Tuesday 31 March 2020

Dungeon Bitches Part 2

General mechanics, default moves etc here.

Corpse Dolls given more detail here.
Wounded Daughters given more detail here.


Character Creation:

Step 1: pick a class.
Step 2: answer the class's Three Questions
Step 3: assign stats
Step 4: pick moves

Stats: You start out with two stats at +1 and two stats at -1. You can add +1 to one stat of your choice.

Moves: You start out with all the basic moves, with an automatic sex move for your class, and then your class will let you pick some from a short list. Exact details vary.




AMAZON
(Hard/Subtle. Violence focus.)

Questions:
What are you running from?
Who did you first kill?
Why do you enjoy violence?

Stats:
Hard & Subtle start at +1, Soft & Queer start at -1.

MOVES:
Pick any two. You also get your Sex Move automatically.

Favoured Weapon
You have a particular weapon that holds sentimental value, and which you are unusually skilled at. When you make use of it, you get +2 to Lash Out.

Endurance
You're just tougher than your companions. You can take an extra point of Hurt before you're Broken. You're at Death's Door after five Hurt, and become Broken if you take a sixth. 

Military Training
You're well equipped to deal with the consequences of violence. When you Lash Out, if you would suffer Hurt as a consequence of the move, ignore the first point of Hurt you suffer.

Poison
You carry a nice supply of poisons, and are skilled in their application. When you attempt use your poison (other than in an open fight), use this move. Your choice of poison might cause uncontrollable bleeding, paralysis, unconsciousness, convulsions, vomiting or some other nasty effect of your choice. For NPCs, you can choose to have your poison's result be death - potentially near instantly, or drawn out and horrible if you wish. PC victims suffer 2 Hurt. Roll with Subtle.
On a miss: You screw up and expose yourself to your own poison. Your victim avoids being poisoned. Take one Harm.
On a Success: Your victim is successfully poisoned, but pick an appropriate complication:
  • You expose yourself to your poison, taking 1 hurt.
  • The poisoning is obvious, and evidence is left behind that might implicate you.
  • The poison acts more slowly than usual, potentially giving the victim time to get to a doctor.
On an Overwhelming Success: Your victim is successfully poisoned, and there are no complications.

Sex Move
Despite your grim demeanour, you're surprisingly good in bed. If you had no Bonds on your partner, you get one. If your partner had no bonds on you, they get one.



CORPSE DOLL
(Hard/Soft. Medicine & Necromancy.)

Questions:What are you running from?
What did you die of?
What brought you back?

Stats:
Hard & Soft start at +1, Subtle & Queer start at -1.

MOVES: 
You get Reanimated, and pick one more. You also get your Sex Move automatically.

Reanimated
You are already dead, but not gone. You do not need to eat, drink, breath, sleep and so on. Poison, cold, drowning and other stuff that needs you to be alive cannot hurt you. Unlike other characters, you can use the Heal move on yourself by stitching your dead flesh back together. When you do this, on a Miss you take an additional Hurt (instead of losing Bonds) as you helplessly watch your carcass slowly crumbling.

Flesh-Crafter
You can make surgical alterations to yourself or your patients, creating all sorts of interesting effects. This ability might be used to create a perfect surgical disguise, 'improve' the patient's anatomy, undo a serious ongoing wound, or any other mad science you can think of. However, without Graft as well, you can't stitch new bits onto your subject. When you use this ability, roll with Soft.
On a miss: You screw up the procedure, badly. Your subject takes 1 Harm and suffers a permanent, ongoing wound as a consequence.
On a Success: You are able to make the alterations you wanted, but there are medical complications. The GM picks a consequence from this list:
  • Your subject suffers significant pain as a result of the procedure. They take one Harm.
  • Your subject's body is badly damaged as a side-effect of the surgery, resulting in a permanent, ongoing wound. 
  • Your subject's appearance becomes warped, marking them as unnatural and making the nature of the alteration obvious.
  • If operating on somebody else, your subject finds the process invasive and uncomfortable. If you had any Bonds on them, you lose one. If they had any bonds on you, they lose one. 
On an Overwhelming Success: You are able to make the alterations you wanted, with only mild complications. You pick a consequence from the list above.

Graft
You can stitch organs and body-parts onto yourself, to grant yourself stolen powers. To do this, you need to be able to justify why the body part in question would give the desired ability. Good examples include a dragon's flame glands giving you fire breath, venomous fangs giving you a toxic bite, wings allowing you to fly, spinnerets allowing you to spin webs, extra limbs letting you hold more weapons and so forth. At first, you can only graft things onto yourself, but if you have the Flesh-Crafter move you can graft body parts onto others as the process's alteration. Doing this - on yourself or others - is difficult, and the body initially rejects the grafted-in tissue, resulting in one Hurt being suffered.

Corpse Puppets
You can reanimate carcasses, by stitching part of yourself into the corpse to operate it. Doing so causes you to suffer one Hurt from the loss of flesh. The animated husk is under your total control, with as much finesse as its state of decomposition will allow, and also largely expendable. The husk remains animated until it is utterly physically destroyed - even severely mutilated it will continue to act.

Sex Move
When you fuck somebody, the whole experience is deeply disturbing for them - you are, after all, clammy to the touch and might be decomposing a bit - even as you take comfort in the sense of vitality. You may heal one Hurt, and they get a Bond on you.



BANSHEE
(Hard/Queer. Uncontrolled supernatural prowess.)

Questions:
What are you running from?
How are you marked as supernatural?
Why can't you control your power?

Stats: 
Hard & Queer start at +1, Soft & Subtle start at -1.

MOVES: 
Pick any two. You also get your Sex Move automatically.

Scream
When you scream, roll to Lash Out at +1. Add the following options to the possible consequences:
  • Everybody who didn't know ahead of time to cover their ears is deafened. 
  • All delicate objects nearby shatter. 
Burn
You have learned to sacrifice your health in exchange for supernatural might, torching away flesh and sanity for temporary power. When you roll for a move with Hard or Queer, you make take Hurt to get +1 to the roll for every Hurt suffered. You may choose how much Hurt to spend after rolling the dice and seeing the result.

Stalk
When pursuing a target, you have an uncanny ability to arrive in places you weren't meant to. You may spend a Bond on somebody to appear in a scene with them (one currently going on, or beginning a new scene if you wish). No distance, barriers, wards or security can prevent you appearing in this way.

Blaze
You can mantle yourself with an aura of furious supernatural power. Each time you do this, choose one effect:

  • You can cause anything you see to burst into flames just by willing it.
  • Weak-willed NPCs, animals and non-sentient monsters are overcome with terror and utterly unwilling to approach you.
  • Objects move at your command when you gesture to them.
  • Animals flock to you and obey your commands.
  • Nobody but you is capable of talking louder than a murmur. 
When you lower the aura, you take one Hurt, plus one more Hurt for every full day you'd kept the aura active.  


Sex Move
When you fuck somebody, you go all out and the experience is raw, feral and a little scary. You may suffer any amount of Hurt, and get that many Bonds on your partner. Your partner can do likewise.



RUNAWAY NUN
(Soft/Subtle. Spiritual support and conflict avoidance.)

Questions:
What are you running from?
What do you venerate?
What brings you comfort?

Stats: 
Soft & Subtle start at +1, Hard & Queer start at -1.

MOVES: 
Pick any two. You also get your Sex Move automatically.

Spiritual Adviser
Your words, though quiet and cloaked in religious symbolism, are surprisingly shrewd and persuasive. When you use a Bond to offer somebody XP to do something, if they don't accept, you get the Bond back.

Cloistered and Sanctified
You are something precious, to be protected from the grim realities of the world. You take -2 to rolls to Lash Out. Whenever you are unable or unwilling to act to act, your companions get +1 to any rolls to protect you. You get a Bond on them when they do.

Beatific Visionary
You have a connection with a benevolent higher power that you can call on for aid. When you Commune With Strange Powers, you may spend a Bond on the subject of your question. If you do, you may roll with Soft instead of Queer.

Beyond Reproach
Your status as an ordained member of a religious sisterhood protects you from certain social consequences. If you are ever accused of wrongdoing - regardless of whether you actually did it - this move triggers. Roll with Subtle.
On a miss: Your shamed reaction provides compelling evidence as to your guilt, regardless of whether or not you're actually at fault. Your accuser gets a bond on you.
On a Success: Your reputation defends you. You immediately get a Bond on anybody who took part in the accusation and, if they had any Bonds on you, they lose one.
On an Overwhelming Success: Your reputation absolves you and shames your accuser. You immediately get a Bond on anybody who took part in the accusation. If they had any bonds on you, they lose all of them, and you get that many extra Bonds on them.

Sex Move
You're a nun, and you know you shouldn't be fucking people. You and your partner have a choice: either you confess to failing your vows, in which case your partner gets two Bonds on you, or try to keep it secret, in which case you get two Bonds on your partner.



WITCH
(Soft/Queer. Flexible magical power to solve all problems.)

Questions:
What are you running from?
Who taught you your gifts?
What is the price of your gifts?

Stats: 
Soft & Queer start at +1, Hard & Subtle start at -1.

MOVES: 
You get Witchcraft, and pick one other move. Note that, since the other Witch moves refer to the Witchcraft move, they're useless if taken as a cross-class move without first taking Witchcraft.
You also get your Sex Move automatically.

Witchcraft
You are capable of casting codified spells from some magic tradition. When you gain this move, pick three spells from the list that you can cast:

  • Shapeshift (take on the physical form of an animal or person, lasting as long as you wish).
  • Enthrall (the spell's victim becomes obsessed with your approval, lasting as long as you wish).
  • Glamour (creates an intangible illusion of anything you can picture, lasting as long as you wish).
  • Animal Speech (you can temporarily talk with and understand animals, and they react well to you).
  • Shroud (somebody or something becomes invisible and otherwise imperceptible, until its presence is impossible to ignore).
  • Second Sight (temporarily become able to see invisible things and pierce illusions and disguises).
  • Transform (temporarily turn the spell's victim/recipient into an animal).
To cast a spell, you need to spend a few minutes performing the correct rites, and the subject of the spell must be present. If you have an appropriate token representing the spell's subject - a little wax doll, a vial of their blood, a letter with their signature - that is just as good as if they were there in person. There is no limit to how frequently you can cast spells, so long as you have the time and space to do so.

The Vancian Tradition
When you cast a spell, you may leave it unfinished, suspended in your mind so that only the final syllables and gestures need be made to complete it. Completing a spell prepared in this way takes only a moment and a flick of the wrist, rather than several minutes of complex rituals. You may have only one such spell readied in your mind at a time; prepare another, the currently prepared spell is wasted.

Expanded Repertoire
You know the other four spells you didn't initially pick.

Magical Research
You have worked to unlock arcane secrets, and have created an entirely new spell of your own. Work with the GM to determine what new spell you've created.


Sex Move
When you fuck somebody, you can keep a little token from the encounter to remember it by. Obviously, counts as a sympathetic token for the purposes of casting spells on your partner.



WOUNDED DAUGHTER
(Subtle/Queer. Supernatural endurance & lost humanity.)

Questions:
What are you running from?
When did you become a Daughter?
How much humanity have you abandoned already?

Stats:
Subtle & Queer start at +1, Hard & Soft start at -1.

MOVES:
You get Unstoppable Life, and pick one other. You also get your Sex Move automatically.

Unstoppable Life
Your physical body refuses to die, recovering from even the most horrible of injuries. Like a rabbit gnawing off its leg to escape a trap or a lizard shedding its tail to distract a predator, you slough off humanity to evade death's embrace. If you are at Death's Door and would take Hurt from a physical source (injury, poison, starvation, etc), this move triggers. You erase all Hurt suffered. Furthermore, you discard some aspect of humanity, such as morality, restraint, mercy or ambition.

Feral Attacks
Maybe you can spit teeth like bullets. Maybe your maw is a ragged-toothed semicircle, far wider than it should be. Maybe your fingernails extend into talons. Maybe your kiss is lethally venomous. Maybe your saliva teems with diseases to which you are immune. As you abandon humanity, you will acquire all these strange defences, and more. Whenever you Lash Out from surprise (after a successful Escape Notice), you roll with Subtle. Whenever you Lash Out at a victim put off guard by your sex-appeal - that is to say, who you have just successfully Flirted with - you roll with Queer.

Immunity
The as things wound you, you become acclimatised to the pain and learn to shrug it off like it were nothing. Exposure to sickness, hunger, fear, knives and fire all serve only to inure you to their worst stings. When you are brought to Death's Door, you become totally immune to whatever it was that caused that penultimate point of Hurt. You are only immune to one thing at a time: if brought to Death's Door again, you can choose either to retain your current immunity, or discard it and become immune to the current source of pain.

Desperate Hope
If an effect would trap you, grab hold of you, put you to sleep, knock you unconscious, mentally enthral you or otherwise render you helpless, you get one last burst of spiteful action before it claims you. You might choose to Lash Out when you do this; if you have the Feral Attacks move, you may roll with Subtle or Queer (whichever is better) instead of Hard. Alternatively, you might try to Escape Notice, or to use some other move. If your response can destroy whatever threatened you, or allows you to escape it, then the effect doesn't happen and you wriggle away in time. Otherwise, after your last action is done, you are ensnared and must rely on your companions to save you.

Sex Move
When you fuck somebody, the raw force of untamed, furious life within you uncoils and extends. It uses the meeting of your bodies as a conduit to feed. You and your partner may collectively decide to transfer any amount of Hurt from one of you to the other.



10 comments:

  1. If the character is asexual (and lets say, aromantic as well), how does system deals with it in terms of Bonds and powers? Does it mean that such character is potentially handicapped from the beginning because they cannot use sex moves?
    To clarify, I only mean it is from mechanical point of view on how system works for such characters.

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    1. I have known asexual & aromantic people who've fucked and/or dated, for a variety of reasons. Curiosity, not having worked stuff out yet, desire to fit in, not being that into it but not being particularly opposed to it either. Also there's the whole grey-ace thing.
      This stuff all exists on a spectrum, and behaviours are often situational and fluid.

      Mechanically? You can (say) use the Flirt move, or benefit from it, because attention is nice, even if you're not attracted. This is something that the PDF I'm working on stresses more: flirting's a sort of background hum to your interactions, and it's not clear how serious and sincere it is until one or other party wants to escalate. Bonds, in particular, represent how important you are to somebody, and that can arise from factors other than sexuality. Fucking gives you some neat bonuses, but it isn't vital to every PC; a PC who is *less* attracted can just, like, Not Fuck and they'll be fine.

      That being said: I would say that a character who isn't attracted to women isn't a suitable PC here, in the same way that a man isn't a suitable PC.

      One thing I'm mindful of is that - while some non-binary identities ought to be valid as PCs in this game, I don't want to do the 'women & NB' thing which kinda erases NB identities by automatically lumping them in with women. So, my take on this is that NB people *can* be PCs in some but not all cases, and it'll vary from person to person.
      Same deal with asexuality. It feels very iffy to me to lump asexuality in with the gays when it's really its own thing. The game's about attraction to women, and if a character just flat doesn't experience that (because they're full-on-heterosexual, or because they don't experience attraction at all) then I'm not sure they really fit here. That being said, as with NB identities, it's gonna vary from case to case and expression to expression.

      As I say. I don't want to be excluding people, but I've also got *very specific* themes in mind here, and feel it'd be doing those *other* identities a disservice if I tried to square-peg-round-hole things, you know?

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    2. Asexual was mentioned as a valid choice of the character in part 1; I took the most difficult case of it (asexual aromantic), to see how system would work mechanically for such borderline case. I believe(d) that even if the game has 'attraction to women' as a part of its clearly defined 'mood' (for the lack of the better word), such character could be still valid choice because the attraction possibly could be aesthetic, of admiration, of comfort, possibly of duty or other non-romantic connections.

      My apologies if the question was not appropriate to the idea of the game.

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    3. Yeah. I think there's room for grace-ace and similar identities here, but if you're going for a character who flat out doesn't experience attraction that's outside the scope of the game.

      I think there's room for non-sexualy active characters, though. They don't engage with a big chunk of the rules, but then there's also an *explicit* option for a Nun who doesn't fight, which again means you're not engaging with a chunk of the rules.

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  2. wish there were more strictly non-magical options on the table... as it stands only the Amazon and the Nun seem to be able to get by as non-superheroes? like, there's something to be said about a group dynamic where only ONE of them's "the supernatural one," right?

    maybe a temporally-displaced playbook would fit, covering everything from a woman who's spent a decade in a coma to a fairytale sleeping-beauty type who's a century or two out of touch, idk.

    otherwise I really love the direction the concept is heading! it is tragically probably too queer for the folks I game with, but that's just an excuse to get a better, queerer gaming group together once this thing's out...

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    1. I'm PDF-ifying this currently, and part of that is adding some extra moves to each Skin. In particular, the Banshee gets a couple of extra moves that mean you can play her as being merely-iron-willed and oddly lucky, rather than displaying outright supernatural powers.
      I think that, if you swap out the 'you're undead lol' move for the Corpse Doll, you can run her as a mundane (if unrealistically talented) surgeon; again, some of the new moves help here.

      The issue with adding an extra class is that you end up doubling up on stat-combinations; you have two hard/queer classes, etc, which become tricky to find mechanical niches for.

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    2. Yeah, the Corpse Doll's probably the one I have the most issue with. If there were more alternative options to turn it into a vaguely more grounded character I think the game would benefit tremendously from it, especially for groups that want less of a Monsterhearts vibe and more OSR, everybody's just worms in the dirt and shit.

      More non-explicitly-supernatural moves for the Banshee would be fantastic, though, I absolutely love Stalk as a move lmao

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  3. This is really just a message of support because the only place I interact directly with you is the shithole (you know the one) but I also do check your twitter occasionally. You're tremendous; when you strike true with your writing it's among the best stuff anyone is putting out for RPGs. Ynn and the Stygian Library are so clever, so effective, so brilliantly beguiling and so much fun to play through! And outside of game stuff you express a confidence, identity and sense of integrity that's very admirable.

    I'm very happy to have had the chance to read through and play through some of your material. I just want to express that even amongst the anonymous you have people who'll support you and who are your fans. You're great; you should be exactly who you want to be and you'll continue to be great in doing so. Take care, keep well and don't let the bastards grind you down.

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    1. I know the exact place you mean, it's pretty wild there sometimes.
      But yeah. Considering stuff about me that came out recently (traaaaans), there's been some people using it as an excuse to be assholes. So it's nice to hear that people have my back.
      Thanks for this message, it really made me happy reading it.
      Stay cool, anon.

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  4. This is really great stuff. The goals and mechanics of the game are aligned in such an elegant way.

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