I’m running a playtest game of the Whisper Killings. The first scenario in my Whispers of Erlig campaign for the Streets of Avalon RPG. We finished it last weekend. My crew decided they were interested in continuing on so we’ll be playing more of it. I think it went rather well as I utilized the Investigation framework for the game with the detail and flow clues but I did one other thing. I added a side story.
A side story is a small situation or problem that isn’t intentionally part of the scenarios framework but is there for the GM to add in if they see an opportunity, think it would be interesting, or decide to have it as part of a missed roll to get a clue. This one took my players to the Tik Tok, a graveyard in the shadow of the clock tower. There, a Grimhaggen Alchemist named Garren Vell was the overseer of the Tik Tok and was also experimenting with the embalming of bodies, something the Grimhaggen family would like to have as a potential monetary stream. Garren was also working on something a little more personal. The resuscitation of dead people.
Garren believes that the creation of an elixir which can bring back the dead will allow him to move up greatly in the Grimhaggen familes hierarchy. He’s also fascinated with the concept of raising the dead. Unfortunately Garren didn’t figure out how to make embalming fluid, or a fluid which resurrects the dead, but he did make a fluid that raises the dead as zombie. Hungry, infectious, zombies.
So two of the characters are walking into this situation, Bitsy our orphanage overseeing nurse fighter and Slippery Jim Bolivar, our vermin catcher house of bone magic user. To make a long story short, they discovered the zombies, Garren released them as a distraction and booked it out of there, Jim ended up getting bit trying to save an NPC mausoleum/morgue clerk named Dominic who, in being saved, now works at Bitsy’s orphanage as a clerk, and that led to Bitsy cutting off Jim’s infected arm before it could kill him and turn him into a hungry infectious zombie.
Now I want to get into this last part, the arm cutting, because it highlighted to me that I designed the game to work the way I wanted. First off, I don’t have rules for missing limbs, rules for cutting off limbs, and I invented the infectious zombie rules for this side story.
Simply, If you get bit by one of these zombies you make an endurance resistance roll against the zombies physical stat plus the difficulty die. If you fail you get the condition grave rot in addition to whatever harm you take from the bite. The end state of the grave rot condition is to receive powerful healing magic to cure it or die within an hour and turn into an infectious zombie.
With that Jim was in a lot of trouble. Lucky for him he’d befriended the Liche’ priest Dalinar at the Tik Tok who had some juice, not enough juice to get rid of the Grave Rot, you need to be able to put at least 5 spell points into a healing spell to get rid of it or have an NPC who narratively has that kind of power. Dalinar didn’t but since context matters in this game I decided that Dalinar’s spell trying to heal Jim gave him a few hours instead of an hour.
That’s when Jim’s player turned to me and asked, is it in my blood stream or just my arm. I replied, “Just your arm.” Jim’s player then looked at Bitsy’s player and said, “I guess you’ll have to cut it off.” Bitsy’s player was shocked. Actually I think all of us took a bit of a breath but we continued on. Bitsy is a nurse and trained in Chirurgeon but she’s not trained with the medical kit, nor did she have one which would allow her to preform surgery. She mentioned that and then Jim’s player told her to cut it off with her great sword. Once again we all took a pause at the situation that was unfolding.
After I got my bearings I realized I needed to heat things up. I told Bitsy she could cut the arm off and the target number was 14. I also mentioned but she could use her profession die and have advantage since she was trained in Chiurgeon. She made the roll and got a 15. I described the horrific sight of this act with the camera on Dominic’s face, Dominic was holding Jim’s arm which came off and then Dominic was on his ass holding Jim’s severed arm with a splash of blood on his face.
My Avalon has Alchemists but they haven’t perfected a solid version of anesthesia. So since context matters I had Jim make an Endurance resistance roll, TN 12, to survive the shock of this event. If he failed he straight up died from a heart attack. Jim failed the roll initially but spend a point of grit, rolled another die and got double 5’s, getting a hit and living.
To take it one step further I asked Bitsy’s player to make a Psyche resistance roll TN 12. On a failure they would gain the condition Terrified of what I can do with a Greatsword or something to that nature. They also spent some Grit to make their roll. They just had to turn a die from a 3 to a 4 to equal the target number.
In the end Jim’s condition changed from Graverot to Amputee and the Amputee condition had the end result of once you’ve spent 75 downtime points you get used to having one arm. Then the condition would turn into a permanent tag. Still a hindrance but not once that occupies a condition slot.
It was a very interesting and tense scene that happened as a reaction to the previous sequence. It allowed me to utilize the flexible rules of the game to make the scene feel good to all the players involved, including myself.
Now I can see different GMs making a variety of different calls which would change how this situation turns out. They could see the context differently, the players might try very different things than what mine did, the GM would have to make different rulings based on what they tried and the tools, trainings, and abilities they had at their disposal. I’d be quite curious to see how other people utilize this rules set because of this.
So that was what I did as a part of this past weekend. The experience was a very cool one and made me feel pretty good about how the game handled the situation from a rules point of view. There were consequences to actions and missed dice rolls. That consequence won’t debilitate the character forever, it just made something they’ll have to think about and work around for a while. It’s exactly the kind of thing I was hoping the game could do without being some specific situation I was designing for.