The Festival of Scarlet and Shady Cultists

Concept

Theme: High School Students enter the wonderful world of cosmic horror, possibly die a lot. Now in cultist form! A oneshot test of The Festival of Scarlet and Amber rules and overall game concept, after some revisions.

The City - one of many within the Great Polish Republic, and just like the nation whose flag it raises to the heavens, mighty and rotting alike. Sealed off from the rest of the nation by mountains, connected only by the sea and great train tunnels - the old home of fishermen has grown tremendously over the centuries, becoming an important trade port. The great concrete palace towers above the dense cityscape, a memory of times and opportunities past, now long since bought out by a corporation whose exact purpose here nobody truly understands. Here is the place where old Slavic rituals lingered long beyond their time, kept alive by the distance from the Church - and where the dead are still buried in the mountains, where the cold mists are said to let people see their dreams. A city of modern trade and people from distant shores mixing, a city of old legends and superstitions.

A city where ancient dreams are still dreamt, wild and unbound.

You are all students at the prestigious Copernicus Lyceum, the oldest and most respected of the City's high schools, and one that most often is attended by the promising children of those who come to the city to work, the results of its importance as a hub for maritime trade. You have all heard the legends and stories about the old port and its surroundings - and, indeed, you know more about them than your peers. You are the privileged few, the ones who have peered beyond the veil, and have learnt about the Transcendent Ones, who are beyond the bounds of petty physicality. You praise their names, and in return, are allowed to share in a sliver of their miracles.

Or so you like to tell yourselves, at least.

You are all part of a cult - or perhaps separate cults, but ones who are, for the time being, allied in their purpose. Still teenagers, your grasp of true arcane lore is limited, but nevertheless, you have all picked the path that you want to walk in your lives, and what to put your faith in.

There is a ceremony being prepared at an old building, where you often gather for the cult rituals - a sacrifice to your gods, to honor them and show your dedication. This is what you have been waiting for - and today, you were granted the great honour of picking the sacrifice yourselves.

Now, the night of the ritual can begin in its earnest...

Note: just for this, everyone can be assumed to have Cult Connections special characteristic as a freebie, because, well, yeah, so just pick one more and you're good to go. (if someone actually wants to play a sacrifice, that will be permitted and you'll get 2 SCs instead)

Also, specify what sacrifice your characters have prepared! (either agree on one together, or everyone can bring in their own! 1 per person. The sacrifice is human in nature)

Character Creation

Character creation is as per The Festival of Scarlet and Amber, also The Festival of Scarlet and Abused Ruleset for reference. Reposting some of the bits for convenience, but looking at the rest of the page might help as well. (feel free to abuse system as much as you want, testing the rules is something of the point here. Feel free to play around with character concepts as well)

One thing that I'd like to ask you to do is make two characters each, though, in case one dies, so that testing can continue freely. Festival is supposed to have death as a real threat to be concerned about without actually being a hilarious murderfest, so the idea is to tweak things until that point is achieved. (this time death is considerably more likely. Well, we already had a death last time, but...)

Stats

• Physical
  
• Smarts
  
• Charisma
  
• Perception
  
• Mental Health
  
• Eldritch Lore
  

All stats start at 3, with the exception of Eldritch Lore, which starts at 0. This can be considered the "baseline" ability of a high school student. However, all player characters can be assumed to excel in a certain field; you can distribute three extra points in stats of choice, with the exception of Eldritch Lore, which represents abilities that are above average in the given field. (for this specific game, you are allowed to add 1 of the extra points to Eldritch Lore, however)

In addition to that, a single Skill might also be chosen; this is essentially a character's speciality, not bound to any specific stat, but instead having wide application to actions related to it, which reduces the difficulty of associated actions by 1 and adds 1 dice to it. For example, a Cooking skill would not only allow the character to prepare an unusually tasty meal, but also cover things such as recognising ingredients, memorising recipes or swift use of a kitchen knife - not all of which have to be used for entirely harmless purposes.

Each point of Physical grants 5 Health Points, each point of Mental Health grants 5 Mental Health Points.

Special Characteristics

A character has a single Special Characteristic as well; it goes beyond only affecting stats and may have significant effects on the character's background, as well as future plot developments. It is also the only way to raise Eldritch Lore stat above 0 for a starting character, though any additional points gained can only be spent on it when specifically noted.

Note: the list is by no means complete. If you have any ideas for more, feel free to put them on the talk page, or discuss them in the chat.

• The Fated One- gives the character access to a full set of three Fate points, as compared to a single one that others have access to, allowing them to deny the seemingly inevitable and change fate. However, they still only get 1 XP at the end of investigations, even if they have full set of three remaining. The ones that weave fate often pick favourites - but is having their attention a good or bad thing?

• School Idol - the character is highly popular within the school, based on their own merits - they are smarter, prettier, more athletic and more pleasant to talk to than other students. Perhaps they are the winners of a nation-wide mathematics contest, or represent the school as the ace of the sports team - either way, they are the pride of their school. They get three more points to spend on their stats, as well as an additional Skill related to the reason for their popularity, but they also have greater attention and pressure put on them - and maintaining their current life without utterly collapsing is far harder for them than for the others. They only regain half the MP in the same amount of time as other characters. (and as such, they only regain half the MP they normally would between investigations) They are the ones who excel - but the sharpest of swords can also be the most fragile, until no blacksmith can put it back together.

• Renaissance Man - the character's expertise spans a significant number of different areas, though not exceling in any given one more than usual, granting them two additional Skills.

• Clearly a Mermaid - the character gets bonuses to all actions involving sea or water in general - gaining a bonus dice to the relevant stat and reducing the difficulty for the action being taken by one, as well as being assumed to have Swimming as a Skill. This does, in fact, apply to Eldritch Lore - the sailors have their own legends, and they keep knowledge of them well. Some might even say too well, at times.

• Old Blood - the character's ancestors have made a terrible pact with the transcendent ones - or engaged in a blasphemous union with one of their servitors. By now, this is long in the past, and the results of it have thinned considerably - yet there is still the taint of something inhuman within the character's blood, and regardless of the possible benefits it might bring, if it surfaces, the results might be exceptionally unpleasant. The character gains 1 point of Eldritch role applicable to non-knowledge based rolls, also reducing their difficulty by one, and either 2 Minor or 1 Major Innate Ability. They also gain some visible sign of the taint, chosen by the player and based on its original source. However, if their MP runs out, it can cause unwanted atavism - and to do so via rolls forced by the use of innate abilities will. Power that transcends humanity by its very nature requires a denial of humanity.

• Cult Connections - the character's family, or perhaps a childhood friend, are a part of a cult of one of the transcendent ones, though they themselves are not properly initiated as a member. The character gains 1 point of Eldritch Lore, one Minor Ritual and can call upon the cult's resources when in need, but they are also tied to it and its objectives, even when they conflict with the ones that the party is trying to accomplish at the moment. After all, what are mortal friendships and human morals in the face of the eternal ones, before whom all human accomplishments and civilisation are nothing but dust? Of course, rejection of this truth is also possible, but may come with its own consequences.

• Call of the Underworld - the character's family, a friend or perhaps just the character, is involved at some level in organised crime present within the City, which is surprisingly vibrant, given the kind of heavy (and heavy-handed) police presence that features within it. A variety of organisations, many of them from abroad, have taken root here. Some cults have taken to using them as their providers and the occasional disposable asset, particularly the human traffickers, but they're generally kept in the dark as to what is really going on. The character gains 1 point of Physical and 1 point in another stat of choice, and can call upon the resources of their organisation if needed - including buying illegal items from the City's black market. (their position, and so the extent of what they can call upon, is most likely rather limited, though)

Work In Progress: More to Come - generally a special characteristic is supposed to offer three things, bonuses of various sorts, although often with a disadvantage attached. Skills count as 1,5 due to being both difficulty reducers and adding dice. Big enough disadvantages can result in additional points. Feel free to offer suggestions here.

The System

The system used in Festival is a rather extensive modification of the "standard" d10 model used in #lords games. Most normal rolls are resolved as usual, by the number of successes on d10 rolls with the target number being 6, but in case of contested rolls, the results are summed up for each character, and the action with the higher total is assumed to be successful, the difference between the two being used to determine the effect. Equipment can further modify the outcome.

For example, in a fistfight, two characters would roll their Physical stat. If one got 6, and the other 9, then the second would win the roll, their attack would connect, and the first character would lose 3 health points.

This is currently an experimental model and may be altered, pending the results of the rules test.

Short Summary

• Rolls: most normal d10 with success number as 6, opposed rolls total up dice results; attacker has the defender's result removed from his roll. Weapons add a flat bonus to damage, attack roll determines if (and how well) it hits.
• 5 HP and 5 MP for Physical and Mental stats, respectively
• Every 10 HP lost at one time the character takes a major wound; loses 1 dice in Physical, but can keep going. Other penalties may apply depending on the wound taken. (losing 10 HP via slow accumulation is also going to result in 1 Physical loss, but without other penalties) Running out is incapacitation in case of minor wounds, death if the last blow caused a major wound.
• Every 10 MP lost at one time the character suffers from a mental breakdown, needs a successful Mental Health check to act again. Running out of MP results in mental incapacitation; every action requires a successful Mental Health check to actually act.
• Fate: can be used to succeed automatically once. Certain kinds of monsters may be able to no-sell it if used to attack them. (you do not lose your one Fate in that case)
• Skills: add 1 dice and substract 1 difficulty from rolls relevant to their subject. Skills are pretty broad, so as long as you can justify why the Skill is assisting the roll, it's fine.
• Eldritch Lore: half of Smarts stat can be used for some degree of comprehension. Each point in stat gives 2 dice; dice can be removed to reduce difficulty on 1-1 basis for rituals, 2 dice for 1 difficulty for improvised sorcery, or added at cost of increasing difficulty by 1. Rituals require time but blow up in your face less than improvised sorcery.
• Innate Abilities: use ritual-grade sorcery with improvised-grade speed to represent being not quite human; have it eat away at your humanity when actually used.
• Effects for sorcery: Minor, Major, Massive. Consult part of the page for details.

Physical and Mental Health

A typical character, before applying any modifications, would have 15 health points and 15 mental health points, from this point on referred to as HP and MP. This number can be reduced or increased during an investigation, as well as its aftermatch. Overall, each point of Physical or Mental Health gives 5 HP or MP, respectively.

HP represents the ability of the character to go on in the physical meaning of the term. Loss of HP is typically associated with grazing wounds, bruises, cuts, burns and so on; they can be treated in relatively short period of time and are generally not life-threatening. Serious wounds are ones that are dealt by attacks or accidents that cause loss of HP equal to or greater than 10 HP in one go; those are the broken bones, ruptured organs and such. Their specific consequences and methods of treating them are context-dependant, but they can be assumed to be incapacitating to a normal character.

If a character has HP left, they can continue acting even after taking a crippling wound, at the cost of a temporary loss of a single point of the Physical stat. This can continue for as long as their Physical lasts - once they hit 0, they're out. (and probably in for a long visit at the hospital - or the morgue, for that matter)

Light wounds are healed fully in-between investigations, thanks to the wonders of modern medical care. They can also be mitigated by treatment during the investigation itself; taking painkillers, bandaging the wounds and such, though those can have their own consequences attached. Serious wounds are context-sensitive, and depend on various variables within the story itself, but generally the only way to heal them on the go is via arcane means.

MP represents the ability of the character to withstand the horrors of this world - human or not. Loss of MP usually happens due to seeing or participating in particularly traumatic events, or witnessing things not meant for human eyes, such as certain arcane effects, entities or lore. Their loss is handled mechanically in the same way as HP loss, though with no equivalent for serious wounds. Notably, though, each consecutive damage to a character's mental health that comes from the same source has a reduced effect, as they build up mental resistance to the source - each encounter with the same source of trauma reduces the difficulty check to resist it by 1.

Total loss of MP results in mental incapacitation, as the character is overcome by the events that he or she has encountered. From that point on, any further action first requires a successful Mental Health roll. Repeated failures may lead to insanity and mental illness. If a character loses more than 10 MP points at once, it results in a temporary breakdown - requiring a single successful Mental Health roll to get out of, though consequences may linger.

MP are regenerated in-between investigations with a Mental Health roll; the stat number + one d10 dice is the number of MP points regained. They can also be recovered in mid-investigation due to context-dependant actions, as well as given out as a kind of RP bonus in certain context.

Eldritch Lore

The knowledge of the arcane and the leftover mysteries of the transcendent ones that still remain on Earth, even as their masters slumber. It is responsible for all actions related to them - comprehending alien mathematics, recognising servitors of the transcendent ones and the characteristics of their cults, learning and using sorcery and so on and so forth. Proper knowledge of Eldritch Lore synergises well with high Mental Health score - it does not protect the character from mental trauma, as even though he or she might be more familiar with the strange sights, they also know far better what they see and the grave implications associated with it, unshielded by ignorance. Of course, there are also those who have embraced the horror fully, throwing their worries to the winds...

Notably, Smarts can be used to substitute for Eldritch Lore when learning from arcane tomes, as even though the contents are incredibly alien and often incomprehensible, created thanks to millenia of desperate attempts of mankind to understand the ineffable and experimentation, they were still written by humans and there is a certain method to their madness that, with luck, one might glean even without fundamental arcane education. Nevertheless, all such rolls are made at higher difficulty, up to difficulty 10. There is also a higher chance of mental health loss on failure present. (in some special cases, even on success!)

Fate

Each character has a single Fate point - representing that, for better or worse, they are the chosen for rather more interesting purposes than merely a miserable death. These points can be burned to assure the success in an action, or to save a character from certain death. It can be used after the roll. However, they only replenish in between investigations, regardless of how long these take, and so should be used with care. Unspent Fate point gives extra 1 XP at the end of the investigation.

However, it should be noted that, while Fate points act as normal when it comes to humans, the servitors of the transcendent ones are the tools of these who weave fate in the first place. While they will always offer you their protection, some of these beings can resist their influence. Take care - when the true monsters of old come out of their hiding places, the rules of the human world can no longer be taken for granted.

Inventory

Conventional

The characters initially have access to the personal belongings of them and their families - from pens to cellphones. Those don't need to be "bought" during character generation and can be safely assumed to be part of their normal lives.

If they have access to appropriate channels, they can also acquire other, less widely available items - such as weapons. Characters who - either themselves or via their families - have connections to the City's criminal underground or cults can even acquire firearms. (while ones such as hunting rifles can be taken even without that, there is a greater risk of them being traced back to you - or your family starting to wonder just where their child is taking a gun to, for that matter, and what is happening with the ammunition)

Weapons tend to add fixed damage value to the attack roll - the roll decides whether the attack hits at all and gives a damage bonus to the weapon's base damage. These can be quite significant - a pistol, for instance, has damage of 7, which means that anything but a really bad shot is going to cause a major wound, and a good one can kill a normal person outright. Armour, in turn, offers flat damage reduction. Stats for these will be provided further as necessary.

Various items and tools generally open up new options - such as cellphone cameras letting you make photos of various scenes, for example. Which may or may not be a good idea, depending on what you want to make the photo of.

Arcane

Magic is fundamentally based on either asking entities of higher order to do something for you, or using the remains of the creations of the transcendent ones that still linger on Earth to achieve certain effects - often effects that modern science really can't explain.

There are generally two methods of doing so - via rituals, and via improvisation.

Rituals are often highly elaborate and, in truth, often contain unnecessary elements, added to the original knowledge over the centuries or even millenia. They take time to set up and perform, but, being the end result of a long history of trials and errors, they are typically relatively safe, as long as the steps are properly followed.

Improvisation, on the other hand, means trying to come up with something of your own, possibly even on the fly, using the knowledge that you have. This can result in causing effects far faster than with rituals - but also means that there is no safety net of tradition and rote present, and failures can backfire rather spectacularly; knowledge that man was not meant to know is not a toy and can be very lethal to the user if treated as such.

Eldritch Lore is the stat that governs how well you can use it. Each point in the stat gives you 2 dice to use. Dice are rolled normally, with 6 as the target success number - however, additional dice can be spent to lower the target number by 1, 1 per 1 for ritual sorcery and 2 per 1 for improvised sorcery, making the effect more reliable, if weaker. Competent sorcerers can perform minor effects reliably - of course, that kind of knowledge does not come easily.

The reverse is also possible - getting more dice at cost of increasing difficulty, with every extra dice adding 1 to the difficulty count. Playing with the fire usually gets you burnt - but nevertheless, in desperate moments, it is the price that one might be willing to accept.

Innate Abilities of those with inhuman ancestry are handled in a similiar manner, and so will be discussed here as well.

Effects are into three categories - minor, major and massive.

Effect Guidelines

Minor effects are relatively limited - violations of reality as understood by humans to a relatively small degree. These includes things such as indefinite breathing underwater, biological immortality, accelerated healing, unnaturally potent toxins, visiting someone's dreams, minor augury, unnatural accuracy with firearms and the like.

Major effects are open violations of human conception of reality and laws of physics. This includes things like teleportation, altering the geometry of local spacetime to use as a shield or to twist someone into pieces, vast changes within the body's structure such as regrowing entire limbs - or growing tentacles -, turning incorporeal and so on. Dimensional travel also belongs to this effect tier.

Massive effects are the things of the transcendent ones - things that reveal the true nature of the cosmos, working on levels that humanity can barely comprehend. Only the most favoured of worshippers of the transcendent ones have any access to these, and usually only as part of great rituals, as human brains are simply incapable of processing the information required to actualise one.

Some sorcery is present at all ranks - for instance, wards can range from minor to massive, as can scrying. The essential qualifier is not so much raw power, per se, although that also plays a role, as the divergence from human understanding of the world - in other words, how exotic the given effect is.

Rituals and Innate Abilities

The number of rituals that can be remembered is equal to twice the number of Eldritch Lore stat - however, they need to be firmly defined and require time to prepare. However, as a benefit, if their execution is failed, the consequences are going to be much less severe, certain safety features already built in into the process. (this should not be misinterpreted as them always being minor, however) They are also easier to reduce difficulty for.

Innate Abilities are the stuff of those with inhuman ancestry - giving them abilities beyond that of normal humans. They may also be the result of sorcerers imbuing themselves with additional abilities, getting further and further away from being human. For both, the difficulty reductions work the same as with rituals - however, as they are innate to their selves now, they may allow one to substitute Eldritch Lore with another stat, such as Physical for regeneration, for instance. However, modifying one's body, or reaching out to one's inhuman ancestry, tend to have harsh consequences, if one wants to keep their humanity. Each failed Minor effect roll, and each Major effect roll forces a Mental Health roll - and with each failure of that, your mind keeps slipping, until you find out that you are no longer human, in body or mind. MP lost in this manner can be regained via meaningful human interaction or therapy - it will not regenerate automatically between investigations, but rather requires an anchor, so to speak.

Altering one's body - or mind - in order to gain an Innate Ability is a Major effect. (or, in some particularly drastic cases, Massive, although the result afterward is extremely unlikely to retain their human self)