Firebreathing Kittens

Join Sofia, Belle, and Queenie as they save the town of Blutburg from Scamantha's nefarious... oats? This adventure is an actual play podcast using the mechanics from Alloyed. 

Join Sofia, Belle, and Queenie as they save the town of Blutburg from Scamantha's nefarious... oats? This adventure is an actual play podcast using the mechanics from Alloyed. 

Join Professor Tinkerton Shellton & Kairos SabyTass as they explore ancient Turtle Tunnels, musical puzzles, a mysterious scroll, and something darker lurking below. Back To Futures Past is an actual play of the Tunnel Goons tabletop roleplaying game. 

Join Professor Tinkerton Shellton & Kairos SabyTass as they explore ancient Turtle Tunnels, musical puzzles, a mysterious scroll, and something darker lurking below. Back To Futures Past is an actual play of the Tunnel Goons tabletop roleplaying game. 

Professor Tinkerton Shellton Interview

Kairos SaybTass Interview

Gadzooks! Adraias and Belle try to keep their wits about them within the insanity-inducing Ashford manor. Join them in the adventure Dreamwalk Estate - an actual play podcast of Call of Cthulhu. 

Gadzooks! Adraias and Belle try to keep their wits about them within the insanity-inducing Ashford manor. Join them in the adventure Dreamwalk Estate - an actual play podcast of Call of Cthulhu. 

Adraias HowlThorne Interview

Caiyra, Dante and Sofia take a job to clear out a spooky mansion of its unwanted guests. Certainly nothing strange or mysterious is going to happen with this investigation. My Best Friend Cthulhu is an actual play podcast of Call of Cthulhu 7e.

Caiyra, Dante and Sofia take a job to clear out a spooky mansion of its unwanted guests. Certainly nothing strange or mysterious is going to happen with this investigation. My Best Friend Cthulhu is an actual play podcast of Call of Cthulhu 7e.

Caiyra Daevi Interview

Spiders And How To Care For Them is an actual play podcast using the mechanics of Tiny Dungeon 2nd edition. Join Kyyyvvyynn, Sofia, and Muse as they battle other worldly arachnids in the silence of the library.

Spiders And How To Care For Them is an actual play podcast using the mechanics of Tiny Dungeon 2nd edition. Join Kyyyvvyynn, Sofia, and Muse as they battle other worldly arachnids in the silence of the library.

Happy April Fool's! Surprise!  We have a collection of solo play adventures for you.  These are games played with just one person.  They can be journaling games, games played against an oracle or a table, by flipping cards, etc.  This year we have The Tower of Icarus, O Patron Mine, Exclusive Interview, and The Eternal Duel.  We hope you enjoy this unusual episode.  We did.  

Varek, Meg, and Muse are attending New Inthera Community College when the moon suddenly turns red and hydra heads start bursting out of the ground around campus. Turns out night classes are a lot more dangerous than advertised. Join the Firebreathing Kittens for an actual play of Kaiju Girls.

Varek, Meg, and Muse are attending New Inthera Community College when the moon suddenly turns red and hydra heads start bursting out of the ground around campus. Turns out night classes are a lot more dangerous than advertised. Join the Firebreathing Kittens for an actual play of Kaiju Girls.

Varek Ashen Interview

In this actual play of the Ecryme system, Morning Mist, Sir Barnabas, and Belladonna Amrille come together to protect factory workers but find themselves faced with versions of their pasts. 

In this actual play of the Ecryme system, Morning Mist, Sir Barnabas, and Belladonna Amrille come together to protect factory workers but find themselves faced with versions of their pasts. 

How To Play Ecryme   Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for Ecryme. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own Ecryme game at home.   I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections. Game category Traits, skills, and specializations Rolling dice Spleen and ideal Difficulty and margins Self transcendence How to attack Impacts and dying Armor Effects Surprise Healing Helping allies Building a character   Game category. The first edition of Ecryme was released in French in 1994. Twenty years later, a second edition was released, which is what I’ll be talking about today. The word ecryme is the name of a mercury like liquid that covers most of the surface of the planet. Only small dotted islands of land are left. This game’s world has 1800’s technology: mass production, steam power, and dirigibles. Air ships and steam trains link the industrial cities on the islands. Bridges lift the trains above the ecryme. The people of this world try to avoid falling in. Most people who come into contact with the dense, motionless ecryme, the flat silver ocean that lacks waves, are corroded by the contact, blistering like being splashed with acid. Those who survive sometimes get unpredictable cephalic powers, which is the game’s magic system. The general mechanic of Ecryme is that you roll six sided dice, add modifiers from your character build, and compare that to the difficulty of the situation or to an opponent’s roll. Outside of combat, you roll two six sided dice, add them together, and add the skill from your character sheet that most closely matches what you’re trying to do. If a trait applies, add it, too. When your character has a specialization that applies, you get plus two to your roll. The sum is compared to the difficulty of the task. Eight is the lowest and sixteen is the highest difficulty score. If your dice roll plus skill plus trait plus specialization is lower than the difficulty, then you failed. If your dice roll plus skill plus trait plus specialization is equal to the difficulty, there is some kind of complication. If your dice roll plus skill plus trait plus specialization is higher than the difficulty, you succeeded. Combat is similar, except you roll four d6 and add your skill. Pick two dice to put into success, which is their word for attack, and two dice to put into reserve, which is their word for defense. If your success attack is higher than your opponent’s reserve defense, you hit them. The amount your success attack went over their reserve defense becomes the damage impact of the attack. The Ecryme rule book comes with a ton of prebuilt character sheets for you to play as or use as pre statted non player characters. I’ll list some. There’s an aeronaut, an archivist, a sword duelist, a wandering mapmaker, a military officer who specializes in explosives, a courtesan, a stilt walker, a glider pilot, a wealthy merchant, an ecryme diver, a preacher, a fugitive, a scholar, an ecryme flower harvester, and more.   Traits. Characters in Ecryme have traits that describe their physical appearance, personality, and social connections. Trait numbers range between negative and positive three. A normal person who is a nonplayer character averages about zero. A plus one means that your character has a little bit more of that trait than the average person. A plus two means they have a lot more than a normal person. A plus three means your character is extremely whatever that trait is. A negative one means that your character has a little bit less of that trait than the average person, a negative two means they have a lot less, and a negative three means they’re extremely lacking in whatever that trait is compared to someone normal. For example in the trait of height, a tall person would have the number one, a very tall person positive two, and an abnormally tall person positive three.   Every character in Ecryme has two points overall in traits. This can be any combination that equals two. For example, your character could have a single plus two trait. Or they could have two plus one traits. Or you could have three plus one traits and one negative one trait. As long as the character has two points in traits overall, you’re good. There isn’t a set list of defined trait words in the Ecryme rule book that you’re limited to using. A trait can be anything you want. You the player name the trait that best defines your character, and you pick which combination of traits equals plus two overall.   Skills. Every character in Ecryme has fifteen skills. Unlike a trait which can be anything you want, every character has the same list of skills, just different personalized numbers in each of them. The fifteen skills are clustered into three categories: physical, mental, and social. The physical category’s five skills are athletics, driving, fencing, brawling, and shooting. The mental category’s five skills are anthropomechanology, ecrymology, traumatology, traversology, and urbanology. The social category’s five skills are quibbling, creativity, loquacity, guile, and performance. The skills are all used offensively and defensively, so for example the medicine skill traumatology can be used to heal or to make someone sick. The guile skill is used both to hide and to search.   Each skill has a number between zero and ten. Starting characters have thirty points distributed amongst those fifteen skills. This is the same pool of points that can be spent on specializations. You can perform a physical or social task that your character has zero skill points in, you’re just less likely to be successful than a character with five or ten points in that skill. Mental skills represent your knowledge in that area, so if your number is zero you know nothing about it and can’t attempt a roll. For starter level characters, no skill will be above five points.   Traumatology? Traversology? I didn’t find some of the skill words self explanatory, so here is what the fifteen skills are used for. Athletics is used when your character runs, climbs, jumps, etc. Driving is used when your character drives a car, pilots an airship, rides a horse, etc. Fencing is when your character is dueling or fighting with any sword, dagger, or bladed weapon. Brawling is used for weaponless combat and fighting with improvised weapons like wrestling, boxing, arm locking, or tripping an opponent. Shooting is the skill used to fire long range weapons. Anthropomechanology is used for understanding, using, and repairing machines such as clocks, locks, vehicles, etc. Ecrymology is the skill used to understand the natural world like flora, fauna, geology, meteorology, etc. Traumatology is medical knowledge and the character’s ability to do surgery, know pharmacology, take the right dose of medicine, etc. Traversology is your character’s skill at knowing about the traverses, the bridges that span the world, and also includes geography, map making, and the construction of bridges. Urbanotechnology is how much the character knows about the city, such as the local slang and dress codes, the richness of their social and professional contacts, knowledge of local history and religion and culture, etc. Quibbling is the skill you use when arguing with or persuading another person, giving commands, interrogating, intimidating, bartering, etc. Creativity is how much your character values creating and crafting, and includes activities like painting, throwing clay on a wheel, forging, sculpting, writing stage plays, etc. Loquacity is the suave counterpart of quibbling, when your character tries to be charming, tries to make a good impression, collects gossip, investigates, lies, spreads false information and is believed, etc. Guile is how well your character can camouflage themself, hide, search without being detected, sneak down an alley, pick a lock, perform sleight of hand, etc. Guile is used both to hide and to search. Lastly, performance is the skill your character uses when singing, acting, playing instruments, etc actions in front of an audience.   There is also another category of skills, but sort of like how in other games not every character is a spell casting wizard, not every character will have this category of skills called cephaly. Cephaly is a mind power that people in Ecryme can get by coming into contact with the liquid mercury ecryme the game is named after. The five cephaly skills are elegy that creates illusions, entelechy which is your power level and the combat skill you use for facing off against other cephalic beings, mekany that remote controls machines, psyche that remote controls living beings and people, and scoria which is divination. If you want to be a cephal in Ecryme, the different difficulties and ways you can use your cephalic skills are listed on page 267 with some examples of what you can do at different difficulty levels. For example shrinking something is a difficulty of ten, and controlling your target is a difficulty of eleven. Not every character has magic, so you might not use that list at all.   Specializations. When a skill has at least five points, you can choose to spend one point during character creation to get a specialization in that skill. Specializations are specific activities your character excels at. Some examples for the athletics skill could be running or climbing or carrying. The driving skill could have a specification in a type of vehicle, like an airship or a train. For the creativity skill, you could get specific about the type of art your character is creative in, like painting, pottery, or sculpture. A specialization adds plus two to the roll if you are doing that very narrow specialized activity.   Do you dream of shouting kamehameha in battle and ending things with your super awesome special combat move? Pages 245, 246, and 247 list some. They’re called maneuvers. You can spend one skill point to add one maneuver to your character sheet just like if you were buying a specialization. Each can only be used once per combat. Some of the maneuvers have requirements for when they can be used, like the Coup de Jarnac needs you to have a success attack margin of at least four. The same combat mechanics can be used for arguing, so pages 248 and 249 list maneuvers you can use when debating someone.   Rolling dice. In Ecryme, you determine how good a character is at something, and how likely you the player are to succeed at that action, by rolling dice, adding your character’s traits, skills, and specializations, and comparing the sum versus the difficulty number. All rolls are done using six sided dice, also called d6. One dice represents reason, logic, and planning. The other dice represents emotion, feelings, and acting impulsively with your gut. You can use two different colored dice or can roll on different areas of your table to keep track of which d6 is reason and which is emotion. When you roleplay your character’s success or failure from that roll, you can lean into the higher of the two dice. If emotion was higher, you can roleplay an intense emotion. If reason was higher, you can roleplay being logical to succeed, or roleplay how over thinking and hesitating caused your failure.   Spleen in Ecryme is a character’s driving fear. Here are some example spleens. A duelist is repelled by the idea of taking another person’s life. This spleen fear makes them only strike extremities when dueling, making them miss more. But they accept missing more because it means they won’t kill anyone while dueling. Another example is a wealthy cosmopolitan person who has heard word of a rebellion. Their spleen is their refusal to accept a rebellion’s potential for chaos and the loss of their own personal power. This spleen fear motivates them to donate to the police and to snitch when they find out where the rebellion’s meeting house is. Another example of a spleen is a young street tough, a hooligan running around with a gang of fellow hooligans at night, who becomes furious if a competitor steps foot on her turf. She will fight them viciously because her spleen, her motivating fear, is that her found family will lose its territory and disband. These are all examples of spleen, a core fear that drives the character’s actions. If spleen is relevant to a roll, roll an extra dice and discard the highest one. Discarding that extra highest dice will make your overall roll lower and worse. If you lose your spleen or ideal during a game session, all of your rolls are at negative two for the rest of the session. Then before the next game session, make a new one.   Ideal in Ecryme is a character’s motivating hope. It’s a principle they look up to that helps them overcome any challenge. Here are some example ideals. An artist aspires to create their perfect masterpiece. An archivist’s ideal is to collect a sample of all flora and fauna. A courtesan hopes to make enough money to stop working. An ambitious worker wants a promotion that comes with a large raise and more respect. An aeronaut captain loves her ship and crew above all else. These are all examples of ideal, an aspiration they feel positively towards that helps them face daily life. If ideal is relevant to a roll, roll an extra dice and discard the lowest one. Discarding that extra lowest dice will make your overall roll higher and better. If you lose your spleen or ideal during a game session, all of your rolls are at negative two for the rest of the session. Then before the next game session, make a new one.   Difficulty. Outside of combat, the difficulty of the task you’ll face will range between eight, easy, and sixteen, almost impossible. Eight difficulty tasks are the most common, while ten and twelve difficulty tasks happen uncommonly, and fourteen and sixteen difficulty tasks happen very rarely in the world in general. You’re on an adventure, so you’ll probably attempt to do actions more challenging than a normal person would succeed at.   Margins. Margin is the difference between the sum of your numbers and the difficulty rating of what you were trying to do. If your two d6 dice roll plus trait plus skill plus specialization is higher than the difficulty number, that is a positive margin. Success! You succeeded at what you were trying to do. If your two d6 dice roll plus trait plus skill plus specialization is equal to the difficulty number, that is a margin of zero. Margins of zero are up to the game master, called a conductor in Ecryme, to interpret. Both success and failure happen with a margin of zero. There could be a complication, or a compromised victory, or a defeat with some positive side to it. If your two d6 dice roll plus trait plus skill plus specialization is lower than the difficulty number, then you failed. The bigger the margin, the bigger the effect. If your negative margin was three, then the failure is more extreme than if the negative margin was one. The highest or lowest your margin can be is called your maximum margin. Your maximum margin is equal to your skill plus your specialization. For example if your number in the traumatology skill is five and your specialization in surgery is two, your maximum margin when removing your ally’s appendix to save their life is five plus two is seven. Because the highest margin a character can achieve is capped at their skill level plus specialization, that can matter for opposed rolls. For opposed rolls, each player or non player character makes a roll, and the person with the higher margin wins. For example let’s say you’re dueling an opponent whose maximum margin in fencing is seven and yours is two. If you both get a margin of three, they actually get it and win, while your maximum margin being capped at two makes you lose the duel. A minimum margin is when a conductor asks for multiple rolls that when added together will add up to a goal number. For example, the conductor can set the minimum margin at six to climb a wall, and the party will accomplish their goal as a group after a few rolls whose margins add up to six. One player throws a rope on a hook up at the top of the wall and scrambles up it, getting a margin of two. The second player climbs the rope and reaches down a helping hand, getting a margin of three. The third player grabs the offered hand and climbs to the top, getting a margin of two, reaching that six minimum margin and accomplishing the collective goal.   Here is an example of a roll outside of combat. You are currently arguing with a streetcar driver. The driver wasn’t paying attention when you paid, but you already did. They insist you pay again. How will you resolve this? It’s time to roll dice. You will roll two d6 and add your trait, skill, and any specializations that apply. The game master says the difficulty is twelve. Eight is lower and sixteen is higher, so twelve is in the middle, not the easiest or most difficult. You roll two d6 and get a two and a four for six on the dice. Now, which trait, skill, and specialization do you want to use to roleplay this? That depends on what your character is best at.   You could be playing as the example character Marcellin on page 206 of the rule book. Marcellin was born to parents who work in a circus and works as a strongman himself. But he dreams of running away from the circus because he believes he has a greater destiny elsewhere. His ambition is to become an important and respected person. However, he would feel guilty about abandoning his family and found family at the circus, who depend on him. Traits range between negative one and three. Marcellin has three traits. True force of nature, plus two, tall, plus one, and not very attractive, minus one. The trait that applies most to convincing a person is probably that he’s not very attractive, minus one. Skills range between zero and ten. Marcellin’s skill in quibbling is a two. Marcellin does have one specialization, brute force, which gives him a plus two when performing his strong man act in the circus, but doesn’t really help him plead his case to the streetcar driver. His overall number is six from the dice minus one from being not very attractive plus two for his skill in quibbling, which is seven overall. Seven is less than the difficulty of twelve, so with a negative margin, Marcellin fails to convince the streetcar driver that he had already paid. The streetcar driver will not let him on. Marcellin could now either pay a second time, or get off the streetcar, or try to beat up the driver and drive the streetcar himself, et cetera.   Let’s reexamine that scenario with a different example character. The difficulty is still set at twelve and you’ve rolled a two and a four for a six on the dice. You are now roleplaying as the rich merchant on page 229 of the rule book. After a convenient marriage to the Count de Mortsauf gave her seed money for investing, she began making lucrative business deals that have been an asset to her konzern, a konzern is like a company in Ecryme, and a bane to her competitors. She has two traits. One trait is that she has an image of purity of righteousness, plus one, and the other is that she has secretly made some contacts with the Black Lily group, plus one. Her skill in quibbling is five. She has two specializations: bartering and making threats. Each specialization gives plus two when doing those activities. Like the scenario with Marcellin, the streetcar driver wasn’t paying attention when the rich merchant paid, but she insists that she did. The driver wants her to pay again. The difficulty is twelve. With six on the dice and a five in the quibbling skill, the rich merchant is at eleven without adding a trait or specialization.   There are multiple different ways to role play this argument with the streetcar driver as the rich merchant and succeed. I’ll demonstrate two ways. The first, with zero margin, is to add one from the trait of her purity and righteousness, and to simply make a pure and righteous expression and insist that yes, she did pay. With a zero margin, the conductor could invent a complication or a compromised victory or a defeat with some positive aspect. The conductor could say, the driver believes you, but your insistence was noticed by a fellow rich person who had been sitting on the streetcar, who now believes are are poor. Like witnessing someone’s credit card get declined and them have to use another card, it doesn’t look good to be seen to not have enough money. The second way the player could role play this situation is to use the six from the dice plus five from the quibbling skill plus one from her contact with the Black Lily group plus two from her specialization in making threats. That scenario could look like this. The distracted streetcar driver staring out the window looks back as the streetcar dips when she steps onboard. The driver pauses her as she walks on, saying she didn’t pay. The fellow rich person on the streetcar watches as the merchant smiles insidiously, leans forward a little bit, and whispers something to the streetcar driver that their peer couldn’t hear. The streetcar driver blanches, all the blood draining from their face, eyes wide with horror, but just for a split second. The driver nervously tips their head in respect and waves the rich merchant onboard. Her mouth quirks into the slightest of smiles as she boards the streetcar, demurely greeting her peer as she walks past and takes a seat.   Two different characters, two different ways to role play the scenario. But the general idea is the same. You add the dice roll to your trait and skill and any specialization that applies. If the number is greater than the difficulty you succeed, and if the number is less than the difficulty you fail. A margin of zero is interpreted by the conductor however they want, mixing success and failure.   Self transcendence in Ecryme roleplaying-wise is when your character pushes themself past their limits. Mechanically, it’s when you spend a point from a skill to increase a roll. That point doesn’t recover until the next session you play in. Here’s an example. Your character has a three in athletics. You are teetering on the edge, way up high. To make sure that you don’t fall off, before you roll, you declare that you’re spending spend two of your skill points from athletics. You then roll your two d6 and add your trait, skill, and specialization, plus a guaranteed two from the skill points you spent. That’s a two and a three on the dice, plus a trait of positive one, plus an athletics skill of three, plus the two skill points, for eleven overall. Your athletics skill is still at three for this roll. After this roll, your skill will be lowered from three to one. It will return to three at the start of the next session. A skill can’t go down to negative values. Zero is the lowest a skill can be. If you have a specialization in this skill that also applies to this particular roll, you can do self-transcendence after rolling the dice, otherwise self-transcendence must be declared before the dice get rolled.   When you use self transcendance in combat, you pick one, either success attack or reserve defense, and apply the self transcendance to one, not both. The skill doesn’t decrease until after the attack is resolved.   How to attack. So far I’ve talked about rolls that use two six sided dice, then add your trait, skill, and specialization. Combat is similar, but you roll four dice. After seeing the results of the dice, choose where they go. Put two of the d6 into a pool called success, which means attack. Put the other two d6 dice in a pool called reserve, which means defense. The book calls it success, which really confuses me, so I’m going to say success attack every time I talk about it. Here are some example actions the success attack dice are used for: throwing a punch in a boxing match, getting away from pursuers during a chase, and charming a guard. The two reserve, defending dice, are used for actions like: dodging that punch in the boxing match, for not being charmed by someone, and for anything that protects your own safety. Together, the success attack and reserve defense for your turn are called your attitude.   If your success attack roll is higher than your opponent’s reserve defense roll, then they failed to dodge and you landed that blow. If your success attack roll is lower than your opponent’s reserve defense, then they dodged well and your punch missed.   It works the other way, too. If your reserve defense roll is higher than your opponent’s success attack, then you dodged and their punch missed. If your reserve roll is lower than your opponent’s success attack, your dodge was too slow and their punch hit you in the face. These are called positive and negative margins. Your margin is capped by your skill and specialization, just like when you roll outside of combat.   Spleen in Ecryme is a character’s driving fear. Ideal is a character’s motivating hope. Spleen and ideal normally give you one more dice for rolls made outside of combat. In combat, they still give you one more dice. The four dice you roll goes up to five. Drop the highest dice if your spleen applies. Drop the lowest dice if your ideal applies.   Injuries in Ecryme are called impacts. A character in Ecryme can be impacted in three ways: physically, socially, and mentally. Physical impacts are wounds, such as a cut, bruise, or burn. For example, a duel can use the fencing skill and impact your physical body. Mental impacts include discouragement, traumatic stress, despair, and insanity. For example, a mental attack from someone with the special cephalic abilities could impact you. Or you could witness something distressing related to your spleen or ideal that hurts you deep in your heart. Social impacts could be a fall in popularity, a loss of reputation, being discredited and no longer believed, or losing a role title. For example a debate can use the quibbling skill and impact your social standing and reputation.   There are four ranks of impacts. From least to most serious, these ranks are: superficial, light, serious, and major. A combat margin is the difference between one character’s success attack and their target’s reserve defense. The combat margin translates into the impact. If the combat margin is zero, you and your opponent bounce off each other, neither landing a blow. A combat margin of one and two causes a superficial impact, like a scratch or a bruise. A combat margin of three and four cause a light impact, like being stunned or getting a nose bleed. A combat margin of five and six cause a serious impact, like breaking a bone or losing a tooth. Having a serious impact gives all of your rolls negative two. Your conductor might tell you that your character now has a negative trait as an after effect of a serious injury, for example a limp from your broken leg if it was a physical fight, or your face on a wanted poster if it was a social confrontation. A combat margin of seven and eight cause a major impact. Major impacts are life threatening and instantly incapacitating. You can’t fight any more. All rolls are at minus four. Major impacts always leave an after effect. Also, you gain a new spleen, a motivating fear. Depending on the situation, it’s possible for a major impact to make your character lose sight of their ideal, their driving purpose. Your character is out of the game if they either get two major impacts or one impact above eight.   Hit points. Ecryme doesn’t technically have hit points, but you can’t take an unlimited number of impacts. Sort of like hit points, or tally marks, you should keep track of how many of each level of impact you’ve taken. Superficial, light, serious, and major. The fifth superficial impact you take becomes a light impact. The fourth light impact you take is a serious impact. The third serious impact you take becomes a major impact. The second major impact you take removes your character from the game. For physical impacts that means death or a coma, for mental impacts that means insanity or a coma, and for social impacts that means banishment.   Armor. If you’re wearing armor, the injury you receive is one level less severe. For example, a major impact would become a serious impact from your armor. Armor can’t reduce the impact to zero, so you’ll still take at least a superficial injury. The disadvantage to wearing armor is that it’s heavy, so you take a negative four penalty on every physical dice roll.   Effect in Ecryme is like a damage bonus in other games. Effect is a modifier to the impact of your success attack or reserve defense because of situational circumstances. Some examples are having the high ground during a sword duel, having a sword during a sword duel, knocking a chair down into your opponent’s path, and having the sun at your back. If your character has a weapon, that weapon might have an effect number. Weapons don’t affect the success attack or reserve defense rolls themselves, just the impact of the rolls.   Page 244 has a table of the different weapons and their effects. Bare hand fighting and improvised weapons have an effect of plus zero. A staff, cestus, sling, cudgel, truncheon, and razor blade have the effect of plus one. A bow and arrow, chain, dagger, knife, and dirk have the effect of plus two. A crossbow, sword, spear, pike, axe, mace, and pistol have an effect of plus three. A flail, battleaxe, halberd, and musket have an effect of plus four. Since I’m talking about weapons, I’ll mention that ranged weapons can’t be reloaded during hand to hand combat. Also, if you’re firing at something far away or a moving target or your visibility is reduced, page 248 lists how much the difficulty increases by. The extra difficulty is usually around plus two.   Here is an example of the effect number increasing the impact during combat. Eugene has a fencing skill of four and a fencing sword that has a plus three effect. His fencing skill being four means Eugene’s maximum success attack margin is four. Eugene rolls a four, five, three, and two. He puts the four dice and five dice and his fencing skill of four into his success attack. Four plus five plus four is thirteen success attack. He puts the three and two dice and fencing skill of four into reserve defense. Three plus two plus four is nine reserve defense. The opponent has a nine success attack, so with a margin of zero, the opponent misses Eugene. The opponent only has a reserve defense of five. Eugene’s success attack was thirteen. Thirteen from Eugene’s success attack minus five from the opponent’s reserve defense equals a margin of eight. But Eugene’s fencing skill is only four, so the margin is capped at four. A margin of four would be a light impact. But this is when the fencing sword with its effect of three comes in. The margin goes up by three, from four a light impact to seven a major physical impact.   What if you’re unable to hit one another? Ecryme’s combat system doesn’t let things stagnate. The difference in reserve defense carries over from one round of combat to the next, applying to the next round’s success attack. If you successfully reserve defended by two last round, that two gets added to your next round’s success attack.   Here’s an example. Eugene rolls four d6 for a round of combat and get six, five, three, and one. Eugene puts the three dice and one dice and his fencing skill of four into his success attack. Three plus one plus four equals eight success attack. Eugene puts the six dice and the five dice and his fencing skill of four into his reserve defense. Six plus five plus four equals fifteen. The opponent has a ten for success attack and also a ten in reserve defense. Eugene’s success attack of eight doesn’t get a positive margin on his opponent’s reserve defense of ten, so Eugene’s attack doesn’t hit. The opponent’s success attack of ten doesn’t get a positive margin on Eugene’s reserve defense of fifteen, so the opponent also doesn’t hit Eugene. But things don’t just stagnate. Next round, the opponent will get a bonus of plus two to their success attack because they had a two reserve defense margin on the eight success attack coming at them. Eugene would have gotten a bonus of five because his reserve defense of fifteen was five higher than the opponent’s success attack of ten, but his fencing skill is four so it’s capped at four.   Ecryme applies the combat rules to arguments, too. There’s an example on page 252 with success attack and reserve defense, where the quibbling skill is used just like how the fencing skill was used in that previous combat example.   Surprise. If you’re taken by surprise in Ecryme, you can only roll reserve defense. Roll just two d6, and apply them both to reserve defense.   Healing. How quickly you recover depends on how badly you were injured. From least to most serious, the impact ranks are: superficial, light, serious, and major. There’s a table on page 254 with the level of impact, the roll penalty, the recovery time without intervention, recovery time with intervention, and intervention difficulty. If a character has a superficial injury, there is no rolling penalty. They will recover within a day without intervention. If an intervention is done, it needs to be made within an hour and takes an hour to do, and has a difficulty level of ten. Light impact injuries have no rolling penalty. Characters recover from light impact injuries after a week on their own. If an intervention is made, it has to be done within a day of the injury and takes a day to do. The difficulty level is twelve. Serious impact injuries give you a negative two modifier to all your rolls. They sometimes cause an after effect, which never goes away. You recover from the serious impact injury enough to not have a negative two modifier after a month. If someone is going to intervene to help you, that intervention has a difficulty of fourteen, must be done within the first week, and takes a week to do. Major impact injuries make all your rolls negative four, have a difficulty of sixteen to treat, the treatment has to be done within a month and takes a month to do, and without intervention the major injury stops giving you a minus four to all rolls in one year. The intervention has the chance of removing the after effect, otherwise a major impact injury recovered on its own without intervention always leaves you with an after effect.   Helping allies. If you help an ally with a task, and how you help makes sense, then the difficulty decreases by two. Environmental conditions can also help decrease a task difficulty by two. For example, if when you’re trying to repair a vehicle you’re doing it in a workshop, the workshop environmental condition decreases the repair difficulty by two.   You can build an Ecryme character three ways: point buy, questionnaire, or archetype. Point buy means that you have positive two points in any free form word traits of your choosing, and thirty points distributed as you like in the fifteen skills. One skill point can buy you a specialization in any skill that has at least five points. Starter level characters don’t have any skills above five points. You’ll also write a spleen and an ideal on your character sheet, a character name, and some equipment. That concludes the point buy method of character creation.   The questionnaire method of character creation is like a personality quiz. You are asked a multiple choice question about your character, and the answer gives you a point in a skill. One example question is, what was your character’s favorite past time when they were a kid? If you answer going to the theater or opera with friends, you get a point in creativity. If you answer snatching candy from marketplace stalls, you get a point in guile. If it was building models, you get a point in anthropo-mechanology. If as a kid, your character chased rats for fun, they get a point in athletics. If your character’s childhood past time was listening to phonograph records telling adventure stories, they get a point in traversology. And lastly, if your character wandered around town for fun as a kid, they get a point in urbanotechnology. The questionnaire is pretty detailed. It’s sixteen pages long and goes from page 207 to 222 in the rule book. The rule book says to pick your six favorite of the twelve questions, and only answer those six questions, not all twelve.   The third way to get a character sheet in Ecryme is to use one of the premade ones. These are called archetypes. Here’s a list of them all. There’s an aeronaut who is great at the driving skill and specializes in airships. There’s a deaf archivist whose ideal is to archive all the flora and fauna of the ecryme, and has a five in ecrymology. There is a duelist whose spleen is that they despise a lack of action, who has a five in fencing and a specialization in the foil. One archetype is a stilt walker who is as comfortable on stilts as they are on foot, who has a five in athletics. There is an ambitious metropolite who has gained favor and power through schemes but also upset some high ranking officials, and they have a five in quibbling with a specialization in blackmail. Another archetype is the raconteur daughter of a nobleman stripped of his title, whose spleen is to get revenge for her father, and has a five in urbanotechnology with a specialization in intimate details about the rich and powerful. Another premade character is a degreaser, a former military officer who was court marshalled for mistreating war prisoners. They have a five in shooting and specializations in both the musket and cannon. Another archetype is the snoop, a person who tracks government officials who have gotten rich selling state property. They have a five in urbanotechnology with specializations in one city location and two ministries of government in that city. There is a map maker with a five in traversology. Philippe is a premade character who is an Icarian, like Icarus who flew too close to the sun, who flies a glider for a specialization in the driving skill. There are also more archetypes, premade characters, including the rich merchant, the acrobatic worker, the pontiff, the ecryme diver, the renegade scientist, the courtesan, the stitch lord, the line worker, the fugitive, the syndicalist scholar, and the ecryme flower harvester.   Hopefully this little rules chat helps my players build their characters and understand how to play. For everyone listening, if you’d like to hear an example adventure, the episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast right after this is a demonstration of us playing Ecryme in a oneshot game session. We invite you to listen to it to hear an example of Ecryme in action. We encourage you to find the Ecryme rule book yourself, and play a game with friends.

Dante, Muse and Sofia get an invite to a garden party hosted by the enigmatic Mr. Darcy, where shenanigans involving giant robots fighting and lighting fast betrothals occur. It really was handled with Pride and Extreme Prejudice. 

Dante, Muse and Sofia get an invite to a garden party hosted by the enigmatic Mr. Darcy, where shenanigans involving giant robots fighting and lighting fast betrothals occur. It really was handled with Pride and Extreme Prejudice. 

This Old Guild Hall is an actual play podcast of Cottages and Cerberus where Stewart and Sofia are hired to fix up the New Inthera Guild Hall by defeating dangerous monsters and making cozy objects.

This Old Guild Hall is an actual play podcast of Cottages and Cerberus where Stewart and Sofia are hired to fix up the New Inthera Guild Hall by defeating dangerous monsters and making cozy objects.

Welcome to a special episode of Firebreathing Kittens. This is our rules discussion where we discuss the rules in the past few games we’ve played, for February 2026.  We’ll discuss the tabletop roleplaying games The Walking Dead, Blade Runner, LURPS, The One Ring, Never Stop Blowing Up, Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls, and Sad Vampire Boyfriend.

Join the Firebreathing Kittens as they play Sad Vampire Boyfriend! In The Undrinkables our three Firebreathing Kittens Queenie, Kamos, and Meru find themselves contracted as security members for the 47th National Remembrance Festival. As they peruse the colorful shops and stalls they start to get a sinking feeling that all is not as it seems. On a quest to investigate they find adventure, cows, and… hey is that blood? And why does it smell so good?! 

Join the Firebreathing Kittens as they play Sad Vampire Boyfriend! In The Undrinkables our three Firebreathing Kittens Queenie, Kamos, and Meru find themselves contracted as security members for the 47th National Remembrance Festival. As they peruse the colorful shops and stalls they start to get a sinking feeling that all is not as it seems. On a quest to investigate they find adventure, cows, and… hey is that blood? And why does it smell so good?! 

Bee Plus Students is an actual play podcast of Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls, following Meg, Queenie, and Muse as they uncover a deadly cosmetics plot and insect impostors. 

Bee Plus Students is an actual play podcast of Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls, following Meg, Queenie, and Muse as they uncover a deadly cosmetics plot and insect impostors. 

How To Play Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls   Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls game at home.   I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections. Game category D3 minus 1 Stats Checks Abilities Empowering abilities Perks Moods Movement rules Combat Going all out Status effects Temporary hit points Dying Healing Daily routines Clubs Building a character   Game category. Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls is a tactical grid tabletop roleplaying game themed around the topic of magical girls. Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, and Puella Magi Madoka Magica are some examples. Although the genre is called magical girl, you don’t have to role play as a female character to play this game. Sailor Moon has Tuxedo Mask, Cardcaptor Sakura has Syaoran Li, there is even Magical Girl Ore. The genre is about how a regular school kid meets a small cute magical creature such as a cat, a winged bear, et cetera, which leads to her ability to transform and use magical powers. Like how glasses prevent people from realizing Clark Kent is Superman in the superhero genre, the costume change into her magical girl alter ego protects her secret identity, letting her keep her daily routine of a normal school life. Fighting evil by moonlight, attending classes by daylight. In Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls, each magical girl has an aspect, sort of like a class in other games, and your specialized abilities from that aspect let you do different things in combat than your team mates. To play this game, everyone should have some sort of way to look at a grid that is twenty squares left to right and fifteen squares top to bottom. When combat starts, magical girls draw half as many cards as their smarts stat rounded down. You spend cards to use and then further empower your abilities. To use an ability, roll as many six sided dice as you have in your stat, dividing the result by two and subtracting one. So ones and twos give you plus zero, threes and fours give you plus one, and fives and sixes give you plus two. To empower your ability, spend additional cards. Empowerment gives a bonus to the ability’s number of dice rolled, area it effects, or duration, based on the value of the card you spend. Apart from combat, there are also mechanics for your daily life, where how you roleplay to balance magical girl combat with attending classes and extracurricular clubs will affect your mood and your report card.   D3 minus 1. This game uses standard six sided dice to generate zeroes, ones, or twos, to use from each dice rolled. To get a zero, one, or two from a six sided dice, you will roll the dice, divide by two, then subtract one. So if you rolled a one or a two, the result is zero. If you rolled a three or a four, the result is one. If you rolled a five or a six, the result is two. The game calls this the three sided result. In this game, every time you round a number, round down. Numbers can’t go negative in Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls, including hit points.   Stats. Each magical girl has stats you will use in checks to see if your character accomplishes or fails at what they try to do. These stats are power, style, smarts, guts, and spirit. Power is how strong you are and how much damage you do. A jock who plays sports is an example of a high power character. Style is your speed, agility, and if you can succeed at things that need finesse. Style is your movement speed, unless it’s less than four, and then your movement speed is at least four. Smarts is how intelligent your magical girl is. The honors student is a good example of a character with high smarts. Each magical girl can use their smarts stat number of abilities from their aspect and from the non-aspect abilities list. At the start of combat, each magical girl draws as many cards as half their smarts score rounding down, with a minimum of one. Your smarts number is also your maximum hand size, how many cards you can hold before discarding. Guts is how much damage your magical girl can take. Guts tends to be a higher number for no-nonsense type characters. Each magical girl starts with ten plus one half of their guts score of hit points. When you gain milestones, guts determines how many hit points you gain with the milestone. Spirit is the range of your magical abilities. You can affect things as many squares away from yourself on the battle grid as your spirit number. A moody sullen character might have low spirit while a cheerleader might have high spirit.   Checks. When succeeding or failing at what your character is trying to do would have an important impact on the story, your game master will ask you to check to see if it works. Roll as many dice as your have in the appropriate stat. For example if you’re trying to leap a long distance, you would look at your number in the style stat, three, and that’s how many dice you would roll, three dice. Because Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls uses a d3 minus one system, your result from rolling dice could range between zero and twice the number of your stat. For example if you roll three dice and get one, two, one, that’s a result of zero. If you roll three dice and get four, three, four, each dice contributed one so that’s a result of three overall. If you roll three dice and get five, six, five, each dice contributed two so that’s a result of six overall. So you can see how the highest result you can get is twice your stat number, and the lowest is zero. Some dice will be zero, some dice will be two, some will be one, so the average result will be around about the stat number.   Abilities. Magical girls can do three types of magical abilities. Universal, aspect, and non-aspect. Abilities can be attacks that reduce the target’s hit points, buffs that apply a positive status effect to a target, debuffs that apply a negative status effect to a target, environmental abilities that impact the battlefield, healing abilities that restore the target’s lost hit points, move abilities that change the target’s location, AoE area of effect abilities that affect multiple squares on the battlefield grid, self abilities that impact only yourself, and team abilities that affect the allies close enough to you. Action abilities can be used on your turn. Reaction abilities are used on someone else’s turn after being triggered by the other person’s action, like by them attacking you. If an ability says the word target, that can mean any character, object, or empty square on the grid that you can see. If it’s blocked and not in your line of sight, you can’t target it. If an area of effect ability would hit allies, you can’t selectively exclude them from the damage. Areas of effect, such as cones and circles, can extend outside the range of your spirit number of grid boxes of influence, as long as they start within it.   Every magical girl can do the universal abilities, which are listed on pages 37 through 39. These univeral abilities include things like a costume transformation into a magical girl, a basic attack, a basic block, a basic dodge, et cetera. All magical girls know all the universal abilities, and can use them by simply spending their action or reaction doing that universal ability. You don’t have to discard a card to do a universal ability.   Your magical girl’s number in the smarts stat lets her know that number of not-universal abilities. These not universal abilities can be either in their aspect or from the non-aspect list. Non-aspect abilities is a list on page 35 and 36 that can be learned by any magical girl. They don’t require your magical girl to take a specialization, called an aspect. But non-aspect abilities do take up one of your finite number of known abilities, and they do need you to discard a card to use them. You can know as many non-aspect and aspect abilities as the number you have for your smarts score. Any magical girl can learn a non-aspect ability, but they aren’t automatically known like the univeral abilities are. Some example non-aspect abilities are shields up, decoy, healing touch, spin attack, and surprise. Non-aspect abilities are different than universal abilities because they take up one of your finite number of known abilities and cost a card to use.   Each magical girl has an aspect, which is sort of like a class in other tabletop roleplaying games. Aspect abilities can only be learned by magical girls who have that specialization. The aspects are fire, ice, water, lightning, earth, wind, time, and butterfly. Each aspect has seven or so abilities in that category. For example the fire aspect has abilities like cauterize, rocket jump, the floor is lava, etc. The ice aspect has abilities like chill out, snow cone, swirling bizzard, snow clone, etc. The water aspect has abilities like fog, mistform, tsunami, osmosis, etc. The lightning aspect has abilities like chain lightning, energize, lightning bolt, flash bang, etc. The earth aspect has abilities like entomb, stone skin, earthquake, avalanch, quicksand, etc. The wind aspect has the abilities wind blast, aerodynamic lift, draft, air wall, etc. The time aspect has rewind, hurry up, stasis, time jump, etc. The butterfly aspect has abilities like mesmerize, iridescent wings, metamorphosis, butterfly swarm, etc. To use an aspect ability, you first discard a card from your hand.   Empowering abilities. Some abilities have text on them that says they do more when they’re empowered. There are three ways to empower a card: how many dice are rolled which can increase how much damage it does, its size like affecting a larger area, and its duration like how many extra turns the effect could last. Abilities that have multiple ways to be empowered let you pick which way you want to empower them. For example if the text says size and duration, you pick which one. Normally when you cast an aspect or non-aspect ability, you spend a card. To use an ability’s empowered effect, spend more cards after that first card.   Each empowerment effect has a cost. That cost isn’t the number of cards you need to spend, but instead is the number of empowerment points needed. The empowerment points you gain for the card depends on its number value, from two at the lowest to face cards to ace high. There’s a table on page thirteen showing all the cards and how many empowerment points you get for spending them. Cards two through five give you only two empowerment points, and are described with words like dainty and cutesy. Spending a six or seven gives you three empowerment points and a modifier word of sparkling or fantastic. Spending cards that are an eight, nine, or ten gives you four empowerment points and a modifier word of super or uber or epic. Spending a jack or queen gives you five empowerment points and a modifer word of hyper or mega. Spending a king gives you six empowerment points and the modifier word of ultra. If you have an ace and spend it, that’s the ultimate bonus, seven.   Add the modifier word from your card onto your ability. For example, a player could empower a fire blast with the queen of hearts to make it become a mega fire blast with five more damage dice to roll. You’re encouraged to loudly announce the new name.   If you have enough points, abilities can be empowered more than once. Here is an example. You are casting an ability with a cone three area of effect. It has the empowerment text on it quote, “Empowerable x 1 Size 3”. That means for for every three points of empowerment, the cone size increases by one. You discard a king, generating six empowerment points. You spend the first three points to increase the cone from size three to four, and the next three points to increase the cone from size four to five.   Perks. Perks are bonus traits your magical girl gets. There are three types: combat perks, ability perks, and character perks. Every magical girl starts with one perk from each category, so one combat perk, one ability perk, and one character perk. Here is an example combat perk. It’s called diamonds are a girl’s best friend, and it doesn’t have any prerequisites. When you spend a diamond card to empower an ability, you get to roll an extra dice for the check made for the ability, because diamonds are a girl’s best friend. Here is an example ability perk. It’s called undodgeable attack. You add the word undodgeable before one of your attack abilities. For example if you pick the ability wind blast, it would permanently become undodgeable wind blast. Any target you wind blast can’t use dodge against it. Here is an example character perk. It’s called fleet footed, and it doesn’t have any prerequistes. If your magical girl is fleet footed, their movement speed is increased by two. You start with one perk from each category.   Moods. When you first create your magical girl, she starts with a neutral mood. Neutral moods don’t give you any bonuses or penalties. The mood scale goes from negative two at the lowest, to zero which is neutral, to positive two at the highest. The GM will tell you if your magical girl’s mood increases, which might happen if in the game you eat at a restaurant, go shopping, etc good thing. The GM will also tell you if your magical girl’s mood decreases, which might happen if in the game you miss sleep, miss a meal, deal with corruption or monsters, or etc bad thing. On Monday mornings, your mood resets one step back towards neutral. The abilities that change your mood during a battle are temporary and wear off when combat ends. At the end of the fight, you return to whatever your mood was at the start of it.   One example of a positive mood is happy. When you’re happy, any time you would make a spirit check, you roll an extra dice. Another example positive mood is bold. When you’re feeling bold, negative status effects end one round sooner than they normally would. Here is an example of a negative mood. When you’re angry, every smarts check you make has one less dice. Here’s a second example of a negative mood. When you’re tired, your movements are two squares shorter.   When the GM tells you your mood increases, you pick a positive mood to take and its benefit. If your mood increases again, you can go to the advanced form of that mood if there is one, denoted by two right arrows and a new word, or you can gain a second mood. That’s the most you can have, either one advanced mood or two basic moods. This also works the same way for negative moods.   Here is an example of advancing a mood. Your magical girl was already feeling the positive mood of encouraged. Your GM tells you that your character’s mood improves again. You can choose to either take the advancement to encourage that is called being inspired, or you could take any basic mood, like happy or excited. Regardless of which you pick, if your GM tells you your mood improves again, nothing happens. Two steps up or down is the maximum.   Movement rules. Style is your movement speed, unless it’s less than four, and then your movement speed is at least four. Everyone playing Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls should be able to look at a grid twenty squares left to right and fifteen squares top to bottom. Imagine that you’re looking top down at your character. Every grid is a five foot square they can move forward, backward, left, right, and diagonally into. Your character can technically jump up from the two dimensional grid, moving half as many grid squares in the up direction as they can horizontally. For example if your movement speed is four, you can jump one half of four is two grid squares up into the air. Magical girls are magical, and they can double jump, triple jump, etc as an action, but if you don’t land on solid ground by the end of your turn, you’ll start falling at a rate of four squares per turn. You never have to walk to pick up your weapon or spend an action on that. A magical girl cannot be disarmed. If separated from her magical weapon, it disappears and reappears in her hand ready to go. There is no mechanical difference between any weapon types, but you’re welcome to flavor your magical girl as holding one if you’d like.   Here is a list of movement rules. If your character is falling next to a wall, you can wall slide to slow your fall from four squares per turn for falling to one square per turn for wall sliding. If the environment is reducing your mobility, like rough terrain, your movement speed is halved. If you try to vertically go upward in rough terrain, half of a half is a quarter. For example moving upward through rough terrain reduces your movement speed from four to one. Swimming doesn’t reduce your movement speed, but you can only hold your breath for as many turns as twenty multiplied by the result of a guts roll. After you run out of breath turns, you start taking one point of damage per turn until you can breathe again, or until you die from drowning if your health reaches zero. More movement rules. A magical girl can fall prone anytime they want, and can crawl at half speed to fit in narrow spaces. The game master might impose a penalty on you if you try to fight from a prone position, and you can’t use any abilities unless you’re standing up. It takes one action to stand up.   Combat. Combat is done on a grid twenty squares left to right and fifteen squares top to bottom. You can move up, down, left, right, diagonal, the opposite diagonal, et cetera in any direction on the grid squares.   Turn order. When players and enemies are fighting, it all happens really fast of course, but to hear everyone’s contribution in an orderly way, officially everyone takes turns. At the beginning of an encounter, all characters make a style check. The highest gets to go first in the turn order, and the lowest has to go last. Here’s an example style check. Your style number is five. You roll five six sided dice, also called d6. You get a 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Using the d3 minus one dice scoring sytem, what matters is the number that shows on the dice divided by two minus one. So your one and two add zero to your score, your three and four give you one each, and the five gives you two. Your total score is four. The enemy’s score was three, so with a score of four you go before the enemy does.   On your turn, your character will be able to talk, and will be able to make two actions and one reaction. If you move, that takes up one of your two actions. If you don’t move, then you can do two actions on your turn. For example you can move and use an ability, or you can not move, and be able to use an ability and then use a second ability. Another example is that you can choose to move twice instead of using any abilities.   Going all out. If you want, at the start of your turn you can declare that you’re going all out. If you go all out, you don’t get a reaction this turn, but do get a third action.   Drawing cards in combat. When combat starts, magical girls draw half as many cards as their smarts score rounded down. You also draw a card at the start of your turn. Your maximum hand size is your smarts score. For example if your smarts is three, if you have four cards in your hand at the end of your turn, you have to discard one. At the end of combat, you’ll discard any cards you haven’t used yet, so you can’t stockpile them from one encounter to another.   Here’s an example attack against an inanimate object. It’s the start of your turn, so you draw a card. Your goal is to blast down a door so you can save the day. The door has a damage reduction, DR, of five, and has three hit points, HP. You raise your magical staff and prepare a magical girl attack, using the first action of the two actions you get on your turn. This is the basic attack ability, from the list of universal abilities, so you don’t have to spend a card to use it. Basic attack says, quote, “Use your magic to strike at your target. You roll one fewer dice for each square between you and your target.” You’re standing right next to the door, so you roll for power, rolling six dice. The dice show a one, a two, a three, a four, a five, and a six. That translates to results of zero, zero, one, one, two, and two. The sum is six total. The door’s damage reduction of five means one damage gets through, reducing the door’s three hit points down to two. You don’t quite break it. The door still has two hit points. But you still have a second action on your turn. You raise your staff and roll a second time. The dice show three threes, a four, and two sixes. Threes and fours on the dice mean one, and sixes become two, so that’s eight damage. The door’s damage reduction reduces the eight down to three damage, but it’s enough. The remaining two hit points of the door are depleted. You break down the door to save the day. Also, you still have the card you drew this turn, and your reaction left. You can use that card to cast a reaction ability you have as part of your list of aspect abilities. Keeping your card and reaction ready to go is a smart choice who knows what’s beyond that door about to come at you.   Status effects. Some abilities have positive or negative ongoing effects. Positive effects can end whenever you want. Negative effects will say how long they last. On going effects that say they last a specific number of turns end at the end of the turn, after your actions are done, not when the turn starts. Some examples of status effects are blinded, charged up, and pacified. Blinded characters have a 50% miss chance on their attacks. Charged up characters get maximum results on the next check they make. Pacified characters can’t take actions that would harm others. There’s also paralyzed, petrified, poisoned, rooted, silenced, slowed, stasised, stunned, terrified, and unconscious.   Temporary hit points. If a perk or ability grants you temporary hit points, those get used up before reducing hit points. Temporary hit points don’t stack; if you are getting more temproary hit points when you already have some, the new number overwrites your previous temporary hit point number. When the encounter ends, temporary hit points go away. You don’t get to start a new encounter with temporary hit points boosting you from the last encounter you were in.   If an effect raises your guts score, your hit points do go up. But be careful, because when the effect wears off you don’t just go back to normal, you lost as many hit points as you had gained, even if that reduction now reduces you to zero.   Dying. When one of your five stats reaches zero, your magical girl stops being able to do any actions and helplessly can’t defend herself. You can role play each zero differently depending on which stat reached zero. If power reaches zero, the magical girl is too weak to move. If style reaches zero your joints lock up. If smarts reaches zero, the magical girl is unconscious. If guts reaches zero, her body hurts too much to move. If spirit reaches zero, you’re too depressed to force yourself to act. If hit points reach zero, the magical transformation ends and you revert back to being a normal girl. All status effects drop off, which is nice. But if you take any damage in your school girl form, you could die or permanently lose your powers, so, you might consider using your newly status effect free normal legs to run to safety while your friends finish the fight. A good game master will give you a non player character to control if your player character dies in a session.   Healing. Magical girls inherently heal one hit point per minute out of combat or one hit point every twenty turns in combat. This usually heals your character up to full hit points in between combats.   Daily routines. Ultra Hyper Fantastic Magical girls has daily routines. There’s a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday breakdown of the week, with three hour time chunks every day, that your magical girl spends in classes, at lunch, back in classes, doing extracurricular activites, having free time, eating dinner, or sleeping. Every weekday, you have four classes to attend. In the morning there’s PE and math, and in the afternoon there’s science and writing. If you are absent from your activities, that has consequences. Missing class means you get a failing grade for that day of the week. Missing your club for the day means your mood decreases one step. Missing sleep decreases your mood one step. If you do attend class, PE, math, science, and writing each has a different stat check you make for the class. For example, in PE you have to roll style and power. Add your style and power stat checks together and add five bonus to your roll. At the end of the week, you get a report card that adds up the check reults you got for each class for each day. That number determines your letter grade. For example, Monday through Friday getting a 13, 16, 14, 17, and 12 in math would add up to a 72, which is a C minus. If you want to improve youre score, you can study during your free time in the evening, which improves your bonus on your roll from plus five to plus fifteen.   Clubs. Every magical girl is in one club that you pick when you create your character. These clubs include cheerleading, chess, cooking, drama, karate, sports, and yearbook. Every day after class but before free time, there’s a block of time in the day for attending your club. If you complete the club’s challenge, you get that bonus listed there. You’ll face a challenge by flipping over a card. The number on the card determines the challenge. You can see the challenges listed in the GM rule book. They’re intentionally left out of the player’s rule book. I’ll just give a few examples so you can get the idea. For example if your magical girl is in the cheerleading club and the card flipped is a five, that’s a pom-pom panic. You need to do a style check to perform a cheer routine, throwing and catching your pom-poms in the air in sync with your teammates. If you get a six or higher, you succeed. The routine looks and feels amazing, and your mood increases by one. If you get a five or lower, your pom-pom hits a pigeon midair, bringing the team’s routine to a screeching halt, literally. Your mood decreases by one. Here’s another example. If you’re in the chess club and draw a two, the challenge is called pawn stars. During the chess match, you have the opportunity to promote a pawn. Make a smarts check. If you get a seven or higher, you promoted your pawn to the piece you needed to win the game. Your mood increases by two steps. If you got a six or lower, you promoted your pawn to a queen without thinking, and accidentally cause a stalemate. Your mood decreases by one step. You’ll notice that those two examples were from the cards five and two. If you flip a face card during a challenge, you’ll have multiple checks to make, a multi part challenge. The first two checks give a bonus or penalty to the third check, which determines the outcome. If you succeed at a multi step challenge, you might increase your mood and also either learn a new ability or gain a new perk.   Building a character. All magical girls start out with 5 in each stat. Choose two stats; one stat will get a plus two starting bonus and the other stat will get a plus one starting bonus. Next, choose an aspect. The aspect will give your magical girl some stat modifications, with most aspects reducing one stat by two and increasing another stat by two, to specialize you to fit the flavor of that aspect. For example, the ice aspect gives you plus two to power, but as a cool person with a heart of ice, you get minus two to your spirit. The aspect also gives you a passive ability. For example, the water aspect’s passive ability says any time a magical girl with the water aspect assists an ally, her checks are automatically maxxed. Your smarts stat is the number of abilities you can know from your aspect abilities list and the non-aspect abilities list. Every magical girl starts with one perk from each category, so one combat perk, one ability perk, and one character perk.   When you gain milestones in Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls, you will gain more perks, hit points, and stats. Every odd milestone gets you a new character perk, every even milestone gets you a new ability perk, and every third milestone gets you a new combat perk.   Here is an example of a character build straight from the rule book. We’re making a character sheet for a magical girl named Mox. First, all magical girls start with fives in power, style, smarts, guts, and spirit. Next, choose an aspect for your magical girl. The example aspect is butterfly, which increases spirit from five to seven, and decreases guts from five to three. Then all magical girls get to pick one stat that gets a plus two bonus and another stat that gets a plus one bonus. For this example character, they chose style to get plus two, from five to seven, and spirit to get plus one, from seven to eight. Because this is a milestone one starter character, using the hit point table, with three guts and milestone one the magical girl has twenty one hit points. Next we determine abilities. Mox knows all the universal abilities, all magical girls do. Mox also knows five more abilities because Mox’s smarts is five. These five can come from the butterfly aspect, or from the non aspect list. They chose magic missile, blink, mesmerize, blood nectar, and healing touch. Each aspect also gives the magical girl a passive ability. For the butterfly aspect, the passive ability is called flutter. The next step is to choose perks. As a starter character at milestone one, Mox has one perk in each category. The combat perk they chose is called lucky, the ablity perk they chose is called dodgy, and the character perk is called wing-a-ling. The very last step of character creation is to pick a club. They pick drama club. Voila, that’s a completed example character.   Hopefully this little rules chat helps my players build their characters and understand how to play. For everyone listening, if you’d like to hear an example adventure, the episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast right after this is a demonstration of us playing Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls in a oneshot game session. We invite you to listen to it to hear an example of Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls in action. We encourage you to find the Ultimate Hyper Fantastic Magical Girls rule book yourself, and play a game with friends.

Hired as movie extras, paid in pizza, neither Josiah nor Sofia raise an eyebrow when asked to withdraw cash from the bank's till. Cameras are rolling in Memory Lane Robbery, an actual play podcast of Never Stop Blowing Up, the role playing game. 

Hired as movie extras, paid in pizza, neither Josiah nor Sofia raise an eyebrow when asked to withdraw cash from the bank's till. Cameras are rolling in Memory Lane Robbery, an actual play podcast of Never Stop Blowing Up, the role playing game. 

Josiah McCoy Interview

Responding to a casting call, Kyyyvvvyynn and Sir Barnabas get suspicious.  Why is the Director more concerned with the vault than the camera?  An actual play of the Never Stop Blowing Up system. 

Responding to a casting call, Kyyyvvvyynn and Sir Barnabas get suspicious.  Why is the Director more concerned with the vault than the camera?  An actual play of the Never Stop Blowing Up system. 

Season 2025 Epilogues

Pulled through time and space to the Prancing Pony, Newson and Wilford race to save Tobald Heatherfoot from the curse of the Barrow-downs. An actual play of The One Ring, the official Lord of the Rings role-playing game. 

Pulled through time and space to the Prancing Pony, Newson and Wilford race to save Tobald Heatherfoot from the curse of the Barrow-downs. An actual play of The One Ring, the official Lord of the Rings role-playing game. 

1000 Enter 1 Leaves is an actual play podcast of the L.U.R.P.S. game system. Follow FBK members Norbert, Grumm and Pippinprick as they navigate the hazardous environment, rabid contestants and the worst dinner bell of all time in the annual Niqamui Fight Club Contest. At stake is the most coveted prize in the land, two minutes of open mike time broadcast far and wide...oh...and something worth a million dollars. Can our intrepid guild members makes the cut, or will they be cut down? Tune in and find out. 

Trailer for 1000 Enter 1 Leaves

A priceless watch goes missing, and the Firebreathing Kittens are the likeliest culprits! Join Tracey and Hefty in this Blade Runner ttrpg mystery adventure as they try to uncover the real culprit and discover something even more important in the process.

A priceless watch goes missing, and the Firebreathing Kittens are the likeliest culprits! Join Tracey and Hefty in this Blade Runner ttrpg mystery adventure as they try to uncover the real culprit and discover something even more important in the process.

An abandoned guardhouse, blood and broken glass.  What befell Plant 4D, and what awaits Deli and Wilford within? Working for Packing Peanuts is an actual play podcast of The Walking Dead RPG.  

An abandoned guardhouse, blood and broken glass.  What befell Plant 4D, and what awaits Deli and Wilford within? Working for Packing Peanuts is an actual play podcast of The Walking Dead RPG.  

How To Play The Walking Dead   Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for The Walking Dead. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own The Walking Dead game at home.   I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections. Game category Skills Pushing and stress How to attack Armor Cover Moving Dueling Sneak attacks Brawling Leadership Swarms Threat levels Single walker attack Fighting a swarm Sacrifice someone Relieving stress Dying Healing Helping allies Jargon Building a character   Game category. This is the official tabletop roleplaying game of the famous TV show, The Walking Dead. You are role playing as a character in a world where society has collapsed. An unidentified malady has spread to all living people, infecting everyone. Anyone who dies, regardless of the cause of the death, is reanimated into what is called a Walker, an undead shambling corpse driven by a compulsion to consume living flesh. If one of the living gets scratched or bitten by a walker, they will succumb, quickly becoming one if the bitten limb is not amputated. Your character can kill an individual Walker, but never enough of them to make a dent in how many there are in the world. It’s not safe out there. You might be able to clear the Walkers from a small haven, such as a roof top, so you can sleep. At your haven you can store food, water, medicine, and other resources, maybe collaborating with a close knit group of fellow survivors. But in a world with no law enforcement, can you trust the people you meet? They might be robbers eyeing your limited food, or murderers, or cannibals, or could simply make too much noise and attract a Walker swarm, a gathering of the undead so numerous that they overrun anything in their path. How long will you survive in this roleplaying game before you become one of… the walking dead. To describe the mechanics in five sentences, this is a game where you will roll six sided dice, also called d6. You succeed when you see at least one six in the dice you rolled. You can push to re roll failures, which adds stress dice. If you get a one on a stress dice, something goes wrong. Weapons deal a set number of damage depending on the weapon, and all characters have three hit points.   Skills. When your character tries to accomplish something in the game world, you might roll dice to see if they are successful or not. A good game master will call for a dice roll any time the character failing could increase tension, make the situation much worse, or make the game more exciting. How do you know how many dice you will roll? Find the skill that best fits what you’re trying to do, and the attribute associated with that skill. The number next to the skill, plus the number next to the attribute, are how many dice you get to roll.   Here is an example skill roll. Rick is trapped, surrounded by Walkers on all sides with no way out. Glenn’s player wants to help Rick. She proposes that Glenn sneak through the Walker filled streets, find a car without being detected, hot wire it, and drive it back to Rick to pick him up. Because the first part of her plan is sneaking, and because if that fails that dramatically changes the outcome of this plan, the game master calls for a roll. Glenn’s player looks at his character sheet. The number three is written next to the stealth skill, and it’s one of three skills under the agility attribute, which has the number four. With three dice from the stealth skill and four dice from the agility attribute, Glenn’s player rolls seven dice total. There are very good odds that at least one of them will be a six. The player rolls and the result is… two sixes! Excellent. Glenn’s stealthy sneaking through the streets was successful, he found a car with no Walkers around. For the extra six, the game master rewards Glenn’s player with a little something extra, such as asking her what color the car is. She says orange. Sweet. The next step will be hot wiring it.   Pushing and stress. In The Walking Dead, a roll isn’t necessarily over if you don’t get any sixes. You can choose to push. Pushing is when you pick up all those dice, add one point of stress to your character, and roll again. For each point of stress, you add one more special dice to the pool. This special stress dice could be a different color than the other dice, or have different symbols on its faces, or can be rolled after the other dice on its own, or could be rolled in a different location on your table, etc. Anyway, to push, you pick up all those failed dice and re roll them, and also re roll as many extra dice called stress dice as you have points of stress. This is another chance to see a six. If you get at least one six as a result, congratulations, your skill roll succeeded. From now on, you’ll roll as many extra dice on all rolls as you have points of stress. If you’ve pushed once, you have one stress, and roll one extra dice. If you’ve pushed twice, you have two stress, and roll two extra dice. Now here’s where keeping track of which dice are the stress dice matter. If you get a one on specifically a stress dice, not your regular dice, then the one on the stress dice means you’ve quote, “messed up”. When you mess up, the threat level on page seventy nine raises. For example you didn’t notice a Walker until it got close enough to attack you, or you were loud enough to get the attention of a Walker Swarm, etc. Something goes very wrong. Stress stays with you until you do something to relieve the stress. This includes narrating a roleplaying scene with your anchor, narrating a roleplaying scene with another character, and resting. When you sleep a full night’s rest, roll two dice and relieve the lower number of stress.   Here is an example of pushing. Glenn is at the car he found. There aren’t any Walkers around. He’d like to try to hot wire the car, so he can drive it back to where Rick is trapped and rescue him. Hot wiring a car is the tech skill. The player looks at Glenn’s character sheet. There’s a zero written next to the tech skill, uh oh. But the tech skill is under the wits attribute, which Glenn has a four in, whew. Glenn’s player will be rolling four dice. She rolls the four dice and gets… four, one, two, two. Yikes, there aren’t any sixes. Glenn’s not going to be able to hot wire this car because he doesn’t have any tech skills. But wait! She can push! Glenn’s player adds one point of stress to his character sheet. This means all future rolls will be made with one extra dice, a stress dice. She picks up the dice and rolls them, and then rolls one extra dice to represent the stress dice. Three, six, two, one, and the stress dice is a… five! Excellent. She narrates how the first time, the car’s engine turns and sputters, sputters, sputters, and fails to roll over. Glenn was about to give up, rather than risk the noise of the engine attracting Walkers. But then he remembered how he knows, based on his knowledge gathered while working as a pizza delivery driver before the outbreak, that this road is a dead end surrounded by the tall concrete walls of a warehouse. There’s not likely to be many Walkers, kept out by the anti tresspassing architecture. It’s safe to make a bit of noise here. He tries the engine again, symbolically re rolling. And gets that six! The engine rumbles to life, the car starts, and Glenn drives away, off to rescue Rick. Huzzah! Because this is a training guide, let’s also discuss what would have happened if Glenn’s player had gotten that six and also gotten a one on the stress dice. The rule book calls this succeeding and also messing up. Yes, the car would have started. And also, something would have gone terribly wrong in a different aspect. The game master gets to choose how. For example there’s the classic attract a swarm of Walkers result, or the classic you didn’t notice a Walker was about to attack you result. You might run out of bullets, get lost, break an important item, or get injured. Or the GM can do something creative, like, Glenn didn’t know the previous occupant of the car had seen the zombie apocalypse, panicked, and hidden in their trunk, not realizing they didn’t know how to open it. Days trapped in the hot trunk had led to their demise, until they had reawoken, undead, but still trapped. Grumbling in zombie speak, the former car occupant now thumps their head softly into the roof of the trunk, shaken and stirred by Glenn’s speedy driving, as Glenn whips around curves and flies over speed bumps, off to rescue Rick, unaware he’s bringing a Walker companion along for the ride. Depending on the scene and how creative they’re feeling at the moment, the GM might ask the player to pick and describe how they messed up.   How to attack. Attacks in The Walking Dead are basically skill rolls. Your weapon will come from the list of gear. Each weapon gives you a specified number of extra dice you roll, and does a set number of damage if it hits.   Here’s an example attack. Rick is trapped. He’s surrounded by Walkers. His weapon is a Colt Python .357 Magnum revolver. You can see the revolver’s stats on page 74 of the rule book. They can target enemies a short distance away, they give the player two extra dice on their ranged attack skill roll, and they deal two damage if they hit. Rick has three in the ranged combat skill and two in the agililty attribute. Three dice from the ranged combat skill plus two dice from the agility attribute plus two dice from the revolver equals seven dice overall. The ranged combat skill says that for every extra six you get, you can increase the damage you deal by one. Rick gets two sixes! That’s great. The Walker he hits takes three damage.   Armor. If you’re wearing armor, when you get attacked, roll as many dice as you have level in armor. For example, metal plate armor has an armor level of eight, so you’d roll eight dice. Each resulting six reduces the damage you take by one. There is a trade off to mobility from wearing armor. For example the metal plate armor reduces all the skill rolls you make that feasibly use mobility by three dice.   Cover. To get behind cover, make a mobility roll. That means rolling your agility attribute plus mobility skill number of dice. Rolling a six means you succeed. If a character is behind cover, enemies firing ranged attacks at them need an extra six to hit. Cover doesn’t affect close combat.   Moving. If you want to increase or decrease the distance between yourself and someone or something, that requires a roll. Mobility is a skill in The Walking Dead. Roll your agility attribute and mobility skill number of dice, and if at least one dice rolls a six, you succeeded.   Dueling. Dueling is the most basic way to fight. There’s one player character and one enemy who isn’t a zombie. Both of you roll dice, as many dice as you have in your combat skill, your attribute, and your weapon bonus. If neither of you rolls a six, then nobody did any damage. If you both roll the same number of sixes, then you both deal your weapon damage to each other. If one of you rolls more sixes, you deal your weapon damage to the other person, and don’t take any. Every extra six past the first one deals one extra damage. If a friend role plays helping you some how, you get an extra dice for your duel. After the first round, you could choose to end the combat and try to accomplish that through roleplaying, or you could keep dueling.   Sneak attacks. If someone is unaware they are being attacked, they don’t roll for that first round of opposed rolls in a duel.   Brawling. If two people gang up on a single target, the lone fighter duels one of the pair and is defenseless against the other. Everyone’s attack for the round happens at the same time. If there are multiple people fighting on each side, you can use the brawling mechanics. A brawl starts with the Game Master, often abbreviated as GM, declaring how far apart everyone is from each other and from objects in the environment, like cover, enemies, etc. Then the GM walks everyone through the six phases in a round. You can do one action per round. This action involves a skill roll, and can be something like a ranged attack, a stealth roll, a mobility roll to move, etc. Drawing your weapon doesn’t take an action. NPCs will say what they’re doing to start each phase. When the GM calls out the phase you want to take your action in, after the NPCs have all said what they will do, say what you want to do and then roll to see if you succeed. The phases are: 1 taking cover, 2 ranged combat, 3 close combat, 4 moving, 5 first aid, and 6 anything else.   Leadership. In a brawl, you have the option of taking the leadership action. Roll your leadership skill plus empathy attribute number of dice. Every six you get is a bonus dice you can give to another player, while telling them what to do, that they can roll if they do what you told them to. Three is the maximum number of leadership dice you can give to a single person.   Swarms. Walkers who are moving around in a group of five or more are called a swarm. The swarm size matters, mechanically, so here’s the definition for it. Five to ten Walkers is a swarm size of one. Eleven to twenty Walkers is a swarm size of two. Twenty one to fifty Walkers is a swarm size of three. Fifty one to a hundred Walkers is a swarm size of four. More than a hundred but less than a thousand Walkers is a swarm size of five. More than a thousand Walkers is a swarm size of six.   Threat levels. The Game Master will declare the threat level publicly to describe settings and at the start of combats. A threat level of zero means you’re in an area that has been cleared of Walkers and are safe for now. A threat level of 1 means there are probably Walkers somewhere around you but not anywhere specifically. They haven’t noticed you and won’t bother you, unless you mess up a skill test, in which case a single Walker might show up for a bite. A threat level of 2 means the Walkers are at defined places on the map that the GM can mark if asked, but they haven’t noticed you yet. When the threat level is 1 or 2, you could try rolling your skills to avoid the Walkers. Examples include stealth to quietly bypass them, or mobility to run away. If you fail, a single Walker might attack you or the threat level will go up. A threat level of 3 means there are Walkers visible, they can see you as much as you can see them, they’re shambling towards you, and all players gain a stress dice. They know you’re there and won’t go away, just standing and waiting for you patiently. Players are limited to only using the skills endure, force, mobility, ranged combat, and stealth. A threat level of 4 means the Walkers are getting pretty close to you. Not arm’s reach, but, they’re coming. Players are limited to only using the skills force, mobility, and ranged combat. A threat level of 5 means they are now within an arm’s reach of you. Their arms. Which they are, in fact, reaching towards you. Players are limited to only using the skills force, close combat, and ranged combat. And lastly a threat level of six means you are surrounded on all sized by Walkers within biting distance. Players are limited to only using the skills force and close combat. Threat levels of three, four, five, and six initiate the swarm fighting mechanics. An example of a threat level is if you try to disguise yourself as a Walker but your disguise breaks down, they’d notice you while within an arm’s reach of you, which is threat level 5 but just like, for you, individually.   There are four ways to increase the threat level. Rolling a one on a stress dice, failing a skill roll intended to avoid Walkers, entering an area that has Walkers in it, and making noise. When a player rolls a one on a stress dice, that is called messing up, and often the GM will say the threat level raises while something else goes wrong, such as friendly fire, injuring yourself, the environment gets worse, running out of ammo, etc.   Single Walker attack. Walkers don’t have hit points, attributes, or skills. When just a single one of them attacks you, make a skill roll of your choice to avoid getting bitten. Which skill you pick will probably depend on the situation. This defense roll doesn’t count as an action in combat, it just happes every time a single Walker goes to attack you. If you pass this skill roll, congratulations, the Walker didn’t make contact with you and due to whatever you did, is no longer threatening you. If you fail this skill roll, uh oh, you will make a roll on the Walker attack table on page 81. That table is pretty diverse, and includes some effects that can immediately kill your character. After rolling on the table, the attack is over and the Walker no longer threatens you. So pass or fail, a single Walker attack is resolved by that skill roll.   Fighting a swarm. Anytime the threat level is three, four, five, or six, you’re going to be fighting a swarm. Like brawls, this combat will be done in rounds. Every round, up to three player characters and or non player characters can take an action. So if there are four of you, or if you have three players and an NPC, remember that sentence during the game. Extra people can help allies and one person can use the leadership skill each round, but only three people can participate adding their successes to the running total for the swarm combat. There are three skill rolls per round, so if you have two player characters, one of you is making two rolls in a round, and the second roll gets two fewer dice. If there’s only one person facing a swarm, the first roll is normal, the second roll gets two fewer dice, and the third roll gets four fewer dice.   Swarm threat. Swarm threat is a number you calculate and keep track of during swarm fights. Swarm threat equals swarm size plus threat level. Each round, three players will do skill rolls and will add together their successes. Any player who fails their individual skill roll receives a single Walker attack. They do another skill roll that is separate from the roll for the round, to see if the single Walker attack hits them or misses.   Here is an example. If the swarm size is three and the threat is four, the players will need to get seven successes in their three skill rolls to win the round.   The round is won if the number of successes reaches the number for the swarm threat. Winning a round will end the fight if the swarm size is three or less. If the swarm size is four, five, or six, then winning a round will reduce the swarm size by one. If you don’t get as many successes as you were hoping for but do get at least half, then you get one free extra success next round. If you don’t get even half as many successes as the swarm threat, which again is the swarm size plus the threat level, then the players lost the round to the Walkers and the GM chooses one of three things. Either the threat level is increased, or the swarm size is increased, or the swarm attacks. If the round is lost and anyone rolled a one on a stress dice, then the GM chooses two things.   The swarm attacking means different things at different threat levels. Below threat level six, it either means a single Walker attack, or a block. A block is when the Walkers have crowded into the escape routes, so mobility and stealth rolls need one extra six to succeed. At threat level six, things go horribly wrong and something called a mass attack happens when the swarm attacks. The GM rolls a random dice to see who’s affected, and that person can’t make the defensive roll, and rolls on the single Walker attack table with no way to avoid it. Every time the swarm attacks, the swarm threat number gets reduced by one afterwards. Eventually the Walkers will move on naturally, if you can hold out that long.   Sacrifice someone. There is a mechanic for sacrificing someone, basically shoving them into the Walker swarm while running in the opposite direction. The two people roll opposed force skill and strength attribute number of dice, and the person who wins is out of the fight while the person who loses has to roll on the Walker attack table on page eighty one. Regardless, that force roll takes up one of the three rolls the party was allowed to make.   Relieving stress. After a roleplaying scene that involves a social interaction with another player character or nonplayer character, a player can tell the Game Master that they relieved stress, and can remove one stress dice. If the scene was with your anchor and lasted an hour of in game time or more, then you can choose to relieve all stress. An anchor can relieve your stress once per session. Relieving stress starts to be important in long term campaigns where you’re using the one healing point per day mechanic, because you don’t get that one healing point a day if you have five or more stress.   Dying. When your character takes three points of damage, they become broken. Broken characters can’t walk, can’t attack, automatically fail all skill rolls, and generally just lay on the ground. Immediately gain one stress and roll on the critical injury table. A broken character that gets hit again, dies.   Critical injuries can come in three levels of lethality: not lethal, potentially lethal after a while, and immediately lethal. Here are three example results from rolling on the critical injury table. If you roll a 1 and then a 1, your character is winded. Being winded isn’t lethal, so you aren’t at risk of dying. You do have a penalty of minus one, meaning one less dice on all your rolls. And this lasts even after you’re not broken anymore, for between one and six hours. Your GM will tell you when you’ve recovered. That was one example. Here’s a second example. If you roll a three and a three, that’s a deep flesh wound. You have a minus two on all your rolls, meaning two fewer dice. The deep flesh wound could be fatal. Your fellow players can make a medicine skill roll to try to stabilize you once a day. If they haven’t succeeded by eight days, then your character dies. Here’s a third example. If you roll a six and a six on the critical injury table, your character’s heart was impaled, and they die immediately.   Healing. As long as you’ve got food, a player character recovers one hit point with each new day. If an ally succeeds on a medicine skill roll to help you, gain a hit point and you’re back up on your feet and no longer broken. The critical injury is still there, though. Every extra six on a medicine roll is one extra recovered hit point.   Helping allies. Allies can spend their entire action to help each other. Each person helping you narrates what they’re doing in the story to contribute, and this gives you one extra dice on a roll, to a maximum of three extra dice.   Jargon. The term d6 means a six sided dice. The phrase d66 means rolling first one, then a second six sided dice. The order they’re rolled matters. For example if you roll a 1 and then a 4, that’s the order they’re in, not four one. A d666 means rolling three six sided dice, and again the order matters. If you roll a two, a five, and a three, that’s the result, not in a different order. Double high means rolling two dice and keeping the highest. Double low means rolling two dice and keeping the lowest. Random dice means everyone rolls one dice and the lowest result loses. For example if a swarm attacks and the phrase ‘random dice’ is used to determine who gets bitten, every player rolls a d6 and the person with the lowest result is the person who got bitten. Opposed rolls where two people are butting heads, such as a race only one person can win or when one person is hiding and another is trying to find them, are resolved by both people rolling and the person with more sixes wins.   Building a character in The Walking Dead involves assigning eleven categories to your character sheet: archetype, name, issue, drive, attribute points, skill points, talent, gear, player character relationships, anchors, and haven. I have the rare opportunity to demonstrate character creation using someone people know and love from a TV show, so I’m going to do that. The creators of this game have made a character sheet for Glenn, so I’ll walk you through each choice they made to make him.   First, there are twelve archetypes, optional prebuilt classes you can use, if you want to quickly generate a pre built character of sorts. People like a doctor, a criminal, a farmer, a kid, a cop, a politician, a preacher, etc. These archetypes are like pregenerated characters that make the game really quick to pick up if you want to play now and think of character building never. Because we have a good idea of who Glenn is as a person, we won’t be using one of those pregenerated archetypes, but if you want to use that, it’s most of the way to a completed character sheet for you. But we don’t need an archetype, we’re making Glenn, who Free League publishing describes like this. Before the outbreak, Glenn was a pizza delivery driver in Atlanta, whose knowledge of the city streets and where to go saved him during the beginning of the outbreak. He soon joined a group of survivors camping outside Atlanta, and their trust in him, being the best at revisiting the city to find provisions, awakened a part of Glenn that had been asleep for a long time. He’s a scout and a runner for the group. Courageous, smart, and fast. But his real strength is his ability to see the best in others, to inspire trust, and to keep the group together. I agree, Free League publishing. It’s fun to play TTRPGs based on a show you’ve all watched, this is neat. Anyway, back to character creation, archetype is custom. Name is Glenn. His issue is that he’s eager to take risks for others. His drive is a desire for everyone to make it, together. All characters have thirteen points in attributes. For Glenn, that’s 2 in strength, 4 in agility, 4 in wits, and 3 in empathy. Starting level characters have twelve points in skills. You will get more as you level up. Glenn starts with one skill point in close combat, one in endure, zero in force, two skill points in mobility, one in ranged combat, three in stealth, two skill points in scout, one in survival, zero in tech, zero skill points in leadership, one in manipulation, and zero in medicine. As you level up, you may gain more skill points and talents. Glenn’s character sheet has two talents, so he’s slightly above starter level characters who have one talent. His two talents are Gatherer and Packmule. Gatherer gives Glenn a plus two to stealth, which means rolling two more dice, when Glenn is on his own. Packmule lets Glenn carry one extra slot of items. Next, Glenn has the gear of a pistol, a backpack with four rations, and a pair of walkie talkies. The pistol has the weapon stats of plus two, which means two extra dice when you roll with it, that it is able to target short range or closer enemies, and that it deals two damage when it hits. We write a few notes about Glenn’s relationships with the other player characters, name two anchors who are people in the group who are important to Glenn, who he can role play with to relieve stress points. For example a friend he can open up to about how he feels. This will depend on who the fellow player characters are. And lastly, we describe his haven, which depends on the adventure, and could range from a bus, a factory with a secure chain link fence surrounding it, a rich person’s house, or simply that old classic, a roof top.   For players in my upcoming The Walking Dead game, when you build your character, please follow the starting character rules, and because we’re late in the season playing high powered characters, please get an additional five skill points and three talents. Starting characters have twelve skill points, you have seventeen, with a max of five in any skill. Starting characters have one talents, you have four.   Hopefully this little rules chat helps my players build their characters and understand how to play. For everyone listening, if you’d like to hear an example adventure, the episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast right after this is a demonstration of us playing The Walking Dead in a oneshot game session. We invite you to listen to it to hear an example of The Walking Dead in action. We encourage you to find the The Walking Dead rule book yourself, and play a game with friends.

Welcome to a special episode of Firebreathing Kittens. This is our rules discussion where we talk about how we felt about the rules we played in the past few games, for summer 2025.  We’ll discuss the ttrpgs Tales From The Loop, DC20, Sexy Battle Wizards, Tiny Pirates, Into The Odd, Fudge Lite, Dragonbane, Outgunned, Black Powder and Brimstone, and Coriolis the Third Horizon. 

Norbert, Newson, and Belle are hurled across the galaxy and must find their way home armed only with companionship, a little knowledge, and an accelerator cannon. Just Trying To Pay Rent is an actual play podcast of Coriolis The Third Horizon. 

Norbert, Newson, and Belle are hurled across the galaxy and must find their way home armed only with companionship, a little knowledge, and an accelerator cannon. Just Trying To Pay Rent is an actual play podcast of Coriolis The Third Horizon. 

How to play Coriolis The Third Horizon.  Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for Coriolis The Third Horizon. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own Coriolis The Third Horizon game at home.   I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections. Game category Attributes and skills Icons Initiative Action Points Armor Critical success Distances Ranged combat particulars Reactions Movement and encumbrance Partial damage Zero hit points or mind points Darkness points Building a character     Game category. Coriolis is a tabletop roleplaying game set in space. You can crew a space craft, explore the horizon by traveling to new star systems through portals, unravel secrets such as who built the portals, plot and scheme with factions over power and influence, pray to the icons, and carry out missions. But beware the Dark between the Stars, an unspeakable corrupting force in the intersection between civilization and the endless nothing of space. All of the dice used for Coriolis The Third Horizon are six sided dice, also called d6. You roll the number of dice your character has in a specific skill. If one of your dice rolls a six, you succeed at what you were trying to do. Coriolis has well described combat rules that players who enjoy Dungeons and Dragons will find interesting.   Attributes and skills. Your character has four attributes: Strength, Agility, Wits, and Empathy. Each attribute has a few skills, which are ways you can apply that attribute during gameplay. The strength attribute has the skill of melee combat. The agility attribute has the skills dexterity, infiltration, ranged combat, and piloting. The wits attribute has the skills observation, survival, data djinn, medicurgy, science, and technology. The empathy attribute has the skills manipulation, command, culture, and mystic powers.   Every point you have in an attribute or skill gives you a six sided dice, also called a d6, that you can roll. For example your observation skill is two and your wits attribute is three, so you roll five dice total when you observe. If you roll all the dice but none of them show the number six, that roll was a failure. Read the skill’s failure text out loud for your game master to interpret. If you get one six on one dice, that means you succeeded. One six is a limited success, so you will read the skill’s wording out loud to find out how that specific skill is limited. For example it might take longer than expected or the information gained might be brief. Extra sixes beyond the first one give you cool bonus effects, which vary depending on which skill you used. You can exchange each extra six one for one for a bonus effect. If you roll three sixes, that means you got a critical success. Each skill has words explaining how a critical success is awesome and how you get an extra bonus because of the critical.   There are 16 possible skills you can put points in. Half are general skills and the other half are advanced skills. Anyone can roll a general skill, but you can’t roll for an advanced skill unless you have at least one point in it. One notable advanced skill is command, which can be used to heal a stressed out ally whose mind points have been depleted to zero. You can’t roll for command to help your friend unless you have at least one point in it.   Here is an example skill roll. The airlock is closing. Sabah tries to hurl herself towards the airlock to make it through before it closes. The Game Master calls for a dexterity roll to see if Sabah gets through the airlock or not. Sabah has one point in the dexterity skill and three points in the agility attribute, so that means she rolls four dice total. If zero of the four dice show a six, she failed, and the airlock closes before she can get through it. If any of those dice show a six, she succeeds and makes it through the airlock before it closes. If one dice shows a six, that is called a limited success. For the dexterity skill, a limited success is described as, quote, “Limited success: you manage to pull off the maneuver, but just barely.” End quote. Every extra six beyond your first might let you pick a bonus effect from the dexterity skill’s page, if it has bonus effects. Some skills do, some skills don’t. Dexterity doesn’t have any bonus effects for extra sixes, but the manipulation skill, for example, does. If three of the dice show sixes, that’s a critical success. For dexterity, the rule book says, quote, “Critical Success. You succeed with flawless skill, and you achieve some unexpected, positive side effect, like helping a friend or creating an obstacle for an enemy. The GM decides the details.” End quote. This example of a skill roll shows you that the more dice you roll, the more likely you are to get a limited success, get bonus effects, and get a critical success.   Icons. If your skill roll isn’t successful, one option you have is to pray to the icons, if that’s a thing you want to do. Praying to the icons can only impact skill rolls, not combat rolls. It’s an instant prayer your character can do that doesn’t take any time out of your other actions. You simply declare that you’re praying to the icon associated with the skill you’re rolling, and you can re roll all your failed dice that weren’t sixes. The rerolled dice now might become successes. If you prepared a prayer to that specific icon beforehand earlier in the session, then praying to that icon not only lets you reroll failed dice, but you also get either a plus one modifier which means one extra dice, or if you prayed in that icon’s chapel, then a plus two modifier which mean two extra dice. Every time you pray to an icon, though, the game master gets one darkness point.   Let’s begin talking about combat rules by starting with initiative. Initiative means turn order. When combat starts, each player rolls one d6, and the game master rolls one d6 for each enemy or group of enemies. The number on the dice is the character’s initiative score, and sets the order that people act in the round of combat. People who rolled a six can take their turn before people who rolled a five, who can take their turn before people who rolled a four, who can take their turn before people who rolled a three, etc. If two people both have the same number, roll a second dice and the higher number goes first. After everyone has gotten to go once, that ends the round, and it’s time to start a new round in the same initiative order as before.   Raising and lowering initiative. There are ways to raise your initiative score. There’s a talent called Combat Veteran that lets you roll twice and keep the higher dice result. Some weapons and certain skill bonuses can also raise your initiative score. If you are performing an attack in a way your GM accepts would surprise the enemy, add two to your initiative. Sneak attacks. To perform a sneak attack on an unsuspecting target, roll the number of dice you have in your infiltration skill and the skill will tell you how to interpret your success or failure. If you wait somewhere to ambush a target and they walk up to you while you remain stationary, you get a plus two to your infiltration roll. Sneak attacks also get modified by the range you are away from your target. Roll only once, and then increase or decrease your sneak attack’s initiative based on distance using table 5.2 on page 86. Lowering initiative. You have the option of choosing to lower your initiative score if you’d like to wait and see how things unfold. For example if you rolled a six for initiative but aren’t sure if these new arrivals are friends or foes, when it comes to you, you can choose to delay until a new lower number, such as a two. Your new score remains your permanent initiative for the rest of the combat.   Action points. At the start of the round of combat, you get three new action points. You can spend your action points to do slow, normal, fast and free actions. Unspent action points do not carry over to the next round.   A slow action costs all three action points. For example, administering first aid is a slow action. Tinkering with a gadget is a slow action. Activating a mystic power is a full action, and takes all three action points and your entire turn.   Normal actions cost two action points. For example, a melee attack in close combat is a normal action. Firing a shot on a ranged weapon is a normal action. Reloading your weapon is a normal action. After a normal action, you still have one action point left for your turn.   You can spend one action point to do a fast action. Some example fast actions are sprinting a short distance, defending, taking cover, dropping to the ground to make yourself harder to hit, getting up off of the ground, drawing a weapon, picking up an item, parrying in close combat, and making an attack of opportunity in close combat. These fast actions all only cost one action point. Note that you can’t attack while you are prone on the ground. While prone, you need to spend a fast action to stand up before you can attack. Quick melee attacks with a light weapon or unarmed also count as fast actions instead of normal actions, although they get a negative two modifier to the attack roll, which means rolling with two fewer dice. Movement is also a fast action. You can move as many meters as your movement rate for one fast action, which costs one action point.   The last category of actions are free, they don’t cost any action points. Some example free actions are when you quickly shout to a comrade, and when your armor protects you against an incoming attack. Those free actions can still be done even if you don’t have any action points left to spend. You can end your turn without having spent all of your action points, and you actually need to if you plan on reacting to an opponent’s attack. Defending against an incoming attack in close combat and making an attack of opportunity both cost one action point. When you help someone perform a slow, normal, or fast action, that counts as an action for you, too. For example, if you don’t have three action points, you can’t help someone with their slow action. Note: helping is never a fast action. The fastest helping can be is a normal action.   Armor. Using your armor is also a free action, and doesn’t cost any action points. When you’re taking damage from an attack, roll the number of dice you have in armor rating. Every six you roll reduces your incoming damage by one. If your armor reduces your incoming damage all the way to zero, you can’t suffer a critical injury from that attack.   Here is an example of a melee attack. To attack an enemy in close range, first say you’re spending two action points to do a normal action to attack in close combat. Then roll the number of dice of your melee combat skill and the number of dice you have in strength. If you get one six, you hit the enemy, yay. When you successfully hit an enemy, your weapon deals the number of damage your weapon says it deals. That’s part of the weapon’s stats. If you get extra sixes, you can spend them one for one to choose an additional effect listed in the melee combat skill’s rule book text. Extra dice can also be spent for extra effects during ranged attacks, too, by the way. The bonus effects for a melee attack include dealing more damage, inflicting a critical injury, striking fear into your enemy, raising your initiative, disarming your enemy, and grappling them. You can have page eighty seven of the rule book open when you attack to read those six bonus options you can choose from, or you can add that text to your character sheet to avoid having to flip through the rule book. Each extra six you roll on your attack can buy one extra effect. For example if you roll two extra sixes, you might choose to do one extra point of damage and disarm your target. Picking their weapon back up would cost them a fast action. Or you could choose two extra points of damage.   Here is an example of how you can ranged attack spending your choice of three, two, or one action points. If you spend three action points, that is a slow action called an aimed shot. You roll your ranged attack number of dice and your agility stat number of dice with a plus two modifier, which means rolling extra dice to represent how you’re taking the time to aim carefully. If your target is within melee distance of you, they’re close enough to react to your slow careful aim and you can’t make an aimed shot against them. You can make a normal shot against a melee target, though. A normal ranged attack costs two action points and has no modifier. Or the third option is that you can spend one action point to do a quick shot, a type of fast action. Rather than taking the time to aim carefully, a quick shot means you’re shooting from the hip. Hey, even hip shots can hit people. Sure, you get a negative two modifier to your attack roll, with means rolling with two fewer dice, but that might still hit the target, and it only cost you one action point, so in some circumstances a quick shot might be just what you need. Those three examples show how a ranged attack can be made spending one, two, or three action points, for a negative two, zero, and positive two attack modifier.   Critical success. As with skills, any time you roll three sixes in combat, that’s a critical success. Your weapon comes with a number for how much damage it does on a critical.   Distances. There are four distance ranges in Coriolis. Something is close range if it is within two meters of you. Two meters is about how long a person is if they lay down. You can step and reach a person two meters from you easily. Short range in Coriolis includes anything up to twenty meters away from you. Twenty meters is how long five cars parked end to end are. Twenty meters is about twice as high as a telephone pole. Long range in Coriolis is anything up to one hundred meters away. One hundred meters is how long a football field is, or about how far you would get if you were quickly walking for one minute. Beyond a hundred meters, everything is called extreme range.   Ranged combat particulars. There are a few things that only come up during a combat involving a ranged weapon. These include target size, range modifiers, taking cover, reloading, automatic fire, mounted weapons, and multiple targets. If you’re a melee fighter fighting a melee enemy, you never need to think about any of those things. But if you’re using a ranged weapon or your opponent is, here’s what those terms do. Target size. If your target is prone or small, your ranged attack gets a minus one modifier, which means rolling with one fewer dice to hit. If your target is large like car sized, you get a plus one modifier, and roll with an extra dice. If you’re trying to hit a huge target, like the side of a barn, you get a plus two modifier and roll with two extra dice to hit. Range modifiers. Firing at a target that is short range, between two and twenty meters away, is normal and doesn’t have range modifiers. At long range, between twenty and a hundred meters away, your ranged attack gets a negative one modifier, so you roll with one less dice. At extreme range beyond a hundred meters, your ranged attack gets a negative two modifier and you roll with two less dice. If you’re within close range, two meters, the modifier depends on whether the target is engaged in combat with you or unaware of you slash immobile. For a target engaged in melee combat with you, probably grabbing your weapon and pushing it out of the way, you get a minus three modifier and roll with three fewer dice to hit. For a target unaware of you or immobilized and unable to dodge your projectile, your ranged attack is made with a plus three modifier, three extra dice. Taking cover. Cover only protects against ranged attack, not melee attacks. Taking cover is a fast action and costs one action point, separate from the movement to reach the cover, which might also be one action point. You can move as many meters as your movement for one action point. The armor rating of different types of covers varies, ranging from two armor for a sofa couch to four armor for a door to five to seven for interior and exterior walls, to a maximum of eight armor for being underground in a foxhole. Cover and armor can be combined. An example of using cover is, if you’re in a fox hole and someone hits you with an attack and would deal four damage to you, roll eight dice for your cover plus one dice for your armor for nine dice total. Every resulting six reduces that four incoming damage by one. Ranged attackers don’t solely suffer from cover rules protecting their targets. If you’re firing from cover, you get a plus one modifier on your attack and roll with one extra dice, for aimed shots and normal shots, but not quick shots, which are made from the hip too rapidly to have aimed. Reloading. Reloading during combat is a normal speed action and takes two of your three action points. Most ranged weapons don’t need to be reloaded during a combat. Certain specific ranged weapons don’t have enough ammunition to not run out during one fight, depending on which type you’re using. If you’re using a long rifle, bow, or rocket launcher, you’ll have to reload after every time you fire. And in the special circumstance that you fired three quick shots in the same turn, if you’re not using a mounted weapon, your clip is depleted and needs to be reloaded. Note: there is a talent called Rapid Reload that makes reloading faster. Automatic fire. Fully automatic weapons are a bit different from other ranged weapons. They fire as a slow attack which costs three action points. They have to fire on a target at long range or closer, not extreme range. They fire at a negative two modifier, which means two fewer dice on your to hit roll, your ranged attack plus agility roll. Those three things are downsides. But the upside is that whether or not your initial attack hit, you can choose to keep rolling dice one at a time. The extra dice get added to your first roll. Remember, extra sixes can get you extra effects, like dealing one more point of damage. So you can keep adding one dice after another after another, up until you roll a one, at which point the fully automatic weapon’s clip is empty and needs to be reloaded. Reloading takes two action points.   Mounted weapons. If you mount your fully automatic weapon on a vehicle, full auto fire has the additional perk of a one ending the attack but not needing a reloading action, because the vehicle has enough space to store a very large clip of ammunition. Multiple targets. The last cool perk of fully automatic weapons is that after rolling is finished, you can choose how to distribute your successes to a new target that is within close range of that first target. The first six that you distribute to a target is a normal hit that deals the weapon’s damage. Every six after the first one can do one of the ranged weapon attack bonus effects, which includes an extra point of damage, among other things. There’s no limit to how many targets you can hit as long as they’re within close range of the previous target.   Reactions. There are also three reactions in Coriolis. Reactions are fast actions that cost one action point to do. These three reactions are: defending in melee, overwatch fire from ranged, and attacks of opportunity. Defending in melee. To defend, first say that you’re going to defend before the attacker rolls their attack against you. Then spend one action point. Then roll the number of dice you have in your melee combat skill and your strength attribute. For each six the defender rolls, you can choose from a list of options that includes decreasing damage, counterattacking, disarming your attacker, or raising your initiative. If the enemy attacked you with a weapon but you were defending unarmed, roll with a minus two modifier, which means you roll with two fewer dice. Enemies can defend if the game master spends a darkness point. Overwatch fire. An overwatch fire is a fast action where you spend one action point to be able to name a ninety degree arc direction you’re setting up a watch in. At any time, you can spend two action points to fire on anything in your watch area. Your attack goes off before the enemy’s, even after they declare their action. If both you and the enemy are in an overwatch position, then you both roll your ranged combat dice to decide who goes first. Attacks of opportunity. An attack of opportunity is when you choose to spend one action point to close combat fight an enemy who was in melee range with you but is now moving away from you. Add plus two to your attack roll. If they stop within melee range of you then you can’t attack of opportunity them.   Movement and encumbrance. Your normal movement speed of your movement rate number of meters might get decreased by difficult terrain, crawling, or sneaking. Difficult terrain, crawling, and sneaking all halve your movement rate.   Overencumbered. If you are carrying more than twice your strength number of items, roll the Force skill every time you move a long distance. If you fail the roll, then either let go of some items or stop moving.   Partial damage. There are some experiences in Coriolis that cause only a fraction of a damage point but, if you receive multiple, can add up to one damage. If you fall, drown for multiple rounds, catch on fire, get smacked by the blast power of an explosion, stay hungry or thirsty for a long amount of time, get too cold, get exposed to the vacuum of space for multiple rounds, are exposed to radiation, etc, your game master might have you keep track of how long you’re exposed for to see if it adds up to one damage point.   Reaching zero hit points or zero mind points. You might reach zero hit points during a combat. You start with the number of hit points of your strength and agility numbers added together. So if your strength is three and your agility is four, you would start with seven hit points. You might have some talents that increase your hit points, too. So what happens during a combat when you run out of hit points and reach zero? That’s called being broken. Broken characters are unable to continue fighting. They’re either unconscious or unable to physically move their bodies. All you can do is ask your friends for help. If you get hit again in this state, you could suffer a critical injury. Only critical injuries can actually kill your character, and they’re not guaranteed to do that. Table five point six on pages ninety six and ninety seven list the critical injury possibilities. There is a d66 table of injury options. To see which one you receive, roll a first six sided dice, also called a d6, to represent the first digit, and then a second d6 to represent the second digit. For example, rolling a three and then a five would be a thirty five on the table. Rolling a one and a two would be a twelve. Each critical injury table entry explains what happens to you and, if you can recover from it, how long that recovery takes. Numbers one through thirty five don’t instantly kill your character. Numbers thirty six through sixty six do instantly kill your character. If you have a good game master, they’ll let you play as a non player character you met earlier in the adventure rather than have you sit out for the rest of the session after your character dies. If you character lives, there are two ways you can recover. The first is to receive first aid. First aid is a slow action, so it costs three action points, performed by an ally rolling their medicurgy skill number of dice. If there’s at least one six, the roll is successful, and your character gets back up immediately, regaining as many hit points as sixes on the medicurgy roll. The second way to recover is by time passing. If you survive the fight, roll a d6 and that’s how many hours pass before you gain one hit point back. Then once you’re no longer broken, you regain one hit point per hour until you’re fully healed. The critical injury has its own separate healing trajectory explained in its entry in the critical injury table.   Reaching zero mind points. You can be attacked not only physically, which depletes your hit points, but also mentally by stress, which depletes your mind points. If you reach zero mind points, your character is too stressed out to function normally. Roll a d6 and that’s how many hours pass before you regain a mind point and are able to function again, unless your friends help you. Your friends can help you recover by rolling command or medicurgy. Note that command is an advanced skill that can only be used by characters with at least one point in it. Each friend only has once chance to help you. Recovery attempts are a slow action that cost three action points, and you gain as many mind points as they get sixes on their dice. Once you’re back up to at least one mind point, you will recover one mind point per hour until you’re back to maximum. Roll a d6 to see if you suffer any permanent effects. If the result is a one, your maximum mind points are permanently reduced by one. If that happens multiple times and your maximum mind points drop to zero, it’s time to make a new character.   Darkness points. I mentioned earlier that every time a player prays to an icon to reroll their failed dice that didn’t have sixes on them, the game master gets a darkness point. Praying to icons is not the only way a game master gains darkness points. It also happens every time the players portal jump, travel in the dark between stars, or use a mystic power. The game master can spend darkness points any time they want to put an obstacle in front of the player characters. Rerolling failed GM dice can be done by spending one darkness point. An NPC breaking initiative order and going first costs one darkness point. A player character’s clip running out of ammunition, meaning the player has to spend two action points to reload after this attack is finished, costs one darkness point. Making a player character misfire, which means the attack is lost and the player character has to spend three action points to clear the jam, costs three darkness points. An NPC can take a reactive action if the game master spends one darkness point. For three darkness points, a player character can drop and lose an important item of the game master’s choice. Reinforcements can be purchased for one to three darkness points during combat. Innocent bystanders can be caught up in the danger for two darkness points. A player character’s personal problem from their character sheet can suddenly affect them for one darkness point. The environment can suddenly endanger the player characters for one to three darkness points. The player character can be struck with sudden madness for one to three darkness points. And lastly some nonplayer character talents or abilities can be activated by darkness points.   Building a character in Coriolis The Third Horizon involves writing something down for the about a dozen categories. These categories are: name, appearance, background, upbringing, concept, reputation score, distribute attribute points, determine hit points, determine mind points, distribute skill levels, talent, icon and icon talent, personal problem, relationship with other player characters, gear, and crew position.   Let’s roll an example character, Calico Jack, a pirate NPC, or non player character, from our past adventure, “Salty Sea Shanties”. He’s a 4 foot, five inch tall handsome sea dwarf with salt and pepper hair. When he smiles at people he’s flirting with, a gold tooth sparkles. Calico Jack’s background is a space to write on the character sheet about where he’s from and how he grew up. Is he a normal human? No, he’s a sea dwarf. Table 2.2 lets you pick one of three upbringing options: plebian, stationary, and privileged. He’s a plebian, so he gets 15 attribute points, 8 skill points, 2 reputation points and 500 birr currency to start with.   Concept. We write on our character sheet what Calico Jack’s concept is, basically, what he does for a living. He’s a pirate captain, so, looking at the list of options, he’d be either a pilot or a fugitive from this list. Probably a fugitive, yeah. Specifically, a criminal. The criminal concept has a page with some stats, and it tells us that criminals like Calico Jack have negative two reputation points. Yeah, that makes sense. I guess that means 2 reputation points from being a plebian minus 2 reputation points from being a criminal leaves us with 0 reputation points.   Distributing attribute points. How many points you get to distribute depends on your upbringing, so looking his plebian upbringing, we have 15 attribute points to distribute. An individual attribute should be at least 2 and at most 4, with the exception of your key attribute, which should be 5. The criminal’s key attribute is empathy. The four attributes are Strength, Agility, Wits, and Empathy. We’ll start by setting the key attribute, empathy, to 5. That leaves ten points left. Calico Jack is fairly well rounded, so we’ll put 3 points each in the other attributes, giving that last point to wits so he can outsmart the law enforcers following him. Calico Jack’s attribute distribution is: strength 3, agility 3, wits 4, empathy 5.   Hit points and mind points. To calculate your hit points, add your strength and agility together. Calico Jack’s strength is 3 and agility is 3, so that means he has 6 hit points. To calculate your mind points, add your wits and empathy together. Calico Jack’s wits are 4 and empathy is 5, so that means he has 9 mind points. Damage can reduce hit points, and stress can reduce mind points.   There are 16 possible skills you can put points in. Half are general skills and half are advanced skills. Anyone can roll a general skill, but you can’t roll for an advanced skill unless you have at least one point in it. As a plebian, Calico Jack has 8 skill points to distribute. The criminal concept’s skills are force, melee combat, dexterity, and infiltration, so let’s put two points into each of those recommended skills. Voila, done. For my players who are playing at a higher level than starting characters, you’ll have five extra skill points to distribute. The most skill points you can put in any one skill is five. Your talent depends on your concept. The criminal’s talents are listed, and we can pick from intimidating, mystical power, or nine lives. Oh, definitely nine lives for Calico Jack. That’s his talent. Looking up the talent on a later page, it gives Calico Jack this ability, quote, “No matter how bad it looks, you always seem to come out of situations alive. When you suffer a critical injury, you get to switch the dice – turning the tens digit into the ones and vice versa (page 94). If your attacker has the talent Executioner, the effects neutralize each other – roll the critical injury normally.”   Every character gets an icon and an icon talent. You can roll for it on table 2.5, or my players can pick out the icon that most matches their character. Calico Jack would probably respect The Gambler or The Deckhand or The Merchant or The Traveler. The Deckhand’s talent suits Calico Jack. It says, quote, “If your ship drops to zero Hull Points or Energy Points, you can restore D6 points of either kind instantly. This requires no action from you – it is the Icons intervening on your behalf.”   The criminal has some options for personal problems. I think I’ll pick this one, quote, “A group of zealous Icon believers are on your tail.” Calico Jack is always trying to escape the people he most recently plundered.   The criminal concept lists some example relationships to other players characters. This one makes me chuckle. Quote, your team mate “is principled. A shame it’s the wrong principles, though.” Haha, so Calico Jack respects that you obey those law things, but not the laws themselves. Gear. The criminal starts with some gear. I’ll roll randomly since it’s a table. He starts with a transactor with a fake identity. That’s handy. Neat. The very last choice in character creation is the crew position. Calico Jack would be the captain. Thus concludes our creation of the Coriolis The Third Horizon version of Calico Jack. The character sheet is all filled out.   For players in my upcoming Coriolis The Third Horizon game, when you build your character, please follow these starting character rules, and add another five skill points. You can put a maximum of five points into any one skill. Your weapon can be any weapon listed in your concept’s starting gear list of items. As your GM, I’ll describe the group’s concept, spaceship, group talent, patron, and nemesis. Not all of that information gets shared with the players, but I can say your group talent will be Last Laugh: the party can get yourselves out of a pinch using your knack for entertainment. The GM gets one Darkness Point per use, and the party can use Last Laugh once per session.   Hopefully this little rules chat helps my players build their characters and understand how to play. For everyone listening, if you’d like to hear an example adventure, the episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast right after this is a demonstration of us playing Coriolis The Third Horizon in a oneshot game session. We invite you to listen to it to hear an example of Coriolis The Third Horizon in action. We encourage you to find the Coriolis The Third Horizon rule book yourself, and play a game with friends.