Game rules

The rules of the game are fairly simple, but there are a number of interconnected options that may take some time to get used to.

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As a quick reference:

1. Declare your action
* What's the scale of the action?
* What do you hope to accomplish by doing that?
* What do you fear might go wrong?

2. Trait Roll
- Choose up to 3d6 of any color to roll (Dark Gift requires requires 3d6)
- 4, 5, or 6 is a "success" or a "hit". (6s count twice for the right color)
- Each success allows you to resolve one of the stakes (defined when declaring the action)
- Can use Assets, Resources or push your luck

3. Damage
- You get any damage, you're out of action.
- Mitigate damage by losing Trait Dice and Assets or Gaining Marks
- Place yourself in advantageous positions to gain Bonus Reserves

4. Recovery
- Follow your desire and dig into the family's skeletons to recover trait dice
- Other players can give 1d6 to an out-of-action character to bring them back.

Declare your action

Any action happens as you declare it. If you say, "I punch the constable in the face", your fist is hurtling toward that bobby’s face. If you don’t roll any hits, you fail to connect solidly, but you are still guilty of assaulting an officer.

If many actions are declared at once, the Chronicler (GM) determines the order of these simultaneous actions. If it is important who acts first, roll competing actions with the Reward "You could do it faster".

You may describe your actions as colorfully or plainly as you like. You may portray your family member as adept, inept, stupidly lucky, or anywhere in between. The purpose of the dice is to create suspense about the outcome, not to make you look stupid.

If your Rookwood is a bumbling klutz but rolls 4 successes to stake a vampire, you can describe it as slipping and knocking the vampire onto a broken chair leg instead of expertly piercing its chest with a sharpened broom handle with the point control of an olympic fencer.

Likewise, if your expert sniper misses, maybe your target stubbed his toe and bent down just as you fired. The dice determine if you succeed or fail, but you can describe what that looks like.

Setting the Scale

The Scale of an action is how much time and effort is represented by one Trait roll. One roll could be a daylong battle between armies or one sword blow between duellists. If the outcome is important but the individual steps taken to reach it are not, such as searching a warehouse for evidence or picking a lock, it is a good idea to condense time-consuming actions to one roll. In these situations, one roll determines the outcome of one action. Breaking the action down step-by-step should be reserved to portray potential reversals of fortune or sudden upsets.


Setting Stakes

The Stakes are the potential Risks and Rewards that can result from the action. When a player declares an action, the Chronicler should ask "What do you hope to accomplish by doing that? What do you fear might go wrong?" to set the stakes.

The players should say what they want to achieve and what potential drawbacks concern them, then the Chronicler should enumerate the stakes. The Chronicler tells the players what bad things might happen (Risks) and what good things could happen (Rewards), based on the player’s stated intentions and the Chronicler’s judgment of the situation. Note that Rewards are phrased with the word "could" and Risks with the word "might" to clearly divide the stakes into two groups

Risks are negative consequences that will result from the action if not prevented. Rewards are opportunities or benefits that can result with extra effort, skill, or luck.

For each success on a Trait roll, you can choose to eliminate one Risk or gain one Reward.

Sometimes, these have to be done in a particular order (if you shoot an enemy, "you could hit it in the eye", but not if you don’t first eliminate the Risk "you might miss"), but Risks and Rewards are not always mutually exclusive.

Every roll should have at least one Stake, the most basic being "You might fail". If there are no consequences to avoid or extra benefits to gain, then you can do things without a roll. There also may be other Risks to an action even if "success" is a sure thing.

Can you climb over that fence, run through the back garden, and climb the trellis to enter the back window of that creepy house? Of course! Can you do it without being spotted, getting cut up by the rose bushes, or breaking the window glass while entering? Roll to see how many of those Risks you can avoid!

Trait Roll

Each character has a dice pool with dice of different colors:
• Brawn (Black dice) is your physical prowess: strength, agility, and toughness.
• Guile (Grey dice) is your mental prowess: reason, wits, and willpower.
• Weird (White dice) is your magical prowess: spiritual power, intuition, and ability to control and resist magic.

When a character attempts to perform an action that carries significant difficulty, danger or stress, determine the scale and the stakes of the roll, choose up to three Trait dice (of any color), and roll them.

- Each die that shows a 4, 5, or 6 is a "success" or a "hit".
- 6s count as two hits if the dice color matches the type of action (e.g. black Brawn dice for physical actions).
- Each success allows you to resolve one of the stakes (remove a Risk or gain a Reward)Effort

Note that the number of dice you roll determines the effort your character puts into the action:
* Roll one die for "moderate effort": You can only achieve one hit (two if the color fits), so you cannot accomplish a lot at one time, but neither will you be stretched too thin.
* Roll 2 dice to make an "extraordinary effort": You exert yourself to have a better chance of success and can achieve greater degrees of success. However, you run the risk of exhaustion: if you roll doubles, you lose one of your dice from the roll.
* Roll 3 dice to make a "supernatural effort" for a magical power, such as your Dark Gift: If you roll doubles or triples, you lose one Trait die and gain another Mark of your Curse.Assets and Resources:

You can spend Family Resources or Individual Assets once per session to help you with your actions, as long as you can justify it:

* If you spend one before a dice roll, you gain one automatic success.
* If you spend one after a dice roll, you can re-roll any number of dice.

Even though you have "spent" the asset or resource, remember that they don't just vanish. You can still use them narratively, you can't gain this one-time bonus again.

Pushing Your Luck

If you roll a Trait check with one or two dice and do not roll any hits, you can increase your effort at a cost. You can add more dice to the roll (up to 3 total), but you must add another Risk for each die added. If there are no obvious additional Risks, use "It might exhaust you: lose a Trait die".

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The Curse

When you use your Curse, you make a Trait Roll like any other action, but you must make a supernatural effort and roll 3 dice. If you have less than 3 dice to roll, you can’t control your Gift.

With every attempt to use your Gift carries the chance of rolling a double and gaining another Mark. Keep in mind that not only this moves you closer to be lost to the Curse, when attempting a non-supernatural Trait Roll , your Marks may inflict additional Risks to all actions where they can interfere. For example, you may sink if you try to swim as your skin turns to stone

At the cost of 1 Weird die, you can suppress your Curse and hide your Marks for one scene, but only during daylight hours. From dusk to dawn, darkness is dominant and the Curse cannot be suppressed.

Damage

Physical injury is the most obvious, but damage can come in many forms: cuts and bruises, rattled nerves and broken concentration, or even crushing ennui and existential angst.

When a character takes damage, they need to mitigate it in order to survive. If damage isn’t canceled somehow, the character will be out of action: knocked unconscious, killed, getting blackout drunk in a dive bar, withdrawn and barricaded in their study in a fit of depressed nihilism, etc. How a character goes out is up to the Chronicler and the player, but it should match the situation in the scene.

Damage can be absorbed or canceled in a few ways:

1. Losing Trait Dice

Your Trait Dice don't represent just your abilities and effort, they also represent your resilience and reserves of energy so they can be temporarily spent to absorb damage.

You can absorb damage by sacrificing dice from Traits: 1 die per hit of damage. You don’t need to lose dice from the same Trait that dealt the damage (losing Brawn for physical damage, Guile for mental assaults…). A physical blow could obviously hurt your Brawn, but it could also distract you with pain and cost Guile,

2. Losing Assets

You can absorb damage by spending Assets if it makes sense in the fiction. When you lose an Asset, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the Asset has been destroyed. It only means that it no longer helps you in a significant way. If you have a PhD and lose this Asset, you don’t have to tear up your diploma. You just don’t get to reroll dice for Trait checks where your degree would have helped until you restore that Asset.3. Gaining Marks

If you need to lose dice to absorb damage but you don’t have enough dice left to spare (or you want to keep 3 Trait dice to use your Gift) and can’t justify using your remaining Assets, you may gain another Mark of your Curse instead.

Bonus Reserves

In addition to spending your regular Traits and Assets to avoid hits against you, you can also spend temporary Assets called Bonus Reserves. These situational beneficial dice can be gained in several ways. The Chronicler may give them to one side in a conflict to represent a circumstantial advantage.

Like permanent Assets, you can only add one success to a Trait Roll by spending Bonus Reserve dice, but any number may be spent defensively to negate hits/damage against you.

For example, if you have the benefit of cover in a firefight, the Chronicler may give you 2 black Brawn dice of Bonus Reserves for cover that you could use to avoid getting shot or other physical harm.

You can also use your Gifts to generate Bonus Reserves for a particular scene. If you summon a murder of crows to fly around and give you a telepathic bird’s eye view of your surroundings, you could use the hits on your Gift roll to buy Guile dice of Bonus Reserves to avoid ambush or aid rolls to search for something from the air.

Recovery

- Every time you pursue your desire and cause trouble for another family member, you are reinvigorated and restore one spent Trait die.
- When a Skeleton Bone occurs, both you and the family member that triggered it can restore a spent Trait die or Asset
- Burring a skeleton also give you +1 trait dice

Out of action
If you are forced out of action by losing all your traits, you can’t come back on your own even if you are still alive. You can only be brought back into play by the intervention of your family. A dead family member might be brought back as a ghostly consultant by a relative with the dark gift to contact spirits. A family member who decides to crawl into a bottle or opium den won’t "get over it" on their own, but could be dragged out by a relative who intervenes.

However you justify it, the rescuer must give one of their Trait dice to the returning family member to restore them. It probably won’t be a cheerful return, because that family member with one Trait die will need to indulge their Desire and Skeletons right away to restore more dice and regain their effectiveness.