In By Appointment, the player characters are the household’s ghosts: an accidental staff assembled across centuries. While there’s a dose of Downton Abbey to the setup, it’s primarily Ghosts with the visible by default setup of Rentaghost. Directness, Desire and Promise are the character’s Resources. We’ll come to Charity later. Directness Ghosts have had plenty…
The house has stood here forever. Not literally. In a squint-and-you’ll-what-we-mean sort of Ship of Theseus kind of way. Bits have burned down, fallen over, been demolished, rebuilt, extended, bombed, modernised and subjected to several regrettable interior designers. But people have occupied this patch of ground since before anyone thought to write down what they…
Over the last three days, we’ve established a new Genre Setup—Dying On The Pass—where characters operate a restaurant, precariously balanced between profitable potential and impoverished collapse. Every service becomes an adventure: impossible customers, absent staff, sabotaged deliveries, critics at table twelve, broken refrigeration, feuding suppliers and a wedding party of twenty-four covers arriving forty minutes…
Now that you have your Resources, character generation continues with the usual Sanction flow (Sanction, p 13). Roll once for Purpose, Struggle and Influence, or draw three cards (three different suits, 1 – 10). If taking the rolling option, make certain that you do not get the same result as another player, especially for Purpose…
In Dying on the Pass, players take on the role of characters who are chefs, servers, porters, managers, buyers and specialists trying to make one service work while the rest of their lives refuse to remain politely outside. The team juggle the professional with the personal in a high pressure environment where every day brings…
My mind turned back to bigger pictures during the last couple of days, while I tinkered with a few ideas. Then yesterday, mid-shower, something struck me. I like trying odd ideas out. One of the earliest ideas I had for Sanction was a Genre Setup for morning television, called Channel 3, pulling inspiration from The…
Strain is crying out to be a push-your-luck mechanic rather than just a rise or fall gauge. It has to be said that the three prompts of Tact, Loss and Strain have been perfect align in that respect, because in my head, mechanically, they just fit the way that I’ve sketched them out. In coming…
Sanction already has a measure that handles Loss in the Supply Die (Sanction, pp 20 – 21), but the concept has a lot more flexibility than the page of rules outlined allows. In Core, Supply Die is named because you’re dealing with the consumables that someone carries, but which no one cares to track with…
While Tact could be a Resource, there’s room for something with a little more subtly in play. When you want to emulate a specific style or approach, and leave it in the hands of the player as to how they roll with it, you can opt for little currency, of the meta variety. Tact asks…
