House Rules

Social Contract

What are we playing and how are we playing it?
It's a mistery game at a victorian London with some fantasy flavor (Castle Falkenstein + Space 1889).

It will be some kind of PBEM RPG, but editing each "turn" post I'll write for the player using a sort of evolution from Quest rules from Forever People.

How long is a session?
Being PBEM there is not such a session but, as the term "session" appears at Story Bones rules with quite importance I'd say that a session is, in game-time terms, the gap between two resting periods long and relaxed enough (remember: for the PC, not the players) to agree that they deserve to gain XP and refresh their burned descriptors.

How long is the campaign going to run?
I'm not sure, but remember that it's a PBEM, so it's lenght will be counted by MONTHS more than WEEKS.

What to do when someone needs to be late/absent/leave the game?
Just an email to GM As Soon As Possible. Be polite, responsible, tustful and respectful with your fellow players and we won't need any rule about this subject.

New people
Lurkers are ALWAYS welcome and just check the Characters roster for vacants.

Our Gaming System

We'll play a low-ruled PBEM game with Story Bones first that will move smoothly to Story Engine (both from Precis Intermedia Gaming).

You'd get more information about this system at this PIG's forum: How does SE work?

Task Resolution

The GM tells the players the difficulty of the feats to accomplish in the scene (a number between 2 and 9). Then the players rolls a number of dice in order to get at least as many odd numbers to equal or beat the difficult number and get a success. The number of dice a player can roll is ONE plus the number of Descriptors he/she has (so, all starting PCs will roll 4 dice).

Once per session a player can burn any descriptor suitable for the situation to get more dice to roll (one per burned descriptor). Next session, the player refresh all his/her burned descriptors.

Further information at Story Bones links above.

Character Creation

Just send an email or write a private message to me with this information about your character:

  1. Culture: Describe the PC's culture, mainly country of origin
  2. Concept: call it "class" if you're a D&D user or just "profession" of your character.
  3. Description: Short description of your PC marking 3 Descriptors and 1 Quirk.
  4. Pursuits: Name 3 general habilities of your PC.

Our Gaming Table

As we won't meet to play this game, we'll need another media to fit our needs instead of sitting around the same table, chit-chat, roll dice and gulp munchies.

We'll play using email AND Wiki, specialy THIS wiki site. I mean, the story of your Characters' actions will be at a series of pages of wiki AND We'll send an email to everyone anytime we make a change at game story.

Acts

An act is something like a scene. It will be the most used way to play this game, the closer to the classical roleplaying that we'll find at this PBEM game.

Check this page for further details: Acts in action

Chapters

Sometimes the characters will just wait some time for the next ferry to the continent or whatever to keep on the adventure. So we won't roleplay every day and scene of this time gap. We'll rather share a fictional schedule and just push Fast-Forward to the story or… maybe some point of your schedule leads to a new and unexpected act.

Check this page for further details: Chapters in action

Our Gaming Dice

Again, as we'll play PBEM we'll need some kind of virtual dice like these from Invisible Castle. So this is the idea:

  1. The GM and the player agrees on the dice pool he'll be able to roll (Ex.: 4) and the GM tells the Dificulty value (E.: Complex=3)
  2. The player goes to Invisible Castle roll dice page.
  3. Then he/she fills the form:
    • Character Name: quite obvious
    • Number of Rolls: 1
    • Dice: 4d6
    • Note: Brief description about what's for the roll.
  4. At the next page, the player will copy the first numbers of the resulting roll and the URL of the link to check it at both the email and the act:

Roll: 4d6 -> [5,6,4,1] (http://invisiblecastle.com/find.py?id=1250021)
Result: 2 odds

This roll would finally be a plain faliure as the number of odds from the roll is lower than the dificulty's level (2 vs. 3)

Sourcebooks Allowed

GURPS-Steampunk-Etheria
Space 1889
Castle Falkenstein
GURPS-Castle Falkenstein

Sourcebooks Banned

Iron Kingdoms
Etherscope I've been very tempted by Goodman's Game's "Etherscope", but I'm much more interested in somewhat called "etherspace" as a victorian view of the fancy "hiperspace" of fictions like Star Wars or Babylon 5 than this kind of "ciberspace".

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