the annotated
kill puppies for satan
-orthe annotated your mother
the annotated kill puppies for satan and cockroach souffle are ©2001,
©2002 and ©2005 by the author, all rights reserved and whatever.
the illustrations are ©2002 by kreg moser. email him at
[email protected] and hire him to do art for your game, yo.
this is the luluduludulydoo version. maybe the final and official
version, can you imagine that shit?
kill puppies for satan
yes every puppy you kill its innocent little soul goes
straight to doggy heaven with all the pretty doggy angels.
fortunately satan doesn’t give a fuck.
character creation
take a piece of paper and write in big letters across the
top: i kill puppies for satan. that’s your character sheet.
next write: my name is and put your character’s name. you
get four stats, so write them next in a little column:
cold, fucked up, mean, and relentless. the scale is 1 to 5,
with 1 being normal and 5 being diabolical. leave a little
space and then write: evil. killing puppies (and other
animals) gives you evil, which you then get to spend on doing
supernatural evil things. now leave a big space and write:
this many people hate me. this is where you keep track of
how many people hate you.
so there’s your character sheet. you get 11 points to spend
on your four stats. yes, 11. just give each one a number
from 1 to 5 and make sure they add up to 11. remember that
satan likes cheaters but the gm doesn’t.
here’s what’s up with the stats.
cold – this is how heartless and calculating a motherfucker
you are. make cold rolls whenever you do something that
requires exactness, patience, knowledge, or great care,
like disarming a security system or reading a book. cold
_________________________________
so satan calls me on the telephone this morning. it’s
wicked early.
“uh?” i say.
“hold for satan.”
i do.
“hey vincent,” satan says.
“hey! it’s good to hear from you.” the thing about satan
is that it’s true. you go too long without hearing his voice
and you start to miss him. i don’t think anybody adequately
prepares you for that.
“i was reading your blog and you’ve done pretty well for
yourself, huh?” he says. “what with selling so much of this
game you’ve made where you play good people trying to serve
god and do good. i was pleased to read about that. send me
a copy if you think of it, i’d like to read this good game
you’ve made about serving god and doing goodness.”
uh oh.
“but look,” he says. “i have a ‘favor’ to ask.”
“no no no,” i say. “no, no way. i’m done with that. done.
please.”
4
corresponds to intelligence in a normal game. a regular
person has a cold of 1, and hannibal lecter has a cold of 5.
fucked up – this is how devious, deviant and weird a
motherfucker you are. make fucked up rolls whenever you
do something that requires paranoia, edginess, quick wits,
or sneakiness, like hiding under a bridge or noticing
that somebody’s disturbed your freezer unit. fucked up
corresponds to perception and stealth in a normal game. a
regular person has a fucked up of 1, and that guy from se7en
has a fucked up of 5.
mean – this is how violent and ruthless a motherfucker you
are. make mean rolls whenever you do something that requires
strength, viciousness, rage, or brutality, like pulling a
trigger or snapping handcuffs. mean corresponds to strength
and skill in a normal game. a regular person has a mean of
1, and mickey and mallory from natural born killers have a
mean of 5.
and finally relentless – this is how gutsy and powerful a
motherfucker you are. make relentless rolls whenever you
do something that requires endurance, discipline, tenacity,
or the will to carry on, like swimming underwater or chewing
through leather straps. relentless corresponds to stamina in
a normal game. a regular person has a relentless of 1, and
jason has a relentless of 5.
now if you absolutely must cheat, fine, take the points,
satan’s proud of you. but the gm’s gonna fuckin’ make you
pay.
_________________________________
“i know you are,” he says.
“i publically disavowed it! at the forge, i did! pretty
much publically disavowed it!”
“i know,” he says.
“anyway what am i going to do? it’s a whole complete little
thing. i can’t improve it, even if i wanted to, even if i
tried. plus its time’s past, it’s not even relevant anymore.
it’s a done joke.”
“i know,” he says.
“fuck. a revision?” i say. “are you serious?”
but satan’s nothing if he’s not willing to make a deal. i
talk him down to annotations.
“hey, so thanks,” he says. “and do send me a copy of that
other game.”
“sure. god dammit, call me sometime when you don’t need a
‘favor.’ let’s just shoot the shit sometime.”
he laughs. “sure,” he says.
he’s my favorite motherfucking asshole in the world.
5
you also get to start out with some evil points.
and consult table 1.
roll a d6
i cheated on
points
you get –1 starting evil, you cheating
bastard. guess you stepped on a roach.
i rolled a 1
you get 0 starting evil.
shoulda rolled better.
i rolled a 2 or
a 3
you get 1 starting evil. choose a +1
animal and a +0 way to kill it. that’s
what you did.
i rolled a 4 or
a 5
you get 2 starting evil. choose a +1
animal and a +1 way to kill it. that’s
what you did.
i rolled a 6
you get 3 starting evil. choose a +2
animal and a +1 way to kill it. that’s
what you did.
tough shit.
table 1: starting evil
and you also have to start out with some people who hate you.
roll a d6 and consult table 2.
i cheated on
points and
starting evil
fuck off, you know you’re
this roll too. you might
ahead and write down that
you. it’s a lie though.
you.
gonna cheat on
as well just go
0 people hate
the gm hates
i rolled a 1
ooh, harsh. 3 people hate you. you must
be one mean cold fucked up relentless
motherfucker.
i rolled a 2 or
a 3
2 people hate you.
mother.
i rolled a 4, a
5, or a 6
only 1 person hates you. better get a
move on, satan don’t want no lily-livered
girly-ass puppykillers in his hell.
one of them’s your
table 2: starting hate
game mechanics
now let’s see, oh yeah mechanics. here they are: roll a
d6 and add your stat. if they add up to at least a 7 you
succeed. if you’re doing something easy, gm’s call, they
only have to add up to at least a 6 to succeed. if you and
somebody else are both trying to do something, and only one
of you can do it, whoever rolls higher wins.
the combat system is, if you’re fighting with somebody, if
you roll higher you hit them, and if they roll higher they
hit you. if you tie then i guess you block each other or
some shit.
6
if somebody hits you, a. make a relentless roll or fall
over, and b. subtract 1 from your relentless. it doesn’t
matter what they hit you with, their fist, their purse,
a .45, who gives a fuck. you can stand up again when the
gm says so, and the gm can feel totally free to give you
whatever penalties and grief seem warranted. you get the
relentless point back when you’ve totally recovered and
healed from the hit, and the gm decides when that is too.
shoulda thought of that before you cheated, shouldn’t you?
the gm can also have you make relentless rolls and/or lose
relentless points for shock, blood loss, trauma, exposure
to radiation, looking directly at the sun during an eclipse,
whatever. if your relentless ever goes below zero, well
there it is. better hope that a. you have a kick-ass doctor
or b. hell isn’t as bad as they say.
when you try to do something that requires you to interact
in a positive way with normal people, like getting a library
card or walking into an airport, the more people hate you the
harder it is. this is the most complicated mechanic in the
game, so pay attention. roll a d6 and don’t add anything.
you’re trying to roll over the number of people who hate you.
if you succeed, you’re fine, carry on. if you fail, the
gm can do shit to you, including but not limited to: giving
you penalties to relevant rolls; making the customer service
people rude, hostile and suspicious; and subjecting you to
petty annoyances like background checks, lame delays, and
body cavity searches.
_________________________________
i’m sure you noticed, those aren’t really resolution rules.
they’re just like some shit for people to do while the gm
resolves everything by fiat. they suck.
try these instead. (they are, by the way, some stolenass resolution rules. i stole the bastards straight from
sorcerer. i’ve stupidized ‘em down to practically nothing,
sorcerer’s rules are waaaay more sophisticated - i did it
for you, dear reader - but whatever. i’m a rule-fuckin’stealer.)
there are no more unopposed rolls, because jesus christ
if there’s no opposition, just give it to the sad fucker.
instead, use these rules whenever anybody wants something for
their character and somebody else doesn’t.
first
go around the table. every person says what their goal is
for their character, then generally what their character’s
going to do to try to accomplish it, including especially
which stat they’re gonna roll.
if your goal requires your character to spend evil to
accomplish it, you better have the evil available.
if someone says a goal that’s incompatible with your goal,
make eye contact with them. you can make menacing eye
7
on the other hand, sometimes you might want to seem
loathsome, creepy, disgusting, sleazy or untrustworthy. on
those occasions, you can go ahead and roll a d6, and try to
roll equal to or less than the number of people who hate you.
if you succeed, you get a bonus to your picking scabs roll or
whatever. fucking weirdo.
oh one more thing, just so you know. some npcs have
different stats than you do. so like if you’re in a
fistfight with good-hearted and upright cops, for instance,
you’ll be rolling mean and the cops will be rolling brave.
if you hit them, they’ll make a dedicated roll to avoid
falling over. no biggie, i just didn’t want to catch you
off guard with it. (they probably keep track of how many
people admire them too or some shit. fucking saps.)
what to kill
now of course satan doesn’t want you to kill only puppies.
satan wants you to kill all kinds of animals, but a. the
cuter and b. the more beloved the better.
dogs
- puppies, +1 evil.
- loyal beloved old dogs, +1 evil.
- seeing eye dogs, +2 evil.
- mean cranky old dogs, +0 evil.
- guard dogs, +0 evil.
- police dogs, +1 evil.
_________________________________
contact if you want, or supplicatory eye contact, whatever,
but do look them in the face. in just a second you’re going
to really, really care what they roll.
if your goal’s incompatible with someone’s, theirs is
incompatible with yours, of course. there aren’t one-way
incompatibilities, so don’t pretend there are.
everyone’s allowed to change their goal and action if they
want to. sometimes you’ll have to go around the circle a
couple times before everyone’s satisfied. that’s fine. ron
calls this the free and clear so i will too: this is the free
and clear.
the gm counts as a person at the table. the gm says the
npcs’ goals and actions. the gm is also allowed to say a
danger, like “the danger is that the cops will show up” or
“the danger is that you’ll accidentally smash the oracular
mirror” or “the danger is that you’ll light the curtains
on fire” or whatever, in addition to whatever the npcs
are up to. the gm gets to decide the danger but anybody
else can suggest good ones. as gm you can have there be a
danger whenever you want, but the real reason for it is for
times where there needs to be a conflict but there’s nobody
available to be the other side.
8
cats
- kittens, +1 evil.
- mean evil old cats who when they die you know they’re going
to kitty hell anyway, +0 evil.
other pets
- bunnies, +1 evil.
- parakeets, +1 evil.
- mean vulgar neurotic parrots, +1 evil.
- nice parrots, +2 evil (good luck finding one).
- goldfish, +0 evil.
- nice fish, +1 evil.
- rare beautiful tropical fish in somebody’s home aquarium,
+2 evil.
- rare beautiful tropical fish in like the dentist’s office,
+1 evil.
- ferrets, +0 evil.
- tarantulas or scorpions, +1 evil.
- hamsters, gerbils and other rodents, +1 evil.
- boas, pythons, garter snakes etc, don’t fuck with them,
they’re satan’s kind of people.
wild animals
- squirrels, woodchucks, chipmunks, field mice, whatever, +0
evil.
- random bugs like ants and earthworms and spiders, +0 evil.
- butterflies, +1 evil.
- songbirds or other everyday birds, +0 evil.
- owls, +1 evil.
- feral or wild cats, +1 evil.
_________________________________
second
everybody rolls a d6. the gm rolls a d6 for the danger (if
any) and only one d6 for the npcs in the conflict, one die no
matter how many npcs.
look at your d6 and add your stat to it, the stat that you
named when you said your character’s action. you want ‘em to
add up to 7 or better.
if you want to spend evil to reroll your die, here’s when.
call out that you’re doing it.
if you’re the gm, you do the same for each npc, add their
stats to their roll, but since you only rolled one die
for all of ‘em it’s like they all rolled the same number.
for the danger, add 4. all dangers have only one stat,
dangerousness, and they all have it at 4. anyhow you don’t
have to call your totals out, since you don’t get a turn, but
you should call out who’s got a 7+ and who’s got less than 7,
including the danger.
third
other than the gm, who has the highest total?
in case of a tie, who rolled the highest die?
in case of still a tie, who’s sitting closer to the gm’s
left hand side?
9
-
mountain lions, +2 evil.
coyotes, +1 evil.
dolphins, +2 evil.
whales, +2 evil.
baby seals, +2 evil.
bears, +1 evil.
sharks, +1 evil.
food animals
- if you eat it, +0 evil.
- if you don’t eat it, +1 evil.
vermin
satan hates it when you kill vermin, because when they die
they go to hell, and then he has to pay exterminator bills.
- cockroaches, -1 evil.
- rats, -1 evil.
- mosquitoes, -1 evil.
- fucking little yappy dogs, -1 evil.
- ticks, -1 evil.
- flies, -1 evil.
- lice, -1 evil.
- hornets, -1 evil.
_________________________________
that person goes first, then the next, then the next, and so
on down to the person with the lowest total, the lowest die,
sitting at the gm’s right. we call that person “the screwed
pooch.”
the gm doesn’t get any turns; npcs only get to react, and
dangers only get to come true or not.
okay, ready?
everyone whose total is 7+ is a winner. everyone whose
total is less than 7 is a loser. this includes the danger.
on your turn, remember those people whose goals are
incompatible with yours? look at them again. if there
are more than one, look at them in order of lowest total to
highest. some of ‘em might be pcs, some might be npcs, one
of ‘em might be the danger; it’s all good.
- if you’re a winner and they’re a loser, you don’t lose
your goal but they lose theirs. you say what your character
does; they say what their character does; the gm says what
results, and between the three of you make their goal not
come true.
also they lose their turn. they’re done.
if they already had their turn, their goal has already not
come true, so you don’t need to do or say anything. if you
feel like it, you can take the opportunity to piss on them or
set yourself up against who’s next in your turn, whatever.
10
how to kill it
+0 ways to kill it
- put it in a sack with a couple of rocks and toss it in the
reservoir.
- shoot it with a gun of roughly the appropriate caliber.
- brain it with a rock.
- hit it with your car.
- behead it on a stump with a cleaver.
- flush it.
+1 ways to kill it
- with your bare hands. (except bugs.)
- hold its head underwater/hold it out of the water by the
tail until it suffocates.
- bash it by the hind legs into a brick wall.
- shoot it with a gun of a radically too-high caliber or with
an automatic.
- lock it in a cedar chest with no food and check on it every
day.
+2 ways to kill it
- eat it live. (except goldfish.)
- with a red-hot poker.
- mutilate it first.
- ceremonially, with special accursed tools and chanting the
names of satan.
- with bottle rockets.
_________________________________
- if you’re a winner and they’re a winner, you have to
choose: give up your goal to screw them out of theirs, or
don’t. say which you choose.
if you choose to give up your goal so that they lose theirs:
you say what your character does, they say what theirs does,
the gm says what results, and between the three of you make
both goals not come true. now you’re both losers too, no
matter what you rolled. your turn is done and they lose
theirs.
if you choose not to give up your goal and not to screw
theirs: you say what your character does to get out of the
way or theirs; they say how their character lets it go, and
that’s it. continue with your turn, they’ll get a turn too,
but on their turn, they skip you. it’s done between you.
- if you’re a loser and they’re a loser, you have to choose:
you both screw up each other’s goals or else you don’t. say
which.
if you choose to give up your goal so that they lose theirs:
you say what your character does, they say what theirs does,
the gm says what results, and between the three of you make
both goals not come true. your turn is done and they lose
theirs.
if you con’t choose to give up your goal to screw theirs:
don’t say anything. continue with your turn, they get their
11
well, that should be enough to fuel your imagination, you
sick puppy you. come up with your own ways to kill it and
the gm will no doubt reward your innovations with extra evil.
unless you fucking cheated.
why to kill it
things that cost 1 evil
- re-roll a die. keep re-rolling until it comes up at least
a 4.
- ignore a hit even though you failed your relentless roll.
- automatically pass the people who hate you roll when you
try to get a library card or something. you don’t creep them
out.
- press your ear up against a door. you can hear everything
that’s going on on the other side, no matter how quiet.
- put a sock over the telephone mouthpiece. until the end
of the phone call, your voice sounds exactly like another
person’s, whoever you want.
- jump out of a window. you’ll be fine when you land, no
matter how far you fall.
- hide in a good shadow or under something. nobody can find
you until you move, unless they happen to touch you.
- force somebody you just hit to re-roll their relentless (or
whatever) roll.
- turn any one piece of music, performed or recorded, into a
muzak cover of hey jude. guaranteed to piss off the band.
_________________________________
turn too. on their turn, they don’t skip you, they get to
choose whether to give up their goal to screw yours, same as
you did. this is how “both losers” is different from “both
winners.” both winners: whoever goes first gets to decide.
both losers: both get their chance to screw both.
if your opposite loser is an npc, the gm should say right
now during your turn whether they give up their goal to screw
yours. if so, say what happens as usual and your turn ends.
the gm doesn’t lose the npc’s turn of course, on account of
npcs don’t have turns.
- you can’t be a loser and they’re a winner. if you are,
you’ve fucked up either who goes before whom, who loses their
turns, or else whose goals are incompatible with whose.
fourth
so now you can see where this goes. if you reach the end of
your turn and you’re still a winner, you win your goal. say
what your character does, the gm says what happens, you win,
you’re happy. if you’re a loser, either you’ve lost your
goal already and you’re sad, or else you’re waiting for some
other loser to choose whether to screw you or let you win.
then the next person goes, then the next, then the next.
at the end of the last person’s turn, tidy up any loose
ends. like, any npcs who survived without losing their
12
- lie still. until you move, anybody who examines you will
think you’re dead.
- say something or make some noise. people will think it
came from somewhere else, wherever you want.
- short out any one electrical device.
- cast a first degree spell out of a satanic spellbook.
things that cost 2 evil
- re-roll a die. keep re-rolling until it comes up a 5 or a
6.
- take telepathic control of a nearby vermin. you can see
through its little beady eyes and control what it does.
- add 1 to any stat for the next half hour game time.
- get back all the relentless points you’ve lost. you’re
healed instantly.
- this only works if you’re wearing a big coat and somebody
hits you. instead of making a relentless roll, your coat
falls open and you’re one big swarming mass of your favorite
kind of vermin. you lose control of yourself but regroup
later at a convenient place nearby.
- spit or blow your nose on something. your snot is fire,
about as hot and as long lasting as a corresponding amount
of that canned fuel sterno stuff. plenty enough to start a
campfire anyway.
- jump up onto the roof of a house or to like a third story
window.
- jump horizontally over like a four lane divided road.
- sprint up to 50 miles per hour.
_________________________________
goals, now’s when the gm says how they win them. also if the
danger wound up a winner, now’s when it comes true.
go back to the first step - the free and clear - and
keep going until everything’s decided. i’m’a call this “a
struggle.” a struggle is one or more rolls, in sequence, all
about the same general things. god dammit, you know what i
mean.
beyond falling down
if you win your goal, you get +1 to your next roll, provided
it’s a continuation of this same struggle. plus you get to
choose one of these following bennies:
- your opponent falls down and loses 1 relentless. if you
have more than one opponent, they all do.
- you get +1 to a roll of your choice in some future
struggle against this same opponent. if you have more than
one opponent, choose one. write this on your character
sheet. you really can’t use it until this current struggle
is over.
- you get an additional +1 to your next roll in this
struggle, provided your goal is to keep what you just won.
these go for pcs and npcs.
if the danger comes true, it doesn’t get a +1 or a bennie,
but it should surely lead straight into more rolling.
13
- call satan on the phone. you’ll probably get his machine,
but he’s pretty good about returning calls.
- hold your breath underwater for up to twenty minutes.
- whistle a tune and while you’re whistling, you’re
invisible. you can walk around and do stuff and nobody can
see you until you stop whistling. eerie.
- drive a car from the back seat.
- cast a second degree spell out of a satanic spellbook.
things that cost 3 evil
- walk through a wall.
- hide inside some solid inanimate object. it has to be big
enough, like a futon or a piano, but while you’re in there
you’re pretty much unfindable. you can still see and hear
what’s going on, but you can’t move yourself around.
- tell somebody to do something (the simpler and more
concrete the better). they have to do it. if it’s
dangerous, complicated, or long-term the gm can let them make
rolls to resist.
- make a dozen or so specimens of your favorite vermin appear
in your cupped hands.
- make a specimen or three of your favorite vermin appear
anywhere you want. consider people’s mouths or ears or in
their pockets with their car keys.
- take on the exact likeness of an animal you’ve recently
killed, for as long as you want. while you’re transformed,
you can at will a. make your eyes glow a hellish red-orange,
b. speak in a tortured inhuman voice, c. leave scorching
hot pawprints (/hoofprints/flipperprints/what the fuck ever)
melted into the carpet, and d. have your reflection and
_________________________________
hate
you’ve probably figured this out already. the how many
people hate you roll is now just a normal roll where the
danger is that you’ll get the body cavity search or the cops
called on you or whatever, and the dangerousness is equal to
how many people hate you instead of being automatically equal
to 4. super obvious.
one-on-ones
oh and look, these probably read like mass orgy conflict
rules, but really they’re based on a super easy one-on-one
thing. you both say your goal, action and stat, you both
roll a die, you both add. then: if one of you’s a winner and
one’s a loser, the winner wins and the loser loses. if both
are winners, whoever rolled the higher total chooses: both
win vs. both lose. if both are losers, both have a chance
to screw the other, and both win only if neither chooses to
screw.
piece of cake. if the full rules seem too hardcore, you can
probably reframe all your conflicts into one-on-ones - but if
you need to do that you’re a fucking unimaginative vanilla
prude and come the fuck on.
14
shadow do different things than your actual self is doing.
perfect for loyal beloved old dogs.
- light a fire just by staring hard.
- grow fangs, claws, proboscises, a tail, compound eyes,
scales, fur, or whatever other animal feature you want.
- fly, about as fast and as far as you can run.
- trip the circuit breakers of an apartment building or all
the houses on a whole block.
- cast a third degree spell out of a satanic spellbook.
things that cost 4 evil
- make a car or a living room or a dumpster explode in
flames, the kind of explosion you only get from action flicks
and trash bags full of gasoline.
- summon a huge swarm of your favorite vermin, hundreds or
maybe thousands of specimens. they act more or less as you
direct, but gradually revert to their natural behavior.
- desecrate a church or holy place. you don’t need to fuck
up the like decor or anything (though of course feel free),
just now it’s not holy ground. presumably there’s some kind
of anti-evil thing that religious fanatics can do to put it
right, but meanwhile it’s kind of a kick.
- telekinetically control vast quantities of shit, sewage,
compost, muck, and litter. you can direct its flow, lift it
into the air, even throw it. back up the pipes and flood out
a whole city block, the fun never stops.
- transform yourself into oily, foul-smelling smoke. float
near the ceiling or seep under the door, and turn back into
yourself when you feel like it.
- create a spell or ritual and write it into a satanic
spellbook. you design the effect and stuff and the gm
decides what degree it is.
- cast a lesser ritual from a satanic spellbook.
things that cost 5 evil
- make one clean, attractive and healthy normal person
consider for one second having sex with you.
- add twenty years to your own life expectancy. (yeah, like
you’re gonna die of old age, i’m fucking sure.)
- add 1 permanently to one of your stats.
- dedicate yourself to a particular animal (don’t choose a
vermin). whenever you kill one, using at least a +1 way to
kill it, you get an extra point of evil. pays for itself.
- cast a greater ritual out of a satanic spellbook.
and that’s that.
satan
so satan’s actually a pretty nice guy. set aside for
a minute the fact that he’s cold, fucked up, mean and
relentless all at 10, he has starting evil in the triple
digits, and three point six billion people worldwide hate
him. underneath he’s just this regularish guy who watches
15
pro wrestling and cspan. (and sure, rules hell and so on.)
but i mean he’s not like the other guy, he’s approachable.
he’s not full of himself, he doesn’t bogart the joint just
because he’s the fucking fallen morningstar, the first person
ever with the balls to spit in god’s coffee. (which you
gotta fucking admit.)
but even so, if you want to hang with him, you gotta follow
a couple rules. they aren’t commandments exactly, because
he’s willing to overlook a few infractions, you know, out of
neighborliness. not like that other prick. just keep ‘em in
mind is all he asks.
satan’s guidelines
- don’t kill people if you can help it. if they’re bad
people, satan would rather have them out doing evil in the
world. if they’re good people, they go to heaven and nobody
wants that.
- if you must fuck with people, better to make them say “why
god why?” than “god help me.” real torture leads people
to find their inner strength and shit, petty meanness makes
people lose faith in each other. better to hit their dog
with your car and drive away laughing.
- don’t try to make the world a better place. i know this
is a no-brainer but you’d be surprised the kind of goody two
shoes want to be satan’s buds. don’t give money to amnesty
international or the nra or even the fucking kiwanis club.
keep your cash for yourself, spend it on cigs and porn, put
it in stocks bonds and iras, who gives a shit. anyway the
world is pretty much just how satan likes it, and if he wants
it different he’ll tell you.
- don’t try to tempt people to sin. it’s a union thing,
and believe me you don’t want to scab on demons. just kill
puppies and leave the rest to the professionals.
- oh, and don’t get caught, asshole. you definitely won’t do
satan any favors from a padded cell in willard.
so great, you’re ready to play, right?
you’re the gm, fuck off.
16
terrific.
now unless
gm shit
so it’s like mad magazine, remember, the lighter side of,
only let’s call it:
the evil fucked up side of...
...npcs
two kinds of npcs, right? kind number one: regular people.
fig 1 is a character sheet for a regular person.
i don’t kill puppies for satan but sometimes i
yell at my dog
who gives a rat’s ass what my name is
cold 1
fucked up 1
mean 1
relentless 1
evil 0
this many people have ever noticed me as a
human being, not just another sad grounddown face in the crowd: 4
fig 1: a normal person
your pcs pretty much don’t need to sweat this kind of npc.
apply satan’s guidelines to them as you see fit and fuck ‘em.
kind number two: people your pcs have to be scared of.
without this kind, the game would be dull as all fuck.
fortunately there are a wide variety. mix and match!
heroes
you know how when you and your crew kick into a bank and wave
your shotguns around and the people are all like weeping and
shielding their kids with their bodies and shit and you say
all right, people, nobody be a hero, somebody always fucking
does? that’s this guy.
- heroes have different stats than your pcs do. instead
of cold, they’re thoughtful; instead of fucked up, they’re
_________________________________
so like, i fucking hate being the gm. it’s too hard. my
goal for all the new dice stuff is to make gming easy, so
i can do it without hating it - that’s all. if you’ve read
other things i’ve written you might think i have some sort of
rpg theoretical agenda, but nope, i just gotta make this game
easy to gm.
it’s a longstanding kill puppies for satan tradition that
i release unplaytested bullshit upon you, and the new rules
fully inherit and partake of that tradition. thus it’s very
possible that they aren’t easier even one little bit at all.
in which case, fuck it!
17
astute; instead of mean, they’re brave; and instead of
relentless, they’re dedicated. use them for basically the
same things, although obviously enough you can’t make brave
rolls to pull the wings off a butterfly.
- they don’t have anything corresponding to evil, i mean they
don’t like do good deeds and then cash them in to set things
on fire or whatever. however, they do get special benefits
when other people are in danger. count the number of normal
people the hero is trying to protect/rescue/help across the
street/what the fuck ever. as long as there’s at least one,
whenever the hero rolls a die and it comes up a 1, she gets
to re-roll. (or he does, you know.) so that’s cool for them
but it sucks ass for your pcs, which naturally is what you
want.
- if you feel like it, you can have your heroes keep track
of how many people admire them, like i said before, but i
wouldn’t fucking bother.
- you may feel some pressure to make heroes’ stats add up to
11, same as pcs’. that’s the stupidity talking. fuck that.
- fig 2 is a character sheet for a random hero.
i’m not a hero, i’m just willing to do what
needs to be done
my name is liz macreedy
thoughtful 2
astute 2
brave 4
dedicated 4
when i’m helping people out i get to re-roll 1s
this many people admire me: 6
fig 2: a hero
religious fanatics
you know how when you manage to plant the satanic artifact in
the antique shop and the district attorney’s daughter thinks
it’s charming and buys it and wears it home pinned to her
coat and later is possessed, naturally, and the demons are
having all kinds of fun hanging out in her nubile young body,
but then eventually somehow a fucking congregationalist finds
out and comes and rings the bell and recites the prayer and
does the thing with the host and all the demons have to leave
her alone and possess the fucking pigeons on the windowsill
instead? that’s this guy.
- religious fanatics have different stats too. instead
of cold, they’re pious; instead of fucked up, they’re
wise; instead of mean, they’re righteous; and instead of
relentless, they’re devoted. same deal though.
- instead of evil, they get miracles. fuckers. miracles
work the opposite way than evil, though. god gives
credit. first you get the miracle, then you pay for it with
prayers and devotions and doing good and calling sinners
to repentance and other lame shit. (god decides when your
account’s paid off of course, and he’s a notorious hard-
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on. plus he’ll do all this underhanded entrapment shit
like giving you a miracle you didn’t ask for and putting it
on your account anyway. it’s just fucking glorified mail
fraud.)
- religious fanatics keep track of how many people rely
on them for spiritual succor. that number is their credit
limit. if 3 people rely on you for spiritual succor then
god will give you up to 3 points’ worth of miracles before
you have to pay him back. there’s a short list of miracles
coming up.
- again, don’t limit religious fanatics to 11 points for
stats.
- fig 3 is a character sheet for a random religious fanatic.
jesus wants me for a sunbeam
my name is elder ezekiel quackenbush
pious 3
wise 1
righteous 4
devoted 3
i owe god for this many points of miracles: 0
this many people depend upon me for spiritual
succor: 3
fig 3: a religious fanatic
here are some miracles.
- the miracle of walking across like a piddly little stream,
1 point.
- the miracle of walking across a pond or lake or river or
whatever, 2 points.
- the miracle of turning water into wine, 1 point.
- the miracle of turning oregano into pot, 2 points.
- the miracle of turning saline into smack, 3 points.
- the miracle of the bottomless happy meal, 2 point.
- the miracle of the all you can eat seafood bar, 3 points.
- the miracle of parting the traffic on the pike, 1 point.
- the miracle of making something holy so demons etc don’t
like it, 1 point.
- the miracle of making a sinner roll a d4 instead of a d6, 1
point for two.
- the miracle of defeating a satanic spell, however many
points of evil the spell costs to cast.
- the miracle of thwarting somebody who’s spent evil to do
something, however many points of evil they spent.
- the miracle of protecting a particular individual from a
particular demon, however many points of evil the demon costs
to summon.
- the miracle of sending a particular demon back to hell
where it belongs, however many points of evil the demon costs
to summon + 1.
- the miracle of making a sinner feel really guilty and low
and have to go lie down for a while or get shitfaced, points
equal to the sinner’s relentless.
i’m such an asshole. not all religious fanatics are
christians, though you wouldn’t know it from reading my list
19
of miracles. there are plenty of fanatical jews, muslims,
buddhists, confucianists, hindus, neopagans, scientologists,
shintoists, taoists, tribal animists, et fucking c. knock
yourself out.
vigilantes
you know how when you sit down at last after a long day in
the meat locker and you put your feet up and set your drink
on the coffee table and turn on cspan and some asshole with
a beer gut and a 12-gauge comes in through your plate-glass
window and bellows something about you’re a slippery sumbitch
he’s been tracking you for eight months and this is for what
you did to little flossie you sick fuck and starts blasting
away? that’s this guy.
- instead of cold, vigilantes are thorough; instead of fucked
up, they’re survivors; instead of mean, they’re vengeful; and
instead of relentless, they’re driven.
- they don’t have evil or anything, and they don’t keep track
of how many people they’ve kicked the asses of. they do,
however, have fucking arsenals full of big-ass guns.
- fig 4 is a character sheet for a random vigilante.
revenge is a dish best served right the fuck
now
my name is jimmy-john giles
thorough 1
survivor 4
vengeful 4
driven 3
i have a fucking arsenal full of big-ass guns
and a l.a.r.g.o. bumper sticker
fig 4: a vigilante
space aliens
you know how when you’re sneaking across the field on a pitch
black night and you slip under the live fence and belly-hump
your way through the cowshit and your heart is thud-thudding
with anticipation at the thought of farmer wylie’s new heifer
and there’s a weird light over there and you lift your head
and they’ve got these horrible tools and they’re slowly and
methodically pulling sweet bessie inside out and laying her
ribs in starburst patterns? that’s this guy.
- instead of cold, space aliens are calculating; instead
of fucked up, they’re mysterious; instead of mean, they’re
inquisitive; and instead of relentless, they’re inscrutable.
- instead of evil, they have cosmic rays, which power
their sinister technology. any given alien will have a
cosmoprotonic battery holding 3 cosmic rays, which they can
use and then recharge back at their flying saucer. each
alien tool uses up 1 cosmic ray per application.
20
- i mention space aliens at all because they’re pretty
much your pcs’ only competition in the cattle mutilation
department. if you want to bring in the men in black and
even give fucking whiny-butt fox mulder a guest spot, that’s
your can of worms.
- fig 5 is a character sheet for a random space alien.
i like to administer anal probes
my name is x-j447
calculating 3
mysterious 4
inquisitive 4
inscrutable 3
cosmic rays 3
i have a thought-form assimilator and an
omnikey
fig 5: a space alien
here are some alien tools.
- a thought-form assimilator makes you think the space alien
is something else, like an owl or a teddy bear.
- a stasis applicator radically slows your metabolism and
body functions. you’re still awake and alive, but an hour
could pass while you blink your eyes.
- an omnikey unlocks any mechanical or electronic lock.
- an e-field disruptor disables any electrical device that
comes within range. it doesn’t affect devices powered by
cosmic rays (think about it).
- a thought-state disruptor makes you forget what happened to
you.
- a levitron makes you weightless.
- a semantic impulsor projects words into your brain.
sorcerers
you know how when you break at night into the holy trinity
college library and jimmy the service elevator so it’ll take
you up to the forbidden archives on the thirteenth floor and
you make your way by flashlight to shelf 444 (two thirds of
the beast) and you look under diablos, christophe, 1701-1767,
and instead of a book there’s a fucking empty slot, and you
look around and somebody’s reading over in one of the nooks,
illuminated by a flickering orb of blue witchlight? that’s
this guy.
- instead of cold, sorcerers are learned; instead of fucked
up, they’re insightful; instead of mean, they’re fierce, and
instead of relentless, they’re resolute.
- instead of evil, sorcerers have potency. they accumulate
potency by observing celestial and otherworldly events, and
by ritually calling up the primal forces of creation. they
use their potency to cast spells.
- usually they cast spells from their own sorcerous
spellbooks, but they can also cast spells from satanic
21
spellbooks with no especial difficulty. the reverse is
not true, your pcs will be totally baffled by a sorcerous
spellbook.
- they also do a whole stack of other wizardly kinds of
things, like take familiars (you’ll have to make up stats for
them yourself, but it shouldn’t be that fucking difficult)
and brew magic potions and fuck, i dunno what else. wizardly
shit.
- fig 6 is a character sheet for a random sorcerer.
i am a master of forces occult and obscure
my name is julietta summers
learned 5
insightful 3
fierce 1
resolute 4
potency 6
my familiar is a small to middling spiritjackal named chakr the red-tooth.
fig 6: a sorcerer
here are some sorcerous spells.
- summoning the storm winds, 1 potency – a fierce and
concentrated wind whips and shrieks around you. everybody
else has to make a relentless (or whatever) roll or fall down
(but nobody loses any points, it’s not like when you fall
down from a hit).
- fist of the storm, 2 potency – lighting falls from the
sky and strikes whomever you want. the strike counts as two
consecutive hits for purposes of rolling to stay standing and
losing points of relentless (or whatever).
- coat of shadows, 2 potency – you are invisible until
natural light (sun-, moon-, star-, or fire-) falls on you.
- word of loosening, 2 potency – whoever hears you speak the
word, everything on and about their person is loosed. ties,
zippers, laces, braids, all come undone, and they also piss
and shit themselves, slobber, weep, and leak snot out their
noses. buttons and snaps aren’t affected.
- sword of the sun, 1 potency – cast on any weapon and until
dawn the weapon will hurt demons, spirits, vampires, ghosts,
and whatever other weird freaky shit it happens to connect
with. you can cast it on a bullet if you want, but casting
it on the gun itself is pretty much a waste.
- world of crystal, 1 potency – every nonliving thing around
you becomes to you (not to everybody) as transparent as
glass. this lasts until you’ve blinked three times.
_________________________________
summoning the storm winds is a good example. see where
it says “everybody has to make a relentless roll”? but now
relentless rolls as such are done away with, right? so what
to do?
you figured this out already of course, but here’s what: the
danger is that everybody’ll fall down.
22
- fire of the sun, 2 potency – cast on a magical item, a
holy object, a satanic spellbook, an accursed thingy, or any
such kinda thing. whatever magic exists in it burns out in
a flash of occult flame. (if it’s a spellbook, it leaves the
ravings alone but consumes every word of the spells.)
so no spells above the second degree.
guess. life’s a bitch.
more work for you i
demons
you know how when you make and execute a genius plan to get
close to the undersecretary to the vice president in charge
of requisitions’ prizewinning afghan hound and you’re there
with the dog and the baling wire and the drano and you’re
just waiting for the moon to come through the clouds and
instead it never fails a fucking fiend from the pits of hell
comes and tells you to piss off but leave the dog ‘cause it’s
hungry? that’s this guy.
- demons have the same stats your pcs do, namely cold,
fucked up, mean, and relentless, in case your brain fell out.
however, demon’s stats go from 2 to 10 instead of 1 to 5.
yes, that means that some demons have to roll a –4 on a d6 to
fail a roll. you got a problem with that?
- demons have evil, too. they use it for the same kinds of
things that pcs do, although they have many more options.
they have to work for it too, and they’re pissed because they
have to actually accomplish things, not just kill a bunch of
stupid puppies. sometimes they’ll fuck with your pcs just
for that.
- don’t bother keeping track, though. you can basically
assume that any given demon will have a dozen points of evil
squirreled away for just this very occasion, and i’m not even
gonna fucking list all the things they can use it for. if it
sounds good, hell, go for it. what are your players gonna do
about it, whine? that’d be new.
- demons keep count of how many people they’ve tempted to sin
and thus condemned to eternal torment, and you can too if you
want.
- you can’t just punch or shoot a demon until it goes away,
they just laugh that shit off. you gotta use magic or evil
or holy water or something. good luck.
- hell isn’t organized like heaven is. demons don’t follow
like some ineffable plan, except when satan can bribe them
to. if for some random reason a powerful old big-ass demon
decides that she’s going to grind your pcs up and feed them
to her hellhounds, satan’s not likely to interfere. unless
they can talk him into it or buy his interest somehow or
something.
- oh, and let’s say that a piddly-ass demon is one with stats
that add up to 12 or less, a small to middling demon is one
with stats that add up to 16 or less, and a big ol’ demon is
one with stats that add up to 17 or more. see the satanic
23
spellbooks section below for stuff about summoning and
binding demons.
- fig 7 is a character sheet for a random demon.
i’ll have the filet of soul, rare if you please
my name is qazach, the duchess of head lice
cold 3
fucked up 5
mean 3
relentless 3
evil plenty
i’ve tempted this many people to sin and thus
condemned them to eternal torment: 8,677
fig 7: a demon
now there’s one demon in particular that maybe i’ll talk
about, and that’s the man himself, el diablo, his infernal
majesty, satan, the fallen archangel of light. put your
hands together, he’s one hell of a guy.
particularly i want to give you some advice for playing the
fucker as an npc, which is kind of intimidating, and face it
you’re gonna have to, what with the pcs calling him on the
telephone all the damn time. so here goes.
- choose somebody from your life. make it somebody friendly,
interesting, kind of complicated but easy to like, someone
who makes you smile when you think of them and who you maybe
wish you’d known better. for me it’s ms drummond, my tenth
grade english teacher (who i’m certain would be appalled).
that’s your satan. you’ll be able to go for a while on just
that person’s charm alone.
- pay attention to eye contact. satan looks everybody in
the eye, but he’s not intimidating and he’s not in your face.
he’s just easygoing and self assured.
- when it comes up, remember that simply nothing can piss
satan off, and nothing can frighten him. the very absolute
fuckingest bad thing that can happen to him at this point is
that he’ll have to wait a few years until everybody involved
dies, and then most of them he’ll get to personally torture
until he gets bored of listening to them whimper. seriously,
no pc (or anybody) can ever do anything worse to him than
that, and it’s just not that bad. he can live with it. he’s
got no worries.
- at the same time, there’s no reason for him to ever put
up with anything once it becomes more irritating than it is
interesting. if you bug him, he can arrange for his various
loyal toadies to kill, cripple, maim, and destroy the lives
of you, your family, your friends, your pet, everybody who’s
ever shaken your hand, and everybody near you in the phone
book (just for good measure). it doesn’t often come to that.
- and here’s the trick to top it off. satan got the ever
loving blue eyed shit kicked out of him, and there’s no
possible way for him to ever even begin to get even. he’s
fucking shit outta luck. the only way he could possibly
24
deal with it is to get a sense of humor. so that’s it. when
you’re playing satan, don’t take anything seriously. to
a guy like that, nothing is serious. (well, one thing is
serious, but man it’s old fucking news.)
and finally other random weird
freaky shit
you know how when you’ve been chasing this damn dog all over
town and back and you just can’t seem to catch up with it and
it’s acting like it knows you’re there and it’s onto you and
you start to wonder precisely who’s chasing whom and then it
surprises you by jumping out of a garbage can and sinking its
teeth into your arm and before you know it it’s turned into
some guy, i mean some fucking guy with a mouthful of your
meat? that’s this guy.
- vampires, werewolves, ghouls, skinchangers, undead, the
whole goddamn freakshow, it’s all out there if you know where
to look. or if you don’t know which side of the fucking
tracks to stay on, puppy boy.
- they all have their own stats and i’m not really inclined
to make them all up. you’ve got the pattern by now surely.
knock yourself out. i’ll do one to get you started. it’ll
be your fave and mine, vampires.
- instead of cold, vampires are cultured; instead of fucked
up, they’re cunning; instead of mean, they’re bloodthirsty;
and instead of relentless, they’re immortal.
- instead of evil, vampires keep track of how hungry they
are. when they use their powers, they get hungrier, when
they drink blood, they get less hungry.
- whenever they make a bloodthirsty roll, they add their
hungry. whenever they make a cultured or cunning roll, they
subtract their hungry.
- only stakes through the heart, burning, beheading, magic,
and garlic can reduce their immortal. they fall down when
they get hit and fail the immortal roll, but unless it’s one
of those things they don’t subtract one from their immortal,
and they can pretty much hop right back up.
- their powers can include turning into a bat or a wolf
or mist, mesmerizing people, moving superfast, being
superstrong, you know, the whole damn list from that other
fucking game. i know you own it.
- fig 8 is a character sheet for a random vampire.
25
a monster i am, lest a monster i wankety
wankety wank
my name is elias dumond iii
cultured 5
cunning 3
bloodthirsty 3
immortal 4
hungry 1
i can transform myself into the bat and transfix
the ladies with my sinister yet compelling
dark eyes, nyorm nyorm.
fig 8: a vampire
so that’s npcs.
pants.
make your pcs piss their puppy-killing
the evil fucked up side of...
...satanic spellbooks
now some of your pcs aren’t going to be motivated by
spellbooks. you’ll set up a great storyline about a corrupt
and heretical sect of congregationalists who were rooted out
and (secretly) burned at the stake back in the late forties,
but their blasphemous grimoire survived in the reference
section of the utica public library, guarded by a reference
librarian who is actually the ancient demon-god baal shebub,
who’ll give it only to one worthy and steeped in the blood
of many many puppies indeed, and you’ll start dropping hints
into the flights of locusts and the gibberings of npcs and
the entrails of little kids’ hamsters, and some of your pcs
will be all like whatever, let’s go blow shit up. well fuck
them. they don’t deserve spellbooks. fuck, their enemies
deserve spellbooks. kick their lame asses.
first degree spells
- good for misleading pursuit – for the next full mile you
walk, any footprints you happen to leave will point backwards
instead of forwards. this spell takes less than a minute to
cast and is only a teeny bit painful.
- good for souring milk - summon up a piddly-ass demon and
tell it to do something. probably it’ll obey, especially if
you tell it to do something really really easy. this spell
takes a good ten minutes to cast and is kind of pricey, like
about as much as a dinner out.
- good for keeping track of the parson - draw a circle on a
map. if anybody who hates you is inside the circle, you’ll
know it immediately (though you won’t know precisely who).
this spell takes a minute or so to cast is all, but the smoke
sure stings your eyes.
- good for avoiding debtors’ prison – create a fat greasy
wad of twenties. spend them quick, though, because at dawn
they’ll turn into a fowl smell and maggots. plus you can’t
26
use them (directly) for any magical purpose. this spell
takes ten minutes or so and you’ll want to floss your teeth
afterward. listerine helps some too.
- good for avoiding the mob - write a word on a piece of
paper, it has to be a real word, and stick it in your pocket.
next time you say that word, you transform into an ugly and
ragged but serviceable seagull, and you stay that way until
sundown. it takes twenty minutes to cast this spell, and it
hurts like a sumbitch.
second degree spells
- good for securing a measure of privacy - pace off a circle
about the size of a vacant lot (or whatever shape, who gives
a rat’s ass). anybody who crosses into your circle before
dawn smells something really really funky, and it gets worse
with every passing second. only people who kinda like that
smell can take more than a few steps. anybody who started
out inside the circle is immune. this spell takes maybe ten
minutes to cast, plus pacing the circle, and is more tiring
than you’d expect.
- good for having back at your ungrateful relations - write
a person’s full name on a piece of paper and wrap it around
a rock. within a week, some kind of unpleasant demon, devil,
or ghoul will visit that person. this spell takes a half
hour to cast and requires you to spend the twelve hours on
either side stone cold fucking sober.
- good for turning a wallet of tobacco into cowshit - summon
up a small to middling demon and tell it to do something.
probably it’ll obey, especially if you tell it to do
something nasty. tell it to do something extra nasty and
it might even try to take credit for the idea. don’t bother
unless you’ve got at least a half hour and a couple three
four twenties to burn.
third degree spells
- good for doing away with the constablery - write the name
of a cop and the name of a disease on the same piece of
paper. the one inexplicably catches the other. only works
on cops, including fbi and atf agents but not including
private detectives or rentacops. this spell takes almost
eight hours to cast (though it can be spread out over a week
or so if it’s more convenient for you that way) and the last
hour will make you dizzy from blood loss.
- also good for doing away with the constablery - make a car
(preferably one you’re not in) swerve wildly out of control.
this spell only takes a second or two to cast, but god damn
the hangover.
- good for having your revenge upon the landlord - summon
up a big ol’ demon and tell it to do something. probably
it’ll obey you or be wicked pissed that you disturbed it for
something so trivial. anyway it’ll take you an hour to cast
27
and set you back a pretty penny, sometimes up to a couple
hundred bucks.
lesser rituals
- good for securing notoriety - summon and bind a piddly-ass
or small to middling demon. they don’t like being bound so
much, but it makes them a. hang around until you’re ready to
give them their instructions, b. obey you without fail, c.
hang around after they’ve completed your instructions to see
if there’s anything else they can do for you, and d. not try
to rip open your ribcage and eat your beating heart. just in
case. this spell takes an hour or more to cast and costs a
couple grand.
- good for taking footpads by surprise - choose a first or
second degree spell from a satanic spellbook and brand it
into your brain. from now on you can cast that spell without
hauling out the ol’ spellbook and chanting the names of satan
and slicing yourself with razorblades and so on. you still
have to spend the evil of course but it’s less hassle. this
spell takes a couple hours to cast and mm, scorched flesh.
- good for lending verity to the contemplation of your
eternal fate - visit hell. you and one lucky guest. and,
uh, don’t misplace your return tickets. this spell takes a
few minutes to cast and doesn’t require anything you won’t
find lying around the house.
greater rituals
- good for securing your prominence in earthly affairs summon and bind a big ol’ demon. and you thought that little
demons were pissed when you bound ‘em. you better not end
up in this guy’s care after you kack. this spell takes a
month to cast and will bankrupt you, plus you’ll never sleep
through the night again.
so any given satanic spellbook is going to be hundreds and
hundreds of pages of ravings and contain three or four spells
at most. many have only one. they usually have descriptions
about as good as those above, but once in a while you’ll
get one that says something like i used this one to get into
goody halford’s basement and then launch into which names
of satan to chant and how many drams of quicklime to moisten
with lamb’s blood and where to put it. what the spell
actually does is for you to know and your players to find
out. (if they’re ever so desperate or whacked that they’ll
try it, that is.)
oh and if you feel like being a real fucker you can give them
spells whose descriptions are just lies. good for getting
out of a jam it says and then what it does is emblazon a bigass glowing bull’s eye on their foreheads, that kinda shit.
so that’s good.
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the evil fucked up side of...
...guns
there are no good gun mechanics in roleplaying. probably
there can’t be because it’s just too complicated. set up
the shot, pull the trigger, and who the fuck knows? even
supposing you hit, bullets spin and tumble and bounce, they
roll around your ribs and out the other side, they mushroom
or shatter into bits, the physics of bullets is fucking
crazy. one guy lives through ten rounds in the torso, the
next guy kills himself with an air pistol. so i’m not going
to bother. i’ll give you some advice, but don’t even expect
any mechanics out of me. if you need gun mechanics, go play
squad leader or millenium’s end or whatever the fuck.
so here’s my advice.
- the whole point is to kill. a gun that won’t kill
somebody in one shot isn’t worth selling to children,
right? so absolutely every single time somebody pulls a
trigger, somebody might die. you, me, random strangers, the
downstairs neighbor, there’s always a chance. make sure your
pcs know it.
- on the other hand, there’s no such thing as a sure kill.
i know it’s a special case, but jfk’s brains were on the
fucking trunk of the lincoln and they didn’t declare him
until four hours later. people get shot in the head and fall
down and stop breathing and go on anyway to live normal happy
lives. not most of the time, not much of the time, very
rarely in fact, but it does happen. if your pcs want to be
100%, make them use a fuckload of bullets.
- nobody knows what’s going on in a firefight, and accuracy
in the real world is for shit. take this poor diallo guy.
those cops shot 41 bullets at him, he was standing in a
for fuck sake doorway, and a. they only hit him with 19 or
something and b. they thought he was shooting back. nothing
like flying bullets to make you stupid. you don’t know where
you hit that guy, you just know he fell down. you don’t
know where the shots are coming from. don’t give your pcs
tactical information, tell them what they see and hear and
make them fucking sort it out.
- every bullet goes somewhere. roll the shot, miss, shit
happens, but do you know where that bullet is now? in a
stone wall? through a window and in old mrs merrihew’s
toaster oven? lodged against the rib of a passing dogwalker?
make your pcs remember to ask what’s going on on the far side
of their targets.
- bullets don’t kill you by magic, they kill you by tearing
big pieces out of you. they splatter blood, they blow off
fingers, they unhinge jaws and elbows, they make you puke
your shredded guts out your mouth and nose. there’s no such
thing as a clean kill. make your pcs gag.
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- dying sucks. sometimes you pass out and never wake up,
sometimes you scream for an hour, sometimes you piss yourself
with pain until fucking tomorrow. you shit yourself.
sometimes a lateral headshot will make your brain swell up
and cut off its own circulation and leave your brainstem
alive, heart beating, breathing in and out, perfect for
organ donation but dead fucking dead. your best bet whatever
happens is to get to the hospital, but who knows. make
your pcs scared to fucking death of death. (let alone that
they’re going straight to hell, and demons are going to piss
lye into their eyesockets for the rest of time.)
- different guns are good for shooting people under different
conditions. a glock 19 is good for shooting people under
normal, reasonable shooting people conditions like when
the fucking jocks have been pushing you around for four
nightmarish years and you can’t fucking take it anymore, plus
they’re wicked reliable. a pump shotgun is good for making
that noise before you shoot people in fucking half. a colt
9mm submachinegun is good for when you want to kill everybody
in the room but you don’t really want to kill the people in
the next apartment, while an m16 is good for when you don’t
care who the fuck you kill. make your pcs use approximately
the right gun for the job (but definitely don’t expect them
all to be gun geeks).
- oh, and if your pcs don’t want guns or want them only
to use on animals not people, they’re super cool (remember
satan’s guidelines). tell them right on from me.
the evil fucked up side of...
...character advancement
if by some terrible mischance you end up playing a kill
puppies for satan campaign instead of just a one night stand
as it were, your players will probably want some way to
improve their characters. well fuck them. it costs five
points of evil to improve a stat, let them save up like
everybody else. whiny butts.
you may want to compromise, however. if you’re a softy.
here’s a way to do it and yet keep a few pathetic shreds of
your dignity. at the end of every session, choose some or
all of the following.
- figure out which pc did the fucked uppest individual thing.
you can just decide, or you can give everybody a vote, or
you can ask for cash bribes. however you decide, give that
person a point of character evil. (character evil isn’t the
same as regular evil, which you get from killing puppies.
i’ll explain in a sec, just jesus christ hold your horses
would you?)
- figure out which pc was the fucked uppest overall. give
that person a point of character evil. if this is the same
pc as did the fucked uppest individual thing, only give one
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point of character evil for both, unless they were truly
fucked up above and beyond the call.
- figure out which pc best followed satan’s guidelines. give
that person a point of character evil.
- figure out which pc got the most new people to hate them.
give that person a point of character evil. in case of a
tie, decide on the basis of how powerful their new enemies
are.
- figure out which pc was most helpful to your fiendish
plans. give that person a point of character evil.
- now divvy a couple three more points of character evil
among the pcs whose players didn’t piss you off. (this is
another great opportunity to pay back cheaters.)
- customize the numbers to how many players you have. two
points average per session seems generous to me.
- the deal with character evil is it’s exactly the same
as regular evil except they can’t spend it during play.
naturally they’ll want to spend it on something lasting, like
improving their stats or inventing spells, since otherwise
it’s a waste. (just in case it’s not obvious a. they can
keep it from session to session same as always, and b. at
the end of the session they can supplement it with regular
evil if they happen to have some left.)
that should make them shut up for once.
the evil fucked up side of...
...hell
you noticed the lesser satanic ritual that lets you and a
guest visit hell? that’s big fun. you should get your pcs
to cast it sometime if you can.
the evil fucked up side of...
...god
frankly i’d skip it. free will and all, remember? it’s
not that god doesn’t care what your pcs do, it’s not that
he wouldn’t rather they knocked it the fuck off, it’s just
that he’s decided to let them (and everybody) make their own
bed. but if you find you’ve got to roleplay him, i’d just
go ahead and make him a joyless judgmental goon-squad fuck,
a glorified orrin hatch (r-utah). patron of woman-haters,
anti-choicers and homophobes (but not of racists, i mean
what kind of sense would that make?). plus he expects you to
kiss his ass. plus since a sense of humor is a way to deal
constructively with being wrong, stupid, and weak, he hasn’t
got one.
but like i said, i’d skip it if i could.
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the evil fucked up side of...
...money
most people who kill puppies for satan have lousy lame menial
jobs, if they can keep a job at all. they don’t have a lot
of disposable income, right? hand to mouth. so don’t let
your pcs buy shit unless they can come up with the cash in
play. fortunately, this game isn’t really about the cool
gadgets, so most of them will deal okay.
however, if your pcs want to be all independently wealthy
and shit, ask them why they’re killing puppies for satan
(small fucking potatoes) instead of gutting cities, murdering
the poor, and raping the developing world like good little
industrialists. shit, those guys are satan’s real toadies.
the evil fucked up side of...
...that first session
you gotta break the ice and get the stupid pcs to work
together. it’s the plague of roleplaying and fuck if most of
the time we don’t just have them meet in a bar instead. you
can go ahead and just do it that way if you want, i mean hell
it’s your game, but maybe try this.
have everybody make their characters. you know how in some
games it says you must draw your character, to connect with
the right parts of your brain or whatever? in this game,
you absolutely must write i kill puppies for satan at the top
of your character sheet. if you don’t do it, you’re clearly
not in the spirit of the game and you might as well fuck off.
tell your players that. tell ‘em i said so.
turn to your first player. have her introduce her character.
hi, my name’s morton and i kill puppies for satan. hi
morton. please say something about yourself.
if you’re gonna run the kick in the head starting adventure
that’s coming up, say how do you know gerald stebbins? why
did he invite you to his birthday party? no, come on, it’s
gotta be better than that, he only invited like eight people
and one of them’s you. are you like his friend or what?
(everybody and their fucking dog compares roleplaying to
improv theater. make your players work for it!)
now your next player. hi, my name’s joanie and i kill
puppies for satan. hi joanie. my mother abandoned me in
the dumpster behind a post office, i was raised by a postal
worker who muttered and mowed his lawn every damn day,
christmas, easter, rain, snow, the fuckin’ ice storm of
‘97, he didn’t miss a single day, out there with his mower
grinding away at twenty two inches of solid frozen ice, i
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mean fuck, man. thanks for sharing that, joanie. (what
about you and gerald stebbins? what gift do you get him?)
here it is: and how do you and morton know each other?
then sit there and don’t say anything until they work it
out. (if it’s clear that they’re not gonna work it out, lazy
fuckers, do something mean to them. okay, well, you were
internet pen pals, you were both posing as fifteen year old
virgin girls, you decided to meet at the mall, and there you
were. now you’re friends, with occasional benefits. suck it
up.)
now your third player, hi my name’s scooter and i kill
puppies for satan. yes i was named after the character on
the muppet show. hi scooter. gerald stebbins blah blah
blah. and how do you know joanie and morton?
so by the end of this you’ll have inter-character stuff going
on, just what you wanted, characters talking, getting to know
each other, spilling beer on each others’ sofas and dropping
butts in each others’ potted plants. never fails. i
guarantee it or your money back. tell the guy at the counter
i said so.
33
springing gerald, the kick in the
head starting adventure
gerald stebbins is a ghoul. ghouls eat corpses, that’s
pretty much their whole deal, and they are the lowest of the
fucking low. in the great cosmological pecking order, right,
it starts with the big pecker himself on the top, then our
man satan, then like the other angels and demons and shit,
then the rest of us fuckups and lowlifes, vampires and space
aliens and the whole like i said the whole freakshow, and
then regular people, then vermin, then shit, then the nasty
fucked up bloody puss that comes out of festering sores, then
ghouls.
when we kill puppies, right, some of it’s for fun and some
of it’s for getting in good with the boss, and most of it’s
for the power. not so with ghouls. ghouls get some sort of
cheap supernatural charge out of eating corpses, but it can’t
even touch the power we get, and it leaves them weak and
crazed and craving more. ghouls are the desperate needlesharing ass-peddling heroin addicts of our world.
so that’s gerald stebbins and let’s face it, the guy is not
a charmer. he’s funny looking, weasely, he’s got no dignity,
and his breath is for fuck all. but like pretty much
everybody, even ghouls, he’s got a few friends (including
your pcs). they’re people who maybe just feel sorry for
him, or maybe owe him one from back in the day, or hell maybe
actually kind of like the guy. i mean it takes all kinds,
right?
and he’s not a bad friend, not at all. sure he calls you
for help, and says he’ll make it up to you and never does,
but he’s always so genuinely grateful that it’s hard to hold
a grudge. he’s loyal and he won’t make excuses when you ask
him for stuff, if he can he will and if he can’t he really
feels bad about it. he won’t fuck you up the ass with a
_________________________________
this is not how i run this game anymore.
if i were to sit down to start a kill puppies for satan game
today, here’s what i’d do. i’d do the first session thing,
but i’d say “who hates you? really? you didn’t put her
precious in the blender or something did you?”
then i’d take a pee break.
then i’d be like, okay, scooter? this guy what hates you?
he’s out there pounding on your door. he’s got a cop with
him. marcie, you’re there too, have you guys been making
out?
just, man, slam ’em with who hates ’em. that’s how i run
the game these days.
it’s kind of too bad though. gerald stebbins + doctor
skippy = good times.
34
sharpened screwdriver as soon as you bend over, not like some
people. you could do worse.
anyway, he’s having his thirtieth birthday party and he’s
inviting all his friends. it’s like eight people and he’s
having it on a thursday night so it won’t conflict with
anybody’s weekend. he’s saved up and booked the banquet hall
at the motel 6 off the pike, you know he’s been planning it
for a while because he doesn’t have much to spare. (he has a
job sweeping up at feeney’s funeral parlor, of course). he’s
borrowed a cd player (maybe from one of your pcs) and checked
some cds out of the public library. he’s even shoplifted a
box of little girls’ birthday party invitations and carefully
written in his name and the time and place.
your pcs will break his pathetic ghoul heart if they don’t
go. plus god damn it how many friends do they have, that
they can just blow one off?
at the motel 6
there’s a buffet with fried chicken, meatloaf, mashed
potatoes, corn, peas, lime jello, squares of carrot cake with
a candle in each, carafes of 7-up down at the end. real 7up in jewel-cut plastic pitchers, not some store brand left
in the three liter bottles it came in. no, this is a class
establishment, just like gerald wanted. he’d be so thrilled,
where the hell is he?
let the guests mingle. this is a great chance to start the
set up of some other future adventure, introduce npcs who
might show up again later, either ones that i’ve provided
below or your own if you’ve thought about it. be sure to
mention rosalie even if she doesn’t talk to the pcs (just
in case), and have somebody make the obvious joke about the
meatloaf.
before it gets dull, in comes franklin breszny. he’s kind of
out of his element, he wasn’t sure he was going to come but
he has to deliver the news.
he stands just inside the doorway and like clears his throat.
if there are lots of conversations going on he waits a little
and then says um, excuse me. gerald’s not coming. he, uh.
he. they. he’s at willard. willard state mental hospital.
so, uh, he’s not going to make it.
poor franklin. everybody looking at him isn’t doing him much
good. so, uh, i’m sure he’d be glad you all came, he says.
uh.
he tries to get out without explaining any more but if
somebody stops him and asks him he’ll tell his whole stupid
story.
35
franklin breszny’s whole stupid
story
(i’m going to tell it in third person, franklin this,
franklin that, but it’s your job as a gm to act it out.
don’t slack off, here. if your game sucks i’m sure as shit
not gonna take the fall for it.)
so franklin breszny once helped gerald stebbins fill out an
application for a scan saver card down at the stop & shop.
franklin thought it was just his random good deed for the
week, but ever since then gerald has called him for help
whenever he has some official document or process to deal
with. he looks over gerald’s taxes (gerald always files
even though he never has to pay). he helped gerald buy a
used car. he even periodically has to explain to gerald’s
prospective employers when they call that no, he’s never
worked with gerald, he can’t offer them any information about
gerald, gerald just puts him down on every form he fills out.
yes, gerald’s a little strange. no, i’m not saying that you
shouldn’t hire him. for all i know he could be an excellent
worker.
anyway, so franklin gets a call night before last.
please come down to willard and pick gerald up?
would he
well, he went down to willard all right, but when he got
there he found out that they didn’t mean pick gerald up
and drive him somewhere, they meant release gerald into
franklin’s custody. which franklin was not about to do. so
instead they made him sign some kind of form and he feels
kind of bad about it but he left him there.
oh, but why was gerald in willard in the first place? seems
feeney jr came into the funeral parlor late, he forgot
something or something, and he walked in on gerald, and
gerald was chewing on old mrs merrihew’s dearly departed
remains. (this was a surprise to franklin, a big surprise,
but it totally shouldn’t be a surprise to your pcs.) feeney
jr just went ahead and called the police, and by the time
they got there gerald was done with one of mrs merrihew’s
hands. he must have put up a fight or something because when
franklin saw him at willard his face was all bashed up.
and like franklin says, he feels kind of bad about it,
because as they were leading gerald back through the big
barred gates, franklin can’t be positive but he thinks he
heard the orderly say, come on now, the needle torture isn’t
that bad, it’s for science.
fig 9 is a character sheet for franklin breszny.
36
i don’t kill puppies for satan but sometimes i
yell at my dog
my name is franklin breszny
cold 1
fucked up 1
mean 1
relentless 1
evil 0
this many people have ever noticed me as a
human being, not just another sad grounddown face in the crowd: 4, but one of them
was gerald stebbins.
i’m the associate manager at big russ’s
wholesale club.
fig 9: franklin breszny
so now unless your pcs are totally heartless pieces of
shit, not just cold fucked up mean relentless motherfuckers,
they’ll go spring gerald. if they don’t seem inclined, the
unfriendly bastards, a. make them feel like the lowdown
abandoning lousy friends they are and b. sic rosalie on ’em.
rosalie towler
rosalie’s been listening in. at first she was trying
to be discreet, just you know kind of hovering near the
conversation, but by the end she’s standing there with her
mouth hanging open and her fists clenched. when franklin
says the bit about the needle torture she steps decisively
into the conversation.
you fucker, she says, you just left him there you piece of
shit? she’s little but it should be clear to anybody that
she’s way meaner than he is. he doesn’t have the stomach for
this, poor guy, and she chases him out into the parking lot.
call yourself his friend you asshole! she shouts and that’s
it for franklin breszny. she spits at his car and he leaves
rubber on the pavement.
rosalie comes back inside with a fierce old gleam in her eye.
so who’s with me?
fig 10 is a character sheet for rosalie.
37
i am a master of forces occult and obscure
my name is rosalie towler
learned 2
insightful 3
fierce 4
resolute 4
potency 3
i get 3 potency every time i get a new
piercing.
i kick ass, but i’m not the kind of sorcerer
who goes around battling occult villains,
i’m the kind of sorcerer who likes to fuck
with people. make up some good stealth/
illusion/psych out spells for me, okay?
fig 10: rosalie towler
now if your pcs don’t suck, feel free to skip rosalie
altogether. unless you think she’s cool and want her
along for the hell of it, in which case draw her in at any
convenient point. whatever, it’s your game.
willard state mental hospital
if your pcs want to stop off and kill a puppy or two on the
way, i’d go ahead and let them. that’s what the game’s about
after all. just keep a move on, don’t turn it into like a
big production.
but so for willard the way i see it there are three ways
you could go. way one: one or more of your pcs have been
inside willard in the past and you can lead them through it
directly. easiest, least hassle, maybe least fun, an okay
detail for a pc’s background. way two: somebody else at the
party (or someone your pcs can call) has been inside willard
and can go along as a guide. also very easy, a good way to
include rosalie or some other npc, but it can take decision
making and direction out of the hands of the pcs, which
is naturally not so good. way three: nobody’s been inside
willard before, your poor sad pcs are winging it, good luck
to their asses. big fun but kind of a pain, and if your
players are anything like mine they’ll turn it into this like
tactical fucking situation, which is yawn. way three is my
preference but you gotta kill that tactical instinct and get
them to jump on in.
anyway, your call.
on to willard.
sometimes i think that i’m the fucked up one in my life, but
then my partner will come up with just the perfect thing and
it leaves me wondering. this is one of those.
willard is your high school. shut your eyes and imagine
it. you go in, there’s that lobby place or whatever,
instead of a trophy case there’s a case displaying the art/
craft or vocational projects of the inmates. off to one
side there are the administrative offices, and then past
38
into the facility proper. the security is much tighter,
of course, the guards inside have stun guns and those big
ass flashlights, and the guards outside have handguns and
tranquilizer rifles, which odds are your high school didn’t.
but the layout works like a (bad) dream.
all the like auditoriums, cafeterias, kitchens, gymnasiums,
locker rooms, and libraries stay, of course, and so do the
grounds, with the same high chain fences (although now topped
with inward-slanting barbed wire) and the track around the
softball field and the cruddy old four-square courts and
shit. even the same parking arrangement, with the drop-off
circle in front of the door and designated parking places,
and throw in a day-trip bus or two for added verity.
inside, the history and english departments are both low
security, the parts that’re most like a hospital. there are
nurse/guard stations in the teachers’ lounges, and the rooms
are full size, four to ten residents per, each with a little
curtained area for a personal space.
the science department is the torture wing, with all the labs
and arcane equipment and shit. chemistry for drugs, biology
for surgery, physics for the needle torture and the firehose
torture and electroshock, earth science for group therapy
and phobia encounter labs. the little greenhouse for growing
plants.
the theater department is vocational skills and the art
department is arts/crafts. the thought of gerald stebbins
doing macrame about makes me pee my pants.
shop class can stay exactly and perfectly the same. same
equipment, same arrangement, same teacher, same students.
sweet lovely shop class.
and your destination: the math department is high security,
with those guard-controlled airlock doors at the ends of the
hallways and the classrooms broken up into individual padded
cells. gerald stebbins is in one of them. (mr halligan’s
room to be precise, in my willard.)
cool, huh?
now the most important the single most crucial part of this
whole very cool very fucked up thing, the most important is
do not absolutely for god sake do not let your players know
that it’s your high school. describe the lighting, the long
tiled hallways, the little numbers over the doors, the sounds
their feet make and the smell of the disinfectant/floor wax,
ask them to turn right or left and let them wander around
to your creepy little heart’s content, but no matter fucking
what never say the words “like a high school.” you’ll be
bursting to share the joke but come on, you don’t want to
ruin it. savor it like the dirty little secret it is and
39
if you must you can let them in on it after they’ve been and
gone.
i think you can see how easy it’ll be to make npcs for the
place too. i’m including a couple but you know they’re just
people from my high school and it’ll be more fun to feature
your own.
but like I said willard has tighter security than your high
school did. let’s see.
there’s one of those little cement buildings by the road
as you drive onto the grounds, it has a couple of guards in
it with guns and they control the big chain link gate. the
sidewalk goes on the other side and they control the lock
on that gate too. they have guns, handguns and if there are
maybe six shotguns in the whole place, two of them are here.
there are no like prison camp gun towers or anything,
but maybe there’s a bell tower or a cupola you can put a
spotlight and a guy with a rifle in.
every hour during the night, somebody walks around the inside
perimeter of the fence, with a big ass flashlight and a
handgun and a tazer, so that’s good. if it appeals to you,
you can have the fence electrified during the night too, or
maybe it has wires running through it that when you cut them
an alarm lights up somewhere.
inside, the guards don’t carry guns, just flashlights and
stun guns and walkie talkies. at night they do rounds or
wander around or whatever, but during the day they more stay
put unless something’s going on.
the nurses’ stations and shit don’t have much for security at
all, just maybe a big old cattle prod in a charger under the
counter and a silent alarm button and a noisy alarm button
too, why not? i can see where either might come in handy.
during the night, they close the doors between the hallways
of course, and you need to swipe your id card and sometimes
enter a passcode to get in. probably they keep the doors to
the science wing closed all the time.
i already mentioned the airlock-style doors into the math
department. the deal with those is that the guards look at
you and your little id card through a bulletproof window, and
if they like the looks of you they buzz you into the airlock,
and once you’re in if they still like the looks of you they
buzz you out the other side. presumably there’s a way to
open both doors at once, like in case of a fire or whatever,
but probably it’s never happened and there’s a mouse living
happily under the switch.
oh and somewhere there’s a security center, with lockers
and camera screens and a dispatcher and things. in the
40
administrative offices probably. that’s where the other four
shotguns and the gas masks and the tear gas are.
springing gerald
if your pcs have a brain among them, they won’t try to fight
their way in. not because they can’t, but because then
they’ll have to a. find gerald’s room while people are
lobbing tear gas at them and b. fight their way back out
again, after the swat team and snipers have arrived. you
might remind them of this.
so that leaves sneaking and lying, both of which are
possible. maybe the chewbacca gambit, with one of them
acting gonzo and the others acting like authority figures?
an oldie but goodie. just remember that if they want people
to believe them they have to make those how many people hate
you rolls.
anyway whatever they do, your job as gm is to make them work
for it. your pcs are gonna succeed, i know it, you know it,
they know it. the question is a. how do they do it and b.
how much does it cost them? the answer should be a. barely
and b. a fuckload. use the imagination god gave you and
satan perverted to his own cold and corrupt ends.
curves
so that’s pretty simple. find a way in past the guards
and stuff, find gerald’s room, somehow get poor gerald back
out with you. enough to fill a session maybe, if you make
getting in and out challenging. but you might want to take
it further, you know, jazz it up a bit. throw a curve or
two. here are a few suggestions to get you started.
- the vacant room
gerald’s not in his cell! where the fuck is he? cafeteria?
gymnasium? macrame class? getting screwed stupid by doctor
skippy? you decide!
- the vacant stare
gerald’s not in his head! he’s been drugged into a loose
floppy incontinent sack of meat. go on and on about how
fun it isn’t to lug a deadweight person around with you.
(especially one that occasionally piddles on you.)
- the familiar face
what if miss faith baroak was one of your pcs’ childhood
therapists? what if somebody famous is in low security? got
a cool recurring npc? did one of the guards used to have a
very sweet little spaniel named daisy duke who whined like
the song of angels? add depth to an existing relationship.
41
- the boiler room
what could be going on in its steaming hissing bowels?
for the laundry.
same
- love at first sight
hey, it happens. have one of your pcs fall terribly for a
guard, a resident, an orderly, a lunatic, a janitor, doctor
skippy, whomever! don’t let the pc blow it off. make it
mutual for twice the fucked upness.
- supernatural security
maybe the scientists who rule the place don’t know it,
but willard’s security system was designed to keep occult
crazies in too. the on-duty security detail always includes
a sorcerer, and the cameras and key doorways in the building
are enchanted. (makes you wonder who’s in there, dunnit?)
- the parasite
to really up the cheese factor, make willard the hunting
ground of a vampire. ham it up! hold your arm over your
face for a cape and do your fingers like fangs. byah, byah!
i vant to suck your blood! (or if you prefer you could play
it straight and make your pcs fucking weep with fear.)
- porky’s
well, you’re here, might as well stop off at the locker room
peepholes. say hi to doctor skippy when you see him.
- the wisdom of the damned
can there be any doubt that there are satanic spellbooks
tucked away in willard’s library? naturally there’s at least
one accomplished (but unfortunate) sorcerer among the inmates
of high security. and don’t forget the doorway to hell in
the locked closet in the macrame room!
- ministering angels
i know it’s hard to imagine, but what if willard is actually
a place of peace and healing? would your pcs even be able
to tell? how would they react to a person of serene carriage
and unearthly beauty in gerald’s cell? do angels have
internal organs?
- the random emergency
fire! flood! blackout! tornado! earthquake! stuck inside
for fuck sake willard state mental hospital while the world
might be ending out there!
anyway that’s enough, fuck that.
42
have fun.
like the man says, it ain’t over
till it’s over
now the first thing is that gerald is in no state. he hasn’t
eaten in a couple of days and he was pretty damn hungry even
then. maybe an animal corpse or two would take the edge off,
just until he can find something more substantial?
ghouls don’t usually like their meat still warm, but maybe
gerald’s desperate enough to make an exception. i wouldn’t
turn your back on him just now.
it’s a real shame that he lost his job at feeney’s though.
now he’s going to have to do the ghoul-on-the-street thing,
getting his earthly remains where he can find them. it’s
grim. (but less grim than torture and starvation in willard,
of course.)
plus the cops are gonna be looking for him.
crash at your place.
maybe he can
anyway, while your pcs are patting each other on the back
and wondering what to do with gerald now, let them go ahead
and forget that the cops are gonna be looking for them too.
several sessions from now you can have a swat team show up
at one of their dismal little homes to deliver an arrest
warrant, and they’ll be all like what the fuck? until
they figure out that this is about the willard break in.
fingerprints, dna evidence, their likenesses caught by the
security cameras, freelance occult detectives, play it right
and you can make them keep paying for this until (like satan)
you get bored of listening to them whimper.
43
npcs
gerald stebbin’s friends
franklin breszny, rosalie towler, and lizzie wire, plus your
pcs, plus figs 11-13: junkie bob teabag, mitchell norler, and
the right reverend paul greengage.
i don’t kill puppies for satan but sometimes i
yell at my dog
my name is junkie bob teabag
cold 1
fucked up 1
mean 1
relentless 1
evil 0
this many people have ever noticed me as a
human being, not just another sad grounddown face in the crowd: 2
my life sucks shit but at least i’m not a
fuckin’ ghoul.
fig 11: junkie bob teabag
i don’t kill puppies for satan but sometimes i
yell at my goldfish
my name is mitchell norler
cold 1
fucked up 1
mean 1
relentless 1
evil 0
this many people have ever noticed me as a
human being, not just another sad grounddown face in the crowd: 5, but 4 of them
were therapists.
i like things just so. particularly, in
alphabetical order.
fig 12: mitchell norler
my tortured soul wanders the earth looking for
surcease
in life my name was the right reverend paul
greengage
in touch with the times 2
psychologically whole 3
tangible 5
recurrent 3
unquiet 4
this many people know i’m a ghost: 3 (none of
whom are at gerald stebbins’ party).
yeah, i know i’m springing this on you. wing
it.
fig 13: right reverend paul greengage
44
staff at willard
doctors fred “coach” weinel, miss faith baroak, skippy
jensen, and delar ford, plus figs 14-18: stew, alan tyrell,
cocoa wells, donna sherlock, dewey rensberger.
i don’t kill puppies for satan but sometimes i
yell at my dog
my name is stew, i’m a nurse
cold 1
fucked up 1
mean 1
relentless 1
evil 0
this many people have ever noticed me as a
human being, not just another sad grounddown face in the crowd: 3
i was a medic in the service, now i’m a nurse
at willard.
fig 14: stew
i don’t kill puppies for satan but sometimes i
yell at my dog
my name is alan tyrell, i’m a clerk in
admitting
cold 1
fucked up 1
mean 1
relentless 1
evil 0
this many people have ever noticed me as a
human being, not just another sad grounddown face in the crowd: 4
shit but man i like to smoke pot.
fig 15: alan tyrell
i don’t kill puppies for satan but sometimes i
yell at my cat
my name is cocoa wells, i’m the macrame teacher
cold 1
fucked up 1
mean 1
relentless 1
evil 0
this many people have ever noticed me as a
human being, not just another sad grounddown face in the crowd: 6
i’m just doing this part time until the record
deal comes through.
fig 16: cocoa wells
45
i’m not a hero, i’m just willing to do what
needs to be done
my name is donna sherlock, i’m a clerk in
maintenance
thoughtful 4
astute 4
brave 2
dedicated 3
when i’m helping people out i get to re-roll 1s
this many people admire me: 8
all the inmates know that i’ll give them free
condoms no questions asked.
fig 17: donna sherlock
jesus wants me for a sunbeam
my name is dewey rensberger, i’m the chaplain
pious 4
wise 1
righteous 1
devoted 2
i owe god for this many points of miracles: 0
this many people depend upon me for spiritual
succor: 0 it used to be 1 but she hanged
herself some weeks ago. now i’m getting
desperate and whiny and i’m a big pest.
fig 18: dewey rensberger
security at willard
figs 19-23: bill tansey, mikey simmons, carl reho, nick
travers, beth moriarty.
i don’t kill puppies for satan but sometimes i
kick my dog
my name is bill tansey, i’m a security chief
cold 1
fucked up 1
mean 1
relentless 1
evil 0
this many people have ever noticed me as a
human being, not just another brutish
powermongering thug: 0
if i had to choose i’d go with the stun gun but
clocking inmates with the flashlight is a
close second.
fig 19: bill tansey
46
i don’t kill puppies for satan but sometimes i
yell at my dog
my name is mikey simmons, i’m a security guard
cold 1
fucked up 1
mean 1
relentless 1
evil 0
this many people have ever noticed me as a
human being, not just another sad grounddown face in the crowd: 3
walking the grounds at night with my gun out makes me
feel like i have a penis.
fig 20: mikey simmons
i’m not a hero, i’m just willing to do what
needs to be done
my name is carl reho, i’m a security guard
thoughtful 3
astute 5
brave 4
dedicated 4
when i’m helping people out i get to re-roll 1s
this many people admire me: 3
skinny smelly junkies can spit on my face and i don’t
lose my cool. i’m kind of a misogynist though.
fig 21: carl reho
bear wants me for a sunbeam
my name is nick travers, i’m a security guard
pious 2
wise 3
righteous 5
devoted 5
i owe bear for this many points of miracles: 0
this many people depend upon me for spiritual
succor: 6
bear has made me a healthier influence on the
patients here than the doctors are. one
day i’m going to beat doctor skippy to
death with a baseball bat.
fig 22: nick travers
revenge is a dish best served right the fuck
now
my name is beth moriarty, i’m a security guard
thorough 3
survivor 3
vengeful 4
driven 4
i have a fucking arsenal full of big-ass guns,
many of which i bring illegally to work
with me.
fig 23: beth moriarty
47
inmates at willard
gerald stebbins, plus figs 24-28: warren garner, alice
metier, standon waide iii, elena moon, katy gregory.
i don’t kill puppies for satan but sometimes i
chew on them
my name is warren garner, i’m whacked
cold 1
fucked up 1
mean 1
relentless 1
evil 0
this many people have ever noticed me as a
human being, not just another sad grounddown face in the crowd: 5
i’ll eat anything.
fig 24: warren garner
i don’t kill puppies for satan but sometimes i
yell at my invisible friends
my name is alice metier, i’m whacked
cold 1
fucked up 1
mean 1
relentless 1
evil 0
this many people have ever noticed me as a
human being, not just another sad grounddown face in the crowd: 6
i had a really weird day and killed eight
people.
fig 25: alice metier
i don’t kill puppies for satan but sometimes i
set my dog on fire
my name is standon waide iii, i’m whacked
cold 1
fucked up 1
mean 1
relentless 1
evil 0
this many people have ever noticed me as a
human being, not just another cackling
howling psychopath: 3
i think i can set fire with my eyes but really
it’s a zippo.
fig 26: standon waide iii
48
i am a master of forces occult and obscure
my name is elena moon, i’m pretending to be
whacked
learned 3
insightful 4
fierce 2
resolute 3
potency 8
i get 2 potency every time i finish a
prescription of thorazine.
i’m starting to wonder about myself.
fig 27: elena moon
jesus wants me for a sunbeam or ruthless agent
of his destroying vengeance
my name is katy gregory, i’m whacked
pious 2
wise 4
righteous 5
devoted 3
i owe god for this many points of miracles: 0
this many people depend upon me for spiritual
succor: 1, my roommate, who is (shall we
say) easily led.
fig 28: katy gregory
49
and i’d like to finish off the npc section of our program
with two new character types, ghouls and scientists, both of
whom feature in our little story. snork.
the evil fucked up side of...
...ghouls
- instead of cold, ghouls are calm; instead of fucked up,
they’re reasonable; instead of mean, they’re ferocious; and
instead of relentless, they’re together.
- instead of evil, ghouls have hungry. it works like
vampires, whenever they use a power their hungry goes up by
1, whenever they feed it goes down.
- every morning when they wake up, they add 1 to their
hungry.
- whenever they make a ferocious roll, they add their hungry.
whenever they make a calm, reasonable, or together roll, they
subtract their hungry.
- when their hungry goes over 5 or 6, they totally freak out
and they can’t use any of their powers until they feed.
- they don’t keep track of how many people hate them, since
pretty much everybody does. instead they keep track of how
many people can stand them. it doesn’t do them any good,
though, since they automatically fail all of their how many
people hate them rolls.
- figs 29 and 30 are character sheets for gerald stebbins and
a friend of his.
hey, pass the ketchup, would ya?
my name is gerald stebbins
calm 2
reasonable 3
ferocious 3
together 2
hungry 7
this many people can stand me: 8
in the kill puppies for satan movie, i’m played
by steve buscemi circa fargo.
fig 29: gerald stebbins
hey, pass the ketchup, would ya?
my name is lizzie wire
calm 2
reasonable 1
ferocious 4
together 2
hungry 2
this many people can stand me: 2
in the kill puppies for satan movie, i’m played
by calista flockhart with filed teeth and
mismatched contact lenses.
fig 30: lizzie wire
50
here are ghouls’ powers.
- sinking your teeth in and not letting go – when you make a
together roll, ignore the die and just add 6 instead.
- getting the fuck outta there – kick open a door or pull the
bars out of a window without bothering to make a roll.
- running like a motherfucker – sprint at about forty miles
an hour for a few minutes.
- scaring the shit outta somebody – your teeth grow long and
sharp, your fingernails grow into talons, your back hunches,
your arms lengthen, and your eyes become staring dead corpse
eyes. you also get +1 to your ferocious.
- being happy – nothing compares to the bliss and
satisfaction of a corpse well digested. it’s almost as good
as good sex, about as good as pretty good sex, which is way
better than your average ghoul has ever had. too bad it’s so
fleeting.
the evil fucked up side of...
...scientists
- instead of cold, scientists are cutting edge; instead of
fucked up, they’re mad; instead of mean, they’re curious; and
instead of relentless, they’re objective.
- yes this means that if you get into a fistfight with
a scientist, they’ll roll on their curious to hit you.
(“fascinating the noise you make when i apply force to your
solar plexus. i wonder if it’s reproducible.”)
- instead of evil, scientists accumulate publishable
material. they may spend a point of publishable material to
a. publish an article or b. be immune to a point’s worth
of any supernatural effect. it’s a little tricky, the effect
still happens and it affects everybody else same as always,
but the scientist can’t see or perceive the effect at all and
isn’t touched by it in any way. make sense?
- they accumulate publishable material by conducting research
in their particular study area, of course.
- figs 31-34 are character sheets for some scientists you
might bump into at willard.
i serve the cold blind nameless god of science
my name is doctor fred weinel but everyone
calls me coach
cutting edge 2
mad 3
curious 5
objective 3
publishable material 2
i’m researching the effects of physical duress
on sufferers of certain psychosocial
disorders.
fig 31: doctor coach
51
i serve the cold blind nameless god of science
my name is doctor miss faith baroak
cutting edge 1
mad 5
curious 2
objective 2
publishable material 4
i’m researching the responses of phobics to
intimate contact with trigger stimuli.
fig 32: doctor miss faith
i serve the cold blind nameless god of science
my name is doctor skippy jensen
cutting edge 4
mad 4
curious 4
objective 3
publishable material 3
i’m researching the electrical activity in the
brains of social deviants in consensual and
nonconsensual sexual contexts.
fig 33: doctor skippy
i serve the cold blind nameless god of science
my name is doctor delar ford
cutting edge 1
mad 5
curious 3
objective 4
publishable material 2
i lead the willard residents’ choir. i’m
researching the effectiveness of simple
pavlovian conditioning in producing
vocalizations of consistent quality.
fig 34: doctor delar ford
52
cockroach souffle
a dozen good sized cockroaches will yield only a heaping
tablespoon of meat. cockroach has a spicy, pungent, lemoncilantro-bug flavor that is intimidating by itself, but
nicely permeates this souffle. this would make an ideal dish
for a champagne brunch.
12 large cockroaches 4 eggs, separated 1 tbsp flour 1 tbsp
butter 1 cup milk 1/4 cup chopped parsley salt, pepper and
cayenne to taste
preheat oven to 325.
plunge cockroaches 1 or 2 at a time into boiling water
and cook 2-3 minutes. cut the carapace open with kitchen
scissors and carefully pick the meat from the abdomen, body,
and top joint of legs.
prepare a bechamel with the flour, butter and milk. when it
is smooth and hot, stir in the cockroach meat and parsley,
and remove from heat. beat the egg yolks well and add.
season to taste and let cool slightly.
whip the egg whites until stiff and fold them gently into the
cockroach and egg yolk mixture. pour into a greased 7-inch
souffle baker and bake until set, about 40 minutes. serve at
once.
contents
cockroach souffle 54; the wisdom of the damned 55; how many
fish would a blowfish blow? 60; good grief and gravy 62; i
scream you scream 66; a big hairy combat example 72; wizardly
shit 76; revenge of the killer puppies 80; scenario: hey,
i found this, you wannit? 82; appendix a: who hates ya,
baby? 87; appendix b: but you can’t 87; appendix c: killing
vampires is easy 87; appendix d: what would jesus do? 87.
54
the wisdom of the damned
the yellow grimoire of malthais van orley
now i have to warn you, malthais van orley (1731-1777) was
one cold fucked up mean relentless motherfucker, plus he
had a real gift. he could sit down and write six hundred
pages in his crabby little hand and in all of them not three
consecutive words would make sense.
benjamin franklin wrote of him: “if it is not the pottage of
vermin, then it is the covetous glance he fixes upon my loyal
old trey. such a damn’d nuisance is this v. o. that i find
myself quite off my hump.”
in the early fifties, van orley’s (so called) yellow grimoire
came to the attention of a disgruntled editor at puffin
books named wilfred leer, who published it in two volumes.
occasionally you can find it in a college library or one of
those used bookstores specializing in books nobody ever buys.
don’t be put off by the fact that it’s totally unreadable
and the frontspiece invokes a curse of pustules and pox on
the reader -- you don’t want it for the reading and the curse
only takes effect if you open the book during a waxing moon
or in february.
van orley wrote three satanic spells into his yellow
grimoire, but they’re tricky to pick out of the gibberish.
have your pcs make a cold roll to find each one.
- good for driving off vagrants, a first degree spell – toss
a small stone at your target. it hits with about the force
of a mediocre professional-level fastball. this spell takes
a second or so to cast and sometimes gives you a nosebleed.
- good for having your revenge upon burglars, a first degree
spell – say aloud the name of something you own. the thing
you name, wherever it is, bursts into fierce flame, setting
anything near it alight and burning itself quickly to ashes.
this spell takes three minutes to cast (by the clock) and
leaves blisters on the palms of your hands.
- good for cheating the hangman, a greater ritual – kiss
your target on the lips. you and your target swap bodies.
forever. if you have magical things like bound demons and
branded spells, they stay with your old body. you’ll still
die of old age when your time is up, no matter how youthful
a body you’re in. this spell takes a couple of hours to cast
and leaves you exhausted and puking.
malthais van orley was in fact hanged on march 6, 1777, and
so that’s when we say that he died, but who knows?
55
the golden guide to satanic ceremonies
now this is a book to find. it was published in 1971
by golden books, compiled by one eliza j. jowre, and
unfortunately went almost immediately out of print. the
story goes that late in 1971 jowre learned that she had
terminal lymphatic cancer, converted to islam and joined a
fundamentalist mosque, to which she willed the book’s reprint
rights on the condition that they never be exercised. the
result is that there simply aren’t very many out there. for
the most part sorcerers, not puppykillers, have the resources
to collect them.
(i have it from a highly placed source that the relevant
authorities found jowre’s last-minute conversion
entertaining, but not particularly convincing.)
the guide contains 5(!) satanic spells, and an absolute bare
minimum of raving.
- good for souring milk, a first degree spell - summon up a
piddly-ass demon and tell it to do something. probably it’ll
obey, especially if you tell it to do something really really
easy. this spell takes a good ten minutes to cast and is
kind of pricey, like about as much as a dinner out. (yes,
this is from the kill puppies for satan main book.)
- good for interfering with the outcome of a sporting event,
a first degree spell – take a ball point pen and scribble on
a photograph of your target. for the next couple hours, any
plants your target happens to step on will clutch and grab
at her feet. the plants don’t get any supernatural strength
or anything, so it’s a small hindrance, but there it is.
doesn’t work on astroturf. this spell takes say ten minutes
to cast, and afterward the pen won’t write.
- good for keeping current with the times, a first degree
spell – turn your tv to channel one. for the next couple
hours it picks up hbn, the hell broadcasting network. this
spell takes a minute or two to cast, banging on the side of
the set sometimes helps, and if you cast it every day your tv
will burn out in a week. an easy variation lets you cast it
on a radio instead.
- good for demoralizing a rival, a second degree spell –
write the name of the person you want to fuck with on a piece
of paper and leave it in a public toilet. until tomorrow,
everything that happens to go into the toilet falls out
of the sky onto your target. yuck. this spell takes ten
minutes to cast, and you might want to choose a time when the
restroom’s otherwise deserted, because the noises and smells
will be embarrassing and you’ll want to clean up afterward.
- good for evading the tax-assessor, a third degree spell
– go peel the numbers off your door or mailbox or porch or
whatever. for one fiscal quarter, your address disappears
56
from the world. you still get electricity and cable and
phone service, but no mail delivery, no pizza delivery, no
landlord visits, and even the goddamn mormons pass you by.
this spell takes five or six hours to cast and calls for two
fifths of bourbon, and after it ends your bills come back
with a no shit vengeance.
the theologia of genevieve st. john
this book has a complicated history, so pay attention.
genevieve st. john wrote the original manuscript in paris in
the early nineteenth century. (or else the nuns of a corrupt
convent wrote it, and used genevieve st. john as a pseudonym,
a possibility which also has merit.) either way the book is
not fucking around, with a capital not fucking around. it
was published in a very small edition in 1847; i’ve never
heard of anyone who owns an original.
in 1910, sir igor bermouth made the first translation
into english, called the “redoubtable.” it is an excellent
translation, dense and nuanced.
occasionally one of these will come up for sale or auction,
if you know where to look; if it sells for less than say
fifteen thousand dollars, it’s not genuine.
in 1912, gregory phipps, an american, made an independent
translation. his is more approachable, perhaps, but with
a much more strident editorial style, and footnotes that
frankly devolve into the fantastic. he was much taken with
the heretical convent theory, and went so far as to identify
six separate authors, whom he named after stage stars of the
period. nevertheless, a valuable and informative book, and
no easier to get.
then, in 1941, sir igor’s son in law, coincidentally also
named phipps, found the french manuscript sir igor had used
and, ignorant of the fact that his father in law had already
done so, published a translation. he believed the book to be
a genuine theological tract, however, and did a lot of damage
to it in order to make it one. he cut out almost wholesale
the perversions and sacrileges, he made the delightful
depictions of freaks and human oddities into trite sermons,
and, confused, he garbled the spells beyond function. if you
have a chance to get “the phipps translation,” make sure it’s
the other one.
and finally, in 1949, professor childe valten translated it,
not from the original french, which she didn’t have access
to, but from an 1886 german edition. oddly, her translation
contains almost a hundred pages not in any other, including
an extra spell. no one knows whether they’re original
to genevieve st. john, original to the german translator,
original to professor valten, or incorporated at some stage
from another source. professor valten published it herself,
57
so naturally it’s a big stupid pain in the ass to find this
one too.
the “redoubtable” and phipps(1912) editions contain two
satanic spells:
- good for deceiving st peter, a second degree spell - until
dawn, you are invisible to angels (and demons, by extension).
this spell takes one minute to cast, but you can’t cast it if
during the past twenty four hours a. you’ve killed something
for evil or b. you’ve used any evil for anything. there’s
a popular belief that this spell might allow you to sneak
through the pearly gates. i wouldn’t count on it, but fuck,
you got a better plan?
- good for facing st michael, a greater ritual – cast this
spell on something you can hold in your hands. whatever
it is, it becomes unholy. if you cast it on a weapon, the
weapon will now hurt demons, vampires, ghosts etc, even
angels. yes, even angels. (angels aren’t killable, but you
can sure as shit make them run away with their tails between
their legs.) you can even cast it on a gun and it’ll work,
you don’t have to cast it on individual bullets. heh heh.
it takes four hours a day for seven consecutive days to cast,
and, barring some other magic or miracle, the unholiness is
permanent.
professor valten’s translation has a third spell:
- good for distressing the mother superior, a lesser ritual
– take your target by the hand and say her full name aloud.
you lose a point of evil, and she gains one, even if she’s
not a puppykiller for satan. she can use it just like
you would, in fact she’ll feel a tremendous pressure to do
so, she’ll have to make relentless or devoted or whatever
rolls to keep herself from giving in. it pisses god right
off when his fanatics use evil. the bad news is that some
demons think that this counts as tempting to sin, and they
might come kick your ass for a scab. the spell takes twenty
minutes or so to set up, and aside from the evil, doesn’t
cost you a damn thing.
plus, if you read any edition but the useless phipps(1941)
one, you get a free point of character evil to spend on
increasing your fucked up! what a deal.
satan!
loves!
you!!!
i found this little pamphlet tucked into a hymnal in the
local lds meetinghouse. who knows where you’ll find it.
it’s a tri-folded sheet of legal paper, poorly typed on both
sides without margins and with very bad punctuation. it’s
almost completely unreadable, and the anonymous author’s
theories (including the title) are facially absurd. it
contains a satanic spell, however:
58
- good for getting away from the piggies, a first degree
spell – the next person who tries to put handcuffs on you
suffers a sudden, temporary, incapacitating brain seizure.
(if you want, you can have them make a relentless or whatever
roll to recover quickly.) this spell takes around half an
hour to cast, plus the time it takes you to write a random
hate letter to 475w 910s heber city, ut 84032. if you cast
the spell and nobody tries to put handcuffs on you in the
next oh say week or so, the spell fades.
don’t actually send random hate letters to 475w 910s heber
city, ut 84032. it’s a law enforcement equipment supplier if
you must know, that’s why them and not some other arbitrary
address, and they never did anything to you. plus no matter
how many hate letters you send, you still can’t actually cast
spells. einstein.
59
how many fish would a blowfish
blow?
or, the evil fucked up side of...
...zombies
let’s start with a sorcerous spell:
- the obedient servant, 3 potency – cast on a corpse. the
corpse becomes animate and supernaturally strong. it will
follow your instructions but is stupid as shit. the spell
lasts for as long as you want, but the corpse continues to
decompose the whole while. blowfish poison is a traditional
component of the spell (as we know from the serpent and the
rainbow). so that’s where zombies come from.
now, the type of zombie you get when you cast the spell
depends on just how decomposed the body is. and yes, if you
keep zombies around they gradually change from one type to
the next.
- instead of cold, zombies are minimally sentient, instead of
fucked up, they’re a pain in the ass, instead of mean, they
want to eat your brains, and instead of relentless, they’re
single-minded.
- if you cast the spell on a body that hasn’t begun to
decompose, you get a zombie who can pass as living. zombies
of this sort usually have high numbers in minimally
sentient and pain in the ass, and low to middling numbers
in want to eat your brains and single-minded. they can
even occasionally talk or otherwise communicate (“want...
to... eat... brains...”). of the three, they make the
best bodyguards, not least because you can take them out in
public.
- here’s a character sheet for a recently dead zombie.
my friends and relations might still recognize
me
i used to have a name
minimally sentient 4
pain in the ass 4
want to eat your brains 2
single-minded 3
- if you cast the spell on a body that is definitely
decomposing, you get a classic evil dead sort of zombie,
vicious and aggressive, with a fucking fearsome hunger for
brains. this sort has high numbers in want to eat your
brains and single-minded, and lowish numbers in minimally
sentient and pain in the ass. of the three, they make the
best killers and shock troops, if you can keep them quiet
between jobs.
60
- here’s a character sheet for a classic zombie.
dead by dawn! dead by dawn!
i haven’t had a name for a while
minimally sentient 1
pain in the ass 3
want to eat your brains 5
single-minded 4
- if you cast the spell on a skeleton (or mostly one), you
get an animated skeleton, of course. skeletons, being more
brittle, pay more attention to their surroundings, but god
damn they still crave the brains. their high numbers are in
pain in the ass and want to eat your brains. of the three,
they make the best protectors for your stuff, since they fold
small and you can put them as an ambush into like your closet
or foot locker.
- here’s a character sheet for a skeleton zombie.
ray harryhousen would be proud to call me his
own
i haven’t had a name for a long ass time
minimally sentient 2
pain in the ass 5
want to eat your brains 4
single-minded 3
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good grief and gravy
being the gm is the shit, and also bullshit. the shit
because you get to toy with peoples’ little lives, bullshit
because it’s like the goddamn sims, their little bladder
meter goes all the way to the red and they can’t figure out
for them stupid selves to get off the stupid couch and go
to the stupid bathroom. no, you gotta click on the little
thing, and click on the other little thing, and they spend so
long in there that they miss their carpool and get fired, and
then they come crying to you, wah wah wah. feebs.
right, but i mean your players. they think that if a. you
didn’t say so or b. it’s not on their character sheet,
then it’s not true. which is a problem, because a. you can
only say so many things, and you hope to god they’re more
interesting than “scooter, you really have to pee, do you
go to the bathroom? do you make it back out in time for
your carpool?” and b. there are only eight things on their
character sheet, and one of them is that they kill puppies
for satan for fuck sake.
so what you want to do as gm is make them responsible for
their own pee. keep the good stuff for yourself, naturally,
but give the bullshit away. killing puppies is a perfect
example. the first couple of times it’s kind of novel, if
you’re into it. but since
rule number one: there must be enough evil
you’re going to end up going through puppies like toilet
paper. it can get a little dull. you could just hand
puppies out, okay you kill the puppy and you get two evil
what do you do now, but then you might as well be playing
observe celestial events for potency or some other lame shit.
and besides
rule number two: there must be more grief
so slacking off on it will never do. no, you’ve got to find
a way to make the damn puppies carry their own weight.
here’s a way. whenever one of your pcs wants to kill a puppy
and you don’t want to deal with it in depth, hand it back to
them:
scooter: man, i’m down to my last couple evil. i gotta
find a puppy to kill. hey, can i find a puppy to kill?
you: sure. what kind of puppy do you find?
who cares what scooter says. i find a baby harp seal living
under a bench in the park, i find a rare beautiful tropical
fish that somebody left in a fishbowl on top of their car, i
find a nice parrot. give it to them, don’t even sweat it.
you: that’s fine.
you can kill it however you want.
62
go
ahead and collect the evil.
you?
what grief does it give
now what you want, of course, is for your players to come up
with devious, perverse, and funny things to do to themselves,
without any more effort on your part. you might have to keep
at it a while, but sooner or later they’ll catch on.
the first thing is to get them to stop thinking about their
damn character sheets:
scooter: uh, i get –1 to my cold for the next six hours.
you: yeah, right. that doesn’t even make sense. try
again.
scooter: well how about if i get a penalty to my people
hate me roll?
you: yawn. keep trying.
eventually they’ll start coming up with good in character
things, genuine inconveniences, not just dumb dice penalties.
making enemies, leaving evidence, hurting themselves, costing
themselves money or time, stumbling into weird shit that
they’d otherwise miss, on and on, they’re probably much
more twisted than you gave them credit for. sometimes dice
penalties or new people who hate them will come out of their
descriptions, and that’s cool, just not vice versa.
anyway once they get away from the dull mechanics-based
grief, the next thing is to make sure they’re serious about
it. whenever they try to get away with weak grief you might
just slap them down:
scooter: okay, well as i’m bashing the fish with a brick
i nick my other hand with the corner and i get a wicked
bad blood blister right -- here.
you: nice try. actually, when you bash the fish with the
_________________________________
of all the useless bullshit in the world, this section is
some.
Here’s some real advice:
i’ve run like a million demos of kill puppies for satan.
what i do when i run a puppies demo, i use all kinds of
“stop” signals in such a way that the players take ’em as
provocation. like this:
me: And ... i mean ... what do you do with the (flinch)
sweet little kitten?
player: i put the blender on ‘whip’...
me: (covering my face)
player: ...i drop the kitten in.
me: ugh, can you imagine the sound that must make? and
the sound the kitten must make? i can’t believe you
just did that, that’s just sick, i changed my mind about
playing this game with you. you don’t, y’know, drink
it, do you?
player: and i drink it!
thusly.
63
brick, the brick splits and there’s this rush of foul
air from the crack. you’re possessed by an obnoxious
little demon, it’s been trapped in there for a long
time. what’s your favorite restaurant?
scooter: uh. pinnochio’s, downtown.
you: great. the demon takes you downtown to pinoccio’s
and you spend the next six hours gorging yourself on
veal and scampi. you eat, what, five dishes an hour,
fifteen bucks a plate, call it five hundred dollars worth
of food. you skip out without paying, of course, and
then the demon curls up in a corner of your mind and
goes to sleep.
scooter: you mean it’s still there?
you: naturally. and i gotta tell you, it needs five
hundred dollars worth of veal and prawns every day or it
gets really nasty.
scooter: but -- but how do i get rid of it?
you: you wait. until christmas. oh, and plus, when you
see morton, the first thing you do is puke on him.
morton: huh? you what?
show them that when they try to get away with lame grief,
instead they get fucked to spare. get them looking for that
magic level -- bad enough that you’ll give it to them, but
not so bad that they can’t live with it. and definitely
definitely not as bad as you do to them when they try to
weasel out. another fun thing is to turn it over to one of
the other players:
scooter: so i kill this puppy, and –
you: hold on. morton, what grief does it give her?
morton: huh? oh, i get it. well, let’s see, what was it
again that she puked on me? veal and prawns?
scooter: oh, come on now!
you: no, go ahead, morton. run with that. what’s the
grief?
that’ll learn ‘em.
once you get it rolling, all you gotta do is decide
occasionally to play a puppy killing out in detail, so nobody
gets too comfortable. you’re golden. oh, and of course if
they fucking cheated during character creation, it’s your
civic duty to give them grief till the blood comes out their
ears. just in case you forgot.
so great, you’ve passed off one of your more irritating
duties as gm. what’s next?
keeping track of a world full of people is a pain in the ass,
but your pcs gotta have friends. that’s one of the best ways
to get them into trouble, right, friends, families, lovers,
naturally it is. can’t do without it. like good old gerald
stebbins, always getting taken off to willard or over their
heads with the loan sharks. kill puppies or not, you still
can’t just blow off your friends.
64
anyway that’s fine, but you should be hatching fiendish
plots, not trying to remember if scooter’s friend marsey is
the one who sniffs between sentences or the one who speaks in
a clipped monotone. right? right.
the solution is the same. farm everybody who’s not important
out to your players. just spring it on them, why not? it
works like this:
you: scooter, someone’s calling you. ring, ring.
scooter: hello. scooter.
you: it’s your friend marsey. he’s just been in a car
accident. morton, would you play marsey for me?
morton: huh? what?
you: play marsey for me. he’s just been in a car
accident. come on, don’t be a feeb.
morton: well, whatever, okay. scooter? (sniff) it’s
marsey. (sniff) listen, could you give me a ride?
(sniff) i’ve, uh, i’ve got a problem with my car.
(sniff)
you can hand over marsey’s character sheet if you want, but
odds are you never bothered to make one for him. sometimes
it’s fun to tell marsey’s new player secrets that marsey
knows, but don’t feel obligated. keep an eye on it and be
ready to step in and it’ll be fine. after a little while
you won’t even notice, you’ll wonder how you managed before.
swear to god.
the only trick is: don’t make anybody play their own friends.
got that? you hate it when two npcs have to talk to each
other in front of everybody, i know you do. your players
hate it too. don’t do it. even if you hate them, even if
they cheated like cheating bastard pigs and you can’t think
of any other way to make them pay. it’s just not worth it.
so keep that up. whenever something gets irritating, figure
out a way to make one of your players do it. eventually
you’ll be left with only the cool stuff, and that is the no
shit shit. gravy.
65
i scream you scream
or, the evil fucked up side of...
...ghosts
the pain in the ass with ghosts is that you have to think
about what’s up with them. their history, their psychology,
their whole backstory. i mean, i guess you kind of have
to with every npc, but ghosts you actually really have to.
nah, fuck it. i’ll make a little table for you to roll on
instead.
- ghosts mostly don’t realize that they’re ghosts, and a
lot of the time the people around them don’t realize either.
a lot of ghosts are visible and have jobs and seem like
everybody else.
- instead of cold, ghosts are in touch with the times;
instead of fucked up, ghosts are psychologically whole;
instead of mean, they’re tangible, and instead of relentless,
they’re recurrent.
- ghosts are most fun when they fail rolls. when a ghost
fails an in touch with the times roll, it is simply incapable
of figuring out what’s going on around it. when it fails
a psychologically whole roll, it reveals the gaps left in
its personality when it died. when it fails a tangible
roll, it becomes translucent, silent, odorless, weightless,
frictionless, something cool like that. and when it fails
a recurrent roll, it disappears entirely and returns to some
earlier state.
- instead of evil, ghosts have unquiet. the theory is that
every ghost has some unresolved something that’s keeping it
here. when the ghost resolves its deal, its unquiet goes to
zero and on it goes to its well-deserved rest.
- since ghosts mostly don’t know that they’re ghosts,
they mostly have no clue what their own deal is. They’re
basically winging it, going where their unquiet leads them.
- they’re also pretty easy to fool. say a ghost is hanging
around until it gets to attend its daughter’s sixth birthday
_________________________________
more actually worthwhile gm advice, speaking of ghosts: have
your players create some npcs!
let ’em stat out the people who hate them, random other
people, just like pass the book to them open to the npcs
section and be like all, “hey, make up some npcs while i’m on
the potty, yeah?” they’ll come up with good shit, and when
you inflict it upon them later, they’ll be happy. it’s a
thing.
also, check this out. this is from a game i ran:
putricene and kaylen are PCs, they hate one another.
they’ve horked flaming snot and gushed vast shit and between
the two of them they managed to kill one metric fuckload of
maggots (=2.2 fuckloads imperial), which satan called them up
about and wasn’t too pleased - “have you seen the state of my
66
party, and its daughter is forty one and married and living
in ohio. you can help the ghost out by having everybody act
the party out, pretending to be its daughter and guests and
so on. get enough details right and it’ll work fine.
- ghosts don’t spend unquiet to do things. instead, their
level of unquiet determines what they can do. or rather,
what they can do easily, since they can do things from other
levels of unquiet, but when they do, their unquiet increases.
bear with me, it’ll make sense.
- a ghost’s unquiet goes up (by 1 point) every time a. it
fails a roll on any of its stats, b. it uses a power from
a different level of unquiet, or c. something happens that
will make it substantially harder for it to resolve its deal.
- a ghost’s unquiet goes down (by 1 point) when a. it
makes a significant move toward resolving its deal or b. it
forgets about its deal for a long time. its unquiet can
never go to zero until it totally resolves its deal.
- sometimes it makes sense to keep track of how many people
know that it’s a ghost.
- here’s a character sheet for a random ghost.
my tortured soul wanders the earth looking for
surcease
in life my name was annabella brockminster
in touch with the times 2
psychologically whole 1
tangible 4
recurrent 3
unquiet 6
my deal is that i’ll hang around until i get to
go to my daughter’s sixth birthday party.
this many people know i’m a ghost: 0
here are some ghostly powers.
at zero unquiet, remember, the ghost goes away forever,
buhbye ghost.
_________________________________
office?” he said - and they burned down each others’ houses
and shit. anyhow Putricene runs through the neighborhood
peering in the windows until he finds somebody with a wallsized tropical fishtank, he jimmies the door, and he feeds
the fish with speed and pcp. he slaps a sticker on the
fishtank that says “dare to keep kids [scratched out] fish
off drugs.” i’m like, “cool, somebody hates you for that!
it’s ... let’s say a vampire. he’s asleep in his coffin in
the basement right now! he’s a vampire who keeps tropical
fish.”
we cut to something else. fluffy crucifying the kittens
in the church sanctuary? atilla chucking mutilated kittens
through the window into the ymca 1st-grade swim class? both?
67
at low levels of unquiet, from 1 to 3, the ghost can do any
or all of these:
- hold down a job.
- remain corporeal in high-pressure or high-sensation
situations, like while competing in a bicycle race or having
sex.
- sleep, shit, and feel hot and cold.
at middle levels of unquiet, from 4 to 6, the ghost can do
any or all of these:
- participate in conversations.
- remain corporeal in low-pressure, day to day situations,
like while pushing the button to call the elevator or
watching tv.
- walk through walls.
- haunt people by making them see things out of the corners
of their eyes and hear weird noises.
- eat, drink, blink, and feel pain. at high levels of
unquiet, from 7 to 9, the ghost can do any or all of these:
- remain invisible and intangeable for long periods, just
watching and waiting.
- manifest as a spectral figure, a chill wind, laughter,
heavy footsteps, things like that.
- manifest as it appeared when it died, a la sixth sense.
- move things around without touching them.
- give people bad luck.
- attack people astrally, doing psychological damage instead
of real damage.
and at very high levels of unquiet, 10 plus, the ghost can do
any or all of these:
- make blood gush out of the water fixtures or pour in
through the windows.
- possess people.
- manifest as a terrifying, horrific, monstrous thing, a
la jacob’s ladder or the first half of the house on haunted
hill remake (the movie was whatever, but gimme a right on for
geoffrey rush).
_________________________________
(shit man we were mean mean mean to the kittens in that
game.)
anyhow then kaylen catches up with putricene in time to see
him applying the dare sticker. kaylen’s still covered in
shit, so he starts throwing it at putricene. they fight, and
Putricene gets the worst of it. kaylen’s there smacking his
head into the refridgerator and i’m like, “did I mention that
there’s a tropical-fish loving vampire who hates you asleep
in the basement?” and they’re like, “yeah, and I’ll bet the
sun just went down,” and I’m like, “yeah.”
so I’m like, “okay, should this be a scary vampire or a like
vampire: the sucking vampire? let’s vote.”
scary wins, 4 to 2. putricene’s player and kaylen’s player
were the 2 opposed.
68
- do very bad things to people, like making them drop lit
matches or sinking their rowboats or dragging them screaming
and bleeding into (and i mean into) the walls.
- anything else scary and cool you can think of.
and here’s that chart i promised you, so you don’t have to
think. roll a d6:
i rolled
a 1
the ghost will hang around until somebody
convinces it that it’s dead. showing it its own
obituary might help.
i rolled
a 2
the ghost will hang around until some particular
thing happens to some particular person. like
maybe the ghost wants revenge on its killer, and
will hang around until its killer’s death.
i rolled
a 3
the ghost will hang around until it gets to see
or do something it was waiting for when it died.
like yeah yeah i know you’ve heard it enough but
like maybe its daughter’s sixth birthday party
again.
i rolled
a 4
the ghost will hang around until it gets to
interact with someone who it really wanted to
see when it died. like maybe its wife or dog or
whatever.
i rolled
a 5
the ghost will hang around until somebody
finds or does some particular thing with some
particular object, like the deed to its land or
its gold locket or its bones.
i rolled
a 6
the ghost will hang around until some particular
situation is restored to how it was before the
ghost died. like maybe until its famiy farm
is restored to its family or ivy covers the old
boathouse again.
while i’m thinking of it, go rent léolo. it’s a frenchcanadian flick on new line home video. it doesn’t have
_________________________________
“so you’re there smacking his head into the fridge, right,
and the front door, it’s been open, it swings - slowly slowly - shut. click.”
kaylen’s player pantomimes holding putricene by the collar
but not smacking anymore, looking around scared.
“let’s, uh, take this somewhere else,” he says.
dude! i did two cheesy special effects, the closing door
and someone unseen touching Kaylen’s face, and they were
running around in circles squeaking and waving their arms!
pissing themselves! all because the vote got them to buy
into a “scary” vampire.
that’s some cool shit that is. you can do that kind of
thing too.
69
anything to do with ghosts or killing puppies for satan or
anything, but it’s a strange, beautiful, fucked up movie and
if you’re like me you’ll realize you’ve been missing it all
this time.
anyway so fine, and at the higher levels of unquiet they
can be kind of disruptive, but your pcs shouldn’t get all
altruistic and shit just because they’re ghosts. sure
you could follow the ghost around and figure out its deal
and reenact its daughter’s goddamn sixth birthday party or
whatever, but why would you? ghosts are just too much fun to
fuck with, and they can also make damn useful friends.
for instance:
my tortured soul wanders the earth looking for
surcease
in life my name was captain mike harvers
in touch with the times 1
psychologically whole 2
tangible 5
recurrent 4
unquiet 5
my deal is that i’ll hang around until i get to
eat some homemade strawberry ice cream.
this many people know i’m a ghost: 2
hands down my favorite bit of world war ii trivia: bomber
crews would take a canister of cream, sugar, sometimes fruit,
sometimes chocolate or coffee, and bolt it to the outside
of their plane. this would expose the cream etc to a. the
below freezing temperatures at their flight altitude and b.
constant shaking so no grainy ice crystals would form. if
the plane landed safely, they’d celebrate with c. lovely
fresh ice cream. no lie.
so this captain mike harvers guy. he was a tail gunner on
a b24 in europe and the plane landed safely, but he didn’t
get any ice cream. he’d personally taken substantial flack.
they rushed him from the plane to the field hospital and not
long afterward he went back to the states. he lived in the
va for a little while and then went home. he married his
sweetheart and five months later climbed the big maple in his
back yard with a deer rifle. he shot his wife three times
as she came around the house with a watering can, shot at the
neighbor’s dog and missed, and then blew his own brains out.
the next owners cut the tree down and by whatever route it
ended up that the city made park benches out of it. That’s
where you can find captain mike harvers today, sitting on one
of those benches downtown, tossing peanuts at the pigeons.
sometimes he goes and stands in front of the ice cream cart,
and reads and rereads the menu, looking for something he
can’t remember and will never find.
70
poor unhappy guy. don’t you just want to hug him? here
captain mike, i made this just for you! Strawberry ice
cream, your favorite!
well, i didn’t mention one very interesting fact. captain
mike notices and remembers every single thing that happens
anywhere in that park. he’s like ten thousand camcorders
aimed at one of the places where shit goes down. if you’re
a little lucky and you ask him the right question, well, i
think you can see the possibilities. drugs, sex, puppies,
incriminating evidence, your enemies on a stick. ask captain
mike.
not so anxious to help him out now, are you? getting used to
the idea of him being there, aren’t you? told you so.
71
a big hairy combat example
(because god knows the main book
didn’t have one)
scooter: you wanna piece of me! you wanna piece of me!
come and get it, you shambling piece of rotting flesh
shit! i haul off and smack him one right in the nose.
my mean roll totals to 6.
jiggo: yeah, right. i let her. my single-minded roll is
a 10. i don’t even stumble. when she gets close enough
i grab her head. my want to eat your brains roll is an
8. want... to... eat... brains...
scooter: aigh! get it off! i do a knee drop onto his
foot. my mean roll is a 9! yes!
jiggo: duh. i hold her up by her hair.
announcer: that’s gotta hurt!
scooter: doh!
morton: hey! you can’t treat my friend that way! i
vault into the ring.
jiggo: whatever. i chew on scooter’s head. anng anng
anng.
scooter: no! get it off! get it off!
announcer: is that blood?
morton: i get jiggo in a headlock! my mean roll is a 7.
jiggo: want... to... eat... brains...
morton: i squeeze! come on, make your roll!
_________________________________
if you think for one second that i’m going to go through the
dumb hassle of writing up a new combat example to exemplify
the new rules, shit brother, you got another thing coming.
oh for fuck’s sweet sake. okay, look.
scooter: you wanna piece of me! you wanna piece of me!
come and get it, you shambling piece of rotting flesh
shit! i’m’a haul off and smack you one right in the
nose.
jiggo: fine with me, i got single-minded out the butt.
when you get close enough i’m’a grab your head. want...
to... eat... brains...
scooter rolls mean, for a total of 6; jiggo rolls want to
eat your brains for a total of 8.
jiggo: heh heh.
scooter: aigh! get it off! my brains! i’m’a do a knee
drop onto your foot to make you let go.
jiggo: yeah right. i’m’a hold you up by your hair and
chew on your head. i’m’a take the +2 too keep what i
just won. anng anng anng.
announcer: that’s gotta hurt!
morton: hey! you can’t treat my friend that way! i’m’a
vault into the ring.
scooter rolls mean again for an 8 this time; jiggo rolls
want to eat brains +2 for a 9; morton rolls mean for a
72
jiggo: dude, i’m a zombie. i already don’t have any
blood going to my brain.
scooter: i use some evil! i use 2 evil! i blow my nose
on him! it’s flame! bwah hah hah!
announcer: can she do that?
jiggo: um, hey! oh... no... not... fire... i let go
and try to beat it out with my hands.
announcer: actually, all that methane you generate? it
goes up with a noise like: foomf. you fall down.
you’re on fire. lose a single-minded. scooter, morton,
make relentless rolls.
scooter: got a 7.
morton: owie! a 4! stop drop and roll!
announcer: you’re down too, morton. you both lose a
relentless.
morton: smooth, scooter.
scooter: well at least it wasn’t a head lock, morton.
duh.
jiggo: i’m kicking and thrashing. do i set anything else
on fire? can i make it to the ropes?
pharus: my zombie! i jump into the ring. i bring my
folding chair.
morton, scooter: oh shit.
morton: i cast a satanic spell! i cast the one where i
summon a big-ass demon! you’re going down, wizard boy!
announcer: morton? that spell takes an hour to cast,
plus you’re on fire.
_________________________________
6. scooter and jiggo win, morton loses, scooter goes
first.
jiggo (looking at scooter): we both win, we both lose...?
we both ... lose.
scooter: okay. so...?
jiggo: so you don’t get away but you’re like thrashing
around and i can’t get a good bite in.
morton: but i’m in the ring?
jiggo: yeah, i’m too busy trying to land my teeth to
notice.
scooter: whew. hey buddy!
morton: the awesome. i’m’a get you in a headlock!
jiggo: dude, i’m a zombie. i already don’t have any
blood going to my brain.
morton: oh right. instead i’ll ... grab a folding chair!
and clobber you with it! and i’ll take the +1 because i
won my goal last roll.
scooter: i spend evil! i spend 2 evil! i blow my nose
on you jiggo! it’s flame! bwah hah hah!
announcer: your goal is to make him let go?
scooter: yeah, that.
announcer: cool. and also the danger is that all that
methane jiggo generates will go up with a noise like:
foomf.
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morton: oh right. i guess i keep rolling around.
announcer: good.
pharus: i hit morton with my folding chair! remember
that i enchanted it with fist of the storm?
announcer: oh, i remember.
morton: noooo...
scooter: oh no you don’t. i tackle him from behind. my
mean roll is an 8!
announcer: pharus, make an astute roll to notice the
sneak attack!
pharus: you mean insightful?
announcer: whatever.
pharus: i got a 6.
scooter: ha ho!
jiggo: hey, what about me? do i make it to the ropes?
announcer: Scooter, you plow into pharus from behind!
he goes sprawling -- lose a resolute, pharus -- and
the folding chair of the storm’s fury flies up into the
air! where’s that d4? it falls on ... morton! kazap
kaboom!
morton: urk!
announcer: you know the deal, morton. two consecutive
hit.
pharus: plus the chair.
announcer: plus the chair.
morton: i rolled a 7, a 4, and a 3, but it doesn’t
_________________________________
jiggo: fuck.
announcer: goal for jiggo, please?
jiggo: oh right. um, eat... brains... i... guess...
everybody rolls. scooter rolls mean for a 5; jiggo
switches up and rolls single-minded for a 9 (nobody
minds); morton rolls mean +1 for a 5; i roll
dangerousness for an 8.
announcer: does your goal oppose the danger, jiggo? i
don’t believe it does!
jiggo: you figured that out all by yourself?
announcer: heh.
jiggo: i eat scooter’s brains! i notice that you suck
this time, scooter, what with that 5 and all. how bout
i get down to skull?
scooter: this is butt ass.
jiggo: ha ha. i choose for you to fall down and lose
a relentless. furthermore i keep you between me and
morton’s chair.
morton: i don’t accidentally hit you, do i, scooter? i’m
like, sorry girl! get out of the fuckin’ way!
scooter: you bastard fuck.
announcer: but: foomf! i choose: you all fall down and
lose a relentless. except you, jiggo. you fall down
and lose a single-minded.
morton: the danger gets to choose a bennie?
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matter. i’m down to 0 relentless. i’m seein’ tweetie
birds.
announcer: so sad.
pharus: victory is mine!
announcer: not so fast. jiggo, you do manage to pull
yourself up on the ropes. but just as you do, scooter’s
flying tackle carries pharus practically right up your
flaming ass. you fall back down on top of him.
scooter: eat hot flaming undead, wizard!
pharus: aiee!
jiggo: owie. sorry... boss...
oh for fuck sake. i forgot that i wanted to have a ghost in
there, so that i could show you how cool it is when ghosts
fail their recurrent roll and have to go back to some earlier
time and place. the wizard was going to cast like sword
of the sun and the ghost was going to be four combat phases
behind for the whole rest of the thing.
well, whatever. you can imagine it perfectly well, and no
way in hell am i going back and rewriting it. what you see
is what you get.
jiggo: hey vincent? are you sure that decomposing bodies
produce methane?
announcer: shut up, on fire zombie boy.
_________________________________
announcer: yeah.
morton: that’s not in the rules.
announcer: it’s in the example.
morton: but... dude that there’s pretty fuckin’ selfreferential, is what that is.
announcer: anybody have a goal?
scooter: my goal is to roll a 10.
jiggo: i’m on fire, so let’s see. my goal is now to
eat morton’s brains. no i mean my action is now to
eat morton’s brains, but my goal is to light the whole
fuckin’ world on fire.
scooter: my goal is to get the hell out of dodge. i’m’a
do it by crawling and scrambling.
jiggo (making menacing eye contact): my goal opposes
yours. just in case you were wondering.
morton: my goal is to knock you the hell down and stay
down, jiggo. with my trusty folding chair.
scooter rolls relentless for a 9, even with her -2. it’s
not a 10 but she gloats. jiggo rolls want to eat brains
for a 6; morton rolls mean for a 7.
scooter: oh yes. the times they are a changin’ for you,
on fire zombie boy.
done! that’s good enough for satan, it’s damn skippy good
enough for you. i’ve got work in the morning.
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wizardly shit
sorcerers are such bastards, y’know? they can cast our
spells, but we can’t cast theirs. they’re rich, suave,
educated, and they take showers. they don’t need to kill
helpless animals to do magic and their magic isn’t mostly
vermin-related.
plus their spellbooks are engaging and well written and not
full of the ravings of some paranoid whack-nut. jerks. they
can bite me.
fine and worthy diversions for a winter’s
evening
like take this book for example. it’s a grimoire by reynaud
copersley, published in 1899 by upstate press. it includes
hilarious descriptions of fourteen victorian parlor games
(including “piggy piggy,” where one person, blindfolded,
sits on the lap of someone in the circle, who squeals like a
pig, and the first person has to guess from the squealing who
it is, and “in the well,” where there’s some stuff and then
everybody makes out with everybody else); recipes for roast
rabbits and game fowl; a delightful account of a year spent
travelling to oregon and back, full of well-drawn characters
and stirring events; and four sorcerous spells.
- the company’s repast, 2 potency – a fabulous meal appears:
quail stuffed with venison sausage, roast potatoes, egg and
cheese pies, wild salad herbs, spiced lobster bisque, and
roast nuts and relishes, serving fourteen. the food is real,
nourishing, and expertly prepared.
- shadows of memory, 1 potency – as you tell a story,
beautiful translucent phantasms appear in the air before you
as illustrations. the spell draws them from your memories,
imaginations, and dreams.
- the horseman’s ease, 1 potency – cast on a smooth stone
and put the stone into a bath. whoever takes the bath is
overcome with a warm, tingling, soothing relaxation, which
eases sore muscles and heals small scrapes, scratches,
and bruises. the sensation lasts until the bath begins to
cool, and leaves the subject invigorated, calm, and in good
spirits.
- the subtle tutor, 2 potency – cast on a book. while you
will it, until the book is done, a quiet voice whispers the
words of the book into your ear. you can direct the voice
to repeat itself, to skip ahead, to skip back, and to resume
where it left off.
as you can see, reynaud copersley was a right fucker and if
he were around today he’d need his ass kicked.
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gifts of rock and fire
here’s another one. this one was written by one of those
larger-than-life world-travelling adventurers of the
twenties, a woman named adelaine north. at the end of her
adventuring career miss north was initiated into an order
of mystics and magi in egypt, and she retired to the riviera
to study and write. gifts of rock and fire is her memoir.
it’s moving and insightful and it contains three substantial
sorcerous spells.
- untying the knots of the wind, 3 potency – the local
weather changes, precisely as you direct. you control the
weather for a full day.
- jonah’s carriage, 4 potency – cast on the ocean. a
gigantic fish of white adamant, with diamond windows for
eyes, rises from the depths and opens its mouth for you to
board. it will take you by sea to any port in the world.
it’s sumptuously provisioned for a journey of up to several
weeks.
- the moon in the earth, 3 potency – cast on a fire. when
the fire goes out and the coals cool, each one will be a lump
of silver ore.
can you believe that shit?
the undisclosed history of the dread
covenant of hellfallow hall, a novel
this book was published in 1943 and it’s one of those
irritating books that pretends to be a novel when really
it’s a polemic. (so that’s good. at least one of these
damn wizard’s grimoires is irritating, i’d be pissed with
a capital pissed if none were.) the great wizardess isabel
estafen wrote it, but before she was especially great. it
contains three sorcerous spells.
- the divining glass, 2 potency – cast on a mirror, and name
a person aloud. that person’s image appears in the mirror,
as though someone were following her around with a camcorder.
- speaking silent words, 1 potency – write a sentence or two
on a piece of paper. your target hears those words in her
head, recognizably in your voice.
- eavesdropping on the past, 1 potency – name a time o’clock.
you hear in your head everything that anybody said, in your
current place, at the time you named.
whatever.
shit.
that’s not so very cool.
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we can do that kind of
the wartime grimoire of stephen bullherald
this one’s cool though. stephen bullherald sent it with
his son to france in 1916. it’s written in a clear and nononsense style and contains four very practical, pretty easy
spells of the sort we’re particularly jealous of. like check
out the fourth one.
- to stop bleeding, 1 potency – the wound doesn’t like close
or seal or disappear or anything, but the blood clots rapidly
and the bleeding stops.
- to hit your mark, 1 potency – cast on a gun. next time
you fire it, you will hit what you aimed at, all other
considerations aside. the spell is nullified if somebody
else fires the gun before you do.
- to hide and remain hidden, 1 potency – stomp a bootprint
into the dirt. As long as you can see the bootprint, even
out of the corner of your eye, you are silent and invisible.
- to stay safe in gunfire, 3 potency – until one hour passes,
no bullet can harm you.
how it is exactly that stephen bullherald’s son lost the book
and didn’t come home from france alive, no one knows. but i
hardly need to point out that it probably served him right,
wizard’s brat.
making magic items
the easiest type of magic item to make is called a suspended
spell. what you do is you take the spell and then instead
of casting it, you attach it to some physical object. the
pairing of spell and object should make sense, since in
order to release the suspended spell you have to do something
appropriate to the object. a good example is pharus’ folding
chair from the big hairy combat thing. he suspended fist of
the storm in a folding chair, and when he hit somebody with
it, the spell went off.
you decide yourself, when you suspend the spell, if only you
can release it, or if anyone who does the right thing can.
suspending a spell costs one extra point of potency and takes
only a few minutes.
next is potions, powders, salves, unguents, ointments,
tinctures, blah blah blah. there, you take the spell and you
invest some stuff with it. herbal pastes and concoctions are
traditional but anything goes. greasepaint is more and more
popular. anyway, choose a spell that makes sense for it,
but think flexible. invest the divining glass into grated
nutmeg and sprinkle it on the mirror, invest gunpowder with
to hit your mark and load bullets with it. anybody can use
a potion, if they know to. consider labelling it so that
somebody doesn’t sprinkle it in their eggnog. making potions
78
costs an extra point of potency per dose, and takes at least
an hour per dose too.
and then the big stuff, actual enchanted objects. that’s
like if the folding chair of the storm’s fury had unlimited
charges, or like the mirror were always a divining glass. it
should always take at least three or four times the potency
to enchant an object, plus require months or years, plus it
should depend on the correct celestial circumstances. other
than that, go hog wild.
hog wild sounds like: squee!
squee!
79
revenge of the killer puppies
sooner or later you know it’s going to come to this.
just too perfect. i don’t see how you can avoid it.
it’s
- instead of cold, werewolves are assimilated into human
society; instead of fucked up, they’re sly; instead of mean,
they’re ferocious; and instead of relentless, they’re dogged
(ha ha).
- they have different ferocious and dogged (ha ha) scores in
human form than they do in wolf form, and in wolf form they
range from 6 to 10, like demons, so that’s serious. oh, but
they can’t make assimilated into human society rolls at all
when they’re wolves of course.
- what is it that hurts werewolves? silver bullets, right?
garlic doesn’t? yeah, that’s it. silver bullets. i have
no earthly idea where somebody would get a silver bullet. if
your pcs claim to have some, ask them where the fuck they
got them and don’t let up until they admit that yeah, yeah,
you’re right, they couldn’t possibly actually have any, no
they were just trying to get away with it.
- if you feel like it, you can give individual werewolves
unique weaknesses or spiffs of their own. the moodier and
fucked upper the better, naturally. i’m thinking of one who
keeps her heart in a jackal-headed funary jar in her office,
that sort of thing.
- anyway, meanwhile, until you get your hands on some silver
bullets or the heart in the jar or what have you, whenever
werewolves change form, they immediately heal any injuries
they might have, plus they’re unkillable.
- werewolves can change form pretty much whenever you want
them to, usually a. when they’re in deep shit and the other
form will be better able to handle it, and b. when they’re
wicked hungry and the other form will be better able to
stalk, catch, and eat it. changing is instinctive, totally
out of their personal conscious control, but it happens when
it’s called for.
- werewolves are not happy. they aren’t ecowarriors or
anything else spiritually fulfilling. they go flipshit
under the full moon and eat their friends, and they know
that nobody will ever love them, really love them for what’s
inside. as a result they’re bitter, lonely, vindictive, and
full of hate.
- here’s a character sheet for a random werewolf.
i walk on silent paws under the moon
my name is deborah tyrone
assimilated into human society 1
sly 3
ferocious 3/8
dogged (ha ha) 2/7
i must pass my curse on to another before i may
be free. (hey, now there’s something fun
you could do to a pc...)
80
now this is key. do not fuck around with werewolves. make
them mean, vicious, terrible, and shocking. they are
humanity’s inhumanity incarnate, they are the ripper and the
hunter and jeffrey oscar-meyer-balogna-song dahmer. they
will fucking kill you and fucking eat you, i kid you not.
there’s no excuse for lame werewolves.
over there.
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don’t make me come
scenario: hey, i found this, you
wannit?
so poor pathetic gerald stebbins has been doing the ghoul on
the street thing. which is sad, but hell, there’s only so
much you can take of him sleeping curled up on your loveseat
with his skinny-ass ankles sticking out of the ratty afghan
he uses for a blanket and him getting up at all hours and
checking on the mousetraps again, slobbering like maybe
they’ve killed another snack for him since he checked ten
minutes ago, and would he please just go back the fuck to
sleep, it’s seven in the morning for crying out christ, not
that (he says) eating former rodents is at all even the real
thing, and you oughta try it sometime, it tastes goo-ood and
it’s more fun than bad crack cut 50-50 with soap flakes.
he says he’ll make it up to you, please don’t put him out on
the street, but he always says that and instead he just eats
your corn flakes and leaves gray infected toenail clippings
in your bathroom sink.
so whoda thunk when the feeble bastard shows up three weeks
later with the no shit choirboys’ ring?
briefly, the choirboys’ ring
the choirboys’ ring is an ugly like high school class ring
style ring, gold tone, with a big glass stone that’s not
quite the right color of red. instead of greek letters or a
motto or whatever, the design has the word choirboys around
the band. to look at it, it’s quite obviously worth shit
for money. it’s a demonic device, though, steeped in satanic
humours and imbued with their sinister sympathies. when you
wear it, what you do is touch somebody else’s skin with it
(shaking hands is perfect) and lean close to them and whisper
a short, simple, you-directed command in their ear. vote for
me, sleep with me, forget you saw me here, take a bullet for
me, give me your wallet, that kind of thing.
they don’t do it right away, as though mesmerized – no, it
sinks into their brain and they never think of it again,
until an opportunity presents itself. when it does, bang!
they do it.
(if you feel like it, you can have them roll relentless or
whatever to resist, or fucked up or whatever to notice that
they’re waiting for it, or whatever. it’s your clambake.)
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you bet your ass i wannit.
question is...
who else does?
pilchard jeffers’ widow, estranged
i am a master of forces occult and obscure
my name is erneztina jeffers, although i
usually use my maiden name, andrzaj.
learned 4
insightful 5
fierce 3
resolute 3
potency 8
my familiar is a big ol’ spirit-raven named
war.
ms andrzaj split with her husband ten years ago or so, and
took let’s say 40% of their little magical order with her.
she may have cursed him to death, and she knows to the one
what sorcerous and satanic artifacts he owned.
pilchard jeffers’ former pupil
i am a master of forces occult and obscure
my name is paul markson
learned 3
insightful 5
fierce 2
resolute 5
potency 3
i get 1 potency every time i have sex.
naturally, mr markson feels that he should inherit his
mentor’s books and paraphanelia. he may have murdered
pilchard for precisely that reason, or because pilchard was
an old prude and didn’t like the way his rising star was
carrying on. either way he too knows exactly what pilchard
owned.
it might be fun and twisted to play erneztina and paul as
secret ex-lovers from before the split, or even current
lovers, possibly conspiring. but enemies is fun too. the
choices, man, the choices!
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pilchard jeffers’ older son, a big
disappointment
i don’t kill puppies for satan, but sometimes i
audit people
my name is pilchard jeffers jr, but people call
me jeff
cold 1
fucked up 1
mean 1
relentless 1
evil 0
this many people have ever noticed me as a
human being, not just the shark in a suit
who wants to take their house away: 6
jeffers jr doesn’t have any idea what stuff his father owned,
but better, he has a list. odds are good that he wants his
estranged mother to get none of it, but on the other hand
they’d make excellent allies too. he may have murdered his
father in a fit of penis envy or whatever freudian thing.
the munson county scorched earth party
i am a master of forces occult and obscure
my name is matilda jeffers, but i prefer to be
called matt
learned 2
insightful 3
fierce 4
resolute 2
potency 2
i get 3 potency every time i personally affect
the outcome of a political election.
revenge is a dish best served right the fuck
now
my name is j. “hiroshima” bird
thorough 5
survivor 2
vengeful 3
driven 3
i have a fucking arsenal full of a fraction of
a gram of weaponized smallpox.
i serve the cold blind nameless god of science
my name is kev barret
cutting edge 5
mad 4
curious 2
objective 2
publishable material 4
i’m researching the effect of internetdelivered subliminal messages on borderline
personalities.
84
i don’t kill puppies for satan but sometimes i
stomp on people’s heads
my name is [email protected], i’m whacked
cold 1
fucked up 1
mean 2
relentless 1
evil 0
this many people have ever noticed me as
a human being, not just another frowny
emoticon on the chatboard: 1
kev, to whom i am fanatically devoted (which
i don’t find odd) can use a point of
publishable material to give me +1 mean for
an hour or so.
matt jeffers knew at least about the ring, and probably most
of the rest of her father’s stuff too. she may have murdered
him to get his power and because she hated him for his
radical (by comparison) just-right-of-center politics. oh
and no matter how they pester her, she won’t sleep with any
of the rest of her political party.
a small assignment of credit
if it weren’t for mr. ron “sorcerer” edwards, none of the
above people would have been related to / fucking each other.
okay but the real question is...
who even gives a hairy white rat’s ass who killed the old
fucker? not me. don’t even use this as an excuse to play
out some dumb agatha christie murder mystery lameness. “ah,
but what you didn’t realize, jiggo old fellow, you nor the
constablery neither, is that miss matilda jeffers is secretly
(dum-dum-tum) the butler!”
no.
the point is, your pcs have the ring, they love it, it’s fun
to play with in the bathtub, but all these other extremely
random weirdos keep showing up and trying to take it away
from them.
i can’t believe you were even considering the murder mystery
thing. weak.
85
oh, and the bad news, before i
forget
remember how the choirboys’ ring is a demonic artifact? the
bad news is that demons have, you know, plans for that kind
of thing. particularly, they give them to otherwise good
upstanding moral kind boring people, to – ready? – tempt
them to sin.
i’ll have the filet of soul, rare if you please
my name is kektak, junior arbiter of leeches
and maggots
cold 3
fucked up 3
mean 5
relentless 2
evil plenty
i’ve tempted this many people to sin and thus
condemned them to eternal torment: 2,464
i’m in charge of the choirboys’ ring.
kektak doesn’t want your pcs to keep the ring, because
they’re already condemned, right? if they commit sins with
it, so what? he doesn’t get any credit a-tall for tempting
them.
but, and this might be good for a giggle, if your pcs give it
to somebody, or maybe even if somebody manages to get it from
them by cunning or stealth, then they’ve tempted that person
to sin.
and have i made it perfectly clear yet what demons like to do
to pcs who scab on them?
86
appendix a: who hates ya, baby?
you’ll notice that there’s never any mention in the rules of
how to get new people to hate you. that’s because: use your
imagination god damn yez. mechanics would totally miss the
point. totally miss it.
that said, i’d think that the last thing you’d want to do is
add your friends to the stat. i mean, fuck man, they’re your
friends. what else you got going for you?
appendix b: but you can’t
you can screw your friends, and you can screw the pooch...
appendix c: killing vampires is
easy
...if a. you’re in the know and b. you’re forewarned and
well equipped and c. you have the wherewithal to hold a
supernaturally powerful uber-predator who personally survived
the civil war, the burning times, the age of enlightenment,
the third reich, the great depression, the renaissance,
the reformation, and the for fuck sake spanish inquisition
too, and who during that time killed people numbering in
the mid five digits, I mean all alone, no death squads or
crematoriums, with bare hands and fangs, can you imagine
the cunning and energy and ferocity, and you’d only make it
a very slightly larger five digit number, my mind boggles,
it makes pol pot look like mr for fuck sake fred h. rogers
– anyway but hold that voracious fucker bastard down until
sunrise.
i’d run.
appendix d: what
would
jesus do?
hang there whimpering and eventually die.
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