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OverviewThe GameKarma in the Dark is a game about a group of desperate misfits and outcasts trying to survive a cutthroat cyberpunk-fantasy future. Your only form of worth is your degree of usefulness to those above you.

You play to find out if your team can survive admit the clash of criminal empires, greedy corporations, unpredictable spirits, scheming dragons, and constant temptation to discard your soul for greater power. As a fledgling team, you will steal corporate secrets, rescue (or take) hostages, pilfer arcane artifacts, destroy reputations, reveal conspiracies, smuggle weapons, and eliminate targets.

The SettingThe world is lost. Dominated by corrupt authorities, skyscraper cities, and the unblinking eye of worldwide surveillance, there are no heroes left. The bad guys have already won.

The world is awakened. Expressed in resurgence of mythical creatures into reality, along with the appearance of elves, dwarves, goblins, and other metahumans, magic flows through the land and mortal blood once more. All myths are real.

The world is unbalanced. The gap between wealth and scarcity reached the breaking point generations ago, and now the fracture is permanent and pervasive. Those at the top define, control, and maintain all that is desirable. Those at the bottom are irrelevant to the point of invisibility.

The world is yours to design. Karma in the Dark is a blend of cyberpunk and high fantasy tropes. Your group will walk through a world creation process even before you create your characters. This will allow you to weave together the threads of cyberpunk into the world -- and themes -- you want to explore most.

The PlayersEach player creates a character and works with the other players to

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carve out the basic identity of the team. The players will focus on bringing their character to life, challenging the established powers, and pushing the team’s story forward in interesting ways.

The players work with the Game Master (GM) to define tone and style of the game. This partnership starts with co-creation of the world, but will continue through all of play.

The CharactersThere are two forms of currency in this world: favors and contacts. The player characters (PCs) complete jobs for more powerful factions so they can bank both. The players will create characters with different sources of power and unique sets of skills.

Each PC taps into one of the world’s three primary power sources. These archetypes, or souls, represent their essential place in the world: cyber souls, who embrace the advancement of technology; magic souls, who commune with awakened energies; and mortal souls, who leveraged the enduring drive of humanity. Each archetype has three classes. You can mix and match skills freely within an archetype, but reaching outside of your primary soul will come with a cost.

Cyber Souls

• TheHacker:take control of all things electric

• TheTechJockey:befriend and inhabit machines

• TheCyborg: fight back with a cyberware edge

Magic Souls

• TheWiseOne:speak with spirits and harmonize with magic

• TheOccultist: overpower and manipulate with magic

• TheMystic:augment the physical with magic

Mortal Souls

• TheDrifter: run on drugs and attitude

• TheBroker: network and manipulate

• TheShadow: infiltrate and vanish

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The TeamAs a group, you will create your team. You choose a team specialty that matches missions you are most interested in playing. You will also choose a starting Fixer. Your fixer has an affiliation with a specific circle of society, and will be able to arrange special contracts for factions within that community. While neither your specialty or fixer will limit your group, you will gain benefits from using them, and are a way to decide on an initial play style for the group.

Specialties

• Cleaners: Assassins, saboteurs, and masters of redirecting heat

• Couriers: Experts in extraction, insertion, and smuggling controlled substances

• Enforcers:Thugs skilled at sending messages, intimidation, and interrogation

• Fact Finders: Investigators, truth seekers, and information experts

• Heavies:Hire muscle for protection and security

• Spooks:Spies, thieves, and information brokers

Fixers

• ArcaneCircle:Factions primarily concerned with magic and the supernatural

• CorporateCircle: Factions for all corporations and businesses

• Entertainment: Factions associated with popular entertainment and media

• LawEnforcement: Factions associated with law enforcement and private security

• Matrix: Factions primarily concerned with the Matrix, cyberspace, and technology

• Organized Crime: Factions for all criminal organizations, from small gangs to international syndicates

• Political:Any faction concerned primarily with government

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and political interests, including the military

The team gets its own “character sheet” just like a PC, which you will use to track the teams special abilities, upgrades, contacts, and long term business relationships.

The Game MasterThe GM brings the danger and weirdness of the world to life around the PCs, especially the indifferent sledge-hammer of the authorities, threat of warring criminal factions, and otherworldly magic. The GM balances the impersonal power of the factions by bringing non-player characters (NPCs) to life with individual desires, skills, and flaws.

The GM does not design a story. The GM offers hooks for the players to pursue, and presents them with obstacles to their goals. As the players react, the GM continually ties consequences and outcomes into a wider web of relationships between the PCs and other factions. As the PCs stack up debts and favors with those factions, the GM will portray how the political world influences their pursuits.

Where Did This Game Come From?Karma in the Dark uses the Forged in the Dark ruleset which was originally created by John Harper for Blades in the Dark. Blades in the Dark is a game about crews of scoundrels in an industrial fantasy world. Karma has evolved into a different game in terms of tone, playbooks, and some core rules, but they share a common core: characters push themselves to their limits in an attempt to elevate their station in the world, play is fast-paced, GMing is primarily improvisational, and the team/crew takes on a character of its own. They both also explore the melding of magic and technology, albeit in different eras.

Additionally, Karma in the Dark relies on a core mechanic of social currency which was inspired by the debts and favors system of Urban Shadows by Andrew Medeiros and Mark Diaz Truman. Described as a “political urban fantasy”, the game does an excellent job of merging the Apocalypse game engine with the urban fantasy genre.

Finally, the cyberpunk-fantasy genre is inspired by Shadowrun. This game was born from a desire to combine that unique cyberpunk-fantasy mashup with streamlined mechanics and a return of focus to Shadowrun’s original world building emphasis on political tension and consequences for every choice.