[Principia Novae] First playtest draft

[Jasper]

PRINCIPIA NOVAE

Survival and Legacy at the End of Civilization
A Role Playing Game of the Iron Age

by Jasper McChesney

A Primeval Press Game

Introduction

It's the end of an age; the end of Civilization; the end of the world as it has been.  The Roman Empire is failing: spread thin, its garrisons return home, its people turn inward, its senators bicker.  On the edge of it, you are faced with a question: What fate will you make for yourself?  Will you go about a normal life, blithe to larger happenings?  Will you desperately try to stay the tide as long as you can?  Or will you try to make something new, for yourself and perhaps for others?  Will you die with the old world, or help create a new one?

PRINCIPIA NOVAE is a role-playing game about forging a new world, new beginnings, in the midst chaos.  It is a game about values, legacies, and trust, among other things.  Each character in the game lives on the fringe of the Roman Empire: a fringe that is rapidly giving way entirely.  It is in this context that the characters and players are asked important questions, that must be answered through action:

What do you value?  What will you take from the old world, and what will you replace?

What legacy will you leave?  How will your actions serve those who come after you?

As you cut a path for yourself, whom do you trust to take along?

To put it in more concrete terms, the characters in PN will be involved in the making of a new society, and new lives for themselves.  What exactly this means is highly variable, and there is no one answer, but the next few sections will make a start at providing one for your group.

Setting & Themes

While PN is by default set at the end of the Roman Empire, it could very easily take place somewhere else.  Indeed, PN's version of history is highly fanciful, in order to make the setting more appropriate to the themes of the game.  Many other settings may work just as well.  Instead of placing your game in the European iron age, you could draft it as an atomic-apocalypse game in mid-western America.  Or perhaps it could be about religious monks who escape the corruptions of public life to create an ascetic retreat.  PN is nominally geared towards historically based settings (like Rome, Medieval France, or Feudal Japan), but adapting it to other periods can be done with some creativity and effort.

More important than the specific setting are some common themes.  These themes include the elements discussed above: legacies, trust, values, and abandoning an ordinary life.  More broadly, PN is a game about abandoning an old society and the creation of a new one in its place.   The new community need not even be physically isolated from the old: the point is rather that the characters are striving to create a bubble of civility in what is otherwise becoming an uncivilized world.

While these rules will typically assume the creation of a physically isolated community, with attention to politics, organization, and military matters, but many other interpretations main themes are possible.  For instance, the game could be about the creation of a center of learning during the dark ages, or the creation of civil pride in an Italian city-state.

PN does not really even have to be about creating a new society: it can instead center in some other way around the basic themes discussed above.  It could simply be about a merchant in Venice trying to expand his empire.  This option is equally viable, but will probably take a little more work.  Whatever route you want take, your entire group should decide together.


Characters

Each player in PRINCIPIA NOVAE, except for the Game Master, controls one character.  As part of the discussion about setting and themes (above), your group should decide what kinds characters it wants to play.  In other words, characters should not be made separately by each player, and then brought to the table.  Instead, they should be made specifically so that they can and will work together.  This is a game about new beginnings: if one character's beginning leads him away from the others, there's little point in playing.

At the same time, this does not mean that all characters must be blood relations or have absolute trust in one another.  The key is for the characters to have goals that are compatible if not outright shared.  Follow the steps below for basic instructions on creating a characters.  Once you're familiar with the system, feel free to follow the steps in any order.

1. Background

Think about the history of your character and the basics of who he is.  Ask yourself the following questions:

[*]Where is your character from? Is he from civilization, from a pagan tribe?  Is he local to where the campaign is set, or from somewhere else?  A city, a town, a village?

[*]Who was his family?  What class of society did they fit into: peasants, artisans, merchants, public servants, or nobility?  How well did they do, within their bracket, and what kind of upbringing did the character have; what kind of education?

[*]What has your character done with his life so far?  What have his occupation been?  Has he been in the army, an artisan, a farmer, a public servant?

[*]Finally, start thinking about his personality, and his physical appearance.  How does he interact with others?  Who does he like and who does he dislike, and why?
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2. Spirit

Spirit represents a character's sense of self; his confidence, will, and drive.  Spiritful people are often able accomplish great things in their life, while spiritless people are more ordinary, and seldom escape the life they were born into.

Spirit is a numerical resource that all characters have.  It can be gained and then spent in various ways.  During character creation, Spirit is used to buy all the different skills and abilities a character has, representing what he's been able to accomplish in his lifetime so far.   The amount of a Spirit that each player's character has to work with depends on the campaign: if the players want to control great larger-than-life characters, they should start with more Spirit.  Also, not all characters need start with the same amount.  A reasonable amount would be 40 points per character.

3. Attributes

All people have certain basic abilities, called attributes.  These attributes are fundamental skills that every person has to one degree or another, though some people are better than others.  There are eight attributes, which are as follows:

Acting - The ability to control your own behavior; to lie, to cover up your feelings, to pretend to be someone else.

Charm - The ability to interact well with other people, to leave a good impression, make friends, or to seduce.

Coordination - Kinesthetic ability.  Speed, reflex, and bodily control.  Useful for artists, warriors, pickpockets, and acrobats.

Empathy - Your ability to read other people's emotions, to understand your own, and to subtly affect either.

Fitness - Cardiovascular strength.  Fit people can run far, work hard, and survive in tough conditions.

Intellect - Abstract reasoning and logic, used to analyze battles, conduct business, draft laws, and solve puzzles.

Strength - Your limb strength and overall size and burliness.  Strong characters tire less easily, can do hard work, and come out on top in a fist fight.

All attributes are assumed to begin at level 3, this is ?average.?  First, shuffle points between the attributes to account for your character's heritage and upbringing.  Don't move more than five points in total, and don't set any attribute higher than 5 (and don't have more than one at this level).

You can spend three Spirit points to increase an attribute by one level.  This should mostly reflect your character's occupation or some training he's had.  A good guideline is to raise an attribute by one point if any of the character's occupations related to it; and two or three if it really depended on it.  For instance, a soldier should get a +1 to Strength, while a blacksmith gets +2 or +3.  Eight is the maximum level for any attribute.  Expect to spend twenty-five Spirit or less on attributes (you'll need to spend most of it on other things).

4. Skills

In addition to attributes, each character has skills that represent tasks he has become good at over his life.  In general, skills are more important than attributes.  

Administration
Agriculture
Argument
Brawling
Business
Carpentry
Combat
Engineering
Entertaining
Etiquette
Husbandry
Law & Custom
Leadership
Medicine
Orienteering
Ranged Weapons
Riding
Sailing
Smithing
Strategy
Surgery
Survival
Tactics

Spend Spirit to give your character skills and then raise them: each skill level costs three points.  These skills should reflect the upbringing and occupations of the character, as well as conscious effort he has put into developing something.  It would be typical to spend twenty to thirty points on skills.  Use the following table as a guideline for what kinds of skill levels a character might have:

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Lesser skill in a job 2 to 3 Skill used in childhood +1 to +2
Primary skill of a job 4 to 5 Character is an expert +1 to +3

6. Values

Values are beliefs that motivate a character to act. They can be traits that are valued in other people, morals, strong emotions, actions that are integral to the character's sense of self, true compulsions, or actions the character feels fated to perform.  Values are specific: they name or imply behaviors that the character feels compelled to engage in.  Emotions must be connected to a particular person, place, or organization; virtues and ethics must promote some specific kind of action, not simply ?moral behavior? in general or even adherence to a large set of rules.  

Values are rated numerically, so that larger ones are more important to the character: he considers them more crucial to live by.  When a character tries to act in accordance with his values, he is emotionally motivated to do well, and gains a bonus on his attempt (see the task Resolution section).  

As with skills, Spirit is spent to gain new values or increase old ones.  It costs two Spirit for one point of a value.  No character can have more than ten points in values total.  Most characters will have at least three different values, adding up to five or.  A lack of values translates into directionless and ennui: having few values is possible, but usually results in a boring character.

6. Traits

Traits describe the nuances of your character.  They name quirks of behavior, aspects of personality, and likes and dislikes of people and institutions.  They should not describe large-scale patterns of behavior, or anything that could be covered by a value: traits are nowhere near as serious or important to a character.  Also avoid taking traits that overlap each other.  Traits are important when your character interacts with other people.  They have no rating, and a character can have any number of them, though four to six would be typical.

7. Investments

Investments are commitments that a character has made for himself which he is emotionally invested in, and therefore driven to support.  They are shorter term than Values, not quite as intensely emotional, and deal with ends rather than means.  Investments can be made in made in projects, relationships, or institutions (in the latter two cases, preferably ones that may or may not fail and which therefore need support).  

Investments are created by ?spending? Spirit.  However, since Investments are serious emotional commitments, and Spirit represents ambition and drive, it is better to think of an Investment as a literal investment of Spirit.  And just as you would invest money at a bank, invested Spirit grows and can be reclaimed later.  

Every point of Spirit used creates an equivalent level of Investment.  There is no limit to an Investment's strength, and a character can have as many as is appropriate.  Generally, it is preferable to have large investments right from the beginning, and spending 10 to 15 points is appropriate during character creation.

8. Resources

Resources represent a characters monetary wealth and holdings.  Characters with many resources can pay for a variety of things more easily than others.  It costs three Spirit for every points of resources.  Resources also have a free element to them, akin to traits, called specialties.  A character must take two specialties at a time: one positive, one negative, outlining financial areas where the character does well and poorly.  A player can define as many specialties as he likes, though none should be more extreme than +3 or -1.

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[Jasper]

Task Resolution

When a character tries to accomplish something and there is doubt about whether or not he will succeed, the situation must be formally resolved with task resolution.  The identification of a task is the first step in its resolution, and the need for a one is usually made clear by a player stating a desire to accomplish something.  

Scale

Scale is primarily a measurement of how precisely the task is defined by the player.  A very precise action, like thrusting at someone with a sword, is precisely defined, and therefore of small scale.  But tasks need not be defined precisely.  Rather than stating exactly what the character intends to do, a player can instead focus more on what he intends to accomplish, and basically by what means (though this is often implied).  For instance, ?I attack my enemy.?  This kind of thing is at an intermediate scale.  Finally, large scale actions are very long and involved, and may even be going on while other actions are being carried out, e.g. ?During the next few months, I'll be building a stables next to the main lodge.?  There are no specific categories for scale: rather, it's a continuum which players and GM must simply have a sense of.

Determining scale is usually very easy, based on how a player states his character's intentions (as in the above examples).  Only occasionally will the GM need to explicitly ask about it.  If a player states precisely how his character is going about something, the task should be considered small, while if he leaves much to be defines later, it is probably larger in scale.

Usually, a group will have a shared sense of what scales should be used when.  Actions that are extremely important, and which have dire consequences, should usually be handled with a series of smaller tasks.  Similarly, actions that are interesting to the players, and which get them excited, should also be broken down more.  Less interesting tasks, where the players are concerned with results and not details, and those of less importance should be handled with larger tasks.

Stakes

It is important to know what exactly a character hopes to achieve in any task.  Stakes are one way of getting at this: simply consider the question, what does the character stand to lose if he fails?  A task with no stakes probably does not need to be a task at all: success can simply be assumed.  As with the other aspects of task definition, this is a question that usually need not be asked directly, or even discussed, if the answer is obvious.  On the other hand, occasionally asking this directly can also be useful, for it reinforces the idea (for both GM and players) that failure should come with consequences, and it may give the GM good ideas!

A second thing to consider is the idea of Quality, Efficiency, and Timeliness.  It relates not to what a character might lose, but what he hopes to accomplish.  Which of the three above items is of most concern to the character?  Usually, quality is the issue.  Occasionally, however, skilled effort can be assumed, and what is in question is really whether the work can be done in time, or with what resources exist.  Generally it will be obvious when this is the case, but it's worth pointing out, since the results of a task should reflect what it was in fact about.

Skills & Attributes

After the scale of a task is known, the players need to consider what skills and attributes the character will be employing in it.  There is always one skill or attribute that is primary in the character's attempt, and this is known as the primarily or main ability.  The main ability should be chosen based on what skill or attribute is most relevant to the task at hand.  Usually main abilities are skills, in part because they are more specific. Additional skills or attributes which are relevant to the task and could help the character, become ?secondary abilities.?  With rare exception, these are attributes if the main ability was a skill, or vice-versa (i.e. skills and attributes aren't both used as secondary abilities).  

Usually there is only one relevant secondary ability.  If there are more than one, the player must usually choose which to use.  However, he can also decide to use more than one by spending Spirit: each point spent allows one extra secondary ability to be brought into the task.  There is no limit on the number that can be employed, as long as they are all related to the task.  

Rolling

With the above elements defined, resolution can proceed.  Resolution turns on a die roll.  First, all of the character's abilities should be added together.  Then the player's character should take up a number of six sided dice equal to the main ability and roll them.  The dice that come up with a value of four or higher are then counted, and added on to the running total.  This is the final roll result.  What it means depends on how challenging the task was.

Difficulty

The challenge of a task is defined numerically, and is called the difficulty.  Most basically, the difficulty can be set as a static number by the GM to reflect the nature of the task or adverse conditions.  For a character to succeed at a task, his roll result must exceed this number.  If the GM thinks the difficulty is not static, and that there is some unpredictable aspect to it, he can define it dice as well, which he rolls just like a player does, counting the dice that come up four or higher.  This becomes the difficulty.  The more random the GM wants the difficulty of a task to be, the more dice he includes.

Some times, a character will not be opposed merely by the inherent difficulty of what he attempts, but by another person directly.  This is called a contest.  In contests, an  environmental difficulty set by the GM is not necessary.  Instead, the GM rolls for the other character, using his attributes and skills, just as the player does.  A roll result is  found for each character, and whoever has the higher result wins.

Opposing characters in a contest generally use the same attributes and skills, since these are defined by the nature of the task.  If the two parties are opposing each other through different kinds of actions, different abilities may be used however.  If use of the same abilities seem necessary but one character doesn't have it, the GM may allow him to use a related one with a penalty, but will more likely rule that the character simply has no main ability in the contest (and thus rolls no dice).

In some contests, one character will have some added difficulty from the environment, or if his task is different and harder than his opponent's.  In this case, the GM adds dice or a static difficulty on to the opponent's roll, so instead of rolling three dice, he might roll five.  Thus the distinction between contest and non-contest is not absolute.

As with all the other aspects of a task, the difficulty or contest opposition must be determined before any rolls are made.  Characters may not necessarily estimate difficulty accurately however, and the GM may or may not make players fully aware of them either.

Values

Values push characters to actions with strong emotional force.  As a result, whenever they try to follow or support their drives through action, they get a bonus to their roll attempt.  The criteria for getting this award is that the intended action must be recommended by the value, or strongly related to it.  If the scale of the task is large and no precise action is declared, then the value must potentially be in support of the goal, and must be conceivably applicable to the task.  Some time it will be the GM who notes the potential use of a value, other times the player.  In either case, both should agree on how it is relevant to the task.

When the player makes the task resolution roll, the character's primary ability is effectively raised by the value of whatever value is relevant: each level of value grants the player one extra die to roll, which acts just like all other dice.  If more than one value is relevant, the effects are cumulative, with more dice being used.  

Using Spirit

In addition to allowing the use of additional secondary abilities, Spirit can also be spent to grant a direct bonus to the roll.  Every point spent effectively raises the primarily ability by one point.  A player can spend as much Spirit as he wants on a given roll.

Winning

Once the rolls have been made, and the task deemed a success or failure, the actual detailed results of that task must be decided on.  This is where a lot of the task definition will be put good use.

Let's first consider what happens when a character is successful.  After all rolls are made, the GM must narrate what happens: how the character wins, what the effects of it are, and so on.  What is to guide him in this narration?  First there is the roll itself.  Look at the ?margin of success,? the difference between the player's roll and the difficulty.  The higher the margin is, the more favorable the results of the task should be for the character.  Consider the following guidelines:

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Margin           Result
1-2                Character gets the bare minimum of what he hoped for, and perhaps with a minor
                 complication, indicating more work ahead.
3-5                The character does well, and things turn out as well as he wanted.
6+                 Things go amazingly well; the character accomplished more than he set out to do, or
                  the results have a greater impact than expected.

Remember the issues of Quality, Efficiency, and Timeliness.  Which of these three was most in question?  If the character did very well, this is probably the area in which his success will most strongly be seen.

The other important aspect of narrating a success is Scale.  If the task was based around a tightly defined action, elaboration on the desired effect should be minimal, and the scope of its effects limited, even if the character did very well.  Small scale actions tend to be  cases of binary success or failure.  On the other hand, very large-scale tasks are usually only vaguely defined in terms of intent, not specific action.  Therefore, the exact method by which the character got his success needs to be described, post hoc.  Even the end results of a large-scale task are usually less well defined, and what happens needs to be decided on: the roll indicates that it's a good result, but not what it is, or what effects it may have.

While the GM often takes the lead role in narrating the aftermath of a task, players can get involved as well.  This is particularly the case in larger tasks, where the character's actions need to be imagined, although the result is known.  Players should be given the ability to describe what their characters do and what the immediate effects are.  (Some players enjoy doing this, while others do not, and some tasks lend themselves more to player involvement.  The GM should always give the opportunity, however.)

Losing

Just as with winning, the GM must narrate the ends results of a failed task.  Again consider the Scale of the task, but also think about the Stakes, as originally defined.  This begins with Quality, Efficiency, and Timeliness, since whichever was most important should probably be the area in which the character fails, or which proved impossible to realize.

More important than the way in which the character failed, however, are the consequences of that failure.  Hopefully the question ?what does the character stand to lose if he fails?? was considered or had (at least one) obvious answer.  If it was formally answered by the player, so much the better, but don't be afraid to use the answer merely as a stepping stone for a more detailed, and less expected resolution.

One thing to keep in mind when narrating losses or victories, is that task resolution does not necessarily map cleanly onto character performance.  Thus, even though the roll incorporates character skills and attributes, the narration need not address this: a high roll could indicate favorable circumstances that happen to come together, while a poor one could reveal that the task was in fact much harder than the character though, perhaps totally beyond his abilities.

Order of Action

In fast-paced scenes, when a lot is going on and many different character all want to act, the question of order arises: which character gets to act next?  Most basically, consider whether it really matters.  Even though many characters may be in the same location, any given character will probably only be affecting some of the other people present.  In this way, you can break task-filled scenes down into more manageable chunks.

The second consideration is simply what seems reasonable.  How quickly could a given character leap into action or respond to what's going on around him?  Thirdly, think about scale.  Although all character in a scene should usually be working on basically the same scale, there will still be differences between their actions.  The character performing the briefer task should generally roll first, since he may interrupt or influence someone  who's taking much longer.

Beyond this, task resolution itself must dictate the order in which characters act. If two or more characters are trying to do something at basically the same time, then Timeliness becomes a part of the Stakes for the task.  Each character should roll normally, in a contest with the other characters.  Whomever wins can be deemed to have acted first.


Injury

Some tasks will include a character's physical well being as part of the Stakes (a short hand way of referring to such tasks is to label them ?dangerous?).  A sword fight is obviously dangerous, but so is spending a night in the freezing cold, hiking along a sheer cliff, or visiting someone with a contagious disease.  Although dangerous tasks are often handled at a small scale, like other serious conflicts, they need not be.

If a character fails a dangerous task, he will acquire an injury.  Injuries have intensities, and the higher the intensity, the more penalties the character will suffer.  The basic level of an injury is equal to the margin of failure (the difference between the difficulty and the roll result) but depends on the Danger Rating.

Danger & Safety Rating

The Danger and Safety ratings are flip sides of the same coin.  If a character is unlikely to be harmed in a task, the task will have a positive Safety rating.  If harm seems certain, it will have a high Danger rating.  Nominally dangerous tasks have neither (or zero in both).

The Safety rating is generally more frequently used.  It indicates a reduction to the margin of failure for the purpose of calculating injury.  Thus, it is possible to lose a somewhat dangerous task, and yet not get hurt.  Common examples would be a friendly wrestling match, walking through a swamp, or fighting while wearing armor. Totally safe tasks, where injury is impossible, have infinitely high Safety ratings.

The Danger rating is conversely employed when a character wins a task.  It indicates the margin of success necessary to avoid injury: subtract the Danger from the margin, and if the result is positive, the character receives an injury of that level.  A Danger rating could be used to model any situation where basic success is not enough to avoid the inherent dangers of the situation.  For instance, a character might push a friend out of the way of a charging animal, and be successful, but still be injured himself.  Usually, Danger ratings are used more at larger scales, particularly in battle.  The players may all roll to see how easily they beat some bandits, knowing it to be easy for them.  But it makes sense that unless they perform amazingly well, their characters will still walk away with a few bumps and scrapes.

Like the rest of task definition, Danger and Safety ratings should be made clear before any dice are rolled, and players should usually have some clear idea of what their characters could be getting in to before they commit (perhaps subject to the results of an appropriate task).

Recording Injuries

If a character does end up taking an Injury, it is recorded on the character sheet in the appropriate box, starting with a brief description of the Injury, including its nature and what part of the body received it.  For example, ?sword cut to the shin? or ?frostbite - hands and feet.?  If the nature or location of an Injury is not clear from the task itself (and it often won't be), those details will have to be made up when the task's conclusion is narrated, either by the GM, or left up to the player.  This is particularly necessary for larger-scale tasks, where many different kinds of injuries are conceivable.  For instance, a character who befalls an injury while trekking in the wilderness could have taken ill, gotten frostbite, fallen down a ravine and twisted his leg, or be suffering from malnourishment.  Use your imagination to name an Injury that seems appropriate.  In some cases, specifics are less necessary, and something like ?battle wounds? is sufficient.

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Injuries            S         Lvl
cut to left leg     W          4
bruised ribs                   2

Pain: 2              Total Untreated: 6

General Effects of Injury

Every Injury that a character has results in a penalty to any task where it might reasonably have an effect. This penalty is applied directly to the character's roll result.  If the penalty exceeds the character's combined abilities, he is incapable of even attempting his intended action.  The GM will decide when an Injury comes into play.  Usually, this is any physical activity that uses the affected area.

At the bottom of the table is a place for recording Pain.  Pain is a measurement of the discomfort a character is experiencing thanks to his Injuries.  A character gets one level of Pain for every three levels of Injury he has in total. Pain results in a penalty that is applied to every action the character tries to perform, whether it has anything to do with the injured areas or not.

Worsening & Basic Treatment

Injuries can have other effects beyond task penalties however, and may be life threatening, particularly in the short term.  Like tasks, recovery can be handled at a variety of scales.  Usually a group will want to be fairly consistent about how it deals with Injuries, but this could vary with the specific case.

At the smallest scale, each Injury is considered individually.  The first step of treatment is short-term ?first aid,? which stabilizes an Injury and keeps it from getting immediately worse.  There is a middle column on the Injury table marked with an ?S? for status.  Injuries that will get worse without treatment are marked with a ?W? (for ?worsening?) as soon as they are acquired.  Physical trauma is the prime example of this, through bleeding, but it is not the only one.  Only injuries which cause Pain, i.e. of level three or higher, will worsen over the short term.

The rate at which an Injury worsens depends on its nature.  Bleeding wounds increase by about one level every ten minutes of game time.  Things like exposure and disease may worsen much more slowly.  Basic treatment of an Injury consists of a medicine or surgery task.  The difficulty is equal to the level of the Injury.  A character can work on himself, but of course suffers the effects of Pain.  A successful roll result changes the ?W? to a ?T? for ?treated.?

If Injuries are not being dealt with at the very small scale, worsening and basic treatment can be ignored most of the time.  Only if medical assistance is not on hand does worsening generally need to be considered.  If it is, increase Injury levels normally.  If a character's wounds are severe, and there is doubt about the success of basic treatment, a larger-scale task should be rolled for, just as before.  This should be considered a task that is Dangerous, but for the patient rather than the surgeon. It should have a Danger rating equal to the character's worst wound, and a low difficulty (depending on available equipment and other circumstances).

Shock

Even is his individual Injuries are small, a character can only take but so much abuse before suffering more serious immediate consequences.  Whenever a character receives and Injury, he must perform a task using Fitness to stay conscious.  The difficulty of the task is his current number of untreated (not worsening) wounds, minus three.  If he fails, he goes into shock and passes out, otherwise, nothing happens.  A character who passes out can recover in about an hour, unless his injuries are very severe (see the next section), or when enough of his Injuries have been treated so that he can succeed in the same kind of Fitness task.

Recovery

Once Injuries are no longer worsening, they can begin to heal.  This can be a long process however.  Characters generally heal at a rate of one Injury level per week.  If one has three or fewer Injuries total, he can heal on his own without medical help.  However, with more Injuries, his condition will actually downgrade, worsening by one level per week. (In either case, the player can choose where Injury levels are removed from, or added to.)

When a character needs medical care to recover, someone with surgery or medicine (depending on the type of Injury) needs to perform a task to heal the character.  The task difficulty is equal to the total number of Injuries, plus five dice.  With basic success (margin of 1-2), the character remains the same during the time period covered by the task.  With a good success or better (margin 3+), he heals at his normal rate.  With a failure, his condition degrades.  If through medical help a character's total Injuries are reduced to three, he begins to heal on his own, and further medical help is not required.  

When a character accumulates ten or more Injuries, he comes close to death.  A medical or surgical roll is required, as above, with the same difficulty.  If successful, the character is stabilized, and will not get worse.  However, even if stabilized, he will not get better.  For this, he must spend Spirit: every point reduces his Injuries by one level.  He still cannot heal faster than the nominal rate of one level per week however.

Patient Condition

While characters with a few Injuries receive penalties to their actions, those who have been hurt badly may be more limited.  If a character's Pain equals or exceeds his Fitness, he should generally be bed ridden.  If he tries to be very active, healing will not occur.  Of course, a character with sufficient Injuries will be effectively crippled anyway.  Someone with twice his Fitness in Pain will not only be confined to a bed, but remain unconscious until he heals, except perhaps for brief moments.

There are several ways to escape the effects of pain however.  The first is to spend Spirit.  Each point spent eliminates the effects of one point of Pain for about an hour.  The second includes any number of mundane treatments.  Medication is the most potent example, but lesser treatments like a good bath and massage also exist.  A successful medicine task, with difficulty around five plus five dice, can allow the creation of a -1 or -2 pain reliever (depending on the margin of success).

...

[Jasper]

Values

Values describe strong motivations that impel a character to action.  When a character tries to accomplish what seems right or necessary, he makes a greater effort than usual.  Therefore, when a character tries to act in accordance with a value, he is more likely to succeed and gets a bonus to task resolution: his player rolls an extra number of dice equal to the value's level.

Values can be employed whenever a character tries perform the kind of actions they name or imply.  They can be used repeatedly, as often as they seem relevant.  More than one value can be used at the same time if they both apply to the task at hand, and their effects are cumulative.

If a character is doing an action which he cannot fail at, and it is therefore not a task, he may still benefit from his values.  If an action or a decision is truly momentous and has significant consequences to it, a character who follows his values, is rewarded with an amount of Spirit.  This represents the character's feeling that what he did was right or necessary.  Usually only one points is given.  For life-altering decisions, the GM can decide to award more, up to five points.  A GM may also award a point of Spirit for a series of lesser decisions.  This use of values is much less common than obtaining bonuses at tasks.  It should only be employed if the decision faced by the character was a real one (two choices were both appealing) and if there significant consequences for it (i.e. it was not trivial).  Occasionally, a character will make a great decision by entering into a task.  In this case, he should get the extra Spirit, which he can choose to spend in the task if he likes (see the section on Spirit).  

Conflicting Values

If a character has two or more values that run counter to one another in some circumstance, their effects tend to cancel each other out.  If he acts in accordance with one value that is lower to an opposing one, he gets no bonus dice.  If the situation is reversed, he gets the difference.  A player can prevent this effect by lowering one of the relevant values (the one being acted against) by one or more points: in this case, the normal bonus is received.  The generation of Spirit through major decision making is not affected by conflicting values: the usual Spirit is still awarded, regardless.

Altering Values

In addition to the above mechanic, there are two other ways that values can change.  First, a player can choose to lower any of his character's values at any time, by as much as he sees fit.  This corresponds, of course, to a change in the character's beliefs and feelings.  values can be raised, or a new one acquired, with the expenditure of Spirit.  Every two points of Spirit raises a value by one level.  


Investments

An Investment is an allocation of Spirit into a relationship or project that a character is trying advance.  They represent emotional commitment.  Investments can be made not just during character creation, but at any time during play.  One point of Spirit is used to create an Investment at level one, or to raise an already existing one by an equal amount.

Investments should only be made in projects, institutions, or relationships which could possibly break up or fail.  Usually, they will be things that the character is himself striving to help, but an Investment could be made in something the character considers permanent, like his religious group.  There is no set limit to the number of Investments a character may have, or to their size, though most people choose to Invest significantly in but a few projects.  Characters also do not have to have any Investments.  Having some is usually a good idea, because it gives a character direction, but too strong an Investment is also dangerous.  Of course, character may make strong Investments despite this fact.

Returns

Most Investments are also defined by a finite time span, or some understanding of when the project will be completed. There are two possible outcomes then: either the project comes to fruition and the character has succeeded in his efforts, or it fails.  In the former case, the character has achieved his goal, and becomes more able to put his work towards similar things in the future.  Therefore, when an Investment succeeds, it is dissolved, and the character gets back twice its level in Spirit; that is, twice as much Spirit as he put in.  If the Investment was made in just the first stage of a larger project, the character might immediately reinvest that Spirit into the next Investment.

Some Investments may lack definite end points at which success can be defined.  With them, stability is the norm but the character may still receive a return.  If the target of the Investment improves or grows notably by the character's actions, the character will receive a few Spirit points.  This amount depends on the size of the Investment and the of the improvement; one-third the value of the Investment for a major change is reasonable.

The other possibility is that the Investment fails.  The relationship ends, the institution changes for the worse or is destroyed, the project doesn't achieve what it set out to.  In this case, the Investment also dissolves, but with no return for the character: the Spirit he put in is lost.  This is an emotional blow for the character, and he'll have to slowly work his way back up, in terms of Spirit, to where he was before, either by making successes out of other Investments, or by acting in accordance with his Values.

An Investment can also be consciously eliminated by a player, before failure occurs.  The Investment must slowly be reduced in size over a period of time.  With each ?withdrawal,? the Investment is lowered by two points: one is returned to the character as Spirit, the other is lost (if there is an odd number, the last point goes back to the character).  This process represents a gradual loss of faith in a project, and should generally only occur with projects that have no definite end, or those which are very long-term.  Most Investments will have to be allowed to fail, even if the character knows they are doomed.


Social Interactions

Social interactions between multiple character is handled partially through some specific rules in Principia Novae.  These rules begin with guidelines for how two characters will tend to view one another, known as a reaction.  Reactions color all the interactions two people have with one another: they serve as direct modifiers in social tasks, and should also inform how the players play their characters.  

Whenever two people are about to interact, the reaction needs to be considered: it is defined numerically, with a base-line of zero which represents relative ambivalence.   The reaction of each character towards the other is calculated separately.  First consider the traits of the character: if a trait suggests that he will view the person in a favorable light, the reaction rating goes up by one; if it suggests the opposite, the reaction goes down by one.  Do the same for the character's values, but modify the reaction by the level of the relevant value itself.  

This is the basic reaction rating, and is especially important when two people meet for the first time.  Of course, characters do not always know everything about one another immediately.  In the first minute of a conversation, when introductions are made, only styles of speech, dress, and body movement should be used as tests against values and traits.  As the conversation progresses, more may become relevant however.  The Evaluate skill, used with Empathy can be used to help a character determine more about his target's values and traits.  The difficulty should depend on how familiar the character is with the other's culture or class, the formality and general mood of the meeting, and to what degree the other person is consciously trying to hide himself (or a relevant trait).

Reactions in Tasks

Reactions are not straight-jackets, but they do more than merely suggest appropriate behavior for players.  When two characters interact in any kind of social contest, their reactions to each other directly modify the roll result.  How this modifier is applied depend son the situation, and what the stakes of the task are.  If the two parties are trying to take advantage of one another, they are not attempting good relations, so the modifier is not used.  If, however, they are trying to communicate effectively, even if distrustful and at some level attempting to outdo one another, this communication will suffer.  The modifiers are added together and applied to each character's roll.  Obviously good relations with another character can be a powerful force for accomplishing things.  If effective communication is only a small part of a task's stakes, the GM may apply just a fraction of the reaction modifiers.

Changing Reactions

Reactions are initially calculated just from the compatibility or incompatibility of traits and values.  However, they can change as time goes on, depending on the two characters' actions.  An act of good will should modify a reaction positively, usually by one point, whereas an insult or attack will harm it.  Actions that are in accord with someone else's values, and which either affect that person or are at least witnessed by them, will have a greater affect on the reaction: if a kind who values loyalty witnesses a stranger in his land showing loyalty to his own master, the king will look favorably on him.  In these cases, a reaction change of two or three is usually more appropriate.  Actions made in support of investments can have a similar effect.

All of the rules for determining reactions are guidelines however, and how a character views other people is ultimately up to his player.  The reaction rules make one mindful of arbitrary likes or dislikes though, and may help to prevent characters from unrealistically befriending everyone whom could theoretically help them.  For the most part, players are encouraged to modify their characters' reactions up or down by a few points as they see fit.  Drastic alterations to reactions are likely to be rarer, and should be explained to the other players and GM.

Investments in Relationships

Since investments can be made in relationships, some characters will be positively striving to become on better terms with other people in the world.  Cultivating a relationship in PN should be no different from doing so in real life.  One must be available in times of need, be respectful of differences, and so on.  Building up a relationship so that the other person has a reaction of level ten or more can often be viewed as the end-point of relationship investment.


Spirit

Spirit is a numerical resource that every character has.  It represents a inner drive, confidence, and will.  Someone with a high Spirit will be able to set goals for himself and accomplish them, and pull through hard times.  It is the nature of the main characters of PN that they have high Spirit, compared to the average citizen: it is what makes them interesting and worthy of a story.  Spirit has many different uses in the game.  Many of them have already been described in other sections of these rules, but they will be summarized below.

Spirit can be spent to give a bonus in task resolution.  Each point spent effectively raises the character's main ability by one point, giving an extra die to roll and a +1 to the result.  If the character has no main ability in a task (he is in a contest with some other character, using a skill he does not have), Spirit can still be used.

Values can be increased or created with Spirit.  Every two points of Spirit raises a value by one level.

Characters who are critically wounded use Spirit to heal.  If he has ten or more injuries, a character must spend one Spirit to remove each injury, at a maximum rate of one week per injury.  This represents him tenaciously hanging on to life.  Once he has fewer than ten injuries total, he can no longer spend Spirit in this way, and must heal with the help of a doctor.  

Finally, Spirit is also used to increase a character's skills and attributed.  While characters generally begin as full adults, with a whole range of skills and life experiences behind them, they can still continue to learn and grow; indeed they may well have to.  To increase a skill, three points of Spirit must be spent, while increasing an attribute requires five.  Acquiring a new skill also takes three points.  This expenditure of Spirit represents the character's own commitment to advancement: the effort he puts into training, and the focus he has on the task.


Resources

As characters go about trying to accomplish their goals, they may be said to have three tools at their disposal, broadly speaking.  First, they may take direct action themselves, using their talents and abilities.  Second, they may call on friends and allies to pull strings, get them information, or take any number of other actions.  These tools have already been described by the rules so far.  The final tool is that of possessions, which are called resources.  Resources include money, property, business investments, and physical objects held by a character.  They give a character temporal power, and allow him to accomplish things on a scale that might otherwise be beyond him.

A character's resources are rated numerically to represent all the possible weight he can throw around to get financial things done.  Like skills, resources are bought at character creation and increased later for three Spirit per level.  A typical farmer would have a resource rating of 1, while a senator might have 15.  A typical freeman or soldier might have 2 or 3.

The Uses of Resources

Resources represent what finances a character can mobilize to get things done for him.  It also indicates his general standard of living and how much cash he has ready access to.  Characters with a lot of resources can buy anything that amuses them and not worry about it, while low-resource characters have to scrape the purse to eat a good meal and can never afford to undertake big projects.

Resources are used in task resolution just like skills and attributes.  They can be primary or secondary, as the case warrants.  Often tasks are centered primarily around resources, and tend towards the large scale more often than other kinds of tasks.  As with all tasks though, the exact handling of resources is up to player preference.  Some groups will want to keep the scale in-line with the rest of the game, with occasional forays into real ?nitty-gritty,? while others will prefer to keep resources firmly in the background, as distant tools.  Either method, and anything in between, is fine.  

The difficulties for resource-related tasks operate just like other difficulties.  Keep in mind that the average person (not character) would have a resource rating of 2.  The purchase of everyday items like food should be trivial for such people.  Acquiring a new horse though, is very difficult, and purchasing a villa impossible.  Wealthy characters can not only afford specific items, but set larger projects in motion, and arrange things with relative ease.

Spending Resources

Beyond normal use of resources in tasks, they can also be spent permanently.  Spending a point or more of resources represents total liquidation of part of a character's wealth.  This cash can then be put towards some purpose.  For every point of resource being spent, the character's effective resource rating is two points higher, in the current task only.  After this, the points are gone, the character's wealth permanently reduced (unless he finds a way to increase it again).  

Specialties

If a player likes, he can define specialties for his character's resources.  A specialty describes some particular sub-set of resources that the character either has a lot of, or has very few of.  Specialties are rated such that the number modifies the character's total resource score.  Every positive specialty a character has must be balanced by a negative one: for instance, ?+1 merchant holdings,? ?-1 villa.?  These modifiers are then applied as the situation warrants.  Specialties should not be larger than +3 or -3.

The Decline of Resources

PM is about the fall of society as it presently exists.  One not-insignificant aspect of this collapse is the steady decline in the usefulness of resources.  When currency means nothing, what good will a thousand coins do you?  Over the course of the game, all characters' resource scores should gradually be lowered, bit by bit.  Those who actively try to defend them may have some success, but ultimately, major holdings by wealthy characters are probably doomed.  Redefining a character's resources in terms that are applicable to the new world requires actual in-game actions, or buying resources using spirit.  In general, it is good practice for characters to use their resources as much as possible early on, because the chance will soon be gone forever.

[Jasper]

That's it.  It's been a slowly maturing project, borrowing much from some earlier games which have been dropped by the way side.  My main inspiration, in case anyone wants to know, is from a series of historical fiction novels by Jack Whyte, which cover king Arthur and Camelot as though it were a colony set up by Romans at the fall of the empire.

I'm envisioning play with a lot of planning and player input.  After all, the whole scenario is a big "okay, here's the situation, how do you react" GM setup (like the kind advised for use with TroS for instance).

PN is a game I want to develop very fully.  Although posting the entire document to the Forge is not the way to make money off a game :)  I do entertain notions of at least selling some supplements online if not the whole game.  Even if free, I plan to make it available in a carefully arranged and illustrated PDF, after many revisions and playtests (so...as close to professional as possible even if not in fact).

This is a first draft, though I always like to make my drafts virtually playable and not just some vague rules on notebook paper (Peter Molyneux, who designs computer games, always advises having playable betas, and I agree).  Many things could be explained more consicely I think, a few things like skills are still pretty up in the air, and examples are sorely needed.   But the core game is down.  I'm open to it changing a lot though (as long as it does what I want it too, right?).

Some (semi-)specific Questions:

[*]Will the methods of defining a task be useful?  I'm talking about scale, stakes, danger/safety rating.  Are these things players need help with, or is this superfluous, or better left to a "GM's advice" section?  Is the use of scale clear from the rules, in as much as IIEE goes?

[*]Are the injury rules too much?  If you think so, you should have seen the original draft!  Hoo-wee -- somehow I kept drifting off into GURPS land, and I may have done so again.  It's the one area of the game where I've really nailed down how you do the relevant tasks, and have codified a lot which is elsewhere left up to the players (just in having different categories of wound for instance).  I guess I somehow feared that people wouldn't know how to work it.  Is it necessary?

[*]What's your take on the task resolution system? I asked about this in a previous post, and I'm mostly satisfied with it, thanks to a nice suggestion by Mike Holmes.  I might yet make primaries more significant than secondaries, but that's a question too: does that distinction sound useful, and is it explained well in the text? (I know examples would be useful.)

[*]Are resources and their uses defined sufficiently?  I was erring away from doing something like the injury rules when I wrote them, thinking most people would know what to do, more or less.

[*]The biggie: the whole spirit/values/investment system.  What kind of behavior do you think this kind of reward system will promote?  Will it, as I hope, promote empassioned actions on the short term, while on the longer term also give the players a strong motivation to see through their character's schemes?  I considered having the act of striving towards an investment be rewarded but I thought that rewarding actual results would be more interesting.  As much as SAs in TRoS tell the GM where the game should go, I thought investments (as well as values to a lesser extent) should do the same in PN.
[/list:u]

Of course, any other feedback is also warmly welcomed.

[Edited for some typos.]

[John Harper]

Jasper,

I haven't digested the whole piece yet, but I wanted to say I love Danger/Safety ratings. It's an elegant way to deal with all kinds of "tough victory" situations or to model the hardships suffered when attaining a long-term goal.

It works especially well with the scale rules you have. A player can decide to take a shortcut through the Dark Swamps to get to his destination, make a single roll to cover the journey, and instantly find out how much worse for wear he is when he arrives.

You could use this for a charge against a mass of pikemen, mountain climbing in a blizzard, or... I could go on and on. Very nice mechanic. Bravo.

[Jasper]

Thanks very much John, glad you liked it.  Your examples were just the kinds of things I was thinking about.  

For the most part, danger/safety grew as a logical consequence of scale: not just small-scale operations feature danger, so it needs to be a possibility mechanically; but talking a long walk isn't like being in a battle, so there needed to be a way to scale it.  Simple cut-off points seemed the most straightforward way to do it.  A nice side-effect was the elimination of the "what about armor?" question which I was probably going to just ignore anyway. But what does armor do?  Makes fighting safer.  Then the universality of the system dawned on me.

In general, I think that's a major beneift of identifying and codifying elements of task/conflict resolution that are normally just left up in the air:  the "winging-it" judgments that a GM might make are layed down in and orderly fashion, and then you realise that they can all fit together cohesively.  One of the things I hate about big systems is that much of the system is frequently special-case rules, when something more broad would be a hell of a lot easier to use.