Servitude for Wuthering Heights

[Paul Czege]

 This Message was edited by: Paul Czege on 2001-07-31 14:07 ]

[Philippe Tromeur]

Hello Paul

The idea is that the player characters are the slaves of the wealthy household of a shah or sultan. I was shooting for complex interrelationships between the slaves, partly based on fluctuations in their favor with the family, and their credibility with the other slaves.

That's an original campaign idea, though I think it's more suited to a one-shot long session.

It's really just two additions to the rules, the first of which is a Favor trait. Favor is a die that ranges between d4 and d20. As a character's Favor fluctuates, the size of the die is adjusted upward or downward. The Favor die is added to the result of any Despair roll, and subtracted from the result of any Rage roll.

Personally, I don't think using modifiers is a good idea (especially random modifiers). The absence of modifiers in Cthulhu also shocked me when I was younger, but I realized how much this absence speeds up and clarifies the play of the game. The first drafts of WH used to differentiate the difficulties of actions but I suppressed the rules after playtest, realising I never bothered using them. Same for the differentiation of damage between different weapons.

As for Favor, I'd prefer the use of another d100 attribute with some special effects, and I don't even know if this attribute is necessary. (I was thinking about adding "damnation" for a gothic setting and "honour" for "Oriental Tragedies" but I still wonder if they're so useful).

The second addition to the rules is cantraps, emotionally charged blessings or curses, stolen basically from The Dying Earth quickstart rules. Roll below Despair, modified by Favor, to deliver a cantrap. So the most despairing and least favored and influential slaves are the most effective with cantraps.

Looks like my rules for ghosts, except ghost's Rage and Despair dwindle as they used their dirty tricks on mortals. Also, the French version has some rules for Weather Control, a superpower every real romantic character possess (it rains when they're sad, there's thunder when they're angry, etc) and there are optional rules for "weather duels" in one of the Tragedies included in the printed version.

I was planning also to modify the Problems table, to remove things irrelevant to the situation like the problem of being Irish, and introduce other Problems like Kleptomania.