Category Archives: Roleplaying Games

Wayward Sons – 1st Session & Playbooks

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So we started our campaign two weeks ago. I had written five playbooks with Aki with following the ideas of the players in our gaming group. We had got together earlier to talk about the characters and so most of our group had a good idea of what kind of character they were going to play.

The main point for designing these characters was that they were more “a” than “the”. As the regular playbooks for hacks deal with characters that are the movers and shakers of their worlds in Wayward Sons the characters start out only as regular men and women. They have the possibility of grow to be the most important people of their kind – as well as turn into monsters along the way.

We followed the basic structure of Apocalypse World during this first session. Playbooks were distributed, players fill them out (complaining about bits and correcting others) and afterwards we discussed about the characters and their shared past.

As the established fact was that all characters had had their first paranormal encounter they all decided what was their Angle. (This was something that we quickly realised needed to be presented in the playbook as a choosable option). Within a little over an hour we had created a detailed history for the characters and a horrible mind-map for me to use as a GM as the foundation of the campaign.

Following the advices of AW and told the players that this session was about their characters. We followed them around, used moves and got into trouble. We did not have a fight though. This was actually something a realised only later on. Another thing I noticed was that Wayward Sons probably needs a little more flavourful 1st session sheet for GM.

The summary for the events of the first session:

The characters had arrived the the city of Rapid Falls in North Dakota following the cryptic hint from a Well-Dressed Man. They searched a safety deposit box to and found a large set of papers, photos and 8mm video. While going through the material they realised they were all connected to it and to each other somehow. It all seemed to have something to do with what their fathers and their fathers had done.

Following the leads from the documents the party searched the city archives and tried to make contact with the manager of the bank where the documents where held.

I confess I actually had a basic storyline in mind before we started the session (this actually being a part of a campaign we have been playing for almost two years). Nevertheless the players had a huge impact on the flow of the story and the clues found. It was all in all an excellent starting point for the campaign.

We are getting together to play the second session tomorrow. Hopefully we can work out even more problems with this hack and still have a good time.

The first five preliminary and “this needs some serious editing” playbooks as pdfs:

Notice – Yes. They are all pretty much work in progress. I shared them for feedback.

3:16 Carnage Among Stars Review, Of Sorts

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Caveat: I haven’t actually read the game. This is purely based on one session of gameplay and reading discussions on the net.

Spoiler: This game is garbage. It might have some good hidden intentions, as Ville thinks it does, but despite that, its just awfully designed. It might sound fun, but it has huge fundamental flaws, which are apparently only addressed by the designer by telling people to deal with it. So, I’m dealing with it. I’m telling you how much this sucks.

The basic idea is this: You have a squad of soldiers, who are out there in space killing things. You actually compete about killing things. Its very minimalistic, with basically just two attributes, the Fighting Ability FA, and the Non-Fighting Ability NFA:

Lets start from the beginning. Yesterday we played our first session. We were instructed to make our characters. First, only name, reputation and distributing ten points among the two attributes, with maximum of eight in one of them. So, I gave my character the name Pjotor Azarov, had him have the reputation of a coward, gave him 2 in FA and 8 in NFA. I thought, maybe I can be a medic or something.

Then, I was told I’m the sergeant of the squad, because I have the highest NFA. Ok. I can work with that… I thought at the time.

We were given weapons. I got some basic rifle and a sidearm.

Then, I was told my goal was to keep everyone alive and see to it that our squad follows the orders given by our superiors. Except, I need to compete about the kills as well. This isn’t actually my mission, but since the game only feedback is that I get levels by killing more things than others, this is clearly what I need to do. Ville seems to think there’s some hidden genius behind this, which might be true if the rules in general weren’t such a mess.

The first encounter pretty much revealed all the problems with the game. Since I have a very high NFA, I can generally choose how each encounter begins. Since I have my sidearm, which works close range, while others don’t have any weaponry that does pretty much anything at that range, in order to win in the killing contest, I need to bring those fights to close range. All the time.

Obviously, this isn’t very logical. Why would my character do this, if there wasn’t a poorly conceived rule behind it? Instead of trying to do anything valuable, my character needs to shit on other characters time and time again. However, since the system is – again – so poorly conceived, this isn’t actually helping me. Its just giving me false hope.

Since my FA is so low, I can’t actually hit anything. In the meantime, the other characters will have time to get to better positions and then – since they have higher FAs and more efficient weapons – can beat any of my attempts at getting the high kill score. I just don’t stand a chance.

The other encounters we had were basically the same. I took us to close range, they moved into better position. Killing ensued.

If I had known how the system works beforehand, would I have made my character differently. Definitely. However, this has another problem. This would have lead to much more homogenous characters.

Since NFA is basically useless for more than one character, everyone would max out on FA. Of course, then some poor soul would need to take the bullet, so that the squad doesn’t get ambushed every time. That character would then be forced into uselessness. NFA is good for US, while FA is good for ME. In a game where you are in a situation, where you are supposed to compete, this isn’t good. You can’t spread your wealth if everyone else is keeping theirs.

Now, I do have an out. Each player has a strength. You can use this strength to immediately resolve a situation. Then you get to kill all the threats in the encounter. Sounds nice, but since my weaponry is so poor, I can’t get the kills I need even this way, because the other characters can easily get more in a normal encounter. Also, they have strenghts they can use. You get only one in the beginning, and you only get more by levelling, in other words by killing more than others.

So, basically, I’m screwed. I don’t have incentives to play the game the way it says I should. I don’t have the tools to play the game the way it should be played. Every avenue I have is just poor. I basically have the following options:

1. I keep doing the same thing: I bring battles to close range and hope for the best. However, since the other players can get new weapons and become better at using them at close range, this options is quickly closed, if isn’t already. Since I have the poorest FA, anyone can easily best me at close range.

2. I can go for promotions. The thing is, I can’t really control this. You need to expend a strength to get a promotion, but I can’t get strengths by killing, so I have to rely on purely on luck. I don’t have any control over this.

3. I try to get the other characters killed. This doesn’t really work either. Since my FA is so low, I can’t take them on directly, but since I don’t have any other venues to do this, that’s my only chance.

Basically, I’m screwed. I don’t have any room to maneuver and I don’t have any tools to work with. I did some reading on the subject, and as others had come seen the same problems, they had apparently come to these conclusions:

1. The game is supposed to be played as a team, where people just let everyone level. Well, the system doesn’t support this in any way. It only encourages the competition, so if this is what we are supposed to do, why would we be playing this game?

2. The game is fundamentally PvP. Okay, seems about right. However, again, I don’t have the tools to do this, since I apparently can’t use my higher rank to mess with them and I can’t attack them directly due to my low combat capabilities.

Its a poorly conceived board game in the guise of a RPG. My capabilities are pretty much useless to me and if they somehow became useful, that would put the other characters in a very poor position.

Foreshadowing

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Yesterday I talked about scrying in MtG. For those of you not interested in MtG, its a mechanic which lets you manipulate your library a little bit with the flavor of seeing into the future and being able to react to it, at least somewhat.

This got me thinking. I’ve always been averse about peeking into the future in RPGs. Maybe this is from my teen years, when I tried it a couple of times, but couldn’t really get into it, as I knew my players would moan if any possible predictions didn’t work absolutely correctly. Also, those games were so predictable anyhow that those predictions were basically superfluous.

…but now, things are different. Maybe predictions, or foreshadowing, if were talking about a more grounded world, could be great. They could basically be challenges for the players.

Lets take a movie. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a good example. I’m not spoiling anything more than the movie itself does, so don’t worry (and by the way, if you haven’t seen it, what’s wrong with you?). It begins with the James Stewart character, now a US senator, returning to the town he was elected in. He is clearly known for being the titular character. Then we go back to the time when the place was just a small frontier town and the character is just arriving there.. and gets immediately robbed.

So, how did we get from getting robbed to being a senator? Just let the players figure it out. Give them a starting point and an ending point and see how you get there. You might have remind them from time to time, although probably at least one of them will remember it anyhow.

This might be an interesting experiment.

Four Movie Oneshots

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Just a few movies to use as a basis for a bit different one-shots.

Le Corbeau

Le corbeau is a 70 year old movie by the director of few of my favorite movies (Les diabolique and Le salaire de la peur) Henri-Georges Clouzot. Its about a small village where a series of “poison-pen” letters (spreading malicious rumors) emerge. All sorts of secrets are uncovered and the community falls into disarray.

Ever since seeing this back in the day, I’ve been thinking how to do this correctly in an RPG. Now I feel like we are at a point where I have a group where this could be a viable idea and the games, like tremulus (no, they are not paying me despite my continuous mentions of their game), are at a level where this kind of strange idea is something I could really work on.

Especially the idea of a framework works great here. Probably better than the other frameworks I’ve made. So, lets make one, although it pretty much writes itself.

Stalag 17

One of Billy Wilder’s several masterpieces, Stalag 17 is a movie about a traitor among POWs. Sgt. Sefton has been dealing with the Germans, so he’s the primary suspect and needs to play his game carefully, trying to flush out the real culprit and get out of the camp with the recently brought-in rich guy.

Since we probably have more than one player, this needs some more attention, as the original story revolves around a single main character, with most of the others simply as his foils. But, we don’t necessarily need the player characters working together. One of them could easily be the camp commandant, or a soldier responsible for the POWs. One could be closely modelled on the Sefton character, while others could be parts of the makeshift organization amongst the POWs. Of course, someone could be the traitor.

Tropa de Elite or Elite Squad

A Brazilian film about an elite squad (yes, really) of police in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. Actually the movie is pretty much all over the place, with not much of coherent storyline (but is still very good), so here I’d like to emphasize one of the plots: The pope is going to visit Rio and wants to sleep in a very specific house. The problem is, the house is located right next to a slum. So, to keep the slum clear, the squad is ordered to clean the closest blocks of weapons. Thirty nights in a row.

Okay, the first night might be bad, but the few nights after are going to be pretty easy, as the weapons are gone. Then the locals will begin to see a pattern. This will lead to traps, ambushes, people with scores to settle and so forth. After a while the raids will become more dangerous night after night.

I don’t know what the right amount of raids is. Thirty is clearly too many, but if someone informs the residents about what’s going on early, maybe four or so is enough.

Reservoir Dogs

A movie I expect more of you have seen than the others on this list, but I could have gone with a number of other movies for a different emphasis. For those of you who haven’t seen this, its about a group of criminals trying to find out what went wrong with a robbery. They suspect an undercover cop among them.

You don’t necessarily need to know who’s the cop in the beginning. I think the ideal would be to do this like the movie did it: in other words, not chronologically. Begin with the criminals gathering at the meeting place and then return to what happened in flashbacks. People can accuse each other freely, or move the blame to others. Maybe come up with different versions.

For a lighter game, do a heist. Just give your players some rough information and put different hazards on their way. Let them roll and explain how they took this into account in their planning. An AW-hack would work wonderfully here.

GMing on a Budget

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No, I’m not talking about money. I don’t know if Lauri came up with this term himself, but it sounded good, so I’m using it here.

A definition:

GMing on a Budget is a form of GMing where the GM doesn’t have a full control of the environment. The GM has resources they can use as they see fit, but the rules limit them.

Examples:

Agon gives the GM a number of points, which he can use to build opposition to the characters. Basically the game is about the players competing with each other and the GM plays against the players. With this unique dynamic, giving the GM limited resources is good. Also, the players have some control over the GMs resources, as GM will get more points to use if the players rest.

In tremulus, the GM (or Keeper) can only make moves when the players make moves, the players are silent, the threat track lets them, or the Keeper can spend a hold to do it. Again, the players have some control as being active they can thwart the GM (and give GM more powerful tools, if they are unlucky).

I guess D&D has similar rules (or probably more like guidelines) these days, but I haven’t read the DM Guide of the newer versions (or the Players’ manual, for that matter).

The idea here is to change the dynamic between players and the Keeper. Back in the day the GM was a (hopefully benevolent) dictator, who controlled the whole world. This left the players more like an audience than active participants.

Thankfully, now the GM is more like a member of the group with a different role. Like our company. There isn’t much hierarchy. Obviously, someone is the CEO and not every one has equal stake in the company, but generally no-one orders anyone around. We just try to get things done. The gaming group doesn’t need this sort of hierarchy either, although the GM generally controls all incentives (which is also often the real basis of GM power).

So, how should a GM approach this new situation, where he is limited by the rules. Depends.

In Agon, this actually requires more planning than I’m used to. Also, this approach means I have to railroad the PCs somewhat. I have to “buy” my monsters beforehand and I can’t really do it at moment’s notice. Also, when the players rest, I might need to come up with more obstacles just because I now have more points, which I can’t use to make the final boss tougher since it has its own limits on how many points I can use on it.

This means, you should probably leave some room for the final boss to have more abilities. It would probably also be better if you plan beforehand how you are going to improve it. If you still have more points to use, you can always thrown in some more of your stock baddies, if you have a chart with how many you can buy.

Planning for Agon is really mathy, which I generally don’t mind, but since its more about just calculations then real math, this is basically pretty boring, but its difficult to do on the fly.

In tremulus, the point is not to plan. Your players will give you resources and those are your tools for moving the story along. Enough points is the best way to move the game into a new stage. Using a “hard move” should be a big thing, which gets the players going when the game slows down (although, the game should slow down every once in a while). This means saving those moves. You don’t know when you’ll get more. Gladly, its enough for you to mess with one character. The others will react appropriately, as long as they know something has happened.

I think in general, this idea of limiting what the GM can do is something that warrants further innovation. There must be design space here, which hasn’t been explored yet. Granted, there might have been innovations I’m not aware of (and there probably are)…

Wayward Sons Playbook: Evangelist

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This is for Lauri’s game and I haven’t asked him about this, but I’m just putting this out here for later comparison and as part of the transparency of the project.

I don’t know the exact form Lauri’s playbooks will take in the end, but this is my proposal or prototype for one. We did preliminary characters the other day and this is what I came up with: A small-time televangelist, who has been part of an exorcism where something unexpected by the quite secular character didn’t expect. So, now I just have to make this more generalized so that others might be able to play this some day.

The subheaders in bold, the text in italics and my comments in normal text. The template is from tremulus.

Who Are You?

Despite humble beginnings, you have been able to grow rich by abusing your congregation’s beliefs for years. Whether you actually believe or not, you are able to inspire belief in others. With shallow wisdom and simple brainwashing techniques you are able to hold those looking for meaning in their lives in your hands. But something happened and your world was broken. Suddenly you were in over your head, but you are going to survive, as you always have.

Name

I can’t stop thinking about Oral Roberts, so that would lead me to have good, strong American last names and strange first names from Western side characters. Than again, people like Billy Graham, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have very basic, likable names, with shortened first names.

Jimmy Smith, Bob Gordon, Norm Baker, Clint Jones, Howie Lee, Benny Carson

Look

Gender: Man or Woman

I thought about only having men, because this is a male-dominated profession, but there have been famous female televangelists, such as Tammy Faye Bakker, so no reason to limit this one.

Clother: expensive tailored suit, fine suit, worn suit, rural casual, or puritan robes

Expensive tailored suit is the one we’d most likely see in most fiction, because its just so stereotypical, but I don’t think all these people are making that much money. Some are simple bible salesmen, or they need to attract simpler rural people by appearing more like them or what they would expect.

Face: condensending, aristocratic, serious, or somber

I’m not sure about this. I guess this is fine for now.

Eyes: sharp, peaceful, or accusing

Body: Slim, athletic, full, lithe, or angular

Moves

Okay, so Lauri had a bit different view on how these will work. Instead of the usual way AW hacks work, we’ll have access to more powerful moves in the future, so I’m keeping these moves less powerful than the usual moves playbooks would have. These are largely based on moves from playbooks from tremulus, but with influence from both Apocalypse World and MonsterHearts, although the latter has so many moves related to strings, it doesn’t come up much here.

Lauri asked us for two, but I’ll make some more just for more options. Future players might not want to use the same path I do. I’ll rework these if they are too

Inspire a Crowd: You may use INFLUENCE on crowds of people with time and give them abtract promises in return. On a failure, the crowd may become hostile, or may draw their own conclusions on what to do.

Pretty basic evangelist stuff, riling up crowds with semi-intelligible speeches about the will of god and the bible.

Confessor: Gain +1ongoing after successfully reading or influencing a person to read or influence the same person.

Some stuff for a more classical version of a priest. People often want to trust their religious leaders. After they’ve accepted this character as their link to their god, they will continue to associate with him.

Cold Reading: You may ask an additional question when using INSTINCT on a person. +1forward if using INFLUENCE on the same person.

Having worked with a lot of people, the evangelist has learned to find the angles they can use.

Congregation: If you are surrounded by your flock, they will protect you.

Don’t know what this means at this point. Maybe they are an AW-like gang, maybe not. Maybe they are just some requirement to get hold of the character physically.

The Faithful: When usimg experience to reroll INFLUENCE rolls with people of roughly the same faith, gain +2forward.

Hard to balance this. Is +2forward too much? Probably not, since many moves simply give +1 to a trait and this is quite situational.

Faith Healing

I don’t know what this should do at this point. This isn’t real healing, but maybe you can remove someones minuses for a while or something by making them think they’ve been healed. I think this will get removed later, but just put it in here, since it has so much resonance in how these people are seen in the public. Maybe some other “magic trick” like snake handling could be a move too.

Gear

A worn or expensively decorated Bible, a cross

Don’t know much more about the gear at this point.

One More Problem with Advancement

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There’s plenty of problems with character advancement. Granted, I’m not against it, but I know people who like to argue against it. Still, there are problems, and this is one of them, but from a different viewpoint than I’ve heard before.

Recently I learned the term iconic character. I had been aware of the concept, I just didn’t know it had a name. I don’t know how widely this term is used, but since I think its an important concept, I’m going to use it here. Iconic character is a character which doesn’t really change as time goes by. On the other side, we have the dramatic character. Dramatic characters have arcs. They fall in love, out of love, learn to live with trauma and so forth.

Examples of an iconic character:

Sherlock Holmes is interested in intellectual problems. He doesn’t move away from them. Watson gets married (twice, in fact), but Holmes only meets a woman to show how invested he is in what he does (although the more modern version have made him more interested).

Each of the Simpsons is very iconic, but I guess Homer most of all. He might have become lazier and his fatness is emphasized more, but basically he is still the same (granted, I think I haven’t seen any episodes after season 14, which would be about a decade ago).

I first identified this type of character in House, who is strongly based on Holmes anyway. I felt the show lost its way when House began to change, or they tried to change him. I guess its a natural inclination for current stock of writers, who have been taught to write arcs, but sometimes its just wrong.

Now, from the point of view of a classic RPG advancement, it mostly forces or at least strongly coerces the characters into becoming iconic. You don’t change. You just delve deeper into what you already were. Fighters become better fighters, magi learn more powerful spells, cyborgs update their hardware and/or software and forth. None of this helps with their arcs.

As RPGs are moving towards dramatic storytelling as opposed to the more epic storytelling of the past, when campaigns where basically just a series of events in the lives of the characters, moving into systems, which support more dramatic approach in this regard as well, would probably be for the better.

I guess certain systems have bypassed this and some systems support this kind of gaming. Apocalypse World has bypassed this by emphasizing the stuff you’re not good at, so even if you use your advancements to make your character even more iconic, he or she will still have to face the world as a dramatic character (although I’m a strong proponent of letting people use what they are good at, at least somewhat).

Then, of course, we have the DramaSystem. I have Hillfolk on my desktop, but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. However, from what I gather, the system uses some sort of currency for letting players win or lose scenes, so that everyone gets their spotlight, but will have to give up something to get it. We’ll see. Probably when the physical book finally arrives.

RopeCon 2014 Plans

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Yes, I know I’m pretty early, but I do have ideas, so why not share them.

First, talking to different people at RopeCon and somewhat on this blog, I’ve learned two things:

1. Some of the most valued GMs are part of our Guild.

2. There are people out there looking for new games, but are worried about the GMs and other players.

So, I thought we might provide a service to help out those who don’t want to use the classic heuristic of staying away from fantasy games. This might sound very conceited and might actually be just that, but than again, if we are not the best people to do this, I don’t know who is. Well, at least we are arrogant enough to do this (although I haven’t talked to Ville about this yet, and I didn’t tell anyone I’m going to publish this this early).

My basic idea is this: We get a rubber stamp for next year and stamp the games we believe are up to our standards… whatever those standards may be. Probably just base our recommendations on recommendations from people we trust to know what games are good and which GMs are worthy of our stamp.

What we would probably need to do is to make a page of all the games we recommend and explain our reasoning, whether it is based on a recommendation or its there just because we didn’t want to leave out any of our own GMs (I’m big on reporting possible bias). Now, depending on how secret we want this to be, the stamp doesn’t necessarily need the address, although since we definitely are not above self-promotion, it probably will have the link to this blog at least.

But here’s the problem: We don’t really want to piss of any GMs, but stamping their enrollment sheets when they don’t necessarily know what its all about, might leave a sour taste in somebody’s mouth. Then again, if they really go to the link and see what its about, I don’t think very many would mind. Convention organizers of course might, but as we are just trying to bring quality players and games together to heighten their experience, they really shouldn’t. After all, they want repeat customers.

At this point, I’m just throwing this out there, looking for feedback. Feedback from the guild was pretty good, but people I talked to (including Lauri) were drunk at the time…

Wayward Sons – What’s It About?

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teaser

Wayward Sons is a hack for the Vincent Baker‘s Apocalypse World. As I have already posted the GM prep and the Basic Moves for this hack I decided it was time to tell a bit more of what the game is actually about.

The stories of Wayward Sons take (by default) place at 1980s in a fictional South Dakota city much like Los Angeles and New York. It is a game on neon noir atmosphere, conspiracies, esoteric secrets and horror.

Since X-Files and the first seasons of Supernatural I have planed on running something similar to them but never got around to do this. When Aki GMed some tremulus to our group during this summer I knew I was hooked with the AW engine and wanted to build a hack of my own to suit my needs for the game.

Premises for the Wayward Sons differ a bit from most AW hacks. The characters are not the best of the best, or moves and shakers. They are just average (or pretty near to it) people who are drawn to the world of supernatural horror by events they could not avoid.

During the game it is possible for them to achieve closure or to become one of the most famous hunters of supernatural. But it is much more likely that they will die, go mad or even turn into inhumane monsters they used to hunt. The threat of Taint is ever present on their stories, forcing them to balance between what needs to be done and what they are willing to do to achieve it.

The world where the characters live in is wrapped in paranoia and secrets. They know that most people wouldn’t believe them and have to act under the threat of being locked up in a mental institute. This means that one of the key elements will be trust.

Trust acts a bit like Hx in Apocalypse World or Trust in tremulus, but it is actually inspired by ColdCity. It is used to measure the trust between the character (and some NPCs they regularly interact). But as opposed to tremulus it does not stand for the secrets you know about another character it simply means how willingly you would place your life on their hands.

In addition to this Wayward Sons must be pretty simple. I have had my share of over complicated rules and that is one of the reasons AWengine worked for me. This also means that I will be able to use it to run games set in various different times than just the 80s – our current campaign has had adventures in wild west, 1940s, cyberpunk and in space and I want this hack to allow us to continue on that line.

The picture used in the teaser is from Supernatural and used without permission. No challenge to the owners of the franchise intended.

AW-Hack: Basic Moves

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After surviving the birthday party that was held during last weekend I noticed the complete lack of second part of my input for Demon Week. I’ll probably get back to it in some point but for now I’d like to present the revised basic actions for by Apocalypse World hack.

These basic moves are mainly inspired by tremulus though browsing through some other hacks has also given me some ideas. As stated previously these might change a bit at some point. Any ideas and suggestions are more than welcome.

Act Under Pressure (Roll + Stat)
When you take an action that risks failure or opposition, roll with one of the basic stats.
On a 10+, You succeed.
On a 7-9, the GM offers you a worse outcome, hard bargain or a cost. If agreed upon, you succeed.

Assist/Interfere (Roll + their trust to you)
When you Assist or Interfere on someone’s action, roll their Trust to you.
On a 10+, They take +2 (Assist) or -2 (Interfere) to their roll.
On a 7-9, They take +1 or -1 to their roll, and you are exposed to the outcome of the roll.
On a miss, They lose of point of Trust to you

Fight (Roll + Violence)
When you attack someone or something, roll+Violence. The roll stands for the entire combat. Every participant in a combat inflicts its Harm to the other.
On a 10+, Choose 1
– You deal Harm as established
– You deal +2 Harm but suffer Harm
– They change behavior and do what you want.
– Choose one from below
On a 7-9, They choose 1:
– Flee
– Fall back to a secure location
– Back off calmly
– Give you what they think you want

Influence (Roll + Presence)
When you want someone to do something for you, you may use your wits, charm, looks etc. to ask someone to do it.
On a 10+, they’ll do it but might ask for something in return.
7-9, they’ll do it but will ask for something in return.

Instinct (Roll + Discipline)
When you need to know what others are thinking, meaning or thinking you need to trust on your Instinct. Asks are directed to the GM.
On a 10+, Ask something, GM gives a relevant and usable answer.
On a 7-9, Ask something, GM gives you something interesting, build on that.

Investigate (Roll + Intellect)
Looking for clues in a scene.
On a 10+, choose 1:
– You find something hidden
– You find something lost
– You find something forgotten
– You find a Good item (GM’s choice)
– You find a Minor item (your choice)
– You find a Clue (+1forward)
– Pick one from the following:
7-9, choose 1:
– You find a Minor item (GM’s choice)
– You find a Clue (+1forward), but the situation escalates
On a 6 or less, there either is nothing else to be found or the GM may hold 1 against you.

Reason (Roll + Intellect)
When the clues are gathered, the libraries visited and the old dusty tomes read the player may use Reason to tie in the knots.
On a 10+, Ask something, GM gives a relevant and usable answer.
On a 7-9, Ask something, GM gives you something interesting, build on that.

Spark of Taint (Roll + Discipline)
Whenever you commit an inhuman act (kill someone in cold blood, work magic, eat human flesh etc.) make roll+Discipline.
10+ You remain unaffected by the Taint
On a 7-9, You are fighting the Taint. You may choose to advance it.
On a miss, your Taint advance a step.