Yudhishthira’s Dice

This is a rough, only partly tested system that I whipped up for a game of Afraid that I ran last Halloween. I found the notes recently, and figured I’d toss it out to the world.

The Eldritch Arcane is magic for Afraid. It could probably work for Dogs or a Dogs homebrew too. Its basic principle is that magic lets you go beyond the limits of normal human effort, but that it can exact a terrible price for doing so.

At character creation characters who have Eldritch abilities mark them as such. For now lets just say they come out of your normal dice, but get marked special when you declare them Eldritch. GMs who want to limit magic might say you can only use 1 or 2 dice at character creation as an eldritch ability. If you want to be fancy you could make a new background that grants access to Eldritch powers, and say you have to take it if you want any dice.

Eldritch abilities can be traits (Blood of the Dark 2d8), relationships (Slave of Kali 3d4), or gear (faerie cloak 2d8). In general eldritch gear can be temporarily lost as part of stakes or as part of gaining a condition, but losing it permanently requires a burnout consequence from magical backlash. (I’ll explain that below.) We also experimented with letting some of the dice for a Stat be eldritch, so that you could have Heart 3 (1) with that (1) being an eldritch dice. Results generally indicated yes.

In play, Eldritch abilities work just like others in terms of how and when they get rolled. You use relationships at the start, for those involved or at stake, for example. However, eldritch abilities work a bit differently when they are in play, and for that reason I recommend having dice of a different color or style than all the others in play to roll for your Eldritch abilities, as it will keep things easier once dice start hitting the table. If you don’t have enough dice of different colors you can just keep the eldritch dice in a separate area from your normal dice.

In play Eldritch abilities have the following special rules:

1. When you use one, you can make raise and sees that are clearly beyond the norm. In other words, it lets you do magic. Fly, crush people’s throats by squeezing your fingers together across the room, and so forth.
2. They give you access to the magical world, which allows you to use magical sites or ritual implements as improvised objects. (”Jeepers Scooby, its midnight on Halloween and we’re in Stonehenge? My Druid Blood gives me a 2d8 for this big, excellent ritual space.”)
3. You can use a dice from a magical ability to do something beyond the pale. An action that is beyond the pale risks backlash, a supernatural repercussion, in addition to other fallout. The benefit of going beyond the pale is that it lets you add one dice from a magical ability (and it must be a magical ability dice, the reason for the different color) to any raise, see, or taking the blow. If you raise or see you can do so with three dice total. If you take the blow you take one dice less fallout than you would normally take.

Note: You can use your eldritch abilities for the first two items without risking backlash. In that case they act just like normal dice, save that they let you do kewl raises. It is only if you add a magical dice as a third dice (or fourth for taking the blow) that you risk backlash.

Backlash

When you use an eldritch ability to go beyond the pale, you risk backlash as the inhuman forces rebound upon you. All eldritch dice used to go beyond the pale (add an extra dice to an action) are set aside after they are played (played, not rolled) and after the conflict all of them are rolled after normal fallout has been rolled. They are read just like fallout dice, but use the following tables to determine their outcome.

Backlash Roll
Any 1’s — Backlash experience
2 - 7 — Minor Backlash
8 - 11 — Major Backlash
12+ — Devastating Backlash

Backlash Experience

Note: Eldritch abilities cannot be raised with normal fallout, though they can be lowered. So you can make your Druid Blood go down as a result of fallout, but you cannot increase it. The only way to increase an eldritch ability is through backlash experience.

• Add or subtract 1 dice from an existing eldritch ability
• Take an new eldritch ability at 1d6
• Change the dice size for one magical ability by one step
• Pick from the normal experience list

Minor Backlash

• One condition becomes true
• Seen (an evil occult force knows where you are and gains your highest backlash dice against you in the next conflict you have with it).
• Lose access to one eldritch ability for the next conflict

Major Backlash

• Two conditions become true
• Marked (an evil occult force now can track you and gains a relationship with you with a dice size equal to the biggest backlash dice you rolled.)
• Lose 1 eldrtich ability for the rest of the story
• Lose all eldritch abilities for the next scene
• Lose 2 dice from a Stat
• Change an eldritch ability to d4s

Devastating Backlash

• All conditions become true
• Tainted (as marked, plus against the being you are always considered to be either Alone or Unprepared)
• Lose all eldritch abilities for the rest of the story
• Lose 1 eldritch ability permanently
• Lose 3 dice from a Stat
• Require Real Medical Care

And that, as they say, is that.

Credit Where It is Due: Landon Darkwood had a big impact on this, as should be obvious if you read his article. Vincent Baker, of course, had some impact as well.