# The Resistance Toolbox

The text of this product is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

## Welcome To The Resistance

The Resistance Toolbox is a system reference document (or SRD) for the Resistance System, a generic roleplaying game system. This document is released under creative commons, so you’re free to use it, copy it, modify it and publish it as long as you credit us.

## What Can The Resistance System Do?

We don’t know yet!

At the core of the Resistance system is a focus on loss, change, and - appropriately enough - resistance. The system looks at what characters have to lose and what they’re willing to do to keep hold of it.

We wrote the Resistance system as part of the Spire roleplaying game. In Spire, you play desperate dark elf revolutionaries trying to destabilise, and ultimately overthrow, a cruel and unjust ruling caste of colonialist high elves. There, the system modelled the characters getting in over their heads - going mad from stress, dealing with ongoing injuries, running out of money and forced to perform dubious side-jobs, and avoiding the attention of secret police black-bag squads. We wanted to create a game where failures were as interesting and exciting - if not more so - than successes.

But past that, the stories you can tell with the system are endless; you’ll just need to work out all the moving parts.

## What Can’t The Resistance System Do?

We don’t know yet!

That said, there are a few things that you might want to bear in mind.

This isn’t a plug-and-play system that you insert into a setting and get started right away. This is a toolbox, and you’ll need to use the tools we provide to define the game world and write abilities for the characters.

The Resistance system is a story-game, so it isn’t well-suited to tactical, simulationist games. We abstract a lot away - especially in physical terms - and focus on outcomes and consequences over approaches and skills.

It’s also about losing things, rather than gaining them - and by things we mean equipment, resources, parts of yourself, and people. If you were interested in a game about getting lots of stuff and keeping hold of it, the Resistance system might not be the best fit for you.

## What Do You Need To Do?

Firstly, you’ll need to read through this document. Once you’ve got a handle on the rules and thought of a world to use it in, you’ll need to fill in the blanks around them - decide what resistances characters in your world have, what skills and domains cover their aptitudes, and so on.

## Examples

We’ve tried to illustrate the flexibility of the Resistance system with the examples, but we didn’t want to stick to a single world (or a single set of worlds) in case we ended up accidentally defining a “default” setting for it. As such, our examples might refer to \_implied \_rules - that is, resistances or skills that don’t exist anywhere else in the document, but should be clear enough to suss out through context.

The main reason we’re saying this is to stop you from fruitlessly looking for more information on the IRON resistance you saw on page whatever, because it isn’t here.

## How To Use This Document

As mentioned previously, this is a toolbox - not a complete games system. As the designer, it’s your job to use the mechanical concepts within to provide a foundation for your game world. This boils down to answering the following five questions; however, feel free to rewrite and change your mind as you progress and the setting grows under its own steam.

## What Is The Setting?

First things first, you’ll need a rough idea of what your setting is. You don’t need more than a few sentences to get enough to go with - don’t worry about writing reams and reams of backstory. You can also put down some notes about tone and content, too.

For example: _This game takes place on the high seas in the golden age of piracy - it’s full of rollicking adventure and derring do. \_Or: \_This game is a cyberpunk story of insurrection and struggle against megacorporations._

## Who Are The Player Characters?

The characters are the most important part of the game - after all, it’s going to focus around them more often than not. Work out what sort of people the player characters are going to be, their place in society, their motivations and goals, etc.

For example: _The player characters are separatist forest creatures rebelling against the machinations of the Wicked Witch. \_Or: \_The player characters are demon-summoning warlocks on the lowest rung of the occult mafia._

## What Are The Resistances?

What do the characters have to lose? How can they be hurt? Not just physical pain, either. The Resistance system is powered by resistances (appropriately) and they form the core of the game, so this is an important decision.

_You can find examples of resistances in the Resistance section later on._

## How Do The Characters Grow?

Characters advance when they fulfill the narrative requirement of your game - what is that requirement? What sort of in-character behaviour to you want to promote? What counts as a meaningful achievement?

_You can find examples of advancement conditions in the Advancement section later on._

## What Can The Characters Do?

This is the hardest part of the process. Primarily, you need to determine what the skills and domains are in your game - these power the basic actions and knowledges that the characters will perform.

_You can find examples of skills and domains in the Skills and Domains chapter later on._

Secondly, you’ll need to determine abilities. Abilities are powers, earned by advancing, that give a character additional mechanical or fictional advantage in certain situations as explained in the Abilities chapter later on. This is the most labour-intensive part of the process, but often the most exciting and rewarding, as you’ll hopefully come to discover.

As you can see, there’s a lot of work involved in designing a new game using this core system, but we think that the results can be well worth it.

# Core Mechanic

Generally, play happens as a conversation between the players and the GM, with both parties adding description to the story and reacting to one another’s actions. When the GM thinks that it might be interesting if a character’s action fails, or if there’s something significant at stake, they can ask the player to roll to see if they succeed - and whether they lose something in the bargain.

To see if their action succeeds, the player rolls a D10 and consults the following table:

> **1:** Critical Failure (take double stress) <br/> > **2-5:** Failure (take stress) <br/> > **6-7:** Success at a cost (take stress) <br/> > **8-9:** Success (take no stress) <br/> > **10:** Critical success (inflict +1 stress for each 10 you roll) <br/>

If the character has a relevant skill, they roll another D10.

If the character has a relevant domain, they roll another D10.

If the character has mastery over the action, skill or domain, they roll another D10. (Mastery doesn’t stack - you can only use it once per action, no matter how many sources you get it from. You don’t need a skill to benefit from mastery when using it, although often you’ll have both.)

The player selects the the highest dice result they rolled to resolve the action; the other dice don’t matter, unless they show 10 and they’re inflicting stress on someone else.

**Don’t roll if there’s nothing at stake; if the character could do it, it works, and if they couldn’t, they don’t. Only roll if the character has something to lose.**

> #### Partial Stress
>
> Sometimes you’re just rolling to avoid taking harm and not trying to achieve anything else in particular - you test to see if you can hang onto your mind after seeing something horrific, to avoid damage from someone taking a swing at you, or to escape from a burning building. On a 6-7 result on such an action, you still take stress, but it’s one dice type lower than usual. The same rules apply when you’re trying to buy something for cheap.

## Difficulty

If an action is difficult, the GM subtracts dice from your pool equal to the difficulty. Difficulty ranges from 0 (standard) to 2 (very challenging). Surprise or ambush is a common reason to subtract dice; an NPC’s skill level is also represented by their difficulty, which applies to all rolls made against them.

No matter how high the difficulty of a task, if it’s at all possible, you’ll always roll at least 1 dice. For each point of difficulty that would take your dice pool below zero, the result is downgraded by one step on the core mechanic table above. For example: if a character with a dice pool of 1 attempts a difficulty 2 action, this would leave them with a dice pool of -1. They roll a single dice and treat it as though it scored the next-lowest result on the table; a roll of 10 would count as 8-9, a roll of 8-9 would count as 6-7, and so on.

## Groups

For each character that assists you, if they have a relevant skill or domain, add 1 to your dice pool - but they take stress the same way you would. (There is a limit to how many characters can aid you on any given action, determined by the GM. For example, no more than two people can try to barge open a door without getting in each other’s way.)

For group skill actions (such as sneaking in somewhere), choose one player to lead the group. If they succeed, every other player rolls with mastery.

## Stress

Stress is one of the most important parts of the Resistance system. As characters perform actions in the story, they’ll allot stress to their resistances; the more stress they have, the more likely it becomes that it will coalesce into Fallout - concrete ramifications of misfortune. Marking, enduring, clearing, and refreshing stress, as well as having it turn into Fallout, forms the core mechanical loop of a Resistance game.

## Resistances

Every player character has a number of resistances which represent what they have to lose. The most immediate one to come to mind in RPG terms is health - often characters are caught up in danger and violence, and their physical well-being can be measured in terms of Hit Points, Wound Levels, or some other method of tracking damage.

To represent physical damage in the Resistance system, you could give a character the HEALTH resistance. As they mark stress to this resistance - when they’re hurt, exhausted, infected with a disease or malnourished - the odds of them taking Fallout increase. Fallout associated with the HEALTH resistance might be BROKEN BONE, or OUT OF BREATH, or VOMIT. (But: more on Fallout later.)

In the Resistance system, all misfortune that a character suffers works in the same way as the example above. Rather than tracking money, you can give characters a RESOURCES resistance and mark stress to it when they spend more than they can afford. Rather than trying to simulate or estimate the actions of their adversaries, you can give them a SAFETY resistance and mark stress to it when they put themselves in danger.

## Example Resistance Lists

> #### Fantastical Crusades
>
> **BODY:** Physical damage, exhaustion.
>
> **FAITH:** Doubt, heresy, inaction, loss of standing in the church.
>
> **GOLD:** Loss of resources, supply lines or contacts.
>
> **SOUL:** Spiritual damage, demonic corruption, madness, sickness.

#### Post-Apocalyptic

> **BODY:** Pain, wounds, exhaustion, sickness.
>
> **BULLETS:** Mark stress to Bullets when you fire a weapon, but also when you attempt to buy something, as bullets are the new currency.
>
> **FUEL:** Mark stress to Fuel when you use a vehicle or power a generator.
>
> **HOPE:** Madness, depression, despair, rage.
>
> **REP:** Loss of respect and standing.

#### Office Politics

> **MANAGEMENT:** Mark stress when you upset the higher-ups, fail to perform adequately, or bring the company into disrepute. Fallout includes: additional workload, demotion, termination.
>
> **COLLEAGUES:** Mark stress when you upset your peers. Fallout includes: refusal to help on tasks, vendettas, loss of standing.
>
> **HOME:** Mark stress when you neglect your out-of-work life. Fallout includes: loss of support network, break-ups, ill health.

## Additional Resistance Slots

To represent that some characters are more able to handle misfortune, they can be given additional resistance slots. (How exactly they receive these is handled in the “Character” section later on.) When a character has one or more additional slots in a resistance, they mark stress to these slots first. Then, when the GM rolls to see if they trigger fallout, these additional slots do not count towards their total.

## How Much Stress To Inflict, And To Which Resistance

Situations inflict stress on players relative to the risk and danger involved; this is determined by the GM. Breaking into a low-rent slum will cause D3 stress on a failure; it’s D6 to infiltrate a gang stronghold; and it’s D8 if you’re sneaking into somewhere really important, like a military base. If a player is fighting someone (or running away from them) and they take stress, they’ll usually take stress equal to the amount that their enemy’s weapon inflicts, if the enemy’s within range.

Hopefully it should be clear from the fiction what resistance stress should be marked to. If it isn’t immediately clear, the GM and player should discuss the situation to see what makes sense - and, if they can’t come to a conclusion, maybe there isn’t a need to roll or inflict stress at all.

> #### Stress And Npcs
>
> NPCs don’t have multiple resistances or roll for fallout. Instead, they have one - called Resistance - and when they receive stress equal to their score in it, they’re at the mercy of the player characters.

## Removing Stress

You can remove stress from your character in one of three ways:

You can lay low to remove all stress suffered, but the plot will move ahead without you, and things will occur that are outside of your control.

You can act to remove stress in a particular category by narratively spending time doing something that would remove stress (i.e. borrowing money from a friend to lower RESOURCES stress, visiting a doctor to lower HEALTH stress etc). Remove D3, D6 or D8 stress depending on the lengths you go to in order to recover.

You can refresh (see the Character section) by acting in accordance with your character’s refresh action(s). When you refresh, remove D3, D6 or D8 stress depending on how fully, and how dramatically, you fulfilled the requirements of your refresh action.

Also, suffering fallout reduces the amount of stress your character carries - it shifts from abstract to definite. When you suffer minor fallout, remove 3 stress; when you suffer moderate fallout, remove 5; when you suffer severe fallout, remove 7.

## Fallout

Each time a player character takes stress, the GM checks for fallout - to see if there’s any kind of ongoing, serious effect at play. The GM rolls a D10 and compares it to the current total stress marked against the character’s resistances - if result of the D10 roll is lower, the character suffers fallout. The level of fallout depends on the amount of total stress the character had when the fallout triggered:

> **2-4 Stress:** Minor Fallout
>
> **5-8 Stress**: Moderate Fallout
>
> **9+ Stress**: Severe Fallout

Work out what happens based on the type of stress that triggered the fallout; usually that’s the resistance type that has the most stress marked against it. If there’s a mix, or it’s not clear, go with whatever sounds more interesting.

_Remember: On minor fallout, remove 3 stress; on moderate fallout, remove 5; on severe fallout, remove 7._

If you’d like, you can allocate two fallout results from the category before the one selected instead. (So: instead of being KNOCKED OUT, you can be BLEEDING and PANICKED.) You can also upgrade fallout from one stage to the next if a character suffers fallout from repeat sources. (So: if a character who’s already BLEEDING suffers further minor fallout during the same fight, you can get rid of that BLEEDING and give them a moderate result instead, like BROKEN LIMB.)

Characters can mitigate fallout with an appropriate action; minor fallout can be removed instantly, but anything moderate or above can only be stabilised and managed without long-term care. Abilities that let you clear stress can be used to remove fallout instead, at the GM’s discretion: 3 stress to repair minor fallout, 5 stress to repair moderate or fallout, and 7 stress to repair severe fallout. (But severe fallout generally isn’t the sort of thing that you “cure.”)

# Creating Fallout Results

Included below are example fallout results, but when you create your own resistances, you’ll need to make a few fallout results to go along with it. Alternatively, you can make up fallout on an ad-hoc basis as and when it’s required, judging the severity by the stress incurred and what’s dictated by the fiction - but it’s useful to have things to fall back on, and players often find it more palatable to receive pre-written fallout rather than something you’re coming up with on the spur of the moment.

In general, fallout will at least do one of the following things:

- Make the player choose between two undesirable options
- Increase difficulty in a certain situation
- Line up events to happen in the next session
- Deny character access to certain resources until pre-defined conditions are met
- Frame an upcoming scene
- Dictate an action (usually undesired)
- Trigger additional stress under certain conditions

Fallout has a variety of durations, too. It can be:

- Resolved immediately, then removed
- Held, and resolved at some point in the future (usually before the end of the next session)
- Permanent, removed only with extensive effort
- Permanent, and not removable

When we use the word “resolved,” we mean that the fallout has an effect on the story and is then removed from the character. Some fallout can be triggered multiple times without being removed - for example, a character who lost a leg will suffer penalties when trying to move quickly or accurately. If they get a replacement leg and learn to walk with it, the fallout is resolved.

When creating fallout, it’s important not to overly punish the player or block story from happening. Fallout isn’t a \_bad \_thing: it’s a way of creating story, and roleplaying is primarily about telling stories together, so fallout gives you deeper, more interesting stories by introducing narrative consequences. To that extent, fallout results that give dice penalties, make player characters skip scenes, have players lose control of their character for extended periods of time or permanently remove upgrades and advances generally aren’t a lot of fun - they often stop stories from forming.

Instead, think about how you can push story forward, and how fallout can trigger exciting or interesting situations - fallout can give you additional challenges to overcome or provide a new angle on an existing scene, but it very rarely stops you entirely.

As a guide, Minor fallout is generally resolved within a day or so; Moderate fallout takes longer, or has minor permanent effects; and Severe fallout can redirect a character arc or introduce an entirely new facet to it.

> #### Less-Lethal Fallout
>
> As it stands, the system for resolving fallout is pretty brutal. If you’d like to make your game more survivable (or, more accurately, limit the amount of misfortune lumped upon the player characters) then you can treat each resistance as a separate entity when it comes to calculating total stress, rather than adding them all together - rolling under the stress marked in the resistance in question will trigger fallout, but the stress marked to other resistances isn’t factored in.

**EXAMPLE FALLOUT RESULTS**

With all of these results, we’ve put the relevant Resistance in square brackets before the mechanical explanation of the fallout.

### Spy Fallout

> #### Minor
>
> **ADRENALINE.** [MEAT] Your instincts kick in and you do something stupid. If you’re trying to get away or de-escalate, you lash out at your opponents. If you’re trying to fight, you get panicked and retreat. This is only momentary, and fades after a moment - long enough for a single, immediate action.
>
> **ROUTINE CHECK.** [COVER] Your actions attract the attentions of the police; they don’t come in all guns blazing, but they’re suspicious and want to learn more about what’s going on.
>
> **LIE.** [COVER/LOYALTY] Trying to justify your actions, you tell a lie that will cause a problem this or next session.

> #### Moderate
>
> **NO WITNESSES.** [COVER] You receive word from your handlers that the people involved in the deal can’t be allowed to survive. You’re tasked with eliminating them and hiding the bodies.
>
> **BROKEN ARM.** [MEAT] Your arm breaks under the strain, and splintered bone juts up through your skin. You can’t use the arm until it heals.
>
> **SERVICES RENDERED**. [CASH] You’re forced to sell your skills to a third party to pay your debtors, and the work is not pleasant. Work out with the GM what your character doesn’t _want_ to do but is prepared to in order to make ends meet.

> #### Severe
>
> **TURNCOAT.** [LOYALTY] Tired of being messed around, your true allegiances come to light - you’re a double agent. Maybe you always have been. While you appear to be a loyal agent, in fact you’re serving the enemy, and putting your allies in danger.
>
> **BURNED.** [LOYALTY/COVER] Tired of your incompetence, or suspicious of your true motives, your agency gives you false information and sets you up to be captured and interrogated by your enemies.

### Fey Incursion Fallout

> #### Minor
>
> **TRICKED.** [IRON] The patchwork unrealities of the fey are insidious. The GM picks someone or something you have been interacting with during this situation; it is an illusion, and everyone aside from you can understand this. It is either completely non-existent, or a mask laid over the top of something else.
>
> **WEIRD.** [SPIRIT] You do something unsettling that bothers normal people - obsessive behaviour, singing to yourself, fulfilling a strange compulsion at inappropriate times. At the earliest opportunity, the GM can declare that your weirdness puts a useful NPC off you (and probably your allies, too). Once this happens, remove this fallout.

> #### Moderate
>
> **BAN.** [IRON] Exposed to the fey, your body warps and changes to mimic theirs. You are now subject to a ban, like they are - when you encounter it, all difficulties are 1 higher than usual and you feel compelled to flee the source of the ban. Work with the GM to figure out what your ban is, but here are some examples: music, running water, unforged iron, salt, homes without a mother figure, strong liquor, smoke, scientific instruments, and unpleasant smells.
>
> **PERMANENTLY WEIRD.** [SPIRIT] As WEIRD, but: it lasts until you get proper treatment, and the GM can trigger it whenever they like. You can suppress the effects of this fallout for a scene by marking D3 stress against Mind.

> #### Severe
>
> **CHOSEN.** [BLOOD] You pass out and awaken in a half-dream state before a fey Noble, and you can strike a bargain with them in exchange for your life. If you accept their terms, you return to consciousness (changed, always changed) and if you don’t, you slip away into death.
>
> **FETCH.** [IRON] When no-one is looking, the fey replace you with a animated copy made of feathers, dead leaves, animal bones and clockwork enchanted to look and feel like flesh. You will act as normal and slip into the life your double had (your original character is trapped in a fey prison somewhere beyond the incursion barrier) but always act in service of your fey maker.

### Political Fallout

> #### Minor
>
> **PROTEST.** [FACE] Upset at your actions, the people gather outside your places of power and protest at the injustice. Doing anything nearby will increase the difficulty of all tasks by 1 until the protest dissipates (either give it time, or break it up forcibly).
>
> **DIRT.** [BACKROOM] Whatever you did wrong, _someone_ knows about it, and they’ve got the capacity to damage your reputation with it. GM, you don’t have to decide who it is, but you should work it out before the end of the next session.
>
> **FAVOUR.** [BACKROOM] You’re forced to owe someone a favour; they’ll call on you to help them out next session.

> #### Moderate
>
> **ENCAMPMENT.** [FACE] As PROTEST, but it will not dissipate without your direct action.
>
> **STRIKE A DEAL.** [FUNDS] Running out of credit, you cut a deal with a wealthy supporter to earn funding - someone you’d rather not work with. They’ll call on you at some point during this or the next session of play, and ask for a favour; they can do this once per session from now on.
>
> **WITHDRAWAL OF FUNDS.** [FACE/BACKROOM] A prominent supporter withdraws their funding after what you did upsets them. Until you find a replacement, when you take stress to FUNDS, roll twice and pick higher.

> #### Severe
>
> **HIGH-PROFILE INVESTIGATION.** [FACE] You come under intense scrutiny from official agencies looking to root out corruption and/or illegal acts in your administration. Any stress suffered to BACKROOM is doubled during the investigation procedure; if it uncovers anything serious, you will be forced to retire or hounded out of office.
>
> **PUPPET.** [BACKROOM] You possess no real power - instead, you are controlled by people in your organisation who have leverage over you. You can go along with their commands, trying not to draw any unwanted attention, or take one last shot at claiming power and making an impact before they remove you from office.

# Skills

Skills are one of the most fundamental ways you can define your character in the Resistance system - not only do they state what a character is good at, but they also inform the core actions that will take place in the game.

As such, it’s hard for us to dictate a “core” set of skills that can be transported over to any system. Instead, we’re going to talk about what goes into making a skill list, and then show some examples of our own.

## Making A Skill List

Skills are the levers that you give your players to interact with the world, and as such they provide a guide to the sort of actions that they are expected to attempt. The skills you leave out are in some ways just as important as the skills you put in - for example, putting a DRIVE or PILOT skill says that vehicles are important, and important enough to get their own skill (rather than using, say, CHASE or KILL depending on what the player is attempting). Leaving that skill out (in a game that features vehicles) communicates that the vehicles themselves aren’t that important - it’s the characters, and what they want to do, that is.

We would advise on fewer skills, rather than more, and grouping skills together when possible. For instance: if you choose FIGHT, which covers any and all violence, rather than SHOOT, MELEE and UNARMED or even SHOTGUN, RIFLE, PISTOL, SNIPER, etc - this shows that while you want combat to be a part of the game, you don’t care about the nitty-gritty of how it’s done and instead want to focus on the end results.

You could go even further and decide that your game doesn’t focus on violence, so you don’t have a FIGHT skill at all, and instead think in terms of what the characters would want to achieve with fighting. Instead of having a specific skill for it, the character could tap their SCARE skill or their PROTECT skill, and in-fiction, say they’re doing it through the application of violence.

If you don’t put a skill in the game, player characters can _still attempt that action_, but it doesn’t get a bonus dice when they do. Of course, if it’s an impossible action, then it fails, and if it’s a simple action, then it succeeds, and there’s no need to break out the dice at all.

## Domains

Domains aren’t intrinsically linked to action types, like skills are, but instead to areas of the game world and contacts you might have.

Domains are a way of explaining what’s important in the world - the different areas of influence that make up the story that you’ll be telling together. They’re also a way of giving characters broad competency within certain areas, allowing them to act more effectively when operating in that space. Within the fiction, this shows that the character is experienced with the sort of things they can expect to face; in mechanical terms, it allows a character to specialise in areas of the setting, rather than skills, and thus confer competency (and spotlight time) when those areas arise.

For example, in a game about warring noble houses, each house (and the attached territories and customs) might be Domain; in a game set in a single city, the Domains could represent different factions, areas, social strata and areas of knowledge - HIGH SOCIETY, LOW SOCIETY, GOVERNMENT, COMMERCE, CRIME etc.

## Knacks

If you possess a skill or domain and gain it a second time, you gain a knack - proficiency with a particular facet of the broad spectrum covered by the skill or domain. Using a knack allows you to roll with mastery but, as ever, you cannot gain more than one dice from mastery per roll.

### Sample Knacks

> **DECEIVE**
>
> Roll with mastery when you:
>
> - Create forged documents
> - Use a disguise
> - Impersonate a named individual
> - Drop a casual lie into a conversation

> **LOW SOCIETY**
>
> Roll with mastery when:
>
> - In the docks
> - Interacting with workers
> - Blending in as part of Low Society
> - Defending the people of Low Society

## “default” Skill And Domain Lists

We don’t have any! If we define a “standard” fit, we start to define the setting and world you’re building through the actions and situations that are important. Instead, we’ve provided three sample sets - you can use these in their entirety, for inspiration, or as a starting point for one of your own.

### Traditional Fantasy Skill List

> - **ATHLETICS** - Run, jump, climb trees.
> - **DECEIVE** - Lie, cheat and carry off disguises without being discovered.
> - **HEAL** - Repair damage suffered to the body or mind.
> - **INTIMIDATE** - Scare or threaten people into doing what you want.
> - **INVESTIGATE** - Learn information that others have tried to conceal.
> - **MELEE** - Hit things up close with swords, clubs or your bare hands.
> - **PERCEIVE** - Notice things that others might not.
> - **PERSUADE** - Convince people to do what you want via charm and pleasantries.
> - **RANGED** - Hit things at range with arrows, thrown weapons, or spells.
> - **RESIST** - Struggle on through pain, foul magic or hardships.
> - **SNEAK** - Conceal yourself or items from the notice of others.

### Traditional Fantasy Domain List

> - **ARCANA** - Magic and the occult.
> - **DEMONIC** - The territory and categorisation of the infernal legions.
> - **DUNGEON** - Dangerous places full of monsters, traps and treasure.
> - **FEY** - The lands and customs of the fair folk.
> - **OUTLAW** - Crime, banditry, and robbery.
> - **RELIGION** - Gods and goddesses.
> - **URBAN** - Cities, technology, and civilisation.
> - **WILD** - Nature, animals, and unoccupied land.

### Vampire Hunter Skill List

> - **INSIGHT** - Work out if someone’s on the level or not.
> - **STEALTH** - Hide from sight.
> - **ENDURANCE** - Endure blood loss, vampiric mind control, exhaustion, etc.
> - **KILL** - Viciously end the life of someone, or something, else.
> - **TRACK** - Hunt and follow a target.
> - **INVESTIGATE** - Search the places a target has been to uncover more information on them.
> - **CONVINCE** - Persuade someone to see things from your point of view.
> - **RUN** - Move as fast as you can.
> - **WEALTH** - Use money to get what you want.

### Vampire Hunter Domain List

> - **CRIME** - Breaking the law to get things done.
> - **DHAMPYR** - Half-blood vampires who integrate into human society.
> - **HIGH SOCIETY** - Posh folk with money and power.
> - **LOW SOCIETY** - Common folk without money or power.
> - **PHANTOMS** - Ethereal leeches who harvest the life-force from humans.
> - **POLICE** - Government employees devoted to keeping the peace.
> - **PRIMALS** - Bestial vampires who dwell in wild places and adopt animalistic traits.
> - **STRIGOI** - Old-fashioned traditionalist vampires who rely on spirit-magic.
> - **WILD** - Woods, mountains, swamps - anything far from civilisation.

### 90’s American High School Drama Skills

> - **CHARM** - Be nice to get what you want.
> - **CONCEAL** - Hide yourself, your intentions, or other things from people.
> - **DEFEND** - Protect yourself or others.
> - **FLIRT** - Turn people on.
> - **HURT** - Do people harm, either physically or socially.
> - **LIE** - Tell mistruths to get what you want.
> - **MEND** - Repair broken hearts, bikes, legs or other things.
> - **STUDY** - Investigate information, remember facts and come to your own conclusions.

### 90’s American High School Drama Domains

> - **GOTH** - Depressing music, deep emotions, and audacious makeup use.
> - **JOCK** - Sports! Sports! Sports! Also makeouts, parties and belittling others.
> - **NERD** - Book-smarts, all-night study sessions, anime trivia.
> - **PARENTS** - Anyone more than ten years older than you who doesn’t work at the school.
> - **PREPPY KID** - Spend daddy’s money, dress up nice, probably be a lawyer someday.
> - **PUNK** - Crime, rebellion, fighting and vandalism.
> - **STONER** - Connections to dealers, masterful class-skipping, unusual tangents.
> - **TEACHERS** - Anyone who works at the school.
> - **THEATRE KID** - Cause a scene, learn lines, get obsessed with interpersonal drama.

# Bonds

Bonds are connections that the player characters share with other people, groups or organisations. A bond is a broadly positive connection, if perhaps a complicated one.

GM, give out bonds to the characters as rewards for recruiting allies or achieving objectives.

## Helping Out Your Friends

Once per scene, when you act in a way that benefits someone you share a bond with, you may do so with mastery.

## NPC Bonds

You can also ask an NPC bond to perform a favour on your behalf - something that they wouldn’t normally do and which puts them, and the relationship, under stress and danger. They’re under no obligation to do what you ask - and the GM might ask for a check to get them to comply - but if they do so, they incur stress based on the scale of the favour asked.

Treat performing a favour as a normal roll. An NPC bond rolls 1D10, +1D10 if it’s within their area of expertise, +1D10 if it’s in their neighbourhood/home. If an NPC bond suffers stress when they roll to achieve a task, treat the relationship a separate resistance allocated to the character and allocate stress to it. Here are some sample stress levels:

> **1 Stress:** Give advice or access to general information within their domain; allow safe passage through space they control; offer temporary accommodation.
>
> **D3 Stress:** Get you and your comrades access to a private area or event; lend you a piece of equipment; put in a good word with an authority in their domain; turn a blind eye to minor transgressions.
>
> **D6 Stress:** Gift you a valuable piece of equipment; provide a safe haven for you and your comrades; betray the trust of an outsider; turn a blind eye to major transgressions; commit minor transgressions; engage in moderate-risk actions.
>
> **D8 Stress:** Betray a friend; commit major transgressions; engage in high-risk actions; donate large amounts of resources.

You can remove stress from a bond by doing a favour for your ally in return; the bigger the favour, the more stress you’ll remove.

## Bond Fallout

Bonds don’t count towards your total stress for fallout - they’re handled separately, each as their own track. At the end of each session, roll to check for fallout on each bond that a player marked stress to that session. (If a bond is temporary, such as one earned from an ability, then roll for fallout when it is removed.)

Much like the other resistances, you’ll need to determine some suitable fallout results for bonds - perhaps they get in trouble, draw unwanted attention to the player characters, require resources, get upset and refuse to help, or turn against the party entirely depending on the severity.

## Bond Level

Each bond has a level associated with it to illustrate the scale of the power it can wield in the player characters’ favour. These levels are determined by you to reflect the world your story is set in, but here are some examples:

> **Fantasy revolution:** PERSON, STREET, CITY
>
> **Sentient spaceships:** HUMAN, SHIP, COVENANT, COUNCIL
>
> **Mythic heroes:** MORTAL, CHOSEN, DEMIGOD, GOD, ANCIENT

A bond’s level reflects its overall capabilities, and the scale it works at. The GM and player are encouraged to use their common sense here and judge fairly as to what an organisation of a given size might be able to achieve.

If a bond works against an entity with a lower level than its own, it does so with mastery. A bond can’t work against an entity with a higher level than its own - find a level-appropriate entity within it for them to tackle.

**COMBINING BONDS**

You can combine two similar bonds of equal level and similar description to advance them to one bond of the level above if it makes sense in the fiction of the game.

# Equipment

Equipment, for the most part, lets you do a job. A lockpick lets you pick locks; climbing gear lets you scale a wall; perfume lets you smell like a fancy courtier. Most equipment you use will fall into the above category, and it has no mechanical effect on the game.

(Trying to perform a task without the proper equipment can increase the difficulty of the action, or even make it impossible.)

However, when you acquire an item that matters to you, you’ll define two things about it that are special which mark it out from the many others like it. Make a note of one negative aspect and one positive aspect, for example:

- A warm but unfashionable cloak
- An over-written but insightful guidebook to the area you’re in
- An intimidating but hard-to-steer hot rod
- A fast but stupid horse
- Magic goggles that let you see through walls but not in front of you

If you take advantage of the positive aspect of the item, you roll with mastery on checks where you use it. If you’re forced into a situation where you have to rely on the negative aspect of the item, the difficulty of the action increases by 1.

Weapons and armour have slightly more complex rules, detailed below. (However, if you don’t want to get too in-depth on combat, you can certainly use the above rules for weapons too instead of tags; that’s up to your group.)

> #### Buying and selling
>
> One option, when building a world, is to come up with a currency system and price list for every imaginable item in the world and have players keep track of their spending. However: there is a much easier way, and here it is.
>
> To buy items, the GM decides on the cost involved: D3 for minor purchases, D6 for moderate, and D8 for really expensive or exotic materials. Some items just _can’t_ be purchased without expending a lot of effort to find a seller and do whatever it is they want (that’s worth more than money) to acquire it. Then the player makes a roll using whatever skills and domains are appropriate; on a success, they get what they want without incurring stress, and on a failure, they’d mark stress to a resistance like GOLD or RESOURCES or CREDIT RATING.

## Weapons

Weapons inflict stress on targets based on their type. Most weapons have their stress dice in brackets after their name, but as a rough guide:

> **1 Stress:** Unarmed damage
>
> **D3 Stress:** Civilian or improvised weapons
>
> **D6 Stress:** Military or professional weapons
>
> **D8 Stress:** Heavy or exotic weapons

## Range

The base range for weapons is up-close and personal unless they have a tag that confers an increased range on them. It’s up to you how granular you want to get with distance - you could have the Ranged tag and attach it to every projectile weapon, or you could break it down into Thrown, Short-Ranged, Ranged, Long-Ranged and so on. Ranges are relative to the situations and characters that feature in your story - a “long range” weapon on a spaceship has a significantly longer actual range than a “long range” bow in a low-tech survival horror game, but both use the same relative wording.

If you outrange your opponents you take a maximum of 1 stress per roll until they are close enough to use their weapons efficiently. If you’re outranged by your opponents, you’ll need to succeed on a roll to get close enough without marking stress.

## Ammunition

If a character has a weapon that requires ammunition (bolts, bullets, arrows, etc) we assume that they have a ready supply of ammunition for it - there’s no need to track each individual piece. Running out of ammo, if it’s a part of the story, can be represented as fallout.

## Tags

Weapons may also have tags attached to them that mechanically affect the way they’re used. Most tags will only take effect when a player uses the weapon; as a rough guide, if a tag refers to rolling dice, NPCs can’t use it. (Tags such as Piercing, though, can be used by both player- and non-player characters.)

Here are some sample tags:

> **Accurate:** If the user takes a minute or so to set up the shot (as part of an ambush or surprise attack, and not possible once combat has started) they roll with mastery when attacking.
>
> **Brutal:** When you roll for stress with this weapon, roll two dice and pick the highest. Multiple instances of the Brutal tag stack; if you managed to get Brutal three times, for example, then you’d roll four dice and pick the highest when inflicting stress.
>
> **Concealable:** When you attempt to conceal this weapon, roll with mastery.
>
> **Dangerous:** If your highest D10 shows a 1 or a 2 when you use this weapon, it has exploded. Take D6 stress; the weapon is destroyed.
>
> **Defensive:** While using this weapon, you gain an additional Armour resistance slot.
>
> **Double-barrelled:** You can use this weapon twice before reloading, or fire both barrels at once to give the attack the Brutal tag.
>
> **Extreme Range:** This weapon can be used at extreme range.
>
> **One-shot:** You can only use this weapon once per situation - it takes a very long time to reload.
>
> **Piercing:** You cannot allocate stress inflicted by this weapon to Armour, unless the armour has the Implacable tag.
>
> **Point-blank:** When used at extremely close range, this weapon’s damage increases by 1 dice size; at anything over medium range, it decreases by 1.
>
> **Ranged:** This weapon can be used at range.
>
> **Reload:** Once you’ve used this weapon, it cannot be used again until you spend time reloading it - and it takes a while, too.
>
> **Scarring:** Causes savage, ugly wounds on targets.
>
> **Spread Dx:** If you succeed on an attack with this weapon, you inflict half the stress you dealt to the original target to a number of other targets standing nearby, equal to the result of your Dx roll.
>
> **Surprising:** The first time you use this weapon in a situation, roll with mastery.
>
> **Stunning:** If you succeed on an attack roll with this weapon, you may declare that any affected targets take no stress, but their difficulty is reduced to 0 until they gather their senses.
>
> **Tiring:** When you fail an action using this item, its damage decreases in dice size by 1.
>
> **Unreliable:** When you fail an action using this equipment, it cannot be used for the remainder of the situation.

## Armour

Armour confers additional stress slots equal to its value that can be used to absorb physical stress; at the end of every situation, clear all stress marked to armour. Armour can also have tags, like weapons:

> **Camouflaged:** The armour is designed to camouflage the wearer in specific terrain; when they conceal themselves in that terrain, they do so with mastery.
>
> **Concealable:** When you attempt to conceal this armour, roll with mastery.
>
> **Implacable:** Piercing weapons do not negate this armour, but Devastating weapons do.
>
> **Heavy:** When wearing your armour, you may not use the Pursue or Sneak skills to gain additional dice.

## Example Weapons

### Steampunk

- Grackler Heavy Revolver (D6, Brutal, Ranged)
- Mining Pick (D3, Piercing)
- Galvanic Resonator (D8, Ranged, Unreliable)

### Space Combat

- Defence Batteries (D6, Point-blank, Reload)
- Experimental Laser Assault System “E-LAS” (D8, Piercing, Extreme Range, Brutal, One-Shot)
- Macro-cannon (D6, Ranged)

### Battle-Wizards

- Lucifon’s Baleful Gaze (D3, Ranged, Stunning)
- Bolt of Heaven’s Wrath (D6, Ranged, Reload)
- Keshpeth’s Demonic Servant (D6, Defensive, Dangerous)

# Advancement

Advancement forms the core of the game - it dictates how characters grow in power, and what their aims and actions are, and as such the central reasons for advancement is a very important design decision to make.

Picking it out is one of the hardest parts of your job; it can’t be too easy, or too hard, and it has to encourage the right sort of play. Don’t be afraid to change or modify it halfway through as your setting and system grow around it.

Depending on the scale of the actions performed, you might divide up advancement into size categories - Minor and Major, or Low, Medium and High, for example. When a character advances, their player can select an additional ability from the lists available to them.

## Example Advancement Requirements

In a traditional fantasy game, the characters advance when they clear an area of monsters, recover treasure, or otherwise impose the will of their civilisation on the world.

In a noir detective game, the characters advance when they uncover the truth behind the world - a high advance for solving a whole case, and a low advance for getting answers out of a recalcitrant witness.

In a sci-fi game, the characters advance when they discover new planets and technology or make contact with strange alien species.

In a criminal game, the characters advance when they steal things from other people.

In an urban horror magic game, the characters advance when they sacrifice something important to their driving obsession.

In an exorcism game, the characters advance when they bring a demon (or agents of demons) to justice, banishing or binding it.

In a horror game, the characters advance when they uncover hard-to-find information or equipment vital to combating or escaping the threat. (In this game, equipment and advancement are one and the same, and finding a cache of items might allow every character present to take a low advance.)

In a cultist game, the characters advance when they enact the will of their dark lord and bring his summoning closer to reality.

# Character

Generally, a character will have all of the following facets at the start of a Resistance campaign:

> - Access to skills and domains
> - Extra slots in some resistances
> - Basic equipment
> - A refresh condition
> - An NPC bond
> - A PC bond
> - Two or more abilities (see below)

As they advance in power and progress through the story, they’ll have the option to pick up more facets in the categories above through earning advances.

## Refresh Conditions

Refresh conditions allow players to remove stress from their characters through performing certain actions. These actions are crucially important to the character and form the core of their identity - a police officer, for example, might refresh when they bring a criminal to justice, or a mechanic might refresh when they repair or build a complicated machine. In _Spire,_ classes and additional advances come with a refresh condition attached to them. When you create classes, you can attach refresh conditions, or you can have players select theirs from a list.

Refresh conditions define the day-to-day goals of the character - but they also drive play in a certain direction. By establishing interesting refresh conditions, you can steer your players towards roleplaying choices that they might not otherwise make, because they’re rewarded for doing so.

Here are some examples of refresh conditions:

> **Community Leader:** Do something that improves the lives of those in your area.
>
> **Cowardly:** Avoid your problems for a while, which makes them worse.
>
> **Creative:** Make or build something that has a lasting impact on the world.
>
> **Cruel:** Hurt someone’s feelings - someone who matters.
>
> **Curious:** Uncover hidden information.
>
> **Desperate:** Make someone adore you.
>
> **Hedonistic:** Engage in reckless excess.
>
> **Insecure:** Prove your dominance over another.
>
> **Kind:** Help someone without any obvious benefit to yourself.
>
> **Lonely:** Share a moment of intimacy with another person.
>
> **Manipulative:** Get someone to do what you want, against their better judgement.
>
> **Protective:** Defend someone from danger.
>
> **Religious:** Commune with your god and gain insight on your problems.
>
> **Vengeful:** Gain retribution for a real or perceived slight against you and yours.

The above conditions are provided in the most basic terms, and may well not fit your game; you should come up with your own. When doing so, it’s important to strike a balance between too easy (“Drink a coffee”) and too hard (“Save the world”). A character should be able to satisfy the condition in \_some \_way with a little effort during downtime, but earning a big refresh should require a bit of setup and roleplaying. It’s also important to consider what sort of play you want to reward - do you want wildly different conditions for each character, or would you rather they were able to team up and clear stress all at the same time?

Finally, how do characters gain access to refresh conditions? If you’re using classes to divide up your abilities (see below) then each class should come with a refresh condition. Otherwise, you may want to have players select one or two at character creation and go from there.

## Abilities

“Abilities” is a broad catch-all category for special rules that a character possesses that other characters may not. Abilities generally possess one or more of the following functions, but this should not be treated as a complete list:

- Ask the GM certain questions that must be answered truthfully\*
- Bypass rolling for certain actions, and instead succeed automatically
- Establish truths in the fiction around a theme
- Frame scenes of a certain type \*
- Lower difficulty of challenges or enemies
- Gain access to a useful location or faction
- Create temporary bonds at a certain level
- Gain a permanent, specific bond
- Gain an additional refresh condition
- Gain temporary additional slots in a certain resistance
- Gain a valuable piece of equipment
- Bestow temporary access to a skill or domain
- Gain benefits in the fiction with no specific mechanical change\*
- Ignore fallout from one resistance up to a certain level
- Remove certain kinds of fallout
- Improve an existing piece of equipment by adding or removing tags or improving stress dice type
- Put off or delay fallout until later
- Reallocate stress from one resistance to another, or from one individual to another
- Remove stress from a particular resistance
- Roll with mastery in certain situations
- Confer one of the above benefits onto another character, rather than your own

Functions marked with asterisks above have additional description below.

Abilities may have costs or limits associated with them too, such as:

- Usable once per session
- Usable once per situation
- Use requires a roll, and can result in stress marked to a certain resistance or failure
- Use requires (1, D3, D6, D8) stress marked to a certain resistance
- Useable once only (rare)
- A trigger condition that must be fulfilled to activate the power
- Use requires time be spent preparing or activating
- Additional conditions where stress is marked (weaknesses)

Abilities may also come with bonuses to resistances, NPC bonds, knacks, or access to skills and domains.

## Notes On Ability Functions

**Ask the GM certain questions that must be answered truthfully.** This function is designed to skip long scenes where your character uncovers information - especially information that may not be crucial to the progression of the game. The information gathered will be specific (for example, “What does this person \_want \_right now?” or “What’s the quickest way out of here?”) and often tied to the character class that the ability is a part of.

**Frame scenes of a certain type.** When a player is given licence to frame a scene, that means that they set up the elements and the core motivation of it, rather than the GM - but they’re given restrictions. For example, “CUT A DEAL” allows a player to establish that they have access to an NPC that has the ability to sell them anything they desire - but it doesn’t define the cost, or the willingness of the NPC in question to trade. Framing scenes is pretty much an advanced, slightly more complicated version of establishing truths.

**Gain benefits in the fiction with no specific mechanical change.** This broad function allows players to define things about their character that don’t directly increase their mechanical input to the system. For example, if a character becomes a police officer as part of an ability, it stands to reason that they’d be allowed to make arrests, enter a police station, and command some respect from the majority of civilians. The rules only affect the fiction, rather than the numbers that underlie it.

## Ability Scales And Ordering

In _Spire_, we divided up abilities into three categories - Low, Medium and High - and tied them to advances of an equivalent scale. You can do the same, if you wish.

We did this because we wanted to show a player character’s growth through their story, and to give players something to look forward and aspire to - as well as being able to do some really crazy stuff with the High-level abilities. It also allowed us to offer different levels of reward for different actions whilst allowing the GM some control over the level of advancement.

You might not do this, and that’s fine; all your abilities can be of the same power, or you can arrange them like a skill tree from a video game, and players must purchase the first power in a tree before they have access to the second, the second before they have access to the third, and so on. You might have Major abilities that define a character’s _modus operandi_ and Minor abilities that add little tweaks. It’s entirely up to you, and we encourage you to experiment to see what works best.

## Fiction

Abilities also have fiction attached to them - anything which is not a mechanic. Generally, this comes before the mechanical details. For example, while an ability might be:

“Once per session, gain +3 additional HEALTH slots for the remainder of the situation. At the end of the situation, these disappear; if they’re filled with stress, that stress is first allocated to empty additional slots and then directly to your HEALTH resistance.”

The fiction attached to it depends on the world in which the game is set. In a gritty PI game, it might be:

“DUTCH COURAGE. You keep a flask of the good stuff in your coat pocket; when push comes to shove, you drink it to bolster your resolve.”

In a sci-fi game, it might be:

“STEELSKIN. Your skin is laced with molecules of an organic polymer that can harden in response to an electrical stimulus.”

When you write fiction for an ability, you’re solidifying it within the game world, and adding content through it. You’re also responsible for making powers feel evocative and exciting, so write abilities that players will want to choose!

## Classes Or Pick-And-Mix

Abilities will form the majority of how characters are mechanically defined by their players, so it pays to think about how they’re sorted and distributed. There are two main paths:

PICK-AND-MIX makes every ability available to every character, although some may be locked off for reasons established in the fiction. (For example: a player wants their character to have access to ATLANTEAN SECRETS, but their character hasn’t made contact with the secret cult that guards the world-changing magics. They can’t gain the ability until they do.) Some powers may be “gated” behind other ones. (For example: you can’t gain ARMOUR-PIERCING ROUNDS until you get the GUN ability.)

It’s a good idea to group similar abilities together to aid players in building their characters, rather than shoving them all in one place and having them wade through it.

Pick-and-mix is great because it allows a player to build any character they desire, and it allows you a lot of freedom as a writer to add additional content as and when without it impacting the game too much.

It’s not ideal because abilities are harder to balance (as any combination of powers is available), players could find it hard to get a clear image of their character, and they’ll have to spend a long time sorting through all available abilities.

CLASSES are pre-defined sets of abilities - a player picks their character’s class during creation. Choosing abilities from other classes may be impossible, more expensive, or limited in some way, but characters may also have access to smaller sets of powers that aren’t quite full classes but come with their own requirements for entry. Classes can also come with starting abilities that are added to the character, or access to skills and domains, additional slots in resistances, and so on.

Classes are great because they allow a new player get to started right away, picking a “package” of resistances, skills and domains etc that fit within the setting. They’re difficult because they limit player choice, and you’ll have to offer enough variety so two people playing the same class can make mechanically different characters - and you have to make sure that each class has enough abilities in it to sustain growth over a full campaign.

We don’t have a preferred method - it depends on the game and the story the system is being used to tell. We tend to veer more towards classes, but that’s because that’s what we’re used to, and we don’t want to stop you from designing the best game you can.

## Example Abilities

> ### Wwi Trenches
>
> **WEAPONS MAINTENANCE.** [Low] The first time you or a nearby ally triggers the Dangerous or Unreliable tag on one of their weapons in a situation, ignore it.
>
> **TOUGH AS OLD BOOTS.** [Low] +2 GRIT. The first time you take GRIT fallout in a session, ignore it and carry on.
>
> **PESSIMIST.** [Medium] When a nearby player character (other than you) suffers minor or moderate Fallout, refresh D3. Refresh D6 if they suffer severe fallout.
>
> **CHIN-WAG.** [Medium.] Once per situation, when you help someone out, they remove D3 stress from SANITY. Once per session, when you sit down and talk to someone, they can tell you a secret about themselves and remove D6 stress from Sanity.
>
> **GRENADIER.** [Medium] You are entrusted with a supply of grenades. They have the following profile: (D6, Thrown, Spread D6, Short Supply).
>
> **CRACK SHOT.** [Medium] When you’re firing a weapon, ignore all difficulty modifiers for weather conditions, smoke, movement, cover, and so on. Essentially, so long as the shot is possible, you’re treated as attempting it whilst standing still on even ground in good conditions.
>
> **RAPID FIRE.** [Medium] Any ranged weapon you carry that can hold more than a single shot gains the Spread D3 tag.
>
> **OVER THE TOP.** [High] Once per session, activate this ability. Any nearby allies do not need to roll for fallout as a result marked to GRIT or SANITY for the remainder of the situation; once the situation ends, roll as normal.

> ### Ghost Hunters
>
> **MAKE MANIFEST.** [Minor] Mark D6 stress to SOUL or FUNDING to perform this rite. Any ethereal creature nearby to you is forced to become present in the physical realm, and as such can be interacted with through normal means.
>
> **MEMENTO MORI.** [Minor] Gain the Scry skill. Whenever an undead creature is near you, you are subject to visions and allegorical images that show how it died. Mark 1 stress to MIND to share these visions with others as a ghostly projection.
>
> **POSSESSION FIEND.** [Major] +2 SOUL. Something about you seems inviting to ghosts, and you enjoy the loss of control when you let them in. When you’re possessed, refresh D6.
>
> **DETRITUS MIND.** [Minor] Gain the Ancients domain. Years of exposure to haunted material has left your brain a mess of echoes, full of half-remembered events that may or may not have happened to you. Once per session, select a Skill or Domain you do not have access to; you have access to it until the end of the current situation as the spirits whisper instruction to you.
>
> **RELIABLE INCOME.** [Minor] Gain the Commerce domain. You have access to a small stipend that doesn’t require any input from you - investments, a trust fund, or residuals from a popular book sale. Once per session, clear D6 stress from FUNDING.
>
> **DOG OF WAR.** [Major] Gain the Battle skill, +1 BODY, and access to a revolver (D6, ranged). In addition, once per session, you may describe three elements that are present in a dangerous situation - cover, egress routes, unattended weapons, and so on. The first time you or an ally acts using one of these elements, they roll with mastery.
>
> **GODLY.** [Major] Gain the Church domain and +1 SOUL. You are a pious and devout Christian. Once per situation, when a ghost would act directly against you (possession, attack, theft etc) you can declare that it acts against someone less religious instead. Commiting sinful acts, at the GM’s discretion, can inflict stress on your MIND and SOUL.

> ### Sci-Fi Knights
>
> #### Aegis Ability Tree
>
> An aegis is an armoured hazardous environment suit, designed to protect the user from all kinds of threats - kinetic, radioactive, phantasmic, spiritual or gravitational. As the user bonds with the strange technologies in their suit, it will learn to protect them better. The aegis counts as an Armour 2 piece of equipment.
>
> #### Tier 1: Medical Support
>
> +1 CORPUS. While wearing the aegis you are immune to disease, and the internal air reserves and recycling units can provide you with several days’ worth of oxygen before you’ll need to refill them.
>
> #### Tier 2: Regeneration
>
> Aegis is now Armour 3. Once per session, while wearing the aegis, clear a minor or moderate CORPUS fallout or downgrade a severe CORPUS fallout to moderate.
>
> #### Tier 3: Martyr’s Halo
>
> +1 CORPUS. Mark D6 stress to CORPUS to activate this ability. Roll a D3. For the rest of the situation, when a nearby ally marks stress to CORPUS, the stress marked is reduced by the amount rolled on the D3.
>
> #### Tier 4: Rebirth
>
> Should you die whilst wearing the aegis, you do not die, and instead clear all stress. At some point later in the session you emerge from the aegis, now brittle and glass-like, to reveal your second form - work with the GM to figure out what this is. You are now treated as wearing the aegis at all times, and it cannot be removed. In addition, choose one of the following abilities:
>
> **ASCENDANT.** You can now fly, granting mastery on MELEE and HUNT checks against non-flying targets
>
> **ETERNAL.** Once per situation, clear D3 stress from CORPUS
>
> **RUIN.** Add the Brutal tag to any MELEE weapon carried

# Non-Player Characters

Non-player characters (or NPCs for short) are every character in the game world not controlled by a player. For the majority of these, they don’t need mechanics to represent them - the GM simply arbitrates their actions and responses to player input.

However, if you want to make an NPC more complex (or dangerous), you can use the following rules to measure their abilities in the game world:

**DIFFICULTY:** As mentioned in the Core Mechanic section above, some NPCs have a difficulty rating - this is a general measure of skill and power on their part, and is applied to all rolls a player makes when acting against them. Some NPCs might have different difficulties in certain situations, for example: _Witch: Difficulty 2 when in her lair, Difficulty 0 if you can lure her out._

**RESISTANCE:** Unlike player characters, NPCs don’t have a broad variety of resistances - and they don’t roll for fallout. Instead, they have one resistance - called resistance - and when they take cumulative stress equal to or greater than that value, they’re at the mercy of the player characters.

**EQUIPMENT:** This includes things such as weapons (and their attached stress values and tags), the armour they’re wearing (if any), and also general items with no mechanical effect on the game (clothing, trinkets, jewellery, etc). If they have items that make them better at a certain task other than combat (for example, climbing gear) then you can represent this by increasing the difficulty of actions made against them where that equipment is used.

## Example Npcs

### Goblin

> Difficulty: 0, 1 if it’s trying to hide or run away
>
> Resistance: 3
>
> Equipment: Suspiciously dirty knife (D3)

### Police Officer

> Difficulty: 0
>
> Resistance: 6
>
> Equipment: Taser (D3, Stunning, One-Shot), Truncheon (D3), Stab vest (Armour 1).

### Werewolf

> Difficulty: 2 during the full moon, 0 otherwise.
>
> Resistance: 14 during the full moon, 6 otherwise.
>
> Equipment: Raking claws and vicious teeth (D6, brutal) during the full moon, 9mm pistol for self-defence (D6, ranged) otherwise