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Friday, April 27, 2012

Savage Worlds - Horror

I've started a new game with Steve, a guy I met through a local Portland gaming mailing list. I am co-GMing, or am the GM assistant. I am the rules GM, he is the story GM. We both role play the NPC's.

The coolest part of the game is the "Horror Wheel" Steve came up with. I don't like rolling on charts much, and neither does he. And the Savage Worlds fright table is no exception. So we came up with an alternative, and a pretty good one at that.

First off, I hate the guts skill - even though we're playing a horror setting, I still think the Guts skill is too narrow. In Savage Worlds, there is a lot of combination to skills, and Guts was not one of them. We just use a Spirit check. Based on that roll, you can fail, succeed or get a raise.

If you fail, you go down on the horror wheel, and you have to make a choice of what happens to you; you can take a -1 to Notice or a -1 to Parry. It's up to the player to decide if their character would be Anxious to the point of not being as alert about their surroundings or too scared to defend themselves as well. As you fail spirit rolls, you continue to go down on the wheel, picking choices as you go.

If you succeed, congratulations, no change.

If you get a raise, you go up on the wheel - either recovering from previous fails or to advance on the wheel - to get kinda cocky.

What I like is that even if you start getting raises, your character can still go crazy / insane due to power hungry confidence. I'll post the picture of the wheel here for you to look at.

Keep it Savage!