The Twice-Forsaken Earth redux

[J B Bell]

This damned thing has been gestating for months.  I think it's finally a game that is play-testable.

The Twice-Forsaken Earth

J B Bell

What is this game about?

The Twice-Forsaken Earth is a post-apocalyptic smorgasbord.  Sometime in the future, humans completely screw up the planet.  A small nuclear war kicks the ecosystem into a decline that is clearly final.  Panicked research produces a space "ark" loaded with genetic data, a lot more armaments, and finally working dimensional gateways.  One shows promise, gating to a harsh but habitable world.  A bigger gate is made, and then the Demon Lords, destined to be the new masters of Earth, break through, destroying the weakened remains of human civilization.  The shape-shifting creatures install themselves in power, and prey on humanity's collective guilt, producing a new "religion" of submission to their autocratic authority.  As a side benefit, though, a mysterious energy leaks through, creating riotous mutations among the planet's life forms, and eventually human magic arises (perhaps again), making use of this force.

TTFE asks, in a world where your kind are total subjects, what is justice, what is freedom, and what will you do to get them?  Answering this question helps produce the tenor of the game, from a campaign of vengeance and overthrow against the oppressor class to more nuanced stories with lines blurring between human, demonic, and mutant.

How does your game go about it?

TTFE uses a quasi-dice-pool system.  I like dice pools in a way, but I also don't like rolling buckets of dice.  So I created a system that has "cliffs"--in terms of the "peasant and Gawain" problem, Gawain will always trounce the peasant unless special circumstances (resource expenditure) intervene.

Characters and such possess Traits.  A Trait is rated from zero (nonexistent or not appropriate to the entity) to arbitrarily large integers.  The fifth, ninth, thirteenth, and so on levels re-start dice associated and add a +3 bonus when rolling in Conflicts.

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----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Level ||  1 |  2 |  3 |  4 |  5 |  6 |  7 |  8 |  9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Dice  ||  1 |  2 |  3 |  4 |  1 |  2 |  3 |  4 |  1 |  2 |  3 |  4 |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Rank  ||         1         |         2         |         3         |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Bonus ||         0         |        +3         |        +6         |
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Traits work as in Pace.  That is, they limit how many dice may be thrown into a conflict, rather than always contributing the same amount.

When there is a Conflict, players including the GM declare their intentions and dedicate however many dice from their pool they wish, limited by the appropriate Trait.  Extra Traits may contribute, with the second limited to half its value, the third one quarter, etc., rounding down.

To settle a Conflict, each party rolls one to four dice as indicated in the chart, and takes the highest die, plus the bonus.  The difference is the intensity of the effect.  Winning by one is just scraping by; five is a decisive victory; six to ten are a range of someone of unbeatably superior skill schooling an upstart; beyond that gets into the level of "victor humiliates loser exactly as desired".

What behavior does your game reward/encourage?

As in octaNe, the way Traits work will generally cause players to play to their PCs strengths.  PCs have Traits that normally measure effectiveness, however, all PCs have one or more Troubles.  A player may use a Troublesome Trait (ha ha) in a conflict against his or her own PC, "throwing" the Conflict.  The difference if the player loses goes into the player's pool; however, an equal amount goes into the GM's pool.  Thus is the game fueled.  Other possibilities for using the currency may also be easily developed.

Notes on pools:  both players and GM start with pools that fuel their Traits in conflict.  The pools are in the open; they are not kept as secret "hands."

Players are rewarded immediately for playing out their Troubles, and they are protagonized by using their more effective Traits.  Troubles should have a story of some kind behind them, so "one eye" is not sufficient; it should be "lost an eye to Baron Malleus as punishment for looking at him funny."

The color of the setting creates a few distinct, though possibly mixable types:  humans, with their usual wide range of options; mutants, who have the lowest status socially but Kewl Powers (still working on a special mechanic for this and human magic), and demons, who normally are only NPCs.  Demon "magic" is purely biological; human druids and such have a few distinct styles but cannot heal instantly nor revive the dead, and they also may have privileged knowledge about human history.

Character creation and a few more notes to come shortly.

[greyorm]

Sounds cool so far, JB. I like the solution you've made to giant die-pools.

[Spooky Fanboy]

So, tell us more.

How did these demons come to be?

Where did the magic and mutations come from?

What's the day-in-a-life of a particular citizen like? How closely are the human slaves kept under guard?

[J B Bell]

Here's some more . . . I'll be answering Fanboy's questions shortly, as well as some more rules.

Making Characters

Distribute 60 points among as many Traits as you would like.  You may not have more than one Rank 3 (Level 9+) and two Rank 2 (Level 5+) Traits.  At least one or two of the Traits should be Troubles--things that cause problems for your character.  While characters aren't supposed to like them, they provide dice for the players and also let you inject your own creative agenda into play.

Traits will tend to be more career-style than skill style, so go for "city guard" rather than "sword", "law enforcement", and "duty to city bureaucracy".  If you do want one of those sub-Traits to stand out, though, feel free to throw it in.

It's helpful to record Traits according to rank and dice, rather than straight level, like this:

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Ruffian: 3r2 (+3)

You know to roll three dice, you're second rank (Professional), and you get a +3 bonus to your final result.

More on Conflicts

This is partially covered in How Does Your Game Go about It? above.  However, here are some further nuances.

Trouble

If you need dice, Trouble is how you get it.  How do you get Trouble?  Same way everybody does:  ask for it.  Trouble is limited by your Troublesome Traits.  You can get Trouble from as many traits as you like--and, there are no diminishing returns!  There's a catch, of course:  you gain Trouble dice by adding them into a conflict--on the other side.  You can gain a lot of dice quickly if you have lots of Trouble on your character sheet--but if you lose badly enough, it may be a while--or never--before those dice do you any good.

If you win, you've overcome obstacles in spite of your character's Troubles.  This should be incorporated into the description of the outcome.

Collateral Damage

Depending on the nature of a Conflict, its results may spill over.  When it seems appropriate (espcially if high Ranks are involved), consider the environment, bystanders, and other unwitting participants in a conflict to have a Rank of their own.  Then add three to the bonus they would get, or if you're really feeling anal go ahead and make a roll.  The difference determines collateral damage--in a severe magical duel, this will be stuff like buildings knocked down, whole villages destroyed if someone unleashes Dragon Slave or its equivalent, or for less physically violent stuff, a crowd being turned off by a heated argument.

Pumping It

Optionally, if it makes sense, a player may elect to retain a margin of victory in dice for a future, related conflict.  This should be tracked in a separate pile, and importantly, it isn't limited by Traits.  That is, in a sword duel, rather than delivering a simple death blow with a +5 victory, a player could grab five extra dice, and use them again for a seriously fancy splatterfest.

Hm.  Maybe this is how I should handle magic.  Anyway.

Ganging Up

In a Conflict with more than two sides, resolve in a sensible order.  No need to roll more than once.  If Abilene and Bob are prosecuting attorneys working against Charlie, all three should roll, and compare rolls separately.  If this doesn't produce a result that's easily interpretable for the situation, a run-off roll may be done.

If the sides have obvious primary participants with others in a helping role, treat the allies' Traits like additional Traits of the leaders'--that is, they may be added at half, then quarter, etc. value, if they're appropriate.

[J B Bell]

How did these demons come to be?

This is an open question for the play-group.  They came into the world via human technology, the Gate, suddenly and unexpectedly.  Humans were ready to colonize the new world they had discovered.  On the day the Gate was opened, amid much pomp and circumstance and no military preparation, the demons rushed through, clearly knowing when and where the Gate would open.

The Gate was destroyed by AEGIS, an orbital weapons platform, when it de-orbited itself.  AEGIS seems to still be alive somehow and may communicate with PCs.

Where did the magic and mutations come from?

Magic seems to be a property of the demons' home world that leaks through into Earth.  Humans can manipulate it.   All life uses magic to be much more adaptable--without it, Earth would be dead except for the simplest of organisms.  This allows for the amusing literary conceit of lots of adaptive mutations and few lethal ones.  Areas of hard radiation are zones of deadly, crazed innovation.

What's the day-in-a-life of a particular citizen like? How closely are the human slaves kept under guard?

There are 72 demon Kings, and progressively greater numbers of lesser "royalty" down to Baronets, and finally Automata--temporary "buds" let off by those royalty who can make them, set for a particular purpose.  A human beings' life may come from most of the traditional medieval-level careers, and some demon Lords are kinder than others.  All deliberately suppress technology, at least publicly.  Because demons are accustomed to use their mastery of flesh-shaping, they don't use or understand technology.  A few, of course, are exceptions, running clandestine experiments and even keeping closely guarded human engineers in their service.

There are only a few tends to a hundred million people left on Earth after all the wars and disasters.  But demons number in only the hundreds of thousands.  They keep control by fear, their ability to infiltrate human resistance (higher-order demons may perfectly imitate humans in appearance), and their ability to generate highly tailored and addictive drugs.

A day in the life may vary from a relatively content farmer or shop-keeper under a liberal Lord's domain, up to desperate human cattle kept for food (demons prefer live meat--a few have a taste for human flesh, though most demons regard this as somewhat distasteful).  No human being can escape the central fact that almost any demon holds almost absolute power over him or her.  Some resist, some collaborate to try to secure their own safety and comfort, and some just survive.

Thanks for your setting questions.  There is more information in the old PDF at http://www.swcp.com/~tquid/ttfe/ .

--JB