Lost in The Fold is a setting inspired by Kafka, Orwell, Paranoia, Silo (and the Wool trilogy), and the Backrooms. The world is contained within an enclosed, ignorant community that has become endangered by protocols set in motion by unthinking bureaucracy and ill-considered mathematics. Adventures for the Genre Setup generally involve a petty failure in…
There’s a dual role for Charity in By Appointment. One relates to the GM offering temporal leyway to characters from different time periods, the other supports teamwork. Permission to Play Historical ignorance is not a thing in By Appointment and carries no numerical penalty. Coming from a significantly different time period is much more useful…
If you have been reading the blog for the last couple of days—or, better yet, have been here for a while—you’ll know where we’re heading next, the Lifepath. It’s the heart of character generation in Sanction, where you find both the mechanical potential of your game persona, in their Abilities, but also uncover a few…
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…
