rotational by Alex Wiltshire

Fortune Dark, second edition

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 15:12:25 +0000

I went back to revisit a bunch of rules and the layout for Fortune Dark, a rules-light system I wrote last year for running dark and desperate one-shot adventures.

Download it here for free.

The biggest change is that when a player Takes a Risk, they now tell the GM what they are risking if it goes wrong, and the GM counters by telling how it’s going to be worse.

I entirely ripped this from Brindlewood Bay’s Night Move because THIS RULE RULES. In my little RPG group we’ve been talking a lot about the burden that failing forward and success-with-consequences rules impose on GMs as they try to come up with interesting repercussions for every action. I appreciate the way the Night Move reduces some of that pressure. It balances the load across player and GM by involving the player more deeply in their situation and choices, granting them agency in their fate plus a chance to enter into a little barter-play as they carefully choose a risk in the knowledge that the GM will make it worse. More interplay between GM and players equals more fun, yeah?

Smaller changes: Deny Fate and Purge Debility now only add cursed dice to the Fortune pool. They used to also include removing un-cursed dice, but this meant a mix of different “payments” which reduced the purity of the idea of cursing the party’s Fortune. Only adding dice also means players don’t need to delve into the bag to find un-cursed dice to discard, which reduces fiddliness and also avoids them getting an idea of how many un-cursed dice remain.

I made various little tweaks to wording, particularly doubling down on the PbtA approach to using the term “when” to trigger sets of rules. It reads so naturally while also being very technical and precise. I’m also pleased with how I’ve reordered the Fortune dice pool setup section, explaining how to do it and what it means, so a player can make informed choices as they go:

The party takes 3 dice. This is your party’s collective fortune, which your god has granted to help you claim tribute in its name. For each die in your fortune at the start of your adventure, your party must claim 1 tribute.

You and your other party members can each add up to 2 more dice to your fortune. When the pool is complete, note the total number of dice and put them in an opaque bag. You’re ready to begin — but remember:

When the party fails to claim enough tribute by the end of the adventure, your god deems your party unworthy. As a group, describe how the party meets its end.

Finally, I gave it a new design — well, different fonts — to add a bit more character. The fonts are:

Hyper Scrypt for headers. Barely readable in the best way.
Garabosse for body text. Grunchy-classical.
Basteleur for incidentals. Fun-fantasy in a slightly unsettling way.

If you try Fortune Dark out let me know! Contact details below.

Dog desire paths

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 10:59:31 +0000

Roddy, sniffing the wind

In the graveyard where we often take our dog for a walk, there’s a place where the path takes a 90-degree turn, and I noticed that in the cold and damp of winter a fainter second inner-path has appeared that reveals the route that dogs take. A dog desire path.

New Year Roddy

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 12:05:41 +0000

We’re having some wonderful cold and sunny days…

…here in Bath at the end of the Christmas holiday…

…a bittersweet time, though Roddy’s happy

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TTRPGs of 2025

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 16:22:02 +0000

For me, 2025 has been all about tabletop RPGs. They’re such a crucible of the creative arts. A popular thought is that TTRPGs are experiencing a golden age, and the briefest survey of the flowering of games that are around right now — systems, settings, scenarios, adventures, and so much more — is good evidence that’s true.

So, it’s a good time to be devoting more attention to them. I’ve been playing weekly sessions for several years, but in 2025 I began playing in a second group: double time to experience new games and new table cultures. I also ran a campaign as GM, and in the summer I released a couple of my own small games, Board of Mammon and Fortune Dark. And I’ve been working on another bigger project, too.

To mark the close of the year, here are the TTRPGs that have been most important to me in 2025.

The Between

Awful heroes hunt monsters in a histronic vision of Victorian London.

The setting and melodramatic tone of this very theatrical investigation game weren’t a big draw for me, but The Between’s core design is wonderful and it led to an extraordinarily rich campaign of horrible ghosts, frantic investigation, and interaction between us players.

For me, a lot of it was down to the way its playbooks define character development and inter-character bonds, while also encouraging risky and dramatic play. For example, as I used my Factotum character Waldon’s supply of Masks of the Past to improve bad rolls, the prompts on his playbook helped me tell a particular and horrible backstory about his experiences as a soldier in the imperial British army, such as:

Narrate a flashback to your young adulthood, before you were a servant, that shows your most significant professional triumph.

Getting the spotlight to give these directed vignette flashbacks about my character was thrilling. I prepared ahead of sessions a little, sketching Waldon out, so I looked ahead but totally overlooked the potential of one of the Factotum’s special Masks, The Moss-Covered Gate, which reads, “Unmark the first two boxes on the Mask of the Past.”

It’d seemed so innocuous, but deep into the campaign, as my Masks had begun to run out, I saw it anew: it allowed me to recharge two Masks at the cost (?) of creating a new backstory. I decided that Waldon’s original tale of a bucolic childhood and (profoundly questionable) valour in service of the Queen was a huge lie.

Playing out that change meant so much for his character at this late point in the campaign and was a lot of fun to give the rest of the group the twist that he was never a hero, and it reconfigured his relationship with his employer, Jim’s Undeniable. I’ve never played a TTRPG in which character development is so intrinsic and carefully directed.

Here’s more from Jim, as part of his write-up with Kieron here:

…my character, the shockingly beautiful Alina Gray, was The Undeniable, and as such the [Mask] prompts can only end up revealing her to be an awful person whose powers are woven with humiliation, exploitation, and destruction of others, due to her (literally) towering narcissism. As we responded to the prompts and filled out the story of our characters, the true nature of these monstrous people was revealed.

Blades in the Dark

Vie for power as a gang of thieves on the streets of an eternally benighted fantasy-Victoriana city.

We’re back, baby. My group and I have been playing Blades for years now, and we picked it up again with some of the same characters as our last campaign and also with a new group member, Will. It was nice to be back in the saddle, though it’s actually a new saddle: we’re playing the recently released Deep Cuts supplement, which tweaks a bunch of core rules and adds a chunk of fresh content.

Why do I like Blades in the Dark? It’s fast, dynamic and all about improvisational play, great for encouraging big risks (a lot of our heists end up with our characters jumping out of windows to escape terrible situations we’ve caused) and its setting, inspired by Dishonored, is grounded yet judiciously fantastic. My character, for example, died between the end of our old campaign and the start of our new one, and now he’s a very angry ghost.

Deep Cuts’ changes seem focused on encouraging even more risk-taking, which I like. Actions generally automatically succeed, with rolls deciding the consequences, and if you invoke injuries and afflictions your character has suffered in an action, you’ll earn XP. This means there are great incentives to making big, dangerous, and difficult swings. Is it as good as Blades’ classic position-and-effect roll system? I think it’s an alternative rather than a pure improvement, and mostly attractive to me for its freshness, and that’s been enough.

Mythic Bastionland

A knightly hex-crawl through a land beset by mythic threats and quests.

Good god I love this game. First hit: Alec Sorensen’s gorgeous artwork in the book, a melding of the pre-Raphaelites, medieval illuminated texts, and modern graphic arts. Sumptuous and defining, yet giving so much space for your own imagination. And there’s so much of it. Man!

Alec Sorensen’s work for Mythic Bastionland

Second: the knights. 72 of them, each with a few bare details that give great latitude to flesh them out: a two-line verse, their equipment and horse, an ability, the passion that drives them, and the bizarre seer who knighted them. The Glass Knight, barer of a pike and six-inch needle that only they can remove, able to see through anything they can touch, and driven by looking into places they shouldn’t:

Revealer of all secrets, in stark, judgemental light
In cold and sharpened heart lies no deceitful spite

Third: the spare rules writing. Stiff and formal, a little like the knights you play, it sets out simple procedures in short paragraphs which seem almost impossible to turn into a game of realm-crossing scope. But as you start to play they begin to interlock with each other.

Fourth: the vows and how they guide your knight’s decisions in an open and living world: “Seek the Myths; Honour the Seers; Protect the Realm”. They set out priorities, set in relation to the scant details of the knight you’re playing, that are clear.

Fifth: the way myths play out, strange and meaningful, regardless of whether your knight gets involved or not. You come across omens, strange events you may witness or merely hear about, and they progress through a set which tells a story and affects the land. Do you intervene? Resolve? The vows will help you decide.

Sixth: free exploration of lands which always yield interest. On every page of the book lie a series of “spark tables”, randomised details that the GM can use to add detail to a location. I found Mythic Bastionland extraordinarily engrossing, its world woven from a book that’s effectively made from roll tables: 72 knights; 72 myths; 72 hazards, monuments, curses, ruins and so much more. Through exploration they are spun into a world in which I’m looking forward to playing more in 2026.

Night’s Black Agents: The Dracula Dossier

Secret agents investigate an international conspiracy run by Dracula himself.

I GMed a campaign of the Dracula Dossier this year, which sets the agent loose in a cross-European sandbox of characters, locations and things defined by Dracula and his doings. It’s fantastic and (ah, this is true for so many GMs, right?) I wish I’d done it true justice.

Night’s Black Agents’ vanilla Gumshoe system didn’t fully work for my group, as I’ve written, but I don’t think it’s an indictment of the system itself, more about our taste and my ability to fully make it work.

In fact, I keep thinking about ways I could have run the campaign better. I could have helped set player expectations for what was to come and to have inspired them to fully invest in the sandbox as a place of free choice in what to investigate. I should’ve piled on more pressure — dialled up the Heat from the authorities and the mental load from facing supernatural horrors. I could have laid out the shape of the conspiracy they were facing so they had a better sense of where they were and where it was going.

Ah regrets, regrets. But I also need to hold myself up a little and remember that we had some good sessions where things flowed nicely and I seemed to deal due surprise and tension.

Honourable mentions

Gold Teeth: We spent a chunk of the year play-testing Jim and Marsh’s game of horrible pirates, which they successfully Kickstarted in 2024. It’s a special one.
Deathmatch Island: We only just started this Paragon-based game of Battle Royale and Squid Games, but session one was a lot of fun.
Mothership: We played a few one-off sessions in 2025, and we’ve still yet to experience Mothership truly working for us, but we haven’t given up on it yet.
The Doomed: An honorary mention since The Doomed is a tactical skirmish tabletop game, but it’s by Mythic Bastionland designer Chris McDowall and it features light RPG elements, sort of, and it’s great.

GOTY 2025

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 15:40:41 +0000

Carrying on my grand one-year tradition, I do solemnly present to you my games (that I played) of 2025.

I didn’t play many games, again. I lost several months to a bout of RSI, but I thoroughly enjoyed the few games I did play, and here, in no real order, are the ones that have stuck in my head the most.

Mario Kart World

The Knockout Tour mode, in which you drive a non-stop race on several courses, is so good

I got a Switch 2 and obviously with it Mario Kart World, which immediately became a family favourite, spurring a full couple of months of intra-household competition. It’s fast and colourful and intense and I have almost nothing more to say about it. Because I spent most of my Switch 2 time playing the jazzed-up Tears of the Kingdom instead? Probably.

Avowed

A broad and generous RPG with excellent world design that wears game production efficiency on its sleeve. Acres of evocatively imagined land are laid out with libraries of generic objects which do just enough to make it feel real, if you squint and ignore the hundreds of often diegetically compromised chests placed to reward exploring its every quarter.

Always be climbing. Weird tableaus are up there

The rest is writing, so much writing (in a nice font), that I largely tapped through so I could return to running through the world again. So many things to find and collect, far more than you need, so many places to go, so many quests to check off. So many characters and storylines to follow. And then I’d find myself keyed into a quest-line that captured me and presented hard and consequential decisions, and yeah OK, Avowed is more than just a product of production efficiency.

Despelote

The three months of no-games caused by RSI in my right arm ended with Despelote. And I endured the discomfort despite the fact that there is a lot of football in Despelote. I have no interest in football but there I was, wincing through a history of the Ecuadorian national team and dribbling a ball through city streets, because Despelote is fucking great.

Despelote is a Spanish word for a messy situation, or a noisy or chaotic bunch of people

Despelote is a game about football, yes, but it’s also about childhood and Ecuador and monomania and the difficulty of capturing memory and national pride and dealing with chaos and uncertainty and game development, and about a lot of other things as well. Despelote is also only two hours long and pretty much all you do is run around a town and kick a ball.

I love Despelote’s firstperson take on the football videogame. Contrasting with the stickiness of FIFA, or whatever it’s called now, Despelote’s ball is wild and easy to lose control of, and it’s therefore a thrill to catch it, dribble it through a crowded park, and hoof it through the air. It rewards both a little skill and a little mischievous imagination as you hit bystanders, kick bottles, and generally do kid-stuff while failing to return to meet your mother on time.

So there’s a real game there, but it’s also a tender autobiography by its creator, Julián Cordero, who wove an irresistible sense of humour into the whole thing. I mean, check this trailer, which both exactly captures what it’s all about while also utterly not capturing anything about what Despelote is. Wonderful.

Incidentally, I love its publisher, Panic. Check these three bangers, all published within the past couple of years: Thank Goodness You’re Here, Arco, Despelote. All three games deeply connect with the times and places in which they are set. All three are intimately about the people who live there. All three wildly vary in tone and genre, but they’re all tight, focused games that have something to say. And none tread common ground.

Panic was founded on developing Mac FTP software! And also, it’s no longer just a software company, because it also makes the Playdate, an idiosyncratic handheld console with its own storefront and library of games, free-to-use developer tools, and all the other things that come with creating a game platform.

And all three of those games I mentioned — well, I can say two of them definitely — have this cool thing at the end of the game where you get a URL that brings up a chance to send a self-addressed envelope to Panic and they’ll send something back to you. I mean, what a fucking delightful thing to do in the year 2025. Wonder is still alive.

Keeper

The main thing that I think is extraordinary about Keeper is that it got made. The world’s largest publisher (disclosure: I also work for them) funded this short, linear, dialogue-free adventure with a keen bent towards the picturesque-surreal, with absurdly lush Technicolor landscapes and painterly composition. Keeper’s a game made by game artists and it shows.

In Keeper you play as an ambulatory lighthouse

It has all the limitations of its form. Keeper is primarily a friction-free ride through dazzlingly beautiful places, and most of its puzzles are calibrated to be little more than interaction bumps (stand there and hold X — that kind of thing). Story-wise, it’s the good days of Pixar, right? An emotive lighthouse, a dash of dwelling on the subjects of life and death and time (some may cry at the ending), and a funny weirdo-cute bird sidekick.

Just look at it

These things are not extraordinary. But I played it through, ahhed at the vistas, and when its surprises came — which I won’t spoil — I was delighted. It’s a bold game, proud of what it is, and I’m happy it got made.

Donkey Kong Bananza

Chaotic terrain-smashing fun by the team that made Super Mario Galaxy. Maybe a bit too chaotic. Bananza is forever opening a big hole in the ground that leads to the next area, but it also wants you to continue gouging though the current area in the pursuit of collecting everything. The core journey though the game is pretty easy; the boss-fights are walkovers and most challenges are over before you know it. This lends the whole thing an appropriately kinetic breathlessness as you’re punching through goons and wrecking little guys’ homes, then platforming through lava, then tinkering with a physics-driven setpiece, and then it’s on to the next. No time to think just go.

GET GOLD

Bananza is so bold, so loud, and crashing through its big mutable landscapes is a real buzz. But I’m not finding an awful lot under all the noise and yes, sure, joy. I can only enjoy this huge, sweet gobstopper of a game for a while before I have spit it out. But I’ll inevitably put the sucker back in again.

Q-UP

Apply abilities to raise rank to play in better leagues to raise more rank to play in…

Released soon after Unfair Flips, Q-UP is another game about tossing coins. But Q-UP is more dense and cerebral, finding an intricate puzzle game inside a sharp critique of online multiplayer games and how they use randomness, ranking and match-finding systems to exploit player psychology. That puzzle game is so good that Q-UP feels, frankly, dangerous, because despite its satirical nature, it’s a profoundly compulsive game on its own terms. You flip the coin and then you watch the numbers go up, and up, and up, and up, and then you tinker with your abilities and you do it again and again and again.

Honourable mentions

Ball X Pit: Talking of compulsive, here’s the numbers game applied to an Arkanoid-/Space Invaders-like Rogue-like (bounce balls to destroy mooks before they get to the bottom of the screen). Wonderful gamefeel and sense of progression, and lots to think about during each run.
Earthion: Takes the past couple of decades shmup design and applies them to the form of a classic Mega Drive shmup, which somehow actually runs on a Mega Drive.
South of Midnight: Lovely visual design and fantastic voice-work are enough to elevate otherwise fairly uninteresting third-person action.
Öoo: Short and clever as hell puzzle platformer in which you lay bombs to jump, dash and generally navigate the levels.
The Seance of Blake Manor: Would probably be on my main list, but I haven’t played enough of this excellent firstperson mystery game yet.

Sunrise Roddy

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 20:54:51 +0000

A fine December sunrise today

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Converting Gumshoe QuickShock rules to Night’s Black Agents

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 15:57:20 +0100

For my regular group I’ve been running Night’s Black Agents, a TTRPG in which players are cinematic hyper-competent agents who are fighting a terrible conspiracy which happens to be… vampires. Think Bourne, with vampires. Or Bond, with vampires. Or Mission Impossible, with etc.

Specifically, we’re playing the Dracula Dossier campaign, which supposes that Bram Stoker’s classic novel is actually an after-action report on an ill-fated attempt by British naval intelligence to recruit Dracula. In the game’s present-day setting, Dracula is still around and causing havoc that the agents must foil, once and for all. The book is incredible: 350 pages of Dracula supposition and imagination drenched in contemporary spy paranoia.

It’s a lot of fun and its system, Gumshoe, has been interesting to learn. Gumshoe’s USP is about investigation: whenever a player tries to find a clue with an owned ability, they succeed. No roll, no uncertainty: the info is theirs. This gives investigations real forward motion, never getting stuck behind a failed skill-check. Another great feature is Night’s Black Agents’ campaign design, which gives the players freedom to follow any lead that interests them, and gives GMs a suite of tools to maintain pressure from the vampire conspiracy and to ensure the players are constantly progressing towards the centre of that conspiracy.

One thing that hasn’t been working, however, is Night’s Black Agents’ somewhat crunchy old-style combat, in which players and enemies take turns to roll attacks against each other, chipping health away. There’s nothing wrong with it — it delivers some clever thriller genre nuances and it’s a lot simpler than, say, D&D — but as a group we typically play Blades in the Dark and other expressionistic Powered by the Apocalypse-derived indie TTRPGs, and we weren’t investing ourselves in it.

Then I came across QuickShock, which Gumshoe’s original designer, Robin Laws, developed for the most recent Gumshoe game, The Yellow King RPG. QuickShock completely upends fighting, health and other systems, replacing them with a single round of player-facing Gumshoe-style rolls and a huge set of cards that give players physical and mental injuries that affect play. The cards are very flavourful and rich, in their names (“Existence is a Meat-Grinder”, “It’s a Miracle You’re Alive”); in their effects on the character; and in how the character recovers from them — so much more so than losing health points and asking for a Medic check to restore them.

And amazingly, publisher Pelgrane added the The Yellow King RPG’s rules, including its cards, to Gumshoe’s SRD, which allows anyone to share and adapt them. So I did. Here’s my attempt for Night’s Black Agents.

If you’ve done a similar adaptation, or if you use mine, I’d love to hear about your experiences — contact details below!

Pools and Points

A big challenge was tweaking the number of points each character has, because QuickShock handles a few things differently.

Investigative abilities

One issue was Investigative abilities, because QuickShock removes Investigative point pools. Instead, twice per session a player can “push” a use of an Investigative ability to gain extra effect. We’re finding this provides more tension and interesting choice, but how many abilities should each player have?

I settled for making sure someone has every ability plus overlaps, certainly for the abilities players get for free — Tradecraft, Network and Cover — and also for Notice, plus a couple more for choice. So across all 40 Investigative abilities, my three players have 16 each.

General abilities

Here I had to account for the way QuickShock has a single combat ability, Fighting. This replaces Night’s Black Agents’ Shooting, Hand-to-Hand and Weapons. Because each fight only requires one spend from Fighting per player, I think ratings should be kept relatively low — the character in our group with the most only has 6.

I also had to account for the way Stability and Health pools are no longer soaks for damage, so their ratings should be lower than in the original game. Honestly, I did this by feel, giving the three players 66 points to spend across the General abilities. Seems to work?

Then, because injury and shock cards sometimes affect a bracket of General abilities (Focus, Physical and Presence) I had to divide Night’s Black Agents’ into those brackets, using The Yellow King RPG as a base:

Focus	Physical	Presence
Conceal	Athletics	Cover
Digital Intrusion	Driving	Disguise
Explosive Devices	Fighting	Gambling
Filch	Health	Network
Mechanics	Infiltration	Preparedness
Medic	Piloting	Sense Trouble
Surveillance		Shrink
		Stability

Spending XP

The SRD includes rules for how XP is spent, but I had to account for how Nights Black Agents uses XP to restore Cover and Network pools. Here’s my adaptation:

A new Investigative or General ability: 2 XP
Add to rating of existing General ability: 1 XP per point
Refresh Contacts and Network: 1 XP restores two points

Shock and Injury Cards

A big job was to figure out which cards to actually use for Nights Black Agents. The hundreds of cards listed in the SRD are specifically for The Yellow King RPG and many relate to its setting and situations. The tables below set out the titles of all the cards I chose. Note that I tweaked some of the titles.

Hazard table

The hazards are picked out from the SRD based on the kinds of trouble that Night’s Black Agents would get into.

Hazard	Diff	Ability	Minor Effect	Major Effect
Cobra Strike	4	Athletics	Snakebit	Deadly Venom
Drinking (Moderate)	4	Health	Tipsy	Intoxicated
Drowning	4	Athletics	Cough, Choke, Sputter	Lungful of Water
Escape Burning Building	4	Athletics	Singed	Burned
Exploding Bomb	4	Athletics	Thrown Free of the Explosion	In the Blast Radius
Flying Debris	4	Athletics	Something in Your Eye	Puncture Wound
Food Poisoning	4	Health	Stay by the Water Closet	Ructious Innards
Leap From Second Story Window	4	Athletics	Hard Landing	Turned Ankle
Roughed Up While Helpless	4	Health	It Looks Worse Than It Is	Broken Fingers
Sea Sickness	4	Health	Woozy	Poseidon’s Wrath
Sniper Fire	4	Athletics	Grazed	Shot
Thrown Rock	4	Athletics	Abrasion	Concussion
Toxin	4	Health	Mostly Resistant	Find the Antidote
Crushing Hazard	5	Athletics	Contused	Crushed
Angry Mob Sets Upon You	5	Athletics	Black and Blue	Badly Beaten
Severe Exposure	5	Health	Warm Blanket Needed	Ravaged By the Elements
Smoke Inhalation	5	Health	Lingering Cough	Scarred Lungs
Tortured	5	Health	Through the Ringer	Breaking Point
Leap Between Rooftops	6	Athletics	Hard Landing	Fall to Street Level
Fall From Great Height	7	Athletics	It’s a Miracle You’re Alive	Massive Injuries
Drinking (Heavy)	8	Health	Tipsy	Intoxicated
Exposure to Parasites	4	Health	Unwell	Dysentery
Hunger	4	Health	Hunger	Respiratory Failure
Hypothermia	4	Health	Confusion	Gangrene
Machine Gun Fire	4	Athletics	Bruised While Taking Cover	Sprayed
Marched Past Endurance	4	Health	Winded	Exhausted
Mortar Fire	4	Athletics	Ringing Ears	Hurled and Scorched
Poison Gas	4	Health	Light-Headed	Lung Damage
Sleep Deprivation	4	Health	Bleary	Dead on Your Feet
Small Arms Fire	4	Athletics	Bruised While Taking Cover	Through and Through
Sunstroke	4	Health	Light-Headed	Rapid Heartbeat
Thirst	4	Health	Agony of Thirst	Kidney Failure
Tumble Down a Hillside	4	Athletics	Scuffed Up	Torn Ligament
Rifle Fire	5	Athletics	Bruised While Taking Cover	Rifle Hit
Flame Thrower	5	Athletics	Burned	Roasted
Grenade	4	Athletics	Light Shrapnel	Grenade
Lightning	5	Health	Electric Bolt	Lightning Bolt

Shock table

The difficulty number is based on the stability loss value from the original table, with some tweaking.

Situation	Diff	Minor Shock	Major Shock
You see a fresh corpse; you witness a killing	3	Unease	Dread
A human opponent attacks you with evident intent to do serious harm	3	Close Call	Edgy
You experience a strong unnatural sensation such as intense déjà vu or hallucinations	3	Butterflies	Collywobbles
You witness acts of torture	4	Appalled	A Dish Served Cold
A human opponent attacks you with evident intent to kill	4	Rattled	A Diverting Indiscretion Will Put This In Perspective
You kill someone in a fight	4	A Touch of the Shakes	An Image Seared in the Mind
You see a particularly grisly murder or accident scene	4	The Shudders	Shaken
You see a supernatural creature from a distance	4	Close Call	Edgy
You witness an obviously unnatural, but not necessarily threatening, omen or magical effect — a wall covered in horrible insects, a talking cat, or a bleeding window	4	Must Have Been a Hallucination	Reality Collapse
You learn that one of your Network contacts has been violently killed	4	Rueful	Self-Reproachful
You see hundreds of corpses; you witness a large battle	4	Witness to Carnage	Existence is a Meat-Grinder
You see a supernatural creature up close	5	Haunted	Rationality’s Cruel Veil
You spend a week in solitary confinement	5	Unnerved	Agitated
You learn that a friend, loved one, or Source of Stability has been violently killed	5	Stunned and Saddened	Waves of Grief
You discover the corpse of one of your Network contacts	5	The Price of Failure	A Morbid Scene
You discover the corpse of a friend, loved one, or Source of Stability	6	I Should Have Prevented This	Spiral Into Violence
You are attacked by a supernatural creature, or by a friend, loved one, or Source of Stability	6	What th—?	World Gone Mad
You witness a clearly supernatural or impossible killing	6	A Beastly Sight	If Only You Could Forget
You witness or experience an obviously unnatural, and threatening, omen or magical effect — a cold hand clutches your heart, a swarm of bees pours out of your mouth	6	Alarming Vision	Ghastly Vision
You kill someone in cold blood; you torture someone	6	A Crossed Line	Out of Control
You see one of your Network contacts killed	6	Twinge	Spasm of Guilt
You see a friend, loved one, or Source of Stability killed	7	Primal Outrage	Primal Bloodlust
You are tortured for an hour or longer	7	Grim Flashback	You Know You Broke
You discover that you have committed cannibalism	7	Tastes Like Chicken	A Crossed Line
You are possessed by some outside force, but conscious while it operates your body unspeakably	8	Influence	Violent Impulse
You speak with someone you know well who you know to be dead	8	Haunted	Profaned Memories
You are attacked by a single gigantic supernatural creature or by a horde of supernatural creatures	8	River of Blood	Ocean of Blood
You see a friend, loved one, or Source of Stability killed in a particularly gruesome manner or in a way you are helpless to avert	8	Hollow Promise	Resounding Failure
You kill a friend, loved one, or Source of Stability	9	No Blood More Cold	Atrocity

Enemies

This is a cut-down list of The Yellow King RPG’s enemies, with the removal of some bits and pieces that aren’t relevant for Night’s Black Agents and the addition of vampire types. I could add more and probably will when the time comes. Each enemy also needs other stats, primarily:

Alertness modifier
Stealth modifier
Aberrance / General abilities for use outside full combat

Basic weapons

Use these for fighting a group of mismatched enemies. (First card Minor; second Major.)

Unarmed: Bruised / Battered
Knife: Nicked / Stabbed
Blunt Instrument: Seeing Stars / Dented Skull
Sword/Other Large Blade: Superficial Laceration / Run Through
Gun: Barely a Scratch / Bullet Wound

Civilians

With a Gun

A seemingly innocuous person suddenly draws a pistol from the desk drawer and fires it. The gun-wielding civilian probably won’t try this when facing more than two opponents, as the prospect of being eventually overwhelmed, disarmed, and arrested becomes a certainty.

Numbers: 1
Difficulty: Weak (Escape 2, Other 3, Kill 3)
Difficulty Adjustments: -1 for each PC present after the first (penalties for fighting at less than full strength do not apply)
Toll: 0
Injuries, Minor and Major: Not a Significant Bullet / Shot

With a Knife

As above, but less bang bang, more stab stab.

Numbers: 1
Difficulty: Weak (Escape 2, Other 3, Kill 3)
Difficulty Adjustments: -1 if character is not surprised by the attack; -1 for each PC present after the first (penalties for fighting at less than full strength do not apply)
Toll: 0
Injuries, Minor and Major: Laceration / Flesh Wound

Hoodlums

Full of fight and low on brains, untrained brawlers like these infest decaying neighborhoods in any timeframe or reality you care to name.

Numbers: Number of characters, plus 2
Difficulty: Weak (Escape 1, Other 3, Kill 4)
Adjust to Other Sequences: Drop Escape by 1; increase Kill by 1
Difficulty Adjustments: +1 if agents are drunk
Toll: 0
Injuries, Minor and Major: You Should See the Other Fellow / Concussion

Police

These trained police officers outnumber the player character combatants and are more than ready to show that they’ve always deserved their reputation for toughness.

Numbers: Number of characters × 2
Difficulty: Superior (Escape 2, Other 4, Kill 6)
Difficulty Adjustments: +1 if agents are drunk,
Toll: 1
Injuries, Minor and Major: Basic weapons

Enemy Soldiers and Operatives

For small-scale engagements where the individual skills of combatants determine whether the battlin’ agents live or die, use these foe profiles.

Hapless

Numbers: Less than party
Difficulty: Weak (Escape 2, Other 2, Kill 2)
Difficulty Adjustments: -1 if surprised; +1 if attacking with surprise
Toll: 0
Injuries, Minor and Major: Laceration / Flesh Wound

Outnumbered but Determined

Numbers: Less than party
Difficulty: Tough but Outmatched (Escape 2, Other 4, Kill 3)
Difficulty Adjustments: -1 if surprised; +1 if attacking with surprise
Toll: 0
Injuries, Minor and Major: Barely a Scratch / Bullet Wound

Equally Capable

Numbers: Same as party
Difficulty: Evenly Matched (Escape 3, Other 5, Kill 4)
Difficulty Adjustments: -1 if surprised; +1 if attacking with surprise
Toll: 1
Injuries, Minor and Major: Barely a Scratch / Bullet Wound

Elite

Numbers: Party + 50% (round up)
Difficulty: Superior (Escape 4, Other 5, Kill 4)
Difficulty Adjustments: -1 if surprised; +1 if attacking with surprise
Toll: 2/4
Tags: Mundane
Injuries, Minor and Major: Gash / Bullet Wound

Vampires

Jack

Use this for humans using the Seward’s Serum.

Numbers: Half the number of characters, or 1, whichever is higher
Difficulty: Superior (Escape 2, Other 4, Kill 6)
Difficulty Adjustments: Sunlight -1
Toll: 1
Injuries, Minor and Major: Basic weapons

Ferals

Use these as your flock of recently turned, ferocious but inexperienced bloodsuckers. Their supernatural nature only becomes apparent if provoked to bare their teeth.

Numbers: 2 fewer than the group (unless this results in 0 vampires, in which case it’s 1 vampire)
Difficulty: Evenly Matched (Escape 3, Other 5, Kill 4)
Difficulty Adjustments: Choose one or two standard vampire vulnerabilities (crosses, garlic, fire) and one oddball one; -1 for PCs using at least one of these measures
Toll: 1
Injuries, Minor and Major: Scratched / Throat Punctures

Legendary

AKA Dracula. If it makes eye contact with a character, it can issue a simple verbal instruction which must be obeyed if the character fails a Stability test. Commands that clearly threaten the life of the victim test against a Difficulty of 8. A command that clearly threatens the life of another PC or an innocent the victim has reason to sympathize with faces a Difficulty of 6. Otherwise the Difficulty is 4. Each time a character succeeds in resisting a vampire’s command, the Difficulty of resisting further commands from any vampire during that scenario decreases by 1, for the duration of the scenario. Legendary vampires didn’t get that way by being stupid and will generally tailor their commands so that they are likely to be obeyed.

Numbers: 1
Difficulty: Overwhelming (Escape 4, Other 7, Kill 8)
Difficulty Adjustments: +5 if agents are fighting to Kill or Render Helpless but have not investigated sufficiently to know the special means required to dispatch it (stake through the heart, silver bullets, decapitation, or what have you; otherwise, on a kill result, it appears to have been destroyed but then reforms, angry and ready for vengeance. +2 if agents have tried to kill it before and failed.
Toll: 3
Shocks, Minor and Major: Enrapturing Bite / Vampiric Death Strike

Solitary

Use this vampire when you need a single, moderately powerful example of the breed.

Numbers: 1
Difficulty: Vastly Superior (Escape 3, Other 6, Kill 7)
Difficulty Adjustments: Choose one or two standard vampire vulnerabilities (crosses, garlic, fire) and one oddball one; +1 for PCs failing to use at least one of these precautions
Toll: 2
Injuries, Minor and Major: Intoxicating Bite / Throat Punctures

Mesmerist Vampire

A vampire with strong Mesmerist powers.

Numbers: 1
Difficulty: Vastly Superior (Escape 3, Other 5, Kill 6)
Difficulty Adjustments: -1 if you previously succeeded at a Stability test to resist its mental influence.
Toll: 2
Shocks, Minor and Major: Brain Fever / Shown Your Own Horrific Death
Injuries, Minor and Major: Scratched / Throat Punctures

Renfield

A human with will broken and abilities raised by a powerful vampire.

Numbers: 1
Difficulty: Evenly Matched (Escape 3, Other 4, Kill 5)
Toll: 1
Injuries, Minor and Major: Basic weapons

Animals

Dogs

Use this foe profile either for trained guard dogs or fierce feral dogs willing to attack humans.

Numbers: Two to three times the number of PCs
Difficulty: Weak (Escape 1, Other 3, Kill 4)
Difficulty Adjustments: -2 on an Outdoor Survival Push
Toll: 0
Injuries, Minor and Major: The Atavistic Terror of an Animal Attack / Bitten

Swarm

When countless vermin animals die together, they form a swarm, a rolling carpet or cloud of distorted, quasi-substantial fur, claws, and teeth. May include rats, snakes, weasels, dogs, centipedes, birds, and bats.

Numbers: 1
Difficulty: Tough but Outmatched (Escape 2, Other 4, Kill 3)
Difficulty Adjustments: +1 if anyone dismissed the possibility of a few tiny creatures doing any real harm
Toll: 0
Injuries, Minor and Major: Microscopic Wounds / Cell Damage

QuickShock and Foundry VTT

We’re using the virtual tabletop Foundry to run the game. Foundry’s Gumshoe system already supports QuickShock, which is FANTASTIC, and an existing game can just be converted to it by tweaking a few settings using the instructions here. This was pretty smooth, but had to remake all the player characters and tweaked the NPC settings because most stats are not longer needed.

Then I set to the biggest task: creating all the shock and injury cards, which meant copying (and slightly adapting) the SRD text into Foundry.

Special bonus! Here are Foundry compendium JSON files for all the cards I’ve added to Foundry that you can import into your own game.

Exit

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 11:56:50 +0100

A room at Château de Javarzay in Chef-Boutonne, France

More photos

Board of Mammon update

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 21:37:19 +0100

I released a new version of Board of Mammon, my one-page GM-less RPG in which players are demonic corporate executives competing for Mammon’s favour. Along with a suite of tweaks (Biz Climate is now an Event, and you get to roll more dice), V2’s hot new feature is a second Events table which gives each Board Meeting a bit more infernal colour. Now your supply chain issues might come as a result of church interference, an annoying bloom of demonspawn, or even a newly discovered sin. Thanks for the feedback and idea, Kieron!

Download it here, or on Itch.io, for free.

Board of Mammon

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 17:01:09 +0100

I wrote another RPG. I set myself the challenge of creating it for a single sheet of paper and came up with Board of Mammon, a GM-less PVP one-shot RPG about greed:

You are demonic executives competing for Mammon’s favour in corporate board meetings. At the end of the coming financial year, Mammon will judge you. Who will stab backs and grift hard enough to be its champion?

Download it here, or on Itch.io, for free.

Here are the bullet points:

Lead Finance, Production, Marketing or Personnel in your own awful Business Style
Beg, lie and steal for Bonus to raise your chances in the final contest against the demonic majesty of Mammon
Push to achieve the quarter’s Target while grappling with the prevailing Business Climate
Strive to become CEO and wield power over the other players, but take care not to end up ousted in a Vote of Confidence
Uses an adapted version of the Paragon system, as seen in Agon and Deathmatch Island
Full rules print to just a single double-sided sheet of A4 paper, including cut-out sections for each player profile

As I said, Board of Mammon is a GM-less PVP one-shot RPG, and it’s for three or four players and based on the Paragon system. Let’s break down what all that means.

It’s GM-less in the sense that every player manages their own actions, but each quarterly Board Meeting is run by the player who is currently CEO. If the Company fails the quarterly target, though, they’ll likely be ousted… The sheet is designed so that every player cuts out their own section of the sheet so they have a copy of the simple rules for play.

It’s PVP in the sense that the players are competing with each other to collect Bonus, which will help them in the final contest against Mammon. How do they collect Bonus? By making the best roll in a quarter, or by stealing precious Budget that the CEO has granted them. Backstab, lie, take; do anything necessary to succeed. It’s what Mammon demands.

It’s for one-shot games in the sense that it’s quick to set up and start and features just five contests, covering four quarterly Board Meetings and then a final one against Mammon, taking two to three hours in total.

Three or four players in the sense that this four was what fit on the sheet and is cleanly balanced across the roll tables for the Target and Biz Climate. You could probably make up other divisions (Sales? Logistics?) and tweak for more players, but I wouldn’t recommend playing with fewer than three.

And Paragon? Board of Mammon features a stripped down version of John Harper and Sean Nittner’s Paragon, a simple and fast-paced system used by the excellent Agon and Deathmatch Island. It’s about characters competing in challenging contests by collecting dice pools based on their characters and rolling against the situation. The result then informs the ensuing roleplayed narrative.

The lead image is an adaptation of William Thomas Horton’s illustration of Mammon for A book of images.

Board of Mammon is a work in progress — follow this blog (RSS) or me on Itch for updates, and feedback welcome!