order. The main doors won't work so busting loose is the only option.

General Notes: Willie Shempman is the

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wendigo's handy man, a despicable human being old Pa Hardesty keeps him around to put off cop style visitors. Attempts to go anywhere except Liberty Falls get fatal extremely quickly. If anyone does manage to run hell for leather to Liberty Falls hospital staff will quietly drug them and then arrange to have them dumped back in Revelation Point; play up the creepy in such an encounter.

Running the Game

Timings

The set up for the game should be played as described in the Map Notes 1 at the school. From there on in it's really up to the players, as it should be. Rather than stepping from shadowy presences straight up to a full siege, ramp up the possible numbers of Wendigos as the game progresses. At first make it seem like there might only be six or seven. By the time they've escaped the school and are looking for a new haven imply it's more like twenty or thirty.

Obviously the cop, Pip and Sister Ronnie don't start with the main party. If someone decides to play Officer Kinney up front have him run into Shempman, to dial up the tension with a creepy but non combative encounter. For Pip and Ronnie escape should be a priority and it would be good to give one of them a means of picking the lock on their cell or whatever. Maybe all party members will meet up down the road, maybe they won't each storyline should be personal and keep tension to a maximum.

At the point the main party escape from the school it's usually good to stage an abduction attempt on a female character. See how that works out. Remember the Wendigos a) don't like the interior of buildings and b) like to mess with the minds of their prey. So when the team get indoors give them some time to plan. Good rooftop access is to be had for a cost at the Hospital and the Town Hall. The wendigos don't like interiors but heights don't bother them.

Hopefully as the game reaches its third

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or fourth hour the players should have tooled up some (been injured some) and be thinking about a last stand to get to the garage. (How they find out about the garage is up to you but having the police officer find the map either with or without a player controlling him is a good option.) Remember this is a slasher movie, so make descriptions of encounters graphic and bloody.

If the players could knock off Papa Hardesty that would be super. Note Papa Hardesty's injuries on his injury chart. He's eight foot tall, hairy, mean and tough. Assess the party's efforts to do him damage accordingly.

Wendigos

The only Wendigo to really worry about is Papa Hardesty, the others can

be mown down with impunity. All Wendigos hate light and cramped spaces. They're all able to climb but they're individually fairly weak. I pictured them as being humanoid with blue-black hair covering their body (although they wear clothing and often base ball caps). They have eyes a solid brown-black and wet looking, like blood clots, and sharp white teeth. They mostly carry sickles which they like to attack people's limbs with.

Papa Hardesty eschews weaponry in favour of ripping people apart with his hands. He's also tougher than the others. He lumbers forward and will soak up gunfire. Flames upset him. Chainsaws... well, now you're talking. I made him big so make him fall hard, in both senses, hard to topple but once he goes he should basically fall apart.

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Treasure of the Caesars

Treasure of the Caesars is the crunchiest example scenario in the example book and a foreshadow of the first full No Dice system Marauders! I wanted to include one scenario for people who already enjoy role playing and want to see how far No Dice can go into the world of more traditional role playing.

The basic set up of the adventure is that two rival territories Lemuria and Cibola exist in a mythical location in the Pacific and the players are all on board a Lemurian vessel that subsequently becomes embroiled in a Cibolan affair. The setting uses a martial arts system to provide combat fun.

Set Up

So the story goes when Mark Antony joined Cleopatra in expanding the Egyptian empire onto the Spice Coast

he hoarded vast wealth. In other circumstances he may have snubbed Rome by refusing to help them when crops failed but he had other means of accomplishing this goal with access to the wisdom of the Far East.

Cleopatra was not keen on being referred to as a sorceress but as Mark Antony scaled to godhood in the eyes of the distant Roman people so his hubris grew. In his mind Egypt became as paradise to him and Rome the world of mortal man. Mark Antony dabbled in matters that stretched his spirit to breaking point and all the while he amassed stock piles of treasure.

In the end, however, Octavian Caesar was not to be upstaged by a brutal, cunning warrior king. Octavian was a strategist and he kept working away at the enemies of Egypt until he had formed a mighty alliance between the

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Jews, the Romans and the Teutons. When the fall of Egypt came it was swift, brutal and bloody.

In those days much of Lemuria was still unexplored. Mark Antony, in a move typical of his hubris, packed a fleet of ships and took to the seas from East Africa. Eventually he settled on a large island and build his miniature empire, Antonius Rex sat upon the throne of his island state, which he named Cleopatra after his lost love. There he lived out the rest of his days in moribund decadence, eventually retreating into a massive underground tomb to die.

It is said that upon the expiration of his life Mark Antony pronounced a curse upon his treasures, that any man involved in removing it from Cleopatra would be cursed to sicken and die within five years. The worst curse was reserved for those who actually handled the treasure on the way off the island. It was said they would never feel the sea upon their skin again before they died.

Cleopatra was lost among the thousands of islands of Lemuria. The legend of the Caesar's Treasure passed among seafaring folk. One such man, a Captain Abner Frobishire, formerly of the East Africa & Indias Trading Company, acquired a map that showed the way to Cleopatra. He left the employ of the Company, stealing a ship, and set about assembling a party to move the treasure onto the ships. Further curses would be analysed thereafter. Frobishire is certainly insane but he is ever cautious.

So it is that twelve strangers are bound and caged within the bowels of Frobishire's vessel, the Wayfarer. They will be forced to fight for their survival and then the victors will be forced on to Cleopatra to lift the treasure. The effect of the curse will be well noted and Frobishire has decided that any further thought to the effect of the curse will be reserved until then.

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Additional Rules

Fighting Suits

The suits all have an indication of generic fighting moves during combat. The higher score wins in every move. Suit associations:

Clubs - FeetSpades - HandsHearts - ThrowDiamonds - Reflex

The only one that might require some explanation is the reflex move. This indicates that the player read the opponent's move as it was being made and instantly modified their own attack to block and hit back.

Only named NPCs have fight styles like the players do, goons are unmodified, hence a court card for a goon fight has a flat value of 10.

Fighting Styles

Players and named NPCs have fighting styles that operate on the same four

principles as the suits: kick strength, punch strength, grappling and reflexes. Instead of allowing the suit on the card to dictate the move being made as in the unmodified "Fighting Suits" rule the player can elect before drawing to use their style and tell you what move they are going to make. The suit then acts upon that move either enhancing it or degrading it.

Thus every style has three scores associated with it, these are called degraded, unmodified and enhanced. As each suit has an association with a particular move so that suit can enhance or degrade a specifically chosen move. For example the Drunken Boxing Style has the following scores:

Degraded Unmodified Enhanced

Kick(♣) -2 1 2Punch(♠) -1 1 2Throw(♥) -3 2 3Reflex(♦) -4 3 5

The cycle for suit downgrades/

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upgrades is the same regardless of style. Obviously the suit upgrades its own move and the downgrade cycle is one out of step; so kicks downgrade punches, which downgrade throws, which downgrade reflex moves, which downgrade kicks, like this:

Downgraded By

Upgraded By

Kick Diamond Club

Punch Club Spade

Throw Spade Heart

Reflex Heart Diamond

Example: Simon is using the drunken boxing fighting style to fight a goon who is fighting without a style (or indeed any class, goons eh?).

In the first round Simon decides to go for a quick KO, hoping for a diamond he states that he will attempt to sucker the goon with a reflex, he pulls a 4 of hearts effectively scoring 0. The goon pulls a 2 of clubs punching out at Simon who manages to defend for no loss of HP because the goon still didn't

beat him by a clear 3.

In the following round Simon decides to play conservative with a punch and happily draws a 7 of Spades enhanced by choosing the punch move from his drunken boxing style he scores nine. The goon pulls a pathetic two of diamonds and attempts to react to the punch too slowly. Flailing out with perfect chi balance Simon takes out this one point goon and turns to face his next assailant.

In fighting Aces are worth one and all the number cards are worth their numeric value. If no modification is applied to the move the court cards are worth 10. If the move is augmented by a Finishing Move, then the "Finishing Moves" rule is applied (see below).

If either party exceeds the other by a clear 3 the move breaks their defence and the fighter who employed the losing move loses a hit point e.g. 3 beats 1 = defended, 4 beats 1 = defence break, lose 1 HP.

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Finishing Moves

Every fighting style has a "Finishing Move". These finishing moves allow the fighter access to a known weak point on the opponent through any of the other moves and is associated with a particular court card e.g. the finishing move "Sake Sway" is associated with the Jack in drunken boxing and strikes the opponent's knees knocking them over.

Example: Paul pulls a jack of diamonds and his character is a drunken boxer so he quickly reacts to the opponent's attempted kick with a backward swaying move that allows him to strike back instantly and with devastating effect. He drops down and loops his belt around the opponent's knees pulling the cord the opponent is hoisted into the air and lands heavily on his head, rendering him unconscious.

A finishing move knocks out any goon in one blow and will take 3HP from a named NPC. The Finishing moves can be Degraded or Enhanced like regular

moves but the addition goes onto the next round of combat.

No Ranged Combat

In this game the shots in a gun battle are not treated as any kind of combat but as separate events tested individually.

Combat

Combat is a central part of this game, as such it needs to be made into an involving and fun activity. The system here tries to support turning each fight into a story, pitting various styles against one another in thrilling set pieces. The way a fight progresses is like this:

1) If the fight is one on one the Host plays one character and the Player plays their own character. If it is a goon brawl the Host plays the goons and the Players play their characters.

2) If the current confrontation between one player and one non player is single combat then the Host pulls one card for

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the opponent. If the player is faced down by more than one opponent the Host pulls one card for each opponent and looks at the card(s) in secret.

3) The Host uses the suit to determine what move(s) the opponent(s) are looking to pull. The Host describes these moves to the player, the scores indicate how effective the opponent(s) moves are going to be. If it is clear the moves are particularly weak or strong the Host may colour their description of the opponent(s) threat appropriately.

4) If the player has to choose one (or more) opponents to hit they do so. They state how they're going to counter the move. If it's a single opponent they may say something like: "I will break past his defences and attempt to punch him in the chest". If it is multiple opponents he may say: "I will spin round and jump kick (Kick) the one on the left. Land and sweep (Kick) the middle one and then try to react (Reflexes) to whatever the last one is trying to do to injure me".

A player may attempt to combine a

kick and a punch. They may use reflexes to strike back at all simultaneously attacking opponents, maybe making the attacks work against each other. A player may move in against a single opponent attempting a body move or throw which may topple other opponents temporarily, or they may attempt a defensive leap or roll to put themselves in a position to fight one at a time. Any reasonable story description of the move is allowed to happen.

5) The Host reveals the card(s) for the opponent(s).

6) The player pulls a single card for each move in the order described. In the example in four the player is looking for a Club to enhance their kick, a second club and then a diamond to enhance the reflex manoeuvre. If they succeed in the hit by more than three each additional point is added to their next move. If they succeed but do not break defence then no modifier is applied. If they fail each point by which they fail subtracts from their next move.

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Example Combat

Rachel has found herself in hot water, her ninja has been surrounded by three goons. They're not particularly strong but they're determined to combine their strength to bring her down. The Host pulls one card for each goon and pulls Nine of Diamonds, Six of Spades and King of Clubs. He describes Rachel's predicament thus:

"The one on the left is just waiting to see what you do, but he looks ready for you to do anything. The guy in the middle has committed to a punch that's headed for your face. The guy on the right is spinning into a dangerous looking roundhouse."

Rachel decides that she's going to attempt to grab the puncher and swing him into the way of the kicker, whilst avoiding Mr Ready for Anything. This move relies on a block and grab, which is a body move, so Rachel is hoping for a high heart first. The following throw is deemed to be a hand move so a high spade would be good and the final dodge is a reflexive manoeuvre so a

high diamond would just about finish things off nicely.

Underwhelmingly she pulls a nine of diamonds and takes a -2 penalty because Ninjutsu isn't really suited to the kind of move she's trying to pull off. That gives her a respectable seven, enough to apply the block but the kick connects for the loss of 1 HP and although the puncher is thrown off she's suddenly grappled by Mr Reflexes.

Now she has, however, only got Mr Reflexes to deal with. The other two, happy to wait for the grapple to finish, watch on.

The Host pulls a nasty 10 of Spades for Mr Reflexes and announces:

"It looks like he's going to rabbit punch you in the ribs, unless you counter he's going to do some serious damage."

Rachel says she's going to use a low knee grab to up end the guy and, as they're already grappling, that's a hand move. She's hoping for spades. She gets

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them with a nine enhanced by 4 in Ninjutsu to 13 she avoids the rabbit punch and scoops the guy off his feet. He hits his head on the floor and is out cold.

Seeing their comrade go down the other two start forward. The Host draws 3 of spades for the Punching goon and an 8 of diamond for the Roundhouser. He describes the situation thus.

"The other two are surprised at the turnabout you've put on their compatriot. One strikes out somewhat weakly, the other one watches you warily waiting for you to move."

Rachel decides to risk kicking the Puncher into Roundhouse and a s she's just trying to cause distraction she needs the one move she's pulling to come off, so she's looking for a club. Unfortunately luck's not with her, she pulls a four of spades and gets hit with a downgrade taking her to one.

Punchy's underwhelming blow socks Rachel in the jaw and Roundhouse

takes the opportunity to sweep kick her. She loses her balance and falls, losing two HP because of the vicious reflex move. The Host pulls a King of Spades and a Jack of Clubs, indicating that Punchy and Roundhouse have grown in confidence and are seeking to do serious damage. He describes it thus:

"Both goons launch themselves into the air Punchy is looking to come down with a strike to your face, Roundhouse is going to slam his knees into your torso. This could be punishing."

Rachel decides to play it safe. She wants to roll away quickly. The Host decides this is a defensive move of a reflexes kind, so a high diamond would be great. The two of spades doesn't even slightly cut it and despite an unmodified reflexes bonus of two, that only equals six. So Rachel doesn't quite evade either hit taking one full HP from both attacks.

Rachel's only got two HP left but the goons are surprised that didn't finish her. Punchy springs back to his feet

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and Roundhouse rolls away. The Host draws a seven of clubs for Punchy and three of diamonds for Roundhouse. He describes it thus: "Punchy came off better he's sprung up and lifted his leg. He's looking set to kick you while you're down and hurting, Roundhouse is slower, he's come away looking a little uncertain about what to do."

Rachel decides it's reflexes time. She's going to grab Punchy's ankle, lock it and attempt to throw him at Roundhouse. A high diamond would go across well. Followed by a good spade. The eight of diamonds comes out for her and her enhanced move now has a score of eleven. Punchy's kick is turned into a devastating throw that upends him and a following 10 of clubs (unenhanced, but hey) takes out Roundhouse who just hasn't got the chops to avoid his former partner flying through the air to take them both down at once.

A little sore Rachel gets up and dusts herself down.

"Sucks to be you," she tells the unconscious pile of goon bodies.

Healing

In this game all but one HP are restored at the end of combat. Restoratives may be applied during any spare hour which will heal characters back to full health. The scenario notes will relate when restoratives are available.

Playable Characters

Casablanca - An escaped slave (Kipura/Capoeira)

Old Man Fong - An Old Man seeking a lost relative (Wu Shu)

Ryu Masake - A Japanese Traveller (Karate)

Tcheky Marenovic - A Russian Bodyguard (Arctura/Krav Maga)

Brother Yip - A Monk (Shaolin Kung Fu)

Davey Collins - A Delinquent Drifter (Newberry)

Player Set Up

It's quite simple really all the characters

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start the game unconscious and caged on board Captain Abner Frobishire's vessel "Wayfarer". The characters in the caged area are: Casablanca, Old Man Fong, Ryu Masake, Tcheky Marenovic, Brother Yip, Davey Collins, Kyoto, Richard Duchamps, Reggie Stanford, Maui, Matuku and Drona.

If you do not have six players you can remove characters as you see fit. Act I relies upon there being one Non Player fighter for every Player fighter, although you can do something with the concept of having extra fighters involved who become NPCs when you get to Acts II and III. It's really up to you, read the act notes and decide how you want to run it.

Make sure you explain to the character that the area of islands known to the world at large is referred to by Europeans as Lemuria. Cibola refers to an unknown island group hidden in the vast Pacific filled with brutal, bloodthirsty warriors who take no prisoners and cannot be reasoned with.

Some of the martial arts have names

that have been derived from the supposed roots of their modern names because the adventure is historical. The martial art of Newberry is fictional and first appeared in the 90s comic strip "Accident Man".

No Maps?

This isn't a map based game. I made maps the first time I ran it and they were all but pointless. If you want to make them yourself you should be able to freestyle them. A prop map of the treasure island might be nice but players won't use it for anything and besides Frobishire's probably not gong to let whatever bogus map he has out of his sight.

So here are some guides to the general layout of the Wayfarer and some notes about the island Frobishire believes to be “Cleopatra”.

The Wayfarer – Guide

Lower Deck

Rooms on the lower deck include:

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Casablanca - African - Kipura Fighter

Casablanca has been a slave for a two years. He was originally kidnapped by seven men from his village in West Africa and taken North to Casablanca where he was sold to East Coast traders who started working him on the spice route from India across Lemuria to Peru.

Recently whilst Casablanca was in the Avaiki Islands Casablanca was stolen. Casablanca has never considered what he would do if he were freed. The tribe who originally enslaved him slaughtered his family but he knows they, in turn, were slaughtered in another pointless battle with a neighbouring tribe.

Fighting Style

Capoeira is a fluid dance like fighting style that uses a lot of swinging kicks and emphasises fluidity of movement in a confined space. It looks spectacular and once the fighter is in a rhythm it is almost unstoppable. Capoeira fighters can find themselves in trouble if they face someone with good aerial moves.

CapoeiraDegraded Enhanced

-1Feet( ) ♣ 2 4-3Hands( ) ♠ 1 20Body( ) ♥ 1 22Reflex( )♦ 3 5

Finishing Move – Hand Spin Kick0Q ( ) ♠ 1 2

Old Man Fong - Chinese - Wu Shu Fighter

Fong loves his granddaughter Mei Mei. That's the only reason he left Szechuan on this foolhardy quest. His son was dead, so was his daughter in law, like most of the people in their village. He had thought, upon finding the village aflame that he would walk into the fire and allow himself to be consumed.

When he saw the child, Baker Chan's son, bleeding in the snow, he had known it was not his time to die. This destruction was the herald of Old Man Fong's last great adventure. The boy was weak, he died after three days but he did manage to tell Fong that the raiders had taken the children. Possibly they intended to sell them as slaves. Fong didn't know, all he cared about was that somewhere his eight year old granddaughter was still alive. So, as the winter turned to spring, he had set out from the Xieyang Village of Szechuan to retrieve his granddaughter. Woe betide the man who would stand in his path, Fong was too near to death to fear it on his own account or upon the account of others.

Fighting Style

Wu Shu is an umbrella term for a whole family of Chinese Martial arts. Wu Shu emphasises a fluidity of movement and the correct direction of chi. It is less acrobatic than more general Kung Fu and is a solid fighting style using a lot of kicks, punches and blocks. A Wu Shu fighter will have a problem with heavily offensive fighting styles that devastate upon breaking defense.

Wu ShuDegraded Enhanced

1Feet( ) ♣ 2 3-1Hands( ) ♠ 2 20Body( ) ♥ 2 22Reflex( )♦ 2 4

Finishing Move – Defence Break0J ( ) ♦ 1 2

Ryu Masake - Japanese - Karate Fighter

To Ryu Hakuro this place was much the same as every other place he had found himself in the last ten seasons. When they had accused him of murdering Akemi's father he had known that he could not defend himself. Tetsuo Watanabe had refused Ryu when he had asked for Akemi's hand in marriage.

Never mind that Tetsuo's business partner was rumoured to have been plotting some traitorous action for years; Kyo Masaru was a respected man in the community. In the end blaming Ryu had been the easier option. So Ryu fled.

He had met master Nobuyuki in Burma. The master had trained Ryu in exchange for help running his small farm. In the end Ryu had decided it was time to move on. He had got as far as the port before some men had drugged him. Now he was here. Caged. Furious. As soon as he saw his chance these men would know Ryu Hakuro's rage.

Fighting Style

Karate is the name of a number of styles of martial art that originate from the Ryukyu Islands of Japan. In addition to being a self-defence style karate (properly karate-do) is also viewed as a sport and physical practice. A karate master can easily break a weak or confused mixed style.

KarateDegraded Enhanced

1Feet( ) ♣ 2 42Hands( ) ♠ 2 2-1Body( ) ♥ 1 1-1Reflex( )♦ 3 4

Finishing Move – Aerial Roundhouse0K ( ) ♥ 1 2

Tcheky Marenovic - Russian – Krav Maga Fighter

This is just an inconvenience to Tcheky Marenovic. Let them drug him, let them lock him up. They have to keep him caged because Tchecky Marenovic has the destructive power of the great, black bear. At some point they have to let him out of this cage and then they will see.

All Tcheky wants is a sturdy wife and a sturdy house in a sheltered valley by a stream. It doesn't matter how many inconveniences he has to destroy along the way.

Fighting Style

Krav Maga is a brutal style that emphasises taking an opponent out in short order. While Arctura is instantly devastating if it comes up against a nimble style emphasising evasion over blocking it can run into trouble.

Krav MagaDegraded Enhanced

0Feet( ) ♣ 3 41Hands( ) ♠ 1 2-1Body( ) ♥ 1 21Reflex( )♦ 3 4

Finishing Move – Face Strike0J ( ) ♦ 1 2

Brother Yip - Chinese - Shaolin Kung Fu Fighter

Brother Yip finds this all fascinating. Ever since the monastery had accepted a visit from the Crazy Wisdom Master Brother Yip had found himself compelled to find out more about the circumstances of one's life in the flow of everyday interaction. In the end he had chosen to leave the monastery to test his resolve in keeping his devotions in the flow of life. The world, he has found, is filled with raw experience, but he is not afraid. There are many people who do not understand Brother Yip's way of life or temperament, but he is not afraid.

Even though men have drugged his body and caged it, even though they have brought him onto this ship and set sail for points unknown, he is not afraid. Brother Yip knows life is an illusion and experience a dream. He is just eager to see what happens next.

Fighting Style

Shaolin Kung Fu is an acrobatic style originating from the monastic devotions of Shaolin Monks. It is not exclusively a combat style but the form in fighting emphasises acrobatic moves that are difficult to pull off by someone with little training. Kung Fu runs into trouble against brutal martial arts and fighting styles that can block and counter quickly, Shaolin holds the advantage in stamina battles however.

Shaolin Kung FuDegraded Enhanced

1Feet( ) ♣ 3 40Hands( ) ♠ 1 10Body( ) ♥ 1 21Reflex( )♦ 3 4

Finishing Move – Aerial Kick0Q ( ) ♣ 1 2

Davey Collins - British - Newberry Fighter

Last Davey remembered he'd been in Indonesia enjoying the local facilities and the life of a young man seeing the glorious Lemuria that seemed like a land of dreams from the cold and dirty streets of London. Next thing he knows he's waking up in a cage on a boat with a bunch of other strangers.

He had thought at the time that there were a couple of guys watching his last cage match with an unhealthy interest. The real question now was what did they want with an unattached globe-trotting Newberry fighter? None of the possible answers to that question seem good.

Fighting Style

Newberry is a style that mixes a traditional boxing style with elements of kung fu. It emphasises a ground based approach using ducks, sways and feints to avoid being hit, the offensive moves are exclusively executed with the fists, forearms and elbows. Newberry fighters run into trouble with sweeping moves and leg attacks, although a highly skilled Newberry fighter has learned how to jump out of the way of such attacks.

NewberryDegraded Enhanced

-2Feet( ) ♣ 1 22Hands( ) ♠ 3 4-1Body( ) ♥ 1 21Reflex( )♦ 3 4

Finishing Move – Hook0Q ( ) ♦ 1 2


Enemy Fighters – Host's Guide

Kyoto - Japanese - Karate Fighter HP: 5

Kyoto is a haughty fellow who will not talk to the other combatants save to assert his own authority.

Karate is the name of a number of styles of martial art that originate from the Ryukyu Islands of Japan. In addition to being a self-defence style karate (properly karate-do) is also viewed as a sport and physical practice. Its system of kata make this a highly formalised style and the style can be weak against more improvisational styles that can adapt during the course of the fight. Having said this a karate master can easily break a weak or confused mixed style. Underneath the rigidity of kata is an almost infinite range of subtlety.

Karate Degraded Unmodified Enhanced

Feet( ) ♣ 1 2 4

Hands( ) ♠ 2 1 2

Body( ) ♥ -2 1 3

Reflex( ) ♦ -1 3 4

Finishing Moves - +

K ( ) ♥ Aerial R'house 0 1 2

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Richard Duchamps - Savate Fighter HP: 6

Duchamps fancies himself a bit and seems not to realise the danger he is in, he is happy to fight anyone to fuel his own ego.

Savate is a style that emphasises the use of kicks and open handed slaps. In a way it is a style with a great deal of purity and simplicity but it presents problems when fighting, low, close in and some acrobatic moves.

Savate Degraded Unmodified Enhanced

Feet( ) ♣ 2 3 4

Hands( ) ♠ -2 1 2

Body( ) ♥ -1 2 3

Reflex( ) ♦ 1 2 4

Finishing Moves - +

Q ( ) ♦ Balance Strike 0 1 2

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General Prak - Cibolan - Ganga Fighter HP: 8

General Prak is six foot seven, broad built and terrifying. He wears heavy Cibolan armour and the high ranking Cibolan skull helmet. He speaks Cibolan and is incredibly business like.

Ganga is the style of the Cibolans. It favours grapples, pushes, trips and low kicks. It is vulnerable to aerial attacks and avoidance defensive moves. It can break most blocks.

Ganga Degraded Unmodified Enhanced

Feet( ) ♣ 1 4 5

Hands( ) ♠ 2 2 5

Body( ) ♥ 0 3 4

Reflex( ) ♦ 0 1 2

Finishing Moves - +

J ( ) ♠ Low Smash 0 1 2

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Lieutenant Quivira - Cibolan - Ganga Fighter HP: 6

Quivira is more lightly armoured than Prak. He doesn't speak much and seems to have efficiently trained his men.

Ganga is the style of the Cibolans. It favours grapples, pushes, trips and low kicks. It is vulnerable to aerial attacks and avoidance defensive moves. It can break most blocks. See General Prak

Jeriah Masaka - Cibolan - Ganga Fighter HP: 7

Masaka is a Cibolan traitor. He wishes to make peace with the Lemurian races and has turned on his own people. He is a deposed Cibolan prince whose throne was taken but he will not reveal this. He can speak fluent Franca.

Ganga is the style of the Cibolans. It favours grapples, pushes, trips and low kicks. It is vulnerable to aerial attacks and avoidance defensive moves. It can break most blocks.

See General Prak

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Reggie Stanford - British - Newberry Fighter HP: 5

Reggie is a complete git. He's racist, sexist, narcissitic; all this and ugly with it. His real advantage is that he can take a lot of punishment. He will taunt and belittle opponents in a fight and hope to anger them so he is more likely to get in a few dirty shots.

Newberry is a style that mixes a traditional boxing style with elements of kung fu. It emphasises a ground based approach using ducks, sways and feints to avoid being hit, the offensive moves are exclusively executed with the fists, forearms and elbows. Newberry fighters run into trouble with sweeping moves and leg attacks, although a highly skilled Newberry fighter has learned how to jump out of the way of such attacks.

Newberry Degraded Unmodified Enhanced

Feet( ) ♣ -2 1 2

Hands( ) ♠ 1 3 4

Body( ) ♥ -1 1 3

Reflex( ) ♦ 1 3 5

Finishing Moves - +

Q ( ) ♠ Hook 0 1 2

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Matuku - Samoan - Sawaiki Silat Fighter HP: 7

Silent, brooding and intense Matuku does not speak, Matuku acts.

The Sawaiki Silat is an island fighting style that combines knee and elbow moves with wrestling grapples. Large practitioners use a grounded style that use hard palm techniques and shoulder barges to keep an opponent down. If someone has faced a large Sawaiki Silat opponent and gotten used to constant pummelling originating from the ground upwards meeting a lighter opponent who seems to fly through the air raining persistent powerful blows downwards can be something of a surprise. Both find low moves a trouble as their power comes either from down upwards or from upwards trying to direct falling into power moves.

Sawaiki Silat


Feet( ) ♣ -1 3 4

Hands( ) ♠ -1 3 4

Body( ) ♥ 1 2 3

Reflex( ) ♦ 1 2 3

Finishing Moves - +

K ( ) ♥ Pin and Break 0 1 2

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Maui - Tongan - Maki Tinku Fighter HP: 5

Maui has learned a wide Francan vocabulary, at least in one-liners and insults. He will mock every move an opponent makes in a lighthearted and bantering fashion, hoping that the opponent will concentrate more on his verbosity than his fighting style. Outside of the ring Maui is sly as a fox and about as trustworthy, yet you just can't help liking the guy he's so damn companionable.

Maki Tinku is a nimble style that uses clever footwork and moves that look like breakdancing to grip, lock and disable foes. There are very few kicks involved, feet are usually used as a method of executing acrobatic moves, but if you happen to be bracing off someone's chest... So yes, a lot of opportunity for jumping around like an eight year old having sucked down too many sweeties here. This style is weak against more aggressive long reaching styles like Savate and certain forms of Kung Fu.

Maki Tinku


Feet( ) ♣ -2 2 4

Hands( ) ♠ 0 2 3

Body( ) ♥ -3 1 2

Reflex( ) ♦ -1 2 3

Finishing Moves - +

Q ( ) ♠ Aerial Punch 0 1 2

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Drona - Indian - Kalari Payattu Fighter HP: 6

Drona is an ascetic, which is like being a monk but without the calm. His body is scarred from regular mortification practices. His flexibility is unnatural and he can also withstand a lot of pain. Players would do well to batter him in the head. The minute escape is presented as an option Drona will leap into the sea and swim away, confident he will neither starve nor drown. Did I mention he's odd?

Kalari Payattu has been heralded as the mother and father of all martial arts. A formal Indian style it does indeed imitate aspects of Wu Shu, Silat and Karate. This distillation can make it hard for practitioners of other styles to adjust, Wu Shu fighters expect more fluidity, Karate masters expect more rigidity, Silat fighters expect more close up moves. Unfortunately once any one of these martial artists has the measure of a Kalari Payattu fighter the style is somewhat weak.

Kalari Payattu


Feet( ) ♣ 1 3 4

Hands( ) ♠ -1 2 3

Body( ) ♥ -2 1 3

Reflex( ) ♦ 1 2 4

Finishing Moves - +

J ( ) ♠ Spinning Arm Chop 0 1 2

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Queensberry - British - Drunken Boxing (Zui Quan) Fighter HP: 4

Queensberry learned Zui Quan from someone, probably not a master. His balance is essentially weak and he gets a lot of moves wrong. He likes the Drunken more than the boxing and is like a really sleazy English gentleman gone badly to seed. He stands by Captain Frobishire but will surrender if it seems his Captain is doomed. He will then instantly set about drinking himself into oblivion. A great fighter he isn't relying on sleeping drugs and hired muscle to get the real work done.

Drunken Boxing is a style that emphasises a disciplined core balance to allow a fighter to be flexible and move, literally, like a drunkard. There are a lot of fake falls, swaying movements and hooked fists in this style which seeks to confuse an opponent before unleashing a deadly volley of kicks and blows. This style is effective against formalised and brutal styles but against other fluid styles it really comes down to the skill of the practitioner.

Zui Quan Degraded Unmodified Enhanced

Feet( ) ♣ -4 0 1

Hands( ) ♠ -3 0 1

Body( ) ♥ 0 1 2

Reflex( ) ♦ 0 2 3

Finishing Moves - +

Q ( ) ♥ Trip Fall 0 1 2

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salvoes at the Cibolan Raider. If anyone complains about a sizable vessel only having 12 cannon balls point out the ship was renegade and poor.

2) The Arena, up to 12 cages and a small fighting ring. Six of the ships twelve cannons are here (three to a side). They are locked into runs.

3) Hammocks - nothing of value here. The hammocks are hung in the centre and six of the ship's twelve cannons (six to a side) are stored here. They are locked into runs

4) Galley and kitchen. Rank smelling, dirty, diseased. Low ceiling as it runs under the Captain's Quarters.

Deck

1) Outside area - Access provided to the sails, crows nest, aft deck, foredeck, Captain's quarters, down to the galley and of course the sea by way of a gangplank and a sword (Arrr!).

2) Captain's Quarters - There's a small

safe containing the treasure map and 25 gold dubloons in here. Otherwise it's a fairly tatty bedroom and office with nothing very interesting in it.

Upper Deck

1) Aft Deck - Ship's wheel, access to some sails.

2) Fore deck - Access to more sails. A pointy bit where the figure head is. There is no actual figure head.

Island

Things you will need to know about the island are:

1) Where Jeriah's Clipper is moored. Make the description of the boat as specific as you like. The Clipper is slim, sleek and deadly looking. It houses 18 small cannons. It could be hidden in a cove not visible from the sea.

2) Where the Cibolan Raider is moored. This thing is massive. 24 heavy cannons, deck mounted harpoon guns

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1) A store room containing enough ammunition and powder for two and space for up to 100 Cibolan troops. The thing is well hidden probably in a bay on the opposite side of the island. It is impossible to run it with less than thirty men.

If you produce a prop trasure map you may want to add a big X somewhere. Whether there is any treasure on the island is up to you. Remember this setting is purely for the purposes of a giant game of Kung Fu hide and seek. Possibly the existence of treasure would be overegging the pudding.

Running The Game

Act I - The Contest

One way or another there's going to be a rumble. When the players have woken, eaten and explored their cramped surroundings it is time for Frobishire's right hand man to introduce himself. Queensberry informs the players that they are to assist Frobishire with a mission of the utmost importance, but, after a review of the situation, he has decided that twelve might be too many to manage, even when surrounded by musket wielding rogue privateers. So the

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Captain has come up with a cunning plan to reduce the numbers by half and ensure some level of quality among the remaining combatants. Frobishire would like to pair up the prisoners and have them fight to the death.

It may be that the players can communicate among themselves well enough to incite mutiny at this stage. Queensberry is accompanied by 24 guards all armed with muskets. So it could be that they just agree to the contest. Either way a fight will ensue and some people are going to end up the worse for it. Losers to every round are taken away by Frobishire's men and dumped into the sea to fend for themselves.

If a mutiny is instigated then the crew are going to be somewhat surprised (and mostly disadvantaged). After the sailors have fired their rifles it will take about a minute and a half to reload them, by which time they should be unconscious. Once all of the caged fighters have taken over the ship they should be able to view land. Frobishire will beg for mercy and promise the

fighters vast wealth if they just get on to the island.

Act II - Cibolans!

After the contest give the players an hour or so to patch themselves back up to normal, as soon as they're ready, or not quite ready the cry goes up from the crow's nest. "Land Ho!" Allow them enough time to debate what to do about the island and immediately follow with a cry of: "Cibolaaaaaaans!" Everyone should crap themselves. If they don't you haven't made it plain how nasty the Cibolans are. There are two large Cibolan warships following a smaller Cibolan clipper. One of the warships breaks off and approaches the Wayfarer. At this point feel free to allow everyone still standing to man the cannons and indulge in a colourful piratey sea battle description.

The Wayfarer is not a warship and only has enough cannonballs for two salvos. If the Wayfarer fails to make contact with the Cibolan Warship then six Cibolans will board for every player (and more besides to add to the general

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melee but basically each player will have to down six Cibolans). Reduce this number by one for each salvo success fully delivered before the ships come side by side. The Cibolans fire cannons to weaken the ship as they draw aside. Once it is clear they are losing they will destroy the Wayfarer forcing the players to swim for land.

Act III - Caesar's Treasure

The players will have observed the clipper making its way to shore upon this island a fair way from where the Wayfarer's survivors land. You might want to provide a few NPC survivors to provide a little Cibolan information and to act as cannon fodder. Also this is the island the map to "Cleopatra" mentioned. Whether there is any treasure here is entirely up to you, the point of this act is not the retrieval of treasure but the drama unfolding between the two rival Cibolan parties

on the island.

Jeriah is a Cibolan rebel who has learned some Franca. If the players can keep from killing them he will reveal that he can get them off the island but first they must defeat General Prak who seeks to execute Jeriah as a traitor. He will also tell them that if Prak had possessed only one boat and the winds had picked up faster his clipper, the Wanderer's Rhapsody, would have easily outdistanced Prak. Now, with only one boat left in decent condition after the earlier battle and the high winds that are blowing anyone could easily outdistance Prak in a chase.

Play out the skirmish as appropriate, this isn't a Lord of the Rings style battle, more a series of small encounters. Eventually Jeriah will face Prak and die, the players can kill Prak and escape in the clipper.

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Supplement: The Thirty Six Dramatic Situations For Players

The idea of this supplement is to give you, as a player, some ideas about the general kinds of stories that exist for a character so that you can take part in those situations during the role play for your entertainment. Usually making your own character to this level will only take place in a campaign setting.

Let's get one thing straight: it's not necessary to have a full on dramatic situation arcing over your character's life, these situations can have their volume turned down as well as up. So consider carefully what kind of life the character you have an idea for has had thus far.

If you've role played in the past you may, at this point, be wondering what all this is about. Most role playing games don't give the players such specific chances to pick what story

they're going to take part in.

Over the many years I've been studying storytelling one misapprehension has always governed many people's view of how they're criticising a particular story. That misapprehension is this:

You don't know what's going to happen in a story before you start to hear it.

The context of a story tells you a bunch about what it's going to be about. Dumber than the thought that people can't tell what to expect out of a storytelling experience from cues they receive beforehand is the thought that you can no longer judge a book by its cover.

That proverb was dating from a time when all book covers were blank. You

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had a title, an author's name and a publisher's mark and that was all. These days you are positively encouraged to judge books, movies, video games and all other media by their covers. We live in a society of covers.

Covers are, also, a way of cueing people up for a particular story experience. No one went to see Star Wars thinking that it would be about an astronomy society's brutal leadership struggle.

Storytellers will, and should, try to set you up for the experience you're about to have in the way in which the story is brought to your attention, with its title, associated artwork, tag line, any classification it may have, with reviews.

We live in a world where just about everyone is primed with what to expect from any story they're going to enjoy. Role playing is no different.

So the idea of choosing what kinds of experience your character will have may be a bit strange before you have

thought about it. When you consider that you will engage personally with that character for many hours and it will seem less so. You wouldn't want to spend those hours with a lingering feeling of disappointment now, would you?

Stories In The Past, Stories In The Present

Some of the roles described here really only work if they are something that happened to you in the past. In theory none of the roles are utterly impossible to role play just some are more difficult to role play in a satisfying manner as they require you to portray emotion in a very odd context, or they require your character to not know something you would have to know to choose the role.

If you have a stellar idea for the creation of a character don't let the notes with the role and the difficulty put you off but with all the roles it is important to remember that you should

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definitely book some time to talk the character over with your Host.

Negotiating Your Role

The successful portrayal of any of these roles rests between you and your Host. You, obviously, will have to do most of the work bringing your character's position into play. The Host, however, has to create the rest of your experience. Although it provides the setting for your character to be involved in a role has a different set of challenges from portraying a character sometimes a plot will just be very difficult to stage manage effectively. If your Host does not feel confident in being able to provide you with an adequate experience it might be best to find another way round.

With an experienced Host you may find that they will offer to attempt to engineer roles or situations that require your character to not know something which, were you to choose that situation, you would necessarily have to know. In these instances it is best to tell the Host what situations you don't

want to find yourself in, or just ask the Host not to spring any plot surprises on you.

The Situations

Each situation contains four parts. A title, the names of the roles of people involved in that situation and some notes about how difficult it will be to play through that role in a role playing situation and finally a difficulty rating out of five for a player to portray that role effectively with one being the easiest and five being the hardest.

I - Matters of Law and Negotiation

Supplication

A Persecutor - As this person is in charge of persecuting the supplicant it would be an odd choice of role to play. However persecution has many forms, if, for example you are the owner of a slave then, however kind you are, that is still persecution. (4/5)

A Supplicant - Being the victim, on the other hand, is much easier, particularly

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if judgement is pending, but you have chosen to take your liberty into your own hands. (1/5)

A Power in authority, whose decision is doubtful - Although, technically, quite easy to portray, as being in a position of power outside the supplication core dynamic is quite an important role but not one that requires much effort, this is actually difficult to make anything of. I would recommend against it but I would imagine most people are not that keen to play someone whose central arc is to make a detached decision. (4/5)

Crime Pursued By Vengeance

A Criminal - In order for this situation to play correctly the criminal must actually be guilty of the crime committed so if you want to play this part you will have to remember you are a criminal.

Of course, laws can be stupid but whatever your crime in this role there will be an "avenger" following you so it's probably worse than dropping litter

(unless the game is satirical in nature).

Factor into your character portrayal that according to at least one societal structure you are a criminal who must be pursued by an officer of the law. While this is a tricky thing to factor in it's not impossible and could even be quite appealing. Make sure your Host and you have the same idea of what kind of criminal you will be though. (2/5)

An Avenger - If you read the notes about the "criminal" you will see the hidden feature of this role. You may be an agent of the law that has determined that the person playing the opposite role is indeed an outlaw. If so, you, as a person, may not agree with the law you have to enforce, or you may support it wholeheartedly.

There's also a possibility that although the person you seek is a criminal you are no more than a vigilante. In this case your own relation to the law is questionable. You have to provide a motivation in these cases why you would be pursuing such a criminal in

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circumstances where you may come into conflict with a law enforcement operative doing their job.

There are some subtle character notes to be made and taken when playing this role and clarification with your Host may be a wise idea. (2/5)

Pursuit

Punishment - This is similar to the "Avenger" role in a crime pursued by vengeance, the only real difference is that in that situation the "Fugitive" is definitely an outlaw. In this scenario, for convenience, we can presume that whatever act the fugitive has committed it is not considered criminal in the place where this took place.

That does not mean that it is not criminal in another place or at another time, it just means that no law enforcement operatives are chasing this fugitive. If you are the agent of punishment then you will have to consider that you may very well be alone in your mission and this is going to have an impact on your psyche.

Even so this should be a role not entirely too difficult to portray under most circumstances. (2/5)

A Fugitive - As the fugitive in this scenario you are not punishable by law. This does not mean what you did might not be morally reprehensible or even illegal under other circumstances. You may, simply, have "got away" with whatever it was you did.

Punishment is coming for you, presumably in the circumstances of opting into this situation your character knows that punishment is a possibility. Bear this in mind in your character portrayal. (1/5)

Obtaining

A Solicitor: Not in the legal sense. As in the sense of one who solicits. At its basic level this tends to be an episodic role i.e. I need an invitation to the governor's party and I am asking person x to obtain said invitation. However, a student is soliciting a university to obtain a qualification, a

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man on a quest to prove his worth to the father of his true love is attempting to obtain permission to marry. (2/5)

An Adversary who is refusing: There are some tricky aspects to this role. If you come at it from the obvious direction it is essentially, rather dull or covered by being in the role of the adversary from the "Daring Enterprise" situation on a smaller scale.

If, on the other hand, you are the keeper of some knowledge and someone wants to obtain it from you then it gives you a little more scope; but look at the extraordinary lengths Farscape went to to make Scorpius's solicitation of wormhole knowledge from Crichton play out as drama on a long arc. Basically unless you have some amazing gimmick for making this a good role I would avoid it. (3/5)

-or-

An Arbitrator: In order to assume this role you must, necessarily, invent two opposing parties who want something that you are safekeeping. This aside

from the fact that you are necessarily supposed to be neutral in that situation. Unless you can think of something amazing to make this work I would avoid. (5/5)

Opposing Parties: Obviously you can't be both parties but you could be one of them. You have to decide what it is you are in a dispute over. (2/5)

Self-sacrifice For An Ideal

A Hero - Again the nature of role playing speaks against this, you may not necessarily be able to choose to be a character who sacrifices of themselves for an ideal. However, there is nothing to say that you aren't a character who did sacrifice something for an ideal and this has formed their character. If so you should decide what it was that you sacrificed and make it suitably dramatic. Once you've done that you should be good to go. (1/5)

An Ideal - People cannot be ideals. (6/5)

A Creditor or a Person/Thing sacrificed

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- You could also play someone who was "sacrificed" by someone else for a higher ideal, or at least higher to them. However much we pretend this kind of thing doesn't matter in the end it really does. Where is the person who "sacrificed" you and what are they doing now? What would you say to them if you met them again? (1/5)

II - Missions and Rescues

Deliverance

An Unfortunate - As this is a rather passive role I can't see why any one should particularly want to play it. The main challenge here would be to role play it long term. I would avoid. (5/5)

A Threatener - This is a traditionally villainous role. See my notes on “being evil” in the Player's Guide for some reasons why assuming a role like this may be a bad idea. (4/5)

A Rescuer - When you take on this role as a player your character will either know about their role, in which case you will start the game with a mission,

or you will be expected to assume this role in the course of the game. It's a pretty standard heroic arc to be someone's rescuer so I'm going to recommend it as an easy play. (1/5)

Daring Enterprise

A Bold Leader - This situation is a classic role play arc. To be the bold leader of a personal daring enterprise would mean you have the enterprise in mind and you would have to recruit partners to put the enterprise into operation.

This is a somewhat bizarre role to take within another arc such as the Host will be providing. You may find yourself given the role of a bold colleague in a group undertaking a daring enterprise without plotting a second one into your backstory. Approach with caution. (3/5)

An Object - In many role playing gamessomething of value to the people involved in the enterprise. It is not generally a role to be played, unless you have some other idea. (4/5)

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An Adversary - Now here's an interesting role. You as the "adversary" have some resource that you must protect from a "Bold Leader" and his colleagues. This rather changes the nature of the situation, if you yourself have access to resources to protect the object then your role becomes one of guardian. This is a more static role than many role playing scenarios allow for, it would be best to discuss your idea for a role that incorporates this situation with your Host. (3/5)

Abduction

An Abductor - This situation doesn't really tolerate a long timescale, or in those circumstances where it has done so it changes the complexion of the drama radically. If you are the abductor you will need to have thought through the psychology of that role and the logistics of it quite thoroughly. (3/5)

The Abducted - Naturally this is a rather restrictive role. Unless you can think of some really amazing twist on it that would allow you to still participate in a meaningful way I would

recommend you avoid it. (5/5)

A Guardian - As this equates to "prison warden" it would be unusual to assume this role. In one game that I played I made a character who was the guardian of a gate. This made it a trifle tortuous explaining why I kept leaving my post to go wandering around during adventures. We managed an explanation of sorts but it would have been easier had I been a wandering minstrel or something. Basically, you may find yourself in this role as part of the adventure, playing it permanently may well cramp your style. (4/5)

The Enigma

A Problem - This is not a person. (6/5)

An Interrogator - Now this is a fascinating role to play if you can think of an angle on it. The interrogator is an agent of the problem and hence could be the incarnation of death (death being an enigmatic problem) or the incarnation of a god (gods being enigmatic) or the agent of a secret society. You need to have a really

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strong angle on this role because, as fun as it would be to play, the riddle of your existence needs to be strong not lame. Discuss with your Host. (3/5)

A Seeker - There's a question you have to answer to portray this role. Why the hell have you devoted your life to studying an enigma? Intellectual problems are all great and everything but for it to be something you have devoted your life to investigating... well, that's going to need some explaining. If you can explain it, properly, and with passion, go ahead and play it. (2/5)

Recovery Of A Lost One

A Seeker - Something or someone has been lost. You will not rest until they or it have been found. Be clear on the situation and away you go. (1/5)

The One Found - This is really tricky. Did you know you were lost? See "Pursuit" if you know you're lost you're a fugitive. Otherwise, well, you can't be someone who knows they're playing someone who doesn't know they're

being sought out. (6/5)

III - Family Matters

Vengeance Taken For Kin Upon Kin

Guilty Kinsman - In this role it is presumed by your family (in the broadest sense of that term) that you have committed some kind of betrayal of another family member. The precise details of this incident are between you and your Host.

If you are, in fact, guilty of this act then your motives will be important, if you are not guilty then you are accepting the role of someone who has one crazy family to say the least. Something to consider in the case of both roles is, how does the rest of the family feel about this situation? Has it split them? Do they all hate you? Do they all hate the other guy? This is a complex situation to play out and a tricky role to play from either perspective. (3/5)

An Avenging Kinsman - See the notes about the guilty kinsman. An issue particular to this role is that you have

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taken upon your shoulders the responsibility of dishing out a family's internal brand of justice (or was it placed upon you by other family members?).

Presumably you are in the act of pursuing the guilty kinsman (or else this will be a pretty short arc) once you catch them what are you going to do? (3/5)

Remembrance of the Victim, a relative of both - As a passive role this is not something to be taken at face value. Obviously you have a perspective on the past misdemeanour of the guilty kinsman maybe over time your mind has been changed. Maybe you have to find the avenging kinsman to halt his quest before it's too late. In order to make this part playable you will have to inject an active component into it. It's doable but it's even harder than the other two roles. (4/5)

Enmity Of Kin

A Malevolent Kinsman - Essentially this role means you either hate your

family or at least one member of your family. When you talk this over with your Host focus on exactly how you are involved in this intra-familial strife and the motivations and reasons behind it. (1/5)

A Hatred or a reciprocally-hating Kinsman - This role is just the opposite of the other role. If you are the hated one then the rest of your family hate you too, if on the other hand you hate a kinsman but your family love you then your character becomes an agent of that hatred. So as far as being a player goes you are involved in some strong familial turbulence and the role is really described above. (1/5)

Rivalry Of Kin

The Preferred Kinsman - This is really a mild form of the "Enmity of kin" situation but with a clearer object being the motive for some dislike or rivalry. A role that assumes such a back story is approachable as long as you have worked out the details. As the preferred kinsman you may feel lucky and you may wish to make amends

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with your rival. Just remember it's easier to let bygones be when you're the winner. (1/5)

The Rejected Kinsman - The reverse of the role of preferred kinsman. Consider what remedy may be won for your unfortunate situation and pursue it. (1/5)

The Object of Rivalry - Of course you may be a character who is between two rivals. This situation necessarily demands that the rivals are related but the same rules apply whether the rivals are kin or not. You have to work out how you feel about being an object of rivalry, are you going to make a choice, or are you not keen on either rival? Just because one kinsman is preferred does not mean that you are the one doing the preferring. This will be slightly harder to convey than either of the other two roles so make sure you clarify the situation with your Host. (2/5)

Slaying Of Kin Unrecognized

The Slayer - Due to the problem of you

being a player who knows what story they're in and the character not being such renders this a rather impotent and therefore unrecommended role. (5/5)

An Unrecognized Victim - This means you are dead. If this is appropriate to the game you are playing it could be your phantasmal manifestation could be due to the fact the kinsman must be made to realise his crime. Obviously this option is only available to you in an appropriate setting, discuss with your host. (1/5) if possible.

Self-sacrifice For Kin

A Hero - See notes on Self-Sacrifice For An Ideal except now you are sacrificing for your family. Did your family ask for this sacrifice? Or was it to make amends for some other ill? There are more people involved here and so it could get messier. The previous notes for this role still apply. (1/5)

A Kinsman - Maybe a relative sacrificed something huge for you. In which case how has this impacted your life? Maybe you have a new set of

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priorities in life because of this. Maybe the kinsman is getting to milk it a little. For this to be relevant to your role it has to be manifest in your day to day life somehow. Think about how you can make it so. (2/5)

A Creditor or a Person/Thing sacrificed - See the same item in Self-Sacrifice For An Ideal. (1/5)

Necessity Of Sacrificing Loved Ones

A Hero - Again we come to role which is best attempted in the aftermath. It's not really something you can choose to play from start through to finish because knowing it's coming will colour your portrayal. Even if you do look upon this as "something that happened" it will be hard to portray someone who sacrificed a loved one and is therefore a bit grumpy as opposed to someone who just has a grumpy temperament. (4/5)

A Beloved Victim - The key question here is "victim of what?" Your opposite number in this situation is a relative who essentially did something horrible

to you for "the greater good" whatever that means. The issue of what to do when a relative "sacrificed" you for the greater good is tricky but not insurmountable. You will need a good angle to pull this off. (3/5)

The Necessity for the Sacrifice - You cannot play a necessity. (6/5)

Discovery Of The Dishonour Of A Loved One

A Discoverer - This is a pretty good motivation for some sort of quest or life mission. You have discovered that someone you care about is being dishonoured. What are you going to do about it? Is this a fresh discovery for your character or has an incident already taken place? Overall this is an excellent basis for a character's actions as it is removed enough from the heart of the matter to make all choices dubious and thus lead to some excellent character moments. (1/5)

The Guilty One - Remember that these roles are a matter of perspective. Although someone may societally be

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within this situation in the larger context of the game the taboo or prohibition may seem ridiculous. So a guilty one is either actually guilty or they are guilty by some metric that the guilty one deems inferior or unsatisfactory. You must examine the world view of someone who does something that feels right but is condemned as wrong. Although somewhat tricky to pull off as some characters will be hostile to you with what they feel to be good reason this is not an impossible role to take on. (2/5)

Loss Of Loved Ones

A Kinsman Slain - The key here is slain. Unless you can be a ghost and this happened to you impossible. If ghosts (2/5) if none (6/5)

A Kinsman Spectator - This is probably something that happened in your backstory. You watched your brother/father/mother/sister/cousin get offed by the executioner character and it is up to you to react to that. Be clear in your own context and this should be a fairly easy role to get across. (2/5)

An Executioner - You killed someone's relative, executed them. You are a killer. This is a hard thing to proactively portray but it's not impossible. Be clear on the details and your own motives for doing what you did. (3/5)

IV - Matters of Conquest

Disaster

A Vanquished Power - If you have taken this role it means that you are a deposed power. You had the keys to the kingdom and they were stripped from you by the enemy.

There's a great deal of emotional complexity in a character like this. If the victory of your adversary is fresh you may be angry and suspicious of strangers, with time you may have either mellowed and grown or become embittered. There's a lot that hinges upon whether your power is gone forever or whether you could stage a fresh assault upon your adversary.

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This role is unusual in role playing terms as, traditionally, players always begin the game virtually powerless and always grow in power as a consequence of their role play. To "recover" powers may require modification to some additional rules systems so discuss this aspect particularly with your Host. (3/5)

A Victorious Enemy or a Messenger - If you are, indeed, the enemy mentioned it presumes you have acquired some power that previously belonged to someone else. If this is control of a Kingdom then this is largely a positive development, but think of the story of Spiderman's nemesis Venom to understand how that power might have come with its own price.

If, on the other hand, you are a "Messenger" of that victorious enemy it means you are in the enemy's employ. You have been tasked with finding the vanquished power and delivering a message, is that just a euphemism?

In either case some discussion with your Host is important. If you are a

messenger you might want to discuss with the Host what you picture as your message. If, on the other hand, you are the victorious power itself this presumes you are starting the game with some newly acquired advantage or resources.

If this is the case then you must discuss with your Host how this will play out in practice. Starting the game with power will be a responsibility if the power is presumed to be great and would present a significant role play challenge. (2/5) if the power is individual or if a messenger. (4/5) if the power is great.

Revolt

A Tyrant - The only real way you could satisfactorily commence an adventure in this role is if you are fleeing for your life from the agents of the conspiracy. As the role is very definitely labelled "tyrant" and not "misunderstood beneficent monarch" the presumption is that you would have to be venal and corrupt. See the notes on “being evil” in the Player's Guide. I would avoid this

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unless you have an amazing concept for how it could work out. (5/5)

A Conspirator - You are a rebel soldier. This is always a breeze to portray as being an agent of serious political change is an intellectual role that has obvious objectives. Questions to ask concern whether you doubt your own masters, if you are one of the leaders of the revolution do you doubt your own motives? How fanatical are you? Although being a rebel is something most people can, bizarrely, role play quite easily it could be fun to try to take the role a bit further than just trying to be Che Guevara (1/5)

Rivalry Of Superior vs. Inferior

A Superior Rival - The question of superiority here is always going to be subjective. Given a setting in the past, the race between a father's favoured suitor and another rival for his daughter's heart the former will always be "superior" in that they are the father's chosen. But how the daughter feels about this is entirely another matter.

Not that affairs of the heart are the only place one can have rivals. The fact is that although in this role it could be easily noted out that you are the "superior" rival that is a relative term. You will have to go some way to preserving your superiority because although you may be superior the other person may well just be flat out better. Discuss your concept with your Host. (1/5)

An Inferior Rival - The exact reverse of the other role in this situation. You may well want to examine your rival's superiority and explore ways to undermine it. Just because you're in last place doesn't mean you can't come from behind. As above discuss an idea you might have for this with your Host. (1/5)

The Object of Rivalry - If this is a love contest, or a contest for a promotion you have to give or for an object you own but will bestow on a worthy successor, then you could, effectively, be the object of rivalry. This is a much tougher call than the others to play but it will really depend on what idea you

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have for a character living through this role. Discuss with your Host. (3/5)

Ambition

An Ambitious Person - This is pretty easy to convey. There exists a thing. It is your ambition to possess that thing, go to it. Clarify the details with your Host. (1/5)

A Thing Coveted - This could be you but that would be a very hard thing to play, to be the object of another's ambition. The real difficulty for you is portraying the feelings of someone who is the object of another's ambitions. The difficulty for your Host is that this person with the ambition has to be portrayed by them, or another player who is amenable. Making this a role is not recommended. (4/5)

An Adversary - See the notes for the ambitious person as both are, assumedly seeking the same objective. Or it could be that you merely wish to foil another's ambition, but you need to have a motivation for doing so. (2/5)

Conflict With A God

A Mortal - If you wish to play the role of a character who has taken on a god (or, indeed The God) then expect to have some tricky questions to answer and some tricky role playing choices to make. You could just be a poseur of course, a weekend Satanist or whatnot, but if you're not then you need an actual plan to assault a god. This is not easy to portray and don't expect many friends. (3/5)

An Immortal - This rather loose definition of a god nicely contextualises the exact nature of this conflict. It's not just a matter of a superior opponent, its a matter of this being a vastly superior adversary to the point where the mortal's victory may even be impossible under all but a rare set of circumstances. If you wish to portray a vastly powerful immortal be prepared that there will always be someone who seeks your weakness.

This is a challenging role and there must be clear defined rules about how a mortal might seek to take you on,

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confirm these details carefully with your Host. (3/5)

V - Matters of Fortune

Falling Prey To Cruelty/Misfortune

An Unfortunate - In this case you have either fallen into the clutches of an adversary and are somehow within their power, or you have suffered some misfortune, a curse or disastrous stroke of fortune and have had to recover from this.

Ask yourself, when did this situation start to evolve for your character. How much power would your character have to recover. A character who, whilst suffering a serious misfortune has some ability to recover would be a reasonably easy role to play. If chances of recovery are slim it becomes somewhat harder. (1/5) or (3/5) see notes.

A Master or A Misfortune - Obviously you cannot in and of yourself play a misfortune, and playing the master of someone else's strongly suggests malice.

Unless you have some incredible idea for the execution of this role avoid. (5/5)

Madness

A Madman - I know what you're thinking and no it isn't. Playing a lunatic is fun for about twenty minutes until you realise all the ways you have limited your opportunities to engage with the other players and the larger story.

Now, I'm not talking about mildly barking, charmingly eccentric or deluded but still capable of meaningful interaction here. I'm talking so crazy that there has to be some sort of a victim of you to make the situation work. Unless you can really sell this to your Host I wouldn't approach this role if I were you. (4/5)

A Victim - Being the victim of a madman, on the other hand, is a fine role to explore. Did the lunatic kill your wife? Take a finger? Lose all your money for you? And as we are presuming that the person who

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wronged you is actually mentally ill is it appropriate for you to pursue them in the spirit of righteous vengeance? Clarify with Host, be prepared to play the story but by all means go for it. (1/5)

Fatal Imprudence

The Imprudent - To take on this role means that some failing, probably pride, lead you to lose something or someone valuable to you. If this thing or person is lost to you forever (as the word "Fatal" implies) then there is not much you can do with this role save for try to bring your character some redemption by other means.

There is no reason a thing lost cannot be restored in some cases, in which case your character's objective will be to recover the loss. Either way the role is not too difficult to portray and makes an excellent history for a character. (1/5)

A Victim or an Object Lost - The only possible latitude you have in this role is to be someone who used to be close to

the imprudent character and is now disgusted with that character because of said imprudence. This implies you will have some character dripping around behind you begging for forgiveness. It's not an impossible role to take on but ensure you are ready for a challenge. (2/5)

Erroneous Judgement

A Mistaken One: Another role that is better suited to being something that once happened to you than an ongoing situation. If you made a mistake you need to work out how you feel about that as a character and therefore how your feelings are going to colour your action. This is a tricky role to play explicitly out in the open. (3/5)

A Victim of the Mistake: If you are the living victim of someone else's poor judgement how do you feel about that person now? How does it colour your interactions with others? What are the mistakes you are determined never to make or never to repeat? Bringing the hurt that has been caused to you out into the open is going to be a hard task.

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As with other roles where being grumpy with reason looks like just being grumpy exercise caution. (3/5)

A Cause or Author of the Mistake: You caused someone to make a serious lapse of judgement. So to what lengths are you yourself responsible for the fall out. See the notes for the first two roles to get into the kinds of things you're thinking about from one remove. Maybe no one knows you caused this mistake, in which case how are you feeling about having "got away with it". This is a role it will be extremely difficult to portray effectively as it rests so much on you being pro-active. (4/5)

The Guilty One: Possibly you are guilty of some crime which was only allowed to occur because someone else made a lapse in judgement. Maybe you are really responsible for the victim's situation. In which case how do you feel about this? More importantly how are you going to role play in a way that brings this role into resolution for everyone else. Like the other roles here this is very tricky. (4/5)

Remorse

A Culprit: You did something wrong. Let's not get this out of context here. You committed a sin and you know it. It burns you up. You want to make amends, the question is: how far do you have to go? How far away is redemption? You must have a clear idea of what you want out of this role before attempting it. Clarify the situation with your Host. (3/5)

A Victim or the Sin: If the culprit did you wrong, stole from you, hurt you, betrayed you how do you feel about their remorse? If they try to make amends how do you feel about that? Would they ever be able to mend the pain? Would you be able to forgive? As with the culprit be clear with your Host how this situation came to be and what it is you are looking to gain from this role. This is, if anything, more difficult than being th culprit. (4/5)

An Interrogator: It is your job to probe and examine the guilt of the culprit. You must be detached but you must provide the culprit with the hard

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questions they must answer if they are ever to have peace. If this is your role, why? Is it your job? Are you doing it to help the culprit? Or are you an agent of punishment. The clarity needed in the other two roles is paramount here. If possible avoid trying to take this one on, it's going to be very hard except in unusual circumstances. (5/5)

VI -Matters of Love

Murderous Adultery

Two Adulterers - This is the ideal opportunity to mention that games about this sort of thing have had a history of turning silly. Of course, games of yore related character to "description of physical characteristics". Also, adultery supposes marriage which given the time this list was compiled is now anachronistic. Could be just a love affair in which trust has been betrayed. In any event the use of the word "murderous" indicates that your character is plotting to off someone's spouse (or partner who has a large life insurance policy) for some reason. Unless you are very confident you want

to portray a love affair between yourself and either a Non Player Character or another Player that is illicit you might want to avoid this like the plague. Not to say it couldn't be done, but it's never really been done with any great success. (4/5)

A Betrayed Spouse - Now, this is a tricky one. Although the adulterers could be murderous so could the betrayed spouse. Maybe you fancy being a cuckolded spouse pursuing their partner as they flee with their partner in crime. It's a very personal mission and hard to understand why you, as the betrayed spouse, might become diverted into taking part in group quests along the path. If you're really sure then talk it over with your Host, but this is a demanding role to play. (3/5)

Involuntary Crimes Of Love

A Lover - See the situation Murderous Adultery thing above for notes about playing a character involved in any kind of love affair in-game. In this case the role calls for your character to be

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unwittingly having an affair with someone whom it is not proper for them to be in love with. Of course as a player you will already know the truth of the matter. This renders this role almost impossible to portray meaningfully. Discuss with your Host only if you're utterly convinced your role will only work this way. (5/5)

A Beloved - Having someone pursue you amorously in an erroneous way may be amusing but it's rarely either convincing or dramatic. If you have a sound idea for playing this role then discuss it with your host. Obviously you will, as a player and therefore as a character, know that the love your admirer proposes is not just impossible but downright wrong, but you have a jolly good reason for not telling them why. (4/5)

A Revealer - You might have some secret information about such an improper love affair. Even if you personally don't regard it as such you may know that societally some couple or other are breaking a taboo. The process of handling this information

responsibly could make for a killer story. Discuss with your Host but this is a viable role. (2/5)

Sacrifice For Passion

A Lover - We're back in the same area here. What makes this one difficult is that as a player you have sufficient distance to see that sacrificing everything for passion is a bit dumb. Not that people don't do this, but unless you're right inside the situation it might be difficult to portray. The notes remain The same as for the other sacrifice situations. (2/5)

An Object of Passion - I'm not sure what one is to make of this role. If you are to take it on it means you are involved in a love affair with someone who gave up something significant to them to be with you. That's a tough thing to play as in relationship terms you're playing catch up with them. If the pressure gets too much and you end the relationship it could make you something of a heel. This is a difficult role to play and discussion with your Host is vital.(5/5)

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The Person/Thing sacrificed - As this role in Self-sacrifice For An Ideal with the obvious extra feature that you have been sacrificed over the other person's emotional incontinence. Feel free to let this flavour your portrayal of the character. (1/5)

Adultery

Two Adulterers - See the situation "Murderous Adultery" and remove the murderous element. (3/5)

A Deceived Spouse - See the situation "Murderous Adultery" and remove the murderous element. In this case you might just be dealing with a marriage failure or the loss of a long term partner and be trying to find sensible means of occupying your time, therefore. This role is actually a little easier to play than when murder is on the table but still could really be a nothingy role unless you are willing to have these personal issues intrude into the game time. This is an issue that should really be discussed with your Host. (3/5)

Crimes of Love

A Lover - This is identical to the situation of "Involuntary Crimes of Love" except that people in these roles are aware of what they are doing. Any kind of improper relationship produces this situation and leads to those involved living with a state of secrecy. See the notes on relationship based roles at the head of "Murderous Adultery" for clarification. (3/5)

The Beloved - Of course given the names of the roles here you might infer that the Beloved is somewhat deceived as to the nature of the crime and the reason for the secrecy. This means that the Lover, in this case, is hiding something about the nature of the relationship from their partner. All previous notes on relationship based situations apply. (4/5)

Obstacles To Love

Two Lovers - See my previous comments on romance and the technical problems of same in role playing.(4/5)

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An Obstacle - You cannot play an obstacle without this becoming another situation. (6/5)

An Enemy Loved

A Lover - See my notes on love and also "Obstacles to love" this basically forms that situation except there is one further role. (4/5)

The Beloved Enemy - See my notes on love and other notes on similar situations.(4/5)

The Hater - You know of two people in love and you believe it to be wrong. What exactly is your remedy to this forbidden love? Live and let live cannot be part of your vocabulary here. A challenging role but within most people's grasp. Clarify what your character thinks of the situation with your Host. (3/5)

Mistaken Jealousy

A Jealous One - The problem with this

role is that you must be consumed with jealousy. See the role of the betrayed but murderous spouse in the situation Murderous Adultery for a summary of many of the problems with this role. Your preoccupation is likely to preclude you interacting meaningfully with the details of your adventure. Proceed with caution. (4/5)

An Object of whose Possession He is Jealous - Complicated description. The classic template for this is the story of Othello. In that story Othello believed that his wife, Desdemona, was unfaithful. This thought that Desdemona's heart belonged to a man named Michael Cassio was what incited the jealousy. So in the story we could talk about this role being played by Desdemona's affections. This is a role where things are likely to escalate around you without you being able to do much to stop it. It could be a character history but I doubt it would be a situation you could choose to play. (4/5)

A Supposed Accomplice - Michael Cassio in the example above. The

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person who owns the supposed object of jealousy. Of course, in Othello, Desdemona loves Othello, not Michael Cassio, Cassio is unaware of his supposed possession of Desdemona's affections. Like the role of the object above you must be unaware of the growing poison in the jealous one's heart. Again it could be a past for you but you cannot choose to play the role in its entirety in an explicit fashion. (4/5)

A Cause or an Author of the Mistake - In Othello a villain named Iago deliberately inflames Othello's jealousy, seemingly for no more reason than to have something to do. This nihilistic outlook was unusual at the time Shakespeare wrote his play outlining Othello's story. Nowadays such behaviour is understood to exist. This is a tricky personal outlook to portray. I would steer clear unless you have a specific and killer idea in which case talk it though with your Host. (4/5)

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Supplement: The Thirty Six Dramatic Situations for Hosts

One of the things Role Playing Games have famously generated as pure by-product is drama. Yet it is one of the things many gamers love to experience and to discuss later. This lead me to the question of how to introduce dramatic situation deliberately. I've managed it with some success and some failure. It's all come together in this core book.

The first thing you're going to want to tie down as a Host is what is the dramatic situation emerging in your adventure? Remember a while back in the chapter about “Stats”) we talked about conflict in role playing terms as being the gap between a player's desire and their possible skill?

Well, now you have your adventure writer's cap on. I want you to reframe.

Conflict, when you're writing an adventure, is that which causes the drama that helps the characters to engage with your story. It is a tricky personal dilemma that the characters need to resolve. The story, for all intents and purposes is about the conflict.

Thankfully we have tools to help us think of conflicts. The first one I want to introduce was compiled by a French writer called Georges Polti. These are The Thirty Six Dramatic Situations. By playing about with these you should be able to find a resonance with the story or setting you want to use. Put various player and non player characters in the roles described in the situations and imagine how the story could evolve.

I've annotated the situations to give

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suggestions and also to point out when a situation may be hard to reproduce in a role playing situation. Polti intended this as a list of plot devices to be used in novels or in a stage play. He lived in a miserable time before the invention of role playing as it is today.

It could be you see some of the ones I've earmarked with warnings and you're the type of person to strike out for it in a gung ho manner. Go ahead. What occurs to me is that if you made a group of people who wanted to undertake harsh, cathartic role play that would be required to do some of these situations justice you would have made a group that has never existed in role playing before.

Of course there's even a chance that some of this could be quite harrowing for a player. This is why it is important to talk with your players and discuss their expectations of the coming games. You don't want to make the experience uncomfortable any more than you want to make it tedious.

The Arc

Once you have lone wolfed your players and gathered up notes for their individual story lines you can turn your attention to the arc for your campaign. You should aim to have one situation being the crux of all the drama that happens in the campaign. You may already know what plot you want but that plot may contain potential for being one of three or four situations. If you tie your arc to one specific situation it could give you ideas about the people involved and some NPCs that you can introduce.

The Episodes

You should also have a single situation to resolve in each episode of your game. Rough out how each story could interplay either with individual character's stories (allowing various party members to have spotlight) or with the overall arc. By the time you have noted out a six to eight episode "season" you should have between 10 to 15 situations available to play with during the sessions. It is always better

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to have a story twist and not need it than need one and not have it.

If you have noted all this stuff down in your plan then you should feel a bit more confident about running your campaign. If it seems a bit light, don't worry, all the stuff you haven't tied down is opportunity for the players.

Now let's take a look at your opportunities as a Host for playing with the thirty six situations.

The Situations

Each situation contains four parts. A title. the names of the roles of the people involved in that situation, notes which cover the situations suitability for an arc, and how to help a player who wants to be involved in that situation. Finally there is a difficulty rating for the use of that situation in a role playing context.

The rating is from one to five with one being an excellent situation to involve in role play and five being a very difficult and complex situation to

introduce into role play.

Although a player may have a really clear agenda when approaching a particular role you have to consider how comfortable you are providing the other roles for the character to riff against. If you are not confident it might be time to renegotiate.

Some of the situations require player characters, and hence players, to be unaware of the evolving situation. If you are confident you and the player can have a crack at one of these situations offer the player a choice to have one of the situations laid on them out of the clear blue sky, make sure you gauge your player's ability well.

There are notes explaining particular features of each role and whether you may need to negotiate "surprises" for the player to implement that situation, or whether a particular role is best avoided by the player. Reading the Player's version of this supplement may also be a help.

I - Matters of Law And Negotiation

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Supplication (1/5)

A Persecutor - This is most likely the villain of the piece. The persecutor persecutes the supplicant. Therefore probably not a player. Would make a good villain though. Bear in mind that the supplicant has the power to ask authority to intercede to bring an end to the persecution.

A Supplicant - This could be a player or someone whom the players should choose to help. This person is persecuted by the persecutor and can only be released from this situation by the hand of the power.

A Power in authority, whose decision is doubtful - if the power decides to help the supplicant then the persecution may end, if not then the supplicant is doomed or must find another authority to petition. It could be that after losing a court case the supplicant turns to the players to help them in less legal ways, perhaps in exchange for money.

Crime Pursued By Vengeance (1/5)

A Criminal - Be clear on this, this is not “The Fugitive”, such scenarios are described elsewhere. Here the criminal is indeed the guilty party. If a player wants to assume this role there is every chance that some authority wishes to track them down and bring them to justice. However the Avenger, need not be an agent of that authority giving ample opportunity for the situation to become complex.

An Avenger - The avenger could well be a party member, or a third party known to the players. Although the roles here are clear cut the rights or wrongs of the criminal and avenger roles may be more complex. In the case of Bruce Wayne wanting to avenge his parent's murder at the hands of Joe Chill Bruce Wayne was an avenger and Joe Chill certainly guilty of the crime but would that make Wayne's actions right? This is a central question in this scenario.

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Pursuit (1/5)

Punishment - Embodied of course by some sort of suitable authority figure. Maybe the players are the authority. Maybe the fugitive isn't as guilty as he appears. As punishment it is incumbent on the people or person in this role to acknowledge the mission that they have been charged with even if they are choosing to reject it.

A Fugitive - Of course the players could be the ones being hunted for whatever reason. Or once more they could be placed in the position of being outside the situation and deciding how to weigh in on one side or the other. Seeing that many of these situations have a "victim" and "aggressor" role introducing the idea of players only getting half the story is an excellent way to generate confusion and conflicting loyalties.

Obtaining (2/5)

A Solicitor: Not in the legal sense. As in the sense of one who solicits. Could be

a player or a whole party.

An Adversary who is refusing: The holder of the object to be obtained. As this is quite a neutral situation either could be a player with a little tweaking.

or

An Arbitrator: The one who holds the object to be obtained until the situation is resolved. Again this could be the players. The arbitrator is necessarily neutral.

Opposing Parties: Both of whom want whatever is to be obtained. The players could be on one side of this equation.

Self-sacrifice For An Ideal (3/5)

A Hero - For this situation to play out the hero must actually sacrifice themselves. This will make it difficult to make it a player if the the thing to be sacrificed is their life, unless the person taking on the character is aware of the situation.

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An Ideal - Which should, really, be virtuous and worthy of sacrifice. (Evil people don't believe in self-sacrifice by definition.) It could be, however that the NPC who is the heroic sacrificer might believe strongly in something which the players do not. This could present a problem if the Hero's continued vitality is a problem of the quest they are engaged in.

A Creditor or a Person/Thing sacrificed - Of course it could be that this is what the players are interested in. For example if a brilliant physicist has decided to sacrifice his notes on a particularly juicy invention for the good of humanity, sanity and reality it may be the players really need the invention for some task and have to talk him out of it.

Rivalry Of Superior vs. Inferior (2/5)

A Superior Rival - Now although you may think of hare tortoise here with the players or a sympathetic NPC as tortoise imagine the burden of knowing that in some contest you're going to have to annihilate someone who's just

plain not as good as you are. If you make the rival nice too that's a bonus. The story of the man who tried not to whale on his opponent too bad could even be kind of funny, or kind of tragic...

An Inferior Rival - Although clearly the obvious way to go on this is to make the players an inferior rival to someone who appears to have all the aces (so to speak) and then have them come up with an endearingly idiosyncratic solution to the scenario.

The Object of Rivalry - Again whenever you consider the prize you must make it worthwhile.

Ambition (3/5)

An Ambitious Person - This is a great role for a player as is the role of adversary. It all depends on what the thing coveted is. If the thing is worthwhile a player can probably get behind this. If not then a player can try to dissuade someone from an illusory desire that will bring them no happiness.

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A Thing Coveted - Could be an object, power, a person. It can either be ultimately worth having or an empty prize and this will change the way the situation plays out.

An Adversary - See the notes for the ambitious person. Of course the adversary may just want to ruin the progress of the ambitious one. In which case it is probably not a player or the party, unless the party are, for example, trying to foil the rise to power of a corrupt and evil politician. There is some opportunity here but it requires careful preparation.

II - Missions and Rescues

Deliverance (1/5)

An Unfortunate - Because the unfortunate is necessarily in immediate danger from the threatener and hence in need of rescuing this is not really a good player role.

A Threatener - The villain who may be a person or a situation such as a disaster.

A Rescuer - Almost certainly the players, it is bad form to have the rescuer be controlled by the Host as it smacks of Deus Ex Machina. If the players rescue themselves then they can be both unfortunate and rescuer.

Daring Enterprise (1/5)

A Bold Leader - In this classic Role Playing situation the leader is replaced by the players, or at least by the person paying them to be the mercenaries.

An Object - In many role playing games money or treasure. Maybe the chalice is poisoned.

An Adversary - Monsters, organised by a "boss". This situation forms the basis for most role playing with other situations being added sparingly for seasoning.

Abduction (2/5)

An Abductor - Possibly the villain but possibly a more neutral party who hires the players to be the guardian of the abducted.

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The Abducted - Could be the abducted but could also be one or more of the players.

A Guardian - Could be a force for the players to defeat on a liberation quest, or it could be the players themselves guarding unusual and possibly illegal cargo. This situation is best suited to single session play. Missions of a more general nature can form the basis for a campaign, this would be a very special one off or a campaign or season finale.

The Enigma (3/5)

A Problem - Think "the identity of x's murderer". Thinking more broadly imagine the whole issue of UFOs and alien abduction. The problem with huge life riddles is that, unless you have something really relevant and wise to say they tend to fall apart in the last five minutes. Look at the 60s series "The Prisoner" for clues as to just how lost and confused this situation can become if you have no really profound answers to hand out. For the reverse to see it well handled look at the American serial of the early 2000s "The

4400" which made some great revelations and was overall a satisfying exploration of the issues surrounding its central premise. Approach this scenario with caution.

An Interrogator - Think the murderer. The interrogator is an agent of the enigma so when the enigma is "what lies beyond the veil of death" the interrogator represents the resistance of death to sharing its secrets. In the case of a murder mystery the murderer may be a mute interrogator or may be one of those murderers who taunts the detective, like Hannibal Lecter.

A Seeker - Think the detective.

Recovery Of A Lost One (1/5)

A Seeker - This is a classic and well worn Role Playing plot. The players are asked to find person x. There's not even much I need to say about it, except that like any easy winner it can be just as easily overused. Try to do something else first but if you need it you need it.

The One Found - Just about every

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variation on this is well documented. The most popular of course being the unexpected object. You rescued the princess but the minute you stop in town on the way back to daddy's house she's out drinking and looking to party. You rescued the genius but he keep tinkering with your gear and things you own have strange new functionality. This is a hilarious way to generate a fun experience for Players but like I say, overuse is no one's friend.

III - Family Matters

Vengeance Taken For Kin Upon Kin (2/5)

Guilty Kinsman - Is this a player? Vengeance does not presuppose justice. Maybe one of the players is pursued by his kin in error. Maybe the players see this situation played out in an episode and later discover the injustice.

An Avenging Kinsman - This too could be a player. Matters of family feud are rarely clear cut. As such, embroiling the players in some family business

could be tricky. They may well want to stay out of a family affair. Handle this situation with some care.

Remembrance of the Victim, a relative of both - If this is a non player character they can be villain, they can be innocent bystander or ignored rescuer. The point of this role is to throw a perspective on the feud. Whether it is oil on water or petrol on a fire is up to you as the Host.

Enmity Of Kin (2/5)

A Malevolent Kinsman - Could be a problem the players observe or a problem for one of the player's characters.

A Hatred or a reciprocally-hating Kinsman - This would tend towards a non-player character in most games.

Rivalry Of Kin (2/5)

The Preferred Kinsman - Any of these characters could be one of the players.

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The Rejected Kinsman - See above

The Object of Rivalry - See above with the proviso that to be the object of a rivalry is kind of hard to role play. For this reason I add a difficulty point to the ease of introducing this plot line. If the two kinsmen are princes, however, and the object a kingdom, well, then it's an easy situation to exploit.

Slaying Of Kin Unrecognised (4/5)

The Slayer - The problem with this one is that the pay off is some way down the line from the event regardless of the situation. This story will either play out in two stages, the slaying and the discovery, or if it is a situation external to the players, the slaying, the discovery and then the consequence as the players decide what to do to let the kinsman know of his crime.

An Unrecognised Victim - Obviously, not a player. Unless you are playing a post life game, of course. In which case you could actually reverse this and have the victim know who he is but not recognise his killer. This can also

take place in time travel games.

Self-sacrifice for Kin (3/5)

A Hero - This is as Self-sacrifice For An Ideal except it involves family.

A Kinsman - This will be the person who has demanded, or requires, the sacrifice. Maybe the players do not view this sacrifice as a necessity to the level that the kinsmen do.

A Creditor or a Person/Thing sacrificed - See the same item in the Self-sacrifice for an Ideal.

Necessity Of Sacrificing Loved Ones (5/5)

A Hero - This is a tough one. You could make it particularly tough if the players know what's happening and will intercede (perhaps to save the victim) but they know that by doing so they are somehow dooming the people the hero wishes to save. Unless people properly sign up for this it's probably a situation to avoid.

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A Beloved Victim - Of course this could be one of the players. Although to play a character who doomed their loved ones to save themselves is quite a burden. Again this is a special occasions only kind of situation.

The Necessity for the Sacrifice - This situation isn't just tough on players. I can't, off the top of my head, think of a reason for this that compels. Maybe you have just the thing, in which case please send me your notes once you're done!

Discovery Of The Dishonour Of A Loved One (3/5)

A Discoverer - This situation forms an incitement to revenge. As the discoverer is necessarily at one remove from the crime this is a pretty good player role. The problem becomes how to resolve the situation and if one player is happy to portray the discoverer the other players can decide whether they wish to help or dissuade the discoverer from acting.

The Guilty One - Remember that these

roles are a matter of perspective. Although someone may societally be within this situation in the larger context of the game the taboo or prohibition may seem ridiculous. So a guilty one is either actually guilty or they are guilty by some metric that the players deem inferior or unsatisfactory. This makes this role a player and non-player inclusive one.

Loss Of Loved Ones (2/5)

A Kinsman Slain - Obviously not a player (unless there is room in your scenrio for players who are ghosts), and by now you're probably thinking the ideal person for this role is a sympathetic non-player.

A Kinsman Spectator - Another sympathetic non-player? I can't help, however, thinking of Inigo Montoya from the Princess Bride who saw his father slain.

An Executioner - I can't even remember what the name of the Count who murdered Inigo Montoya's dad was. Similarly I can't remember a lot of

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these people who are nevertheless some of the best villains the world of storytelling has to offer. You want a great villain have them off the relative of someone close to the players (indeed one of the players themselves if back story permits).

IV - Matters of Conquest

Disaster (2/5)

A Vanquished Power - A good way to start a game, if a player or a group of players suffer the disaster and have vast powers stripped from them that's a great set up (and somewhat unusual). They could, of course, be rebels fighting the victorious enemy, or they could be part of the enemy forces trying to establish justice in a land recently sunk into anarchy. There's going to have to be some serious work done here on atmosphere. The air of change an revolution should be rife in the game scenario. As long as you, as Host, ensure that you can cue players into this atmosphere this is a great situation to introduce.

A Victorious Enemy or a Messenger - Enemy just means "enemy to the previously mentioned vanquished power" neither side in this situation is by default wrong or right. See under vanquished power for ways players could be involved in this situation.

Revolt (3/5)

A Tyrant - A villain role, in exceptional circumstances a player could be the tyrant (although of course they were manipulated and misinformed by their advisors) and could find themselves discovering the truth about their powerful position as the peasants gather at the gate flaming torches in hand.

A Conspirator - An agent of revolution, plotting in the night. This could be the players or maybe the players are tricked into helping someone else's revolution by a power hungry megalomaniac. Revolution is a great idea for an episode when appropriate and the struggle for power in an environment such as the Roman Empire could make for a great

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campaign. Preparation for this on your part will be extensive though a revolution should be a centre piece not a throwaway plot.

Conflict With A God (2/5)

A Mortal - Could be either a player or a non-player. The desired resolution to this scenario will depend largely on the benevolence of the immortal. If we are talking a maniac trying to vanquish a benevolent immortal then we might not look so kindly on them as a demon hunter.

An Immortal - This rather loose definition of a god nicely contextualises the exact nature of this conflict. It's not just a matter of a superior opponent, its a matter of this being a vastly superior adversary to the point where the mortal's victory may even be impossible under all but a rare set of circumstances. However the situation may be reversed if our immortal has one fatal flaw which an evil mortal seeks to escape to the detriment of all those protected by the immortal.

V - Matters of Fortune

Falling Prey To Cruelty/Misfortune (2/5)

An Unfortunate - Either, again, some players, a player or a non player character for the adventurers to become involved with.

A Master or a Misfortune - The villain or at least some personal catastrophe which must be remedied. It could be a slave master or a sick child but the adventurers have some reason to step in and become involved. Think carefully on how to make this work.

Madness (2/5)

A Madman - Probably an NPC, mad player characters throw up this situation constantly but it shouldn't always be the basis for the adventure.

A Victim - Victims of the insane are not merely murdered, or stolen from, they are confused, bewildered, hoodwinked, upset. It's an emotional subject. Players or Non Players could

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be victims of a madman. It may even be up to the players to come between a madman and the vengeful victim.

Fatal Imprudence (3/5)

The Imprudent - For "imprudent" read the one who did something that is clearly a bad idea. Of course one who is imprudent may be accidentally so. Thus either the players or a non player can be imprudent.

A Victim or an Object Lost - If the players are the imprudent this could put the players in a victim's debt. Otherwise players may or may not decide to meddle in such affairs should they discover them.

Erroneous Judgement (2/5)

A Mistaken One: This is actually quite common in role playing as the mistaken protagonist is a key ingredient in a lazy plot twist that GMs of yore love. The reason for this is that you can put in a whole quest carried out under poor judgement that later turns out to have screwed things up

monumentally requiring a second quest to fix the first one. Not saying this is bad but it can be lazy.

A Victim of the Mistake: Usually the party or the party by proxy as a sympathetic Non Player Character gets it in the neck. See the notes under Mistaken One for further details.

A Cause or Author of the Mistake: Usually in the situation described above the mistake has more of an Author than a Cause because the most beloved twist is to reveal to the party they've been in the employ of the villain all along. Again I'm not saying don't do this, just, it's popular to the point of cliché. Long term role players even assume that their initial employer may well be the bad guy.

The Guilty One: See Author of the Mistake. Of course if you make the initial employer good in intention but having been duped by a bigger villain this does introduce a less well-rehearsed plot in which your former employer may become beholden to the players as subcontractors as he, in turn,

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flees from his former employer.

Remorse (4/5)

A Culprit: Don't put inexperienced players in this position. Even competent ones have a problem with being wrong. To a certain extent I can understand why this might be. Role Players of yore have not wanted to engage in what is, in essence, an entertainment with a dash of wish-fulfilment to suddenly discover that even their fantasy creation is in the wrong. Maybe it's just a matter of mental preparation but certainly with new players I wouldn't hit them with this role up front.

A Victim or the Sin: Again having a culprit relate to their victim remorsefully is a pretty intense deal, if the experience is to be meaningful. If the experience is not meaningful then it's hollow. A sin, on the other hand, asks no questions.

An Interrogator: Although players may relish the idea of becoming the punisher of a remorseful culprit if you

as Host are portraying the remorse properly then things might go a little off the rails. This particular situation is dramatic but it's hard to do properly. Unless you're absolutely sure of how to execute this one I would avoid it.VI - Matters of Love

Murderous Adultery (4/5)

Two Adulterers - In the Player's supplement I mention that games involving affairs of the heart have a tendency to get silly even when the affair is happening between two Non Player characters. There are exceptions to this, police procedural games can easily have cases that revolve around murderous spouses. As long as the players are sufficiently removed from thinking about imaginary people having nookie the situation is viable. The chances of a player becoming involved in such a situation are slim to none.

A Betrayed Spouse - Likely, as this is "murderous" this will be a non player character, unless you can trust a player to play the scenario to the hilt.

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Basically if it is the betrayed spouse who is to be murdered then they may well have to kill their murderous spouse in the fall out. If, on the other hand it is the betrayed spouse who becomes murderous that could be a distinct problem. I would handle this situation sparingly if you're ever going to use it at all.

Involuntary Crimes Of Love (5/5)

A Lover - See the adultery thing above. Except there are more situations here, such as loving someone one should not for whatever reason. Again affairs of the heart have not traditionally translated well into RPGs. Maybe No Dice will change this, but you need extremely good players to role play one of these scenarios.

A Beloved - The improper object of affection who will likely be unsuitable due to being a relative, or of the same sex, or an inanimate object.

A Revealer - If you put the players in the position of knowing that someone is about to commit an unknowing

crime of love then it will be a tricky situation to reveal particularly if the lover character has some power over them and an uncertain temper. Having said that role playing the conversation where a player has to say: "Er, you know you're madly in love with your father after a sex change operation, don't you?" may be good for laughs but it's not really in the spirit of a serious role play. Approach with extreme caution.

Sacrifice For Passion (5/5)

A Lover - We're back in the same area as "murderous adultery" and "involuntary crimes of passion" here, except perhaps on far more obviously spurious grounds. It is doubtful a player would commit to this from a standing start unless they were particularly interested in role playing this kind of experience.

An Object of fatal Passion - Note that Mr. Polti does not assume that the object of passion is a person...

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The Person/Thing sacrificed - Self-sacrifice for an Ideal although on more spurious grounds.

Adultery (5/5)

Two Adulterers - You might want to see the notes for the "Murderous Adultery" situation with the murderous proviso taken out. The situation remains almost the same but the consequences are less clear cut.

A Deceived Spouse - See "Murderous Adultery" bearing in mind the notes on the other role in this situation.

Crimes Of Love (4/5)

A Lover - This is the "Involuntary Crimes of Love" situation except the people in these roles are aware of what they are doing. Any kind of improper relationship produces this situation and leads to those involved living with a state of secrecy.

The Beloved - Of course given the names of the roles here you might infer that the Beloved is somewhat deceived

as to the nature of the crime and the reason for the secrecy. This means that the Lover, in this case, is hiding something about the nature of the relationship from their partner.

Obstacles To Love (3/5)

Two Lovers - See my previous comments on romance and the technical problems of same in role playing. Of course a player party may be persuaded to help the path of true love run a little smoother out of their own sense of benevolence. This gives you some leeway to use this situation but you must be careful in matters of pitch and tone.

An Obstacle - Family Feud? Caste System? Power Politics and Marriages of Contract and Convenience? A Fatal Medical Condition? Characters on the wrong sides of the divide between two polar opposites life/death, heaven/hell? Be creative.

An Enemy Loved (3/5)

A Lover - See my notes on love and

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also the "Obstacles to Love" situation this basically forms that situation except it is more specific and there is one further role.

The Beloved Enemy - See my notes on love and other notes on similar situations.

The Hater - The forbidden love here is embodied by a character who is likely not a player and probably a villain. Unless players are really committed to portraying the devil's advocate it's probably best to avoid the situation.

Mistaken Jealousy (5/5)

A Jealous One - Most likely a non player, jealousy is tough to role play.

An Object of whose Possession He is Jealous - Complicated description. The classic template for this is the story of Othello. In that story Othello believed that his wife, Desdemona, was

unfaithful. This thought that Desdemona's heart belonged to a man named Michael Cassio was what incited the jealousy. So in the story we could talk about this role being played by Desdemona's affections.

A Supposed Accomplice - Michael Cassio in the example. The person who owns the supposed object of jealousy. Of course in Othello Desdemona loves Othello, not Michael Cassio, Cassio is unaware of his supposed possession of Desdemona's affections.

A Cause or an Author of the Mistake - In Othello a villain named Iago deliberately inflames Othello's jealousy seemingly for something to do. This nihilistic outlook was unusual at the time Shakespeare wrote his play outlining Othello's story. Nowadays such behaviour is understood to exist. This is a tricky situation to manufacture. I would steer clear unless you have a specific and killer idea.

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Further Help

Do you want some more?

Just because the Core Book's over doesn't mean we're sending you out into the unforgiving wilderness to fend for yourself. There are a wealth of FREE supports

for your Hosting efforts available on the world wide web. All of them can be reached via the No Dice Website at:

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The site has news, links to the podcast and forums, details of our up coming publications and FREE adventure downloads for you to run or adapt.

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The No Dice Podcast gives practical advice in an mp3. Two to three times a month you can download an hour's worth of chat about all the issues that crop up in running new and more varied adventures for your players. Hosted by the

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