I honestly didn’t know that you could just play the Black Hack for free by looking at a website. Did you know this? How long have people been keeping this a secret from me? And to what end?
The Black Hack is a super-streamlined roleplaying game that uses the Original 1970s Fantasy Roleplaying Game as a base, and could well be the most straightforward modern OSR compatible clone available. If speed of play and character creation, compatibility, and simple – yet elegant rules are what you yearn for. Look no further!
The Black Hack is a fast playing game and the rules can be picked up in minutes. The full rules fit in a single 20 page A5 book!
In your typical dungeon fantasy game, your attacks have both an attack roll and a damage roll. Why don’t other abilities have this feature?
A quick experiment: All your abilities have a ‘skill’ roll and an ‘effectiveness’ roll. Skill determines breadth of ability, the character’s capacity to take what they know and apply it to the situation at hand. And ‘effectiveness’ is how well that works.
When you roll to test an ability, roll 1d20+ that ability’s skill rating. Target difficulty is 10+the defender’s skill rating. If you succeed, you roll effectiveness and apply that ‘damage’ to the defender’s ‘stress.’
Stress takes the place of ‘hit points.’ When you take enough stress, you gain a condition reflecting what happened to you. When you gain a condition, mark a couple* of your skills. Those skills are at -1 per mark until the condition is removed. [1]
Difficulty, in general, is abstracted much like hit points for monsters would be in standard dungeon fantasy. A cliff that resists the efforts of the party might have 10 ‘stress’ that must be overcome by applying climbing skills, or engineering, or athletics until the party’s gotten on top. Meanwhile, slipping stones cause abrasions or concussions, falling causes scrapes and bruises and broken bones, etc. A monster, obviously, needs to be defeated- but by the sword, or by demoralization? Or can it simply be fed? You can give the world around the players various ‘skills’ that reflect how approaches might be taken. A hungry owlbear might have Ravenous +3, Ferocious +2, and Massive +1, so it’s really good at eating, fighting, and being hard to move (in that order). You might have a hard time in a battle, but it’s not too hard to trick. A stuck door might have Rusted +2 and Jammed +1. Picking the lock is a pain, but it’s not especially durable do you can probably shatter it if you have an axe or something.
As a rule of thumb, you can probably give non-players an amount of stress equal to their skill totals times their durability, where durability is explicitly there to make the challenge last longer (and therefore have more opportunities for the environment to make its own actions).
Probably there needs to be an explicit rule that if the players fail, then the challenge gets an opportunity to react using its own skills and rolls, with its own chance to cause stress and inflict conditions.
Items exist in this ruleset to tell you things about the fiction- a sword lets you cut, but you can fight without it. Ropes let you climb back up from places. Poles let you poke. An axe lets you cleave. A helmet might protect you from head trauma. Probably it’d be cool to let appropriate gear give you a +1 to your skill- after all, you gotta bring the right tools for the job.
[1] I don’t think it’s probably necessary to note which stress condition caused which penalty- if you gain a condition that affects your fighting and one that affects your climbing, it’s probably ok for the condition you gained in a fight to recover and remove the penalty to your climbing. The “human” body/psyche/spirit recovers in a variety of interesting ways, after all. Not that this ruleset specifies that you must play a human, of course. Play a cyber-shark vigilante in a post-human Mars colony for all I care.
Warriors have an additional attribute: Valor. They gain Valor when they defeat a worthy foe (or cause them to admit defeat, or submit). You lose Valor when you are forced to stand down, admit defeat, or retreat.
A being is considered a worthy foe when they have at least as much valor as you (or, if they are a monster, if they have an equal or higher Rank than your Renown.)
When you’re in combat, you gain the twice the difference between your Valor and your enemy’s as a bonus to your attack and damage rolls.
Two examples:
If you have 3 Valor and your enemy has 1, you get a +2 bonus to attack and damage.
If you have 3 Valor and you are fighting a mixed group of enemy warriors (two at 1 Valor, and one at 4 Valor) you get a +4 bonus against the 1 Valor enemies and no bonus against the 4 Valor enemy (who will themselves get a +2 bonus against you).
As you can see, the only way forwards for a Warrior is to find victory, to never back down, and to continue to challenge themselves in battle.
Note: This can lead to fun scenarios where player characters pick on an old man only for the warrior in the group to realize that this seemingly frail old man is actually a retired weapon master, and also for the warrior to recognize that the big blustering barbarian is actually a big wimp and will fold after a little pushing. It also encourages Warriors to realize that some fights are just not worth their time, which is fun in a very particular way to me.
Note 2: This is intended to work alongside the Dungeon Core rules I was writing, where Warriors inherently get a larger damage die than other classes, better hit points, and an additional ‘feat’ that makes them a little different. DC also doesn’t use attributes, so a Warrior in this scheme has hit points, gear, a Valor score, and some skills.
This is the first entry in my series about companion mechanics for generating fantasy characters. I’ll write more about the project itself, later. For now, I’d like to get this stuff out of my brain and into the ether.
The defining characteristic of Rogues are their Connections. For many rogues, this is the Underworld- a loosely defined chain of smugglers, thieves, bandits, and spies that trade information and contraband in shadowy webs. For some rogues, their connections are to fellow heretics, as they hide from unaccepting eyes. Some rogues are revolutionaries, fighting to overthrow the established order in some capacity and remake the society in which they live. Some rogues, almost paradoxically, are members of extralegal or semi-legal enforcement agencies- think witch hunters, bounty hunters, and the like.
So when you make a Rogue, choose one Association and one History. You will also choose one Mission, secretly. You start the game at Rank 1 and Reputation 1- low but with many opportunities to rise.
Association
Criminal– Making money outside of the law
Heretical– Beliefs outside of the norm
Revolutionary– A better world is possible
Espionage– Agents on the line of the law
Protectors– Keeping the realm safe
When you select an association, name it and identify your primary contact (your handler, immediate superior, boss, or some combination). Name its ultimate purpose and a few signs to identify your peers by.
History
Neonate– You are brand new in the organization.
Disgraced– You’re well known in local circles, but not necessarily for a good reason. Write this event down. Your rank is 2 but your reputation is -1.
Rival– You accidentally made a few bad moves and gained a rival out of your league. Name them. Your reputation starts at 2.
Mission
Completion of a mission increases your Rank or your Reputation. Failing a mission may or may not cause your Rank or Reputation to decrease.
The following is a list of suggestions for missions:
Smuggle– get an object from point A to point B
Steal– take something important from someone and bring it back safely
Sabotage– break or destroy something without being caught
Blackmail– gather evidence of a wrongdoing or embarrassment and then return with proof
Assault– Harm (but do not kill!) a target
Murder– Kill a target, and present evidence
Silence– Prevent the spread of information at its source
Rescue– Save someone from a bad situation
Escort– help a person get from one place to another
Postscript
I am trying to be better about attributing source to the images I borrow, but I just browse Pinterest for them and half the time there’s not any actual attribution, just a link to some hosting site (like the image here).
I also don’t know how I feel about having ‘rogues’ be ‘heretics,’ given the real-life effects of inquisitors and witch-burners and the like. And doubly so given that I prefer for my fantasy games to be polytheistic- but I wanted the rogue class to be able to have secret religious societies, typical fantastical ‘evil cults’ and the like and I couldn’t think of anything else.
Similarly, with the name of ‘espionage,’ although at least with that one I’m sure it’s not problematic.
Glimmer is the currency of the underworld. It is pure, distilled lifeforce. It is similar in appearance to moonstone, but moonstone never shines with an internal light, and moonstone does not vibrate, shift, and wiggle in its own power. A typical specimen is about the size of an adult human thumb, with variations in size and shape
When you would die, you instead lose half of your Glimmer to the void, and then you lose 1d6 additional Glimmer. If you are out of Glimmer, you cease to exist- your corporeal body dissolves and your life force ebbs into the background radiation of the universe. If you still have Glimmer, you may still recover.
You may discover Glimmer by accident, as free Glimmer that forms ‘naturally.’ Or you may wrest it from the beaten and battered bodies of your enemies. You may also trade ‘free’ Glimmer from the other denizens of the underworld that you come across in your travels. It is the only universally accepted currency- metals and trinkets have no inherent value here among the dead. And, lastly, you may discover solidified Glimmer in the form of weapons, armor, and other items of note.
You can spend your own free Glimmer to manifest or enhance items that you wish to carry with you. A mundane sword may become enchanted, or an already-enchanted sword may gain new powers. You can also give the Glimmer to others, for any reason you choose.
You can also absorb your Glimmer to increase your own power. When you reach certain thresholds of Glimmer, you ‘level up’ and increase your abilities and power, sometimes substantially. When you lose Glimmer (by ‘dying,’ for example), your ‘level’ can decrease.
A being or item with little Glimmer appears somehow unstable, translucent, insubstantial- for example, the gutter wretches of Schilla. On the other hand, a being or item with much Glimmer seems unusually solid, sturdy, vigorous, and potent.
What causes Glimmer to solidify and form out of soul-stuff and life energy is one of the great mysteries of the underworld.
That’s right, a generator for the heartbreaker I’ve been working on, because it’s more fun to write generators for half-written systems than finish writing those systems. Apparently.
I continuously want to write oddball shit into my generators but that’s my mouth writing checks my brain can’t cash, so this one is fairly mundane for the time being. I think that’s a good thing for a dungeon fantasy game- the characters should be the canvas through which the players explore the strange unreality of the world around them, and keeping them relatively grounded helps with that sort of thing.
antiknez 