Community plays a big role in this system, as both a narrative grounding and the foundational source of many of a character’s basic skill proficiencies.
NOTE: a lot of the character generation complexity to follow can be simplified for those wanting simpler “packages”.
- Four basic human cultures: Barbarian, Civilized, Nomadic, and Primitive. Each gives the character a list of skill bonuses and additional specialized skills (called Professional Skills, described later), as well as an optional set of Passions (also described later).
- Applying skills from culture steps:
- Apply static bonuses to Customs and Native Tongue, a 40% bonus.
- Select three Professional Skills from the culture’s list.
- If desired, select a Combat Style.
- Distribute 100 points among the culture’s list of Standard Skills, Professional Skills, and Combat Style. Each point equals a 1% improvement. Each skill must receive at least 5%, and cannot receive more than 15%.
- Applying skills from culture steps:
- Characters are free to not take a combat style if they consider themselves a non-combatant member of their culture.
Cultures
- Barbarian = Clans of nature-loving folks that shun civilization and stick to their small and nature-focused settlements. Lists athletic skills and those related to surviving in the wilderness, and enjoying the simpler matters of the natural world.
- Civilized = Cities of law, order, and social codes. Think themselves superior to all others because they are. Lists social skills, logical reasoning, and arts, crafts, and commerce.
- Nomadic = Caravans of ever-moving wanderers. The ultimate survivors, adept at staying alive with whatever they find, and enjoying their travels for what they are. Lists a variety of skills related to both nature survival and living on the fringe of human societies.
- Primitive = Tribes of literal cavemen. Most see them as barely more than animals, but they do maintain extended family groups and survive as hunter-gatherers despite their simple means. Lists more straightforward and simple skills as you’d expect of a literal caveman.
Background Events
- Sometime during the character’s past some notable event happened that your character finds formative. This is that event.
- A narrative hook with no mechanical bearing, each player can choose one from the list as part of character creation or roll randomly on the table.
Community
- A character’s community is a bundle of related elements, like family, contacts, events, and passions.
- To start each character randomly rolls or chooses their Social Class, which represents the class that character or their family have enjoyed so far. This influences starting money, available resources and connections, and maybe even the attitudes towards other classes.
Families
- Everyone’s got a family, and regardless of size or prosperity each family influences the scions that go on to do great (or miserable) things.
- Roll on some tables to generate how big a character’s family is, what sort of reputation it has, and what sort of connections have been forged. Each of these should add some form of Connection; Allies, Contacts, Enemies or Rivals.
Connections
- These are people or even organizations that a character has a good or bad relationship with.
- Allies are those that share common cause and will offer help and guidance when called upon.
- Contacts are those of potential influence a character is familiar with, and one that can help but won’t.
- Rivals are those that oppose a character along the same goals, and will attempt to interfere or harass them.
- Enemies are those that wish a character harm, and will go to length to cause such suffering.
Passions
- This is an optional system that adds mechanics to a character’s belief systems, ideals, and loyalties.
- Passions are tracked in the same way as skills, rated between 1-100, but with more potential dynamic changes due to narrative events.
- One example is a Protect passion to a character’s tribe dropping if that character betrays the tribe.
- Passions can be established during game play, not just during character creation, and their starting values depend on the object of said passion.
- They are used for augmenting skills, used as skills themselves, or even as resistances to foreign effects. Detailed in more depth later on.