Augury - Fleaux!

In my last Kickstarter rampage I fell victim to Fleaux!, a wonderful French RPG (you can find the original french version here) that seems to me to be a mix of Black Hack (roll under attribute) with Warhammer Fantasy.

In Fleaux! (which means ‘scourge’ or ‘plague’) you play with criminals and outcasts at the edges of civilization, trying to survive in a 17^th or 18^th century fantasy world that just suffered a massive civil war. There are ruins, devastation, and opportunity aplenty for rascals like you to get rich.

The B&W art and layout are flavourful and beautiful, with a total Warhammer Fantasy vibe. I say Warhammer because while the world is going down in misery and war, you get a sense that you can dive into it, face its challenges, and come out rich. It is not as satirical as the original Old Word, nor as hopeless as Mörk Borg (which actually is so nihilistic that I can’t stop laughing while reading it… I do love dark humor). The cover art of Fleaux! is one of the best in the OSR.

The rules are ridiculously simple and inspired by many of the best tropes of the OSR. You have six attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Erudition, Charisma, Guts, Melee, and Shooting). Origins are Human or Halfling, Dwarf, Elf, Goblin, and Ogre-Blooded. You can roll or choose one. Each Origin has a d6 table where you find where your grew up (and receive an attribute bump of +1). For example, your Dwarf might have received her education “under the blows of the mine guardian’s instructors”, gaining a +1 to Melee. After that you roll your crime, which basically defines why you run from home. Perhaps you were accused of making a pact with a demon, or of bribing a royal office. The entries provide a nice hook for each character.

Now we roll to see how your survived, which defines your Profession. Your can select Resourcefulness, Isolation, Violence or Knowledge. Each one opens a table with a row of professions, which are occupation-style names like smuggler, mercenary, barber-surgeon (yes, there is a ratcatcher). A profession gives your another +1 do an attribute, plus a small advantage. Mercenaries, for example, increases his damage die by one, while barber-surgeons can restore hit points with a successful check.

In Fleaux! your hit points are determined by your Strength, and damage is abstract, usually fixed at d6. Your equipment is determined by how much money you have, as well as your career (and thankfully there is a simple rule for upkeep, which I always find useful). Finally, you have Willpower, which is a Usage Die rule used for special actions and to resist certain effects.

Fleaux! uses a simple 10 level progression. Character gain XP at a pace set by the referee. Leveling up gives you small +1 bonus to stats and HPs. At certain levels you might gain other benefits, like a second profession, or talents. The last ones are like feats. I quite like the fact that in Fleaux! you gain your first talent at 2^nd level. That is nice because it allows players to first learn the rules and play a little with the game, before selecting mechanical benefits. The fact that you have to choose talent later means that character creation is a lot faster and more immersive. That said, there are only 2 pages of talents and they are easy to understand.

Next are the rules. As I said, these are pretty simple and intuitive. Roll below your attribute to succeed, 1s are criticals and 20s are fumbles. You have 2 actions per round and Fleaux! uses Advantage and Disadvantage (made famous by 5E). We also get the full details on Willpower, which is used, for example, when you want to cast spells or when your want to do 2 actions of the same type in a turn (such as attacking twice). Losing all your Willpower triggers a panic roll (which can be quite deadly). Combat is straightforward: roll below your Melee or Shooting and if you succeed roll damage. You can dodge or parry. Armor grants damage resistance and shields grant Advantage against melee attacks (I do miss a rule for shields allowing you to defend better against ranged attacks). Falling below 0 hit points means that you are out of combat and possibly dead. Fleaux! uses a Helpless table to determine (after combat) the fate of your outcast (it reminds me of the great Roll the Body rule from DCC RPG). You might have survived with some damage, a scar, a permanent injury, or you just died.

Fleaux! characters are scum, but tough scum, so we have rules for short and long rests. We also get 2 pages on Firearms, because this is the frigging Modern Age! There are also a few guidelines on how black powder and sorcery are a dangerous (bot exploitable) combination. And speaking of the Devil, sorcery is next. Spells in Fleaux! might misfire and exhausting your Willpower will trigger a Chaos Revenge roll (which is basically a slow death spiral table, with the classical possibility of a daemon dragging you screaming to another dimension). The spells are are small and flavourful. There is nothing so simple (and boring) as “deal X damage to Y”. For example, there are spells to make your blood turn to acid, or to leave your reflection locked in a mirror, so you can spy on others. After that we get “charms, curses and other incantations”, which give some minor spells that are equally interesting. Fleaux! also covers Alchemy, allowing the party to forage for monster parts and create elixirs (without going into big “shopping lists” as some other rules do). This part of the book ends with a few guidelines for enchanted items. This might be the weakest part of Fleaux! because we only get basic rules on how enchanted items work (Mörk Borg’s list of awesome magic items seems to me to be a better approach).

Next, Fleaux! presents us with a complete bestiary and an adventure. I always believe that new RPGs tells us more about themselves through adventures than through rules or setting and Bloodbath at Castle Kragstein is a fine example of that philosophy. It hits home with all the core points of Fleaux! Bloodbath is an open-ended scenario where PCs start as prisoners (for the crimes rolled during character creation) sent to a forlorn prison in the mountains. The location is going to be the stage not only of a barbarian raid but also of a fell necromancy ritual by cultists hidden among the prison’s wardens. It falls to the PCs to survive this gauntlet (and yes, they can ally/betray/interact with all factions, which is a plus!).

Fleaux! has a setting with an Old World-like vibe (but here the Not-Holy Not-Roman Empire crumbled due to civil war). There is a very brief description of each region, just a paragraph, followed by 6 adventure seeds. Interestingly the main threat appears to be an elven empire from the East that employs changelings as infiltration agents (I loved it). There is considerable racial tension between Dwarves, Elves, and Humans, which lends a nice Witcher flavour to the whole thing. We also get details on Ur-Hundun, a parallel world and possible place of origin of Elves, Dwarves, and magic.

The final pages have references for most of the rules, as well as spells organized in card-like fashion. We also have the (beautiful) character sheet.

Fleaux! is definitely worth a look and it provides a different flavor of OSR, more embedded in European modern fantasy than most games. While it has its own unique setting, I can’t avoid the temptation of using it to run a Warhammer Fantasy roleplaying.

A Study of Madness for 13th Age (theoretically Part II)

OK, I already went through a few (famous) madness systems in the last post. Basically, I need madness rules for my 13^th Age game. There are no official madness rules and theoretically this is not a game for that sort of thing (after all, 13^th Age is High Fantasy). But I want to use madness to reflect the flavor of certain factions and to enrich the roleplaying. Let me see my what I can tinker here.

BASIC RULE
The closest thing to be crazy in 13^th Age is the Confused condition (in fact, all Derros are eternally Confused according to the rules). Confused is a powerful condition: “You can’t make opportunity attacks or use your limited powers. Your next attack action will be a basic or at-will attack against any nearby ally, determined randomly”. The idea is that crazy folk are a danger to their own allies.

THE HIDDEN RULE IN THE BESTIARY
During my first 13^th Age campaign I used the Wendigo’s Hunger’s mechanics (Bestiary, p. 212) to reflect the effects of lycanthropy on a character (if you are interested you can check it at Escalation Fanzine Issue 2). That rule could work as more nuanced Confusion condition if that is the type of thing you are looking for.

THE HIDDEN RULE IN 13 TRUE WAYS
In the Underkraken section the authors almost deliver a madness point system to reflect Terrible Enlightenment due to contact with the soul flensers (critters that drain your soul, which in 13^th Age means getting all your cool powers). 4 points of Terrible Enlightenment is crazy territory, and the rules suggest that characters with 8 points you become a non-Euclidian tentacled entity.  13 True Ways also suggests that the benefit behind Terrible Enlightenment would be forbidden knowledge about the Underkrakens, but it does provide much detail on that.

INSANE BACKGROUNDS
I can’t remember where but I read a long time ago an amazing idea for “negative backgrounds”. For example, if the GM wants to use rules for permanent wounds and things like that all she needs to do is add a negative background like “Broken Leg -2” and anything related with that would suffer a -2 penalty on their d20 checks.
We could use something similar for madness inflicted by, let’s say, the Derro. After escaping a harrowing torture from the Derro, a PC might have “Blades Under My Skin 3”. The difference here is that this can be used positively or negatively. This could give him a bonus to checks related with bladed weapons, wounds provoked by them and perhaps interactions with madmen. However, this would be a penalty to checks regarding resisting pain, moving in proximity to bladed weapons or traps (like a phobia), or activities in dark places where Derro might hide etc.
My only concern with this approach is that it is one more thing for the GM to track.

INSANITY DIE
OK, this one here came after my reading of the Book of the Underworld and the Calling’s rule. Basically, every Point of Madness work like an inverted Icon Die. You choose a theme for your Insanity Die, based on the inflicted madness (let’s say for example: Pyromaniac 1). You roll your Insanity Die together with the Icon Die. If you roll 1-2 you trigger an Insanity Episode that will complicate matters at some point. Our pyromaniac, for example, could set the ship the party is travelling on fire. The GM (or the table) control the problem generated. Now, if an Insanity Die comes with a 6 the PC receives an Insane Illumination. This last benefit is controlled by the player. Coming back to our pyromaniac, he could spend his Insane Illumination to determine who created a fire camp, how many where there etc. Or he could declare that he can talk and come to an understanding with a fire themed monster, avoiding a possible combat.

INSANITY DIE (Corrupted Icons)
This works almost exactly as the last approach, but here each madness corrupts one Icon Die of the PC. For example, our above Pyromaniac PC could select his negative relationship with the Three as the corrupted Die. Every time he rolls that Icon Die and gets a 1-2, he triggers an Insanity Episode. Otherwise, the Icon Die works normally. The Icon corrupted could colour how the madness manifests. With the Three that might mean something that our pyromaniac sees himself as a red dragon and behaves accordingly. I honestly preferer the first option (without Corrupted Icons), because of a possible 6 on the die roll.

INSANE ESCALATION
Here madness is something linked to the monster. So battles with the Derro could use a different take on the Escalation Die. Because horror and madness are sometimes tied with loss of control, leave the ED unpredictable. At the start of every round, roll a d6. If it matches the current ED, the enemies steal the ED and it can only be recovered if one PC accepts the Confused condition (save 6+ or 11+ for tougher enemies).

INSANITY TRESHOULD
This approach uses the Fear rules, which kind of make sense. Here we don’t track Points of Madness. A PC is either afflicted by a madness or they are OK. For example: Paranoid. A Paranoid PC that goes below his Fear Threshold hit points would trigger the madness. This could be used just for a Confused condition (save DC could be adjusted to reflect the degree of the madness, otherwise just use 11) during combat. Or this trigger could mean an Insanity Episode after combat, determined by the GM or the table. Note that, during combat, the GM can change the Confused condition to something more specific. For example: Confused makes sense for a Paranoid PC, but a Pyromaniac PC would probably use this action to set something on fire (hurting as many people, including allies, as possible). A PC with hallucinations or something closer to schizophrenia, might stop being considered an ally for the purpose of his party’s spell until he gets rid of the condition. If you find the Fear Threshold too much, just change that; insanity here would be triggered just by being Staggered.

INSANE CHAKRAS
Here madness builds up and taints a PC’s soul, making her more susceptible to magic items. There are two ways to do it. One simple way is that each Point of Madness reduces your character level by -1 for the purpose of controlling magic items. A 1^st level PC with 1 Point of Madness would be automatically controlled by any True Magic item that she attunes to (because Level 1 minus 1 Point of Madness equals 0, so our PC cannot resistant True Magic items’ influence). For the moment this would be my favorite approach. Madness.
If you desire more granularity, you could this approach differently. Instead of reducing the number of True Magic items that a character can use without being dominated, corrupt specific chakras for each madness. For example, a character that becomes consumed by phobia might not be able to resist the quirks of Belts, while a Sadistic character is always affected by the quirks for Melee Weapons. There are 17 chakras to choose. I particularly find it too much granularity and prefer the first option.

FINAL THOUGHTS?
Sometimes I wish I could create a set of customized new Conditions inspired by Darkest Dungeon. Basically, madness would trigger class (or race) specific Conditions that would offer benefits and complications to the character. For example, a Paladin’s Madness could be Zealotry, which would increase his critical hit range by +1 for each round of combat if the only actions taken by the paladin are to attack and damage others (if he do something else or heal using a quick action, he loses the ability to do critical hits and must build his threat range from scratch). Something along these lines might work better.
Another interesting concept would be to use the Devil’s Due like mechanic (from 13 True Ways). Basically, a mad character loss access to the ED unless he “unlocks it” with a specific action driven by his madness. For example, a Paranoid PC can only use the ED in battle after refusing one beneficial effect from an ally.
Of course, who said that we have to use only one approach? Mixing some of the options above might be a good idea to reflect different flavors of insanity.

Cthulhu F’tangh to you all!

A Study of Madness (Part I)

To all my 13^th Age players: stay out! (The Lich King knows when you are reading this!)

This blog has yet again been left for ruin, but for good (?) reasons. First, thanks to the great crew of the Tales from the Smoking Wyrm, I’m still writing stuff for their zine that will hopefully see the light of the day during the next numbers. Second, we have reached a good level and conclusion to our 9-year-old DCC RPG campaign, and I wanted to switch gears to the other RPGs that I’ve been dying to try. Now it is the time of 13^th Age, for two very specific reasons: I want more improvisation and player input at my table, but I also want a more tactical and impartial combat. And this exactly what 13^th Age delivers*.

*Yeah, I know that OSR systems are famous for an impartial referee and a likewise impartial but brutal combat. However, OSR (and DCC RPG) in my mind discourages combat because it is wildly unpredictable. 13^th Age is from another RPG school which actually encourages cinematic and tactical combat (but it also retains some aspects of Old School that I enjoy, like the idea that not all combats have to be fair, and the party should exercise some strategy about what battles are worth).

This is my second 13^th Age campaign. So far we have concluded one adventure and, due to 13^th Age’s crazy improvisational rules, I am dealing with 2 factions that I never thought I would use (much less at the same time): Derros and Star Masks.

Derros are your well known crazy-degenerate-dwarves from the Underworld. 13^th Age escalates the craziness, with a good dash of other themes: psychic powers, torture/sadism, and a lot of conspiracy theory-like madness. You see, derros in 13^th Age believe they have seen “The Truth” in the depths of the Underworld and they are more than happy to share it with you (it also involves a lot of torture, alienation, and mortification of the flesh). It can become very creepy, very fast, depending on how much horror you want.

Star Masks are awesome pseudo-Cthulhoid horrors from the Void, living masks that dominate people, create space zombies, organize cults, give birth to giant alien brains that twist reality in non-Euclidian ways. A nice mix of mindflayers and intellect devourers, plus cultists!

As you can guess, I ended up with 2 factions that both deal with madness as a theme. I don’t want to overdue the theme, so I will be using derros most for the madness and Star Masks more for the whole “Body Snatchers” cult-like stuff.

That said, this is a post about madness in my campaign. 13^th Age does not technically have madness rules and I want to find a good approach for it. I checked all my RPG library and here is what I found so far…

Call of Cthulhu: The Great Old One of RPGs. Madness here is basically mental hit points. If you lose all you are kaput, if you lose a considerable amount real quickly you get a temporary madness. Madness is rolled in tables or chosen based on the circumstances. Simple, intuitive, easy to use. While I like the idea of creating a Sanity/Mental Stress track or points, my 13^th Age campaign is not about horror, so I will pass this option.

GURPS: the Fright Check. One simple check that based on what you are facing can trigger a wide range of mental effects. GURPS makes it easy because it has an extensive list of mental Disadvantages to represent madness. Again, very good for a mortal-level and detailed game, but not what I am looking for.

FATE: FATE has the best approach to madness when we are talking about rules. Basically, madness would be an Aspect, a statement about you character that gives you Fate Points (mechanical bonus) if you can bring it up during the game. This means that it is entirely up to the player to portray their madness. This is very useful, but in 13^th Age would require some form of “Fate Point” economy to work (Recoveries?) and I am a bit hesitant to change the game so much at this point (unless my entire campaign really goes down the Madness Lane). Of course, I could use the Background rules instead of tinkering with Recoveries.

D&D: You get the special Ravenloft checks, which are basically special saving throws that make you roll on Madness tables. 5E learned a lot from Fate and uses Madness basically as Aspects, linking them to the Inspiration mechanic. While not D&D, but still pretty much d20, the good (3^rd Era RPG) Wheel of Time used a pool of Madness that went from 1 to 100, to represent the growing taint of the One Power. You got progressively worse until you became completely insane and start breaking the world all over again (only male spellcaster got this). A progressive mechanic would work nicely in 13^th Age and there is the suggestion of such mechanic within 13 True Ways.

Warhammer: This beauty follows Call of Cthulhu and integrates it nicely with Medieval Fantasy. So you have Sanity Points and Madness Tables. 3^rd Edition, despite the boardgame components, add a Stress Mechanic that is really cool (inspired by FATE).

Trail of Cthulhu: This probably the most dramatic (but interesting) approach to Madness. The rules themselves are quite simple, using a pool of points. The implementation, however, is totally novel (but would require approval from the table, as it can be invasive). Basically, when you get a madness, the GM and the rest of the table create it and start roleplaying (without you hearing the details). Lets say, for example, that you character starts hallucinating due to a recent madness. The entire table will in this case create a few imaginary NPCs. Note that you – the player! – will be deceived, as you don’t know that those NPCs do not exist within the game’s reality! The entire idea is tricking the player, changing her perception of the game. If that table is OK with that, it is an awesome experiment. I might use this approach in 13^th Age as it does not require me to change anything in the system itself.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess: The “Edgy” OSR game. LotFP uses a simple and completely non-mechanical approach to madness. Basically, it states that madness rules break immersion and should be avoided. What the GM should aim to do is create challenges and situations whose ordeals are the kind of thing that normal people would not do. Then, the GM should show how the setting reacts to the characters, treating them – literally – as madmen! Like Gumshoe, it requires a careful approach and a completely honest talk with the table, as it might no be everyone’s cup of tea. There are a lot of examples from LotFP adventures, such as one scenario where the party might end up killing nuns and children that are actually doppelgangers (imagine how the rest of the world would see that butchery?) or one scenario where the key to understand the plot requires one character to kill and eat the villain’s brain. The funny thing is that if every GM pays attention to what the PCs are really doing in most games, (and make society reacts to it), it is pretty easy to create an atmosphere of alienation and make the players wonder how sane their characters really are.

I remember one example from my old AD&D 2^nd table, where they party got a ring of regeneration and used it (and abuse it) to keep them alive. At one point, one character was infected by some kind of flesh-eating ooze (I can’t remember which), and the rest of the party decided to cut his arm off to save him (they also decided to cut part of his face to remove another part of the ooze). To my surprise, the infected player started to roleplay his character’s hesitation to so much suffering, arguing that they could find perhaps a priest or sage to save him. In the end, the entire party put the regeneration ring on the poor soul, restrained him, and went happily (?) to chop him off in order to remove the ooze. The party’s argument was that those actions were the “most rational way” of saving the character’s life. The entire scene was completely insane (and another player even started roleplaying Gollum-like behavior towards the ring, because he didn’t want to part with it not even to save a fellow party member). THIS is madness!

After this brief tour of craziness, my next post will show how I will implement madness within the (cool) rules framework of 13^th Age.