Encounters in Sick Country

Like backwoods, or badlands, sick country is a way to describe a place. There are patches of sick country scattered through the Land of Still Waters, some huge and well-know, helping shape the boundaries of nations, others tiny and ephemeral.

Boundaries of sick country are sometimes vague, sometimes well-defined. They shift, tidally, as the forces in the sick country wax and wane. Locals know the boundary signs of any nearby sick country well and often have extensive myths or traditions regarding them.

Though borders may shift, most sick country has a definite center or focus. Here the virulence of the place intensifies and creatures driven from the settled frontier shelter. Often this locus was a city of the ancient world whose ruins may still be seen from afar. Travelers through sick country would do well to give these relics wide berth.

The largest known sick regions bear the names of the ancient cities at their epicenters: Boston, New York, Toronto, and Montreal. The nation of Jorvik has many smaller regions within it whose borders are well-patrolled. Northern Vye contains Ottawa, and the southern shore of Acadia is blighted by Portland.

What do you encounter?

Roll three Fate dice. At the edge add another die and discard the lowest. Deep in sick country add another die and discard the highest.

Fate dice show 2 blank, 2 +, and 2 - sides.

+3: Settlement

+2: Wanderers

+1: Animals

0: Landscape

-1: Phenomenon

-2: Beasts

-3: Monstrosities

If you want to roll for encounter distance:

+1: Immediate: Ambush; stumbled upon; exits cover nearby.

0: Sighting: Raised dust or smoke; against the horizon; sounds.

-1: Hint: Trail or spoor; remains of a camp; aftermath of a battle or hunt; territorial markings.

Inhabitants

 

Even sick country may be settled, though sparsely, and as close to the edge of safer lands as possible. Land here is cheap or unclaimed, the law is scarce, and there are opportunities for those brave or desperate to seize them.

This section is applicable to both Settlements and Wanderers.

Two dice to determine how do they live.

At the borders of sick country, roll three dice and discard the lowest - in the depths, discard the highest of three. Consider rolling twice and combining the results to get a more nuanced or intense motivation.

+2: There are those who intentionally travel through sick country as benefactors: missionary or Ellisian walker; hermit; messenger; mercenary.

+1: Settlers having some degree of success: farmers; merchants; bandits & toll-takers; an outpost of a nearby borderland or nation.

0: These people are struggling: scavengers; living off limited supplies; paying fealty and tithes to some nearby settlement; failing and likely doomed.

-1: Hunters venture into sick country for many reasons: trappers; trophy hunters; furriers; exterminators. Those passing through unsettled lands should be wary they do not spring some forgotten hunter's trap.

-2: Aside from the natural hazards of these lands, anyone living in sick country is unlikely to be missed in civilization. They attract abductors: the autumn people; bounty hunters; cultists hunting for recruits and sacrifices; a witch of the wastes.

And one die for why are they here?

+1: Seeking opportunity: indebted; cheap land; exploration; salvage.

0: Long-time inhabitants: born here; making it work; delusional; infectious and unwilling to return to civilization.

-1: Exiles: Displaced; usurped; apostates or heretics; fugitives from the law.

Settlements

Structure - two dice

+2: Manor

+1: Homestead

0: Village

-1: Hamlet

-2: Campsite or hut

What state is it in - two dice

+2: Heavily fortified

+1: Under construction or temporary

0: Kept in decent repair; perhaps walled

-1: Re-purposed or adapted from other structures

-2: Crumbling; ruined; or badly damaged

Then roll on inhabitants to find out who lives there.

Wanderers

 

Wanderers may be: displaced from their homes and looking to settle; Glist; long-time nomads; just arriving in sick country; utterly lost; taking a dangerous shortcut; trying to hide.

Animals

Normally these creatures are benign, but many are host to sicknesses which may cause unusual behavior. An encounter with otherwise normal animals may serve to unnerve travelers, or restock their supplies.

Two dice:

+2: Foragers: escaped horse or ghast; wild sheep; deer; trollizard.

+1: Birds: ravens; sparrows; hawk or owl; gulls.

0: A swarm of insects: caterpillars; moths; roasps or roaches; ants.

-1: Rodents: squirrels; rats; rabbits.

-2: roll on Beasts.

Landscape

 

Much of sick country appears normal, like the land that surrounds it. The are regions though where even the earth seems to take ill. Often these places are known to and named by the surrounding natives - Toadwood, Norman's Rot, the Aching Cliff.

Three dice.

At the borders, roll four and drop the lowest. In the depths, roll four and drop the highest.

+3: This land offers respite: wax reeds well-adapted to any nearby sicknesses; a walker grove; a seemingly empty and stocked shelter, well-hidden; a length of ancient self-repairing road is clear and easy to travel.

+2: Teeming with life: obscenely plump and verdant plants, humid and heavily scented; swarms of flies or rats or birds with no obvious food source; fearless and hyperactive wildlife; roiling mist full of unseen chirps, hoots, and squeals.

+1: Passing through tended lands suggests a settlement nearby: farms; trails; orchards; pasture.

0: There are some plants which seem to thrive in the sick country and their abundance should serve as a warning to travellers: willow; sunflowers; pigweed; mustard.

-1: A wasteland of: parched dead trees; twisting thorn scrub; scorched and glass-like barrens; rusted ruins.

-2: This water is: vibrantly wrong color; stagnant and fetid; slick with oil and toxins; clear and still but utterly devoid of life.

-3: Blighted with: fungus and slime molds; miasma; rift in the earth; ethereally poisoned.

Phenomenon

Higher numbers are not necessarily good or safe, but they can be more easily avoided and might yield salvage if investigated.

Two dice.

At the borders, roll four and drop the lowest. In the depths, roll four and drop the highest.

+2: Haunts are warded regions created generations ago that try to scare the curious away from the dangers they hold. They send out periodic ethereal scouts to keep abreast of what's scary these days and manifest them with a variety of illusions and shifting facades.

This haunt: broods over a great plague; is slowly breaking down; has turned malevolent; might reward or bribe those who brave it.

+1: An ancient building: perfectly preserved; partially buried or obscured; active with magic and guardians; finally succumbing to the centuries.

0: Roll on the sickness table. This place is rife with the result.

-1: Zones of ethereal flux in which magic is: dead; wild; empowered; sentient.

-2: Radiation lingers in this area. It is a pernicious threat often undetected until one is deep within its boundaries. The animals and plants here are warped; the place glows faintly in the darkness; headaches and nausea begin quickly; everything appears normal to the naked senses.

Beasts

These creatures pose some risk to travelers and settlers. They are not necessarily hostile, though many of them are hungry or diseased.

Two dice:

+2: Feral animals have lost much of their fear of humans: wight; wild dogs; trollizard; cat.

+1: Most predators will only attack humans if they are hungry or threatened: wolves; coyotes; bears; bobcat.

0: Scavengers: dire rats (these are descended from Gambian pouched rats); wild dogs; hop crow; amphisbaena.

-1: Garoulin: regular garoulin; wolf-garoulin half-breeds; look like dogs but are smart as average garoulin; magic-using.

-2: Roll on Monstrosities.

Monstrosities

Three dice:

+3: Chimera: their artistries; their servants; or they themselves.

+2: Fey other than beguilers are somewhat less common in sick country but not unknown: sprite; goblin; gnome; nymph.

+1: Undead can rise spontaneously or are sometimes released by cultists: zombie; ghoul; wraith; revenant.

0: Lesser thaaskith roam wild here, escaped from or released by the cults. Amphisbaena; jaculus; basilisk; tatzelwurm; cerastes; or cockatrice.

-1: Fargone, or something on its way there: viscerid; luxpuck; tallow; ogre.

-2: Beguilers, the succubi and inccubi, are known to hunt the sick country for the weak and undefended. They may be: whole; decayed; traveling with thralls; recently fed.

-3: Greater thaaskith; rampaging lindorm; medusa on a vision quest; naga travelling between temples; samaelisk, possibly with converts.

Sick

Unsurprisingly, things encountered in sick country are often sick. For any encounter, you may use this chart as many times as you like.

Roll three dice to determine the nature of the sickness:

+3: Maniacal: frenzied & murderous; screeching & terrified; gasping & ecstatic; relaxed & psychopathic.

+2: Stupefied: idiot; animalistic; delirious; forlorn.

+1: Blind: cataracts; seeping eye holes; put out; eyes look fine but don't focus.

0: Disfigured: hunched; spindly; twisted; palsied.

-1: Diseased: leprous & rasping; fevered & sallow; bloated & oozing; wheezing & hacking.

-2: An old plague: clear plastic skin; partially ossified; cysts & vestigial limbs; ethereal siren (agonizingly loud for the afflicted and anyone sensitive, attracts attention in the ether).

-3: Fargone: luxpuck (skeletal and luminous); ogre (rippling muscle and insatiable hunger); tallow (bones soften, flesh flows); viscerid (must survive on the harvested organs of others).

A fourth die can determine how contagious the sickness is.

 

+1: Non-contagious: congenial; dormant; too specialized to host.

0: Moderate: wounds or injection; consumption; handling or grappling; imbued in an object.

-1: Virulent: airborne; bodily fluids; ethereal; skin contact.

Even non-physical ailments can be contagious in sick country.

Reactions

If you want a quick behavior, roll one die:

+1: Ignores, possibly curious

0: Observes, possibly stalks

-1: Aggressive, probably attacks

For a more nuanced behavior this encounter will tend towards, consider rolling three dice on this table. You can add a die and drop the lowest on the edge of the sick country, or add a die and drop the highest deep in it. Player actions and attitudes can guide these reactions.

	Initially appear	and soon turn	because they are
+	Welcoming	Helpful	Principled
0	Cautious	Indifferent	Hungry
-1	Threatening	Aggressive	Afraid

Fate Vis Major Playtest Characters

Piecemeal over the past few days, I've been converting the characters used in the first playtest of my homebrew system for the Vis Major setting over to Fate Core. It was surprisingly easy from a system perspective - way too much of that time was spent trying to find nice little quotes to put on the character sheets.

Also spent more time than usual for a playtest on the character sheets themselves. I really want to grab the group with these, and I hope that making it look like a "real game" will help with that. They're done up as trifold legal-sized sheets, single-sided, in a Google presentation. Playtest is this Thursday!

Skills

The skill list is customized for Vis Major. I'll post the full list at some point in the future but here's a summary.

• Athletics, Deceive, Empathy, Fight, Notice, Provoke, Shoot, Stealth, and Will are handled just like core.
• Physique was renamed Brawn, Burglary was renamed Thief, and Rapport was renamed Charm, but they work basically the same. I just like one-word skills.
• There are three magic skills: Blood, Ether, and Gnosis. Each of these has some limited stand-alone benefit, so it's not a waste tossing a +1 or +2 into them. However, there are Aspects that grant them new uses, so if you're putting a +3 or +4 in one of these you will probably also be taking one of those.
• Contacts became Clout, representing not only who you know but your standing within your various affiliations and capacity to pull rank.
• Resources became Trade, which is your ability to apply your skills to making money, and is another one-word skill.
• Then there's Gambit. I'm really just going to have to see how this plays out, but it's your capacity to plan ahead for potentially outrageous circumstances, your machinations, and your perfect bits of gear you happen to have. It will likely allow for a lot of retconning by the players.

Lore, Investigate, and Drive/Ride are not on the list. Lore is determined by your Aspects, Investigate I plan to do with challenges, and Ride will be handled with Empathy, Charm, or Provoke.

Aspects

Unlike Fate Core, I felt the Aspects on these sheets needed a little more explanation than a single phrase. We have a sense of what a "Fireman" or "Librarian" would be invoked for, but "Aleph" or "Acadian Walker" aren't immediately evident, even though they're common enough in the setting. So a couple fragments to provide an archetype and perhaps a quote.

The magic aspects needed some detailing too since I rather wanted the facts that "your blood is independently alive" or "you can blow up golems" to be staring the players in the face constantly.

There are some blank Aspects left for the players to fill in. Only one character got a personality trait of "Mousy" assigned, and that's only because she was played so memorably that way in the last round of playtests.

Stunts

I've only played Fate once, and it was actually FAE, so we'll have to see if these stunts feel balanced. I'm using an alternate initiative system based on Marvel Heroic Roleplaying where you basically just choose who goes after you, so some of the stunts are based off that to give the decisions more weight.

Then there are some that further enhance magic skills, and a few left blank to fill in at the players' discretion.

Extras

There are no plans to use weapon and armor ratings, so there's just some simple lists of what they're wearing and wielding. I'm hoping that having some of the aspects deal with specific types of weapons will be sufficient. Other gear is suggested by their Aspects.

I listed out some specific foods they're carrying instead of generic "rations" in an attempt to reinforce cultural identities. A common theme I've noticed in works of fantasy that resonate longer is the author tends to describe the foods the characters encounter in greater detail. Tolkien dwells on dishes, and I often think of this bit from Narnia:

"And immediately, mixed with a sizzling sound, there came to Shasta a simply delightful smell. It was one he had never smelled in his life before, but I hope you have. It was, in fact, the smell of bacon and eggs and mushrooms all frying in a pan."

I've gotten a bit obsessive about the food situation in Vis Major, but it's an important way to delineate cultures.

Then there are mounts for most characters. I couldn't find any rules for managing mounts in Fate so I'm just going to wing it. One of the characters has an imp servitor - this is a more complex Extra that I felt was worth knocking his Refresh down by 1 for. Note none of the other magic stuff costs Refresh, just skills and aspects.

Stress & Consequences

The only thing abnormal here is that the Physical stress track is build on the combination of Blood and Brawn, and the Mental on Ether and Will. This is one of the reasons it can be nice to "dump" a point or two into those skills.

Potions

Extracted and stored magic forces in various solutions and salves. Potions are a relatively cheap resource that can get you +1 on a roll, but if you can hold off on dipping into your stock, you can store up enough to try and imbue or enhance an item with them.