The Artifact RPG

For the last two days I’ve toured the largest cave system in the world, Mammoth Caves. For an explanation on how to use these stats, check out the original Survival Games post.

Cave
A cave can act as shelter for PCs or any number of creatures. Few are likely to travel deep into the cave past the line where light from the outside starts to fail but may be chased further into the cave. Elephants have been seen entering a cave to get at minerals in the rock and dirt. Humans have a deep fascination with caves. In Mammoth Caves, Native Americans traveled deep into the cave using only bundles of reeds for torches. Some areas of the cave floor are covered in these burnt reeds. In some areas that modern cavers are only just exploring with modern equipment, they will find a footprint or a torch of someone who had been there 2-4000 years ago. Why did they travel so deep? We don’t really know.

Players may be tasked with finding ancient artifacts left behind or the cave may surface in a different place, providing a route to travel through.

Surmount Method: Squeezing through tight passages, climbing over rubble strewn floors, up and down rock faces, swimming through subterranean rivers.
Surmounting Attribute: Constitution

Surmounting Attribute: Strength (for Climbing)

SP 1 per 10 meters

Hazards

Exertion
For every failed Constitution or Strength roll the characters face an exertion hazard. They get a -2 CDF to Str and a -2 CDF to Con (or 5-6% of the attribute).  CDF penalties accumulate until the characters can recover for a period of time. While recovering, the player rolls for the character’s Con. A Full result means 1 point of Str and Con are recovered. A 1/2 result means that 2 points are recovered. A 1/4 result means 3 points and a 1/8 result means 4 points recovered. If the CDF penalties exceed their Con the character must be rescued off the rock face or fall if they fail another Str roll.

Random Hazard

For every survival round the GM should roll once on the following table.

Roll 1D100

Tight Passage
Characters must crawl through very tight tunnels to move deeper into the cave. Large packs and equipment must be either disassembled and dragged through or left behind. Passages are so tight that characters may need to exhale to fit through. Characters must make a Psyche roll (willpower) to make it through.

Loose Rock
Loose rocks of various sizes cover the passage floor. Traveling over them is treacherous. While slips and falls are minor hazards the injuries can build up over time. Characters must make an Agility roll. If failed they get a -2 CDF to Con (or 5-6% of the attribute).

Dome Pit
A vertical shaft with a dome at the top intersects the passage. The shaft is 1D6 meters wide and may be too wide to jump across. There is also a 25% possibility that the passage is too short to allow a person to jump. Characters will have to devise a method of crossing.

Vertical Climb
A vertical shaft continues the passage either up or down for 1D10x2 meters. Use the Rock Wall obstacle stats for this part of the passage.

Confusion
The characters must make a Subterranean Navigation skill roll or the party is thrown off course for a period of time. Add 2d6 to the remaining SP of the obstacle.

Tunnel Splits
The Tunnel splits into two main passages. If the players have a specific goal to reach, they must pick one of the tunnels. There may not be any way of knowing which tunnel is the correct one unless someone has already mapped the tunnels. If someone has mapped them, make a Subterranean Navigation skill roll to pick the right one.

Tunnel Ends
The tunnel abruptly ends, possibly by getting so narrow that a human cannot pass through. If there is a goal the players have to reach that has not been accomplished, the GM may decide that there was a branch in the path some way back, possibly obscured by a rock or a rock formation.

Underground River
Most caves are formed by rivers, in this cave’s case the river has carved another passage that is still full or mostly full of water. To keep going the characters will have to swim through the river. There is a 50% chance that the characters will have to hold their breath for 2D10 meters along the river’s path before they emerge again in a dry passage. Players will not know how far they have to go underwater. Con roll is required for every turn underwater to stay focused. If the Con roll is failed they must seek air.

Defenses and Weaknesses
10% Chance Defenses: Foul Air
Caves may not always have breathable air. Methane, Co2 or other gasses may make air unbreathable in some or all of the cave.

I mentioned that I would take the posts on food in survival games and put them together into a whole concept so here it is. This post is going to take carrying food, rationing and foraging and work them into one system for reference. I’ve talked about why I went with the numbers in the earlier posts so if you’re reading this and want to know why something is working the way it is, here are some links that will explain.

Foraging Carrying Food Rationing

One of the core concepts of making something fun is being able to win. Without the proper mechanics to deal with food problems, the tests all become an issue of loosing. That is to say, running out of food. To fix this, any RPG food theory has to have an element of choice and the possibility for the players to improve their situation.

Food Units

When traveling, the main concerns about food is, how much can the characters bring with them and how fast do they eat it? For simplicity, it is usually best to deal with food in the number of days the characters can sustain themselves so we will use days of food as a unit. However it will also be necessary to break those days up into meals and even half meals when rationing. For our purposes, there are three meals to every day of food and two half meals for every meal.

Traveling

A character can comfortably carry four days of food. This usually takes up one third of their encumbrance if your game uses it.  If the player chooses they can carry more food in their packs and make their supply eight days but the food takes up two thirds of their packs. The GM should severely limit what items they can take with them at this point, only allowing for two large items like a two man tent and a sleeping bag (or items of like size) or ten small items like drinking cups and candles. A character can carry up to twelve days of food but they cannot carry anything else.

This assumes that the characters will be packing food that is lightweight and as calorie dense as is possible. This does require specific knowledge of foods. If the GM wishes to make a skill for this that may allow the players to pack slightly more food in their packs it adds to the players enjoyment of the task. They get to “win” by putting out effort and doing better than the baseline. Any extra food would be on the meal or half meal level instead of days of food.

Rationing

The figures I’ll give here are for The Artifact RPG because rationing has to have an effect on the characters to make it a choice that the players have to think about. To modify it to your system you can read my reasoning on the subject in the Rationing Mechanics post.

When the players decide to ration food to make it go further, it will have an impact on the characters. Characters can comfortably live off five half meals a day (just under three full meals a day). If they ration under those five half meal, they get a -1 CDF to CON for every half meal missed. This minus builds each day until it is offset by eating more food and getting positive CDFs to offset the deficit. If they eat more than five half meals, they get a +1 CDF to CON for that day for every half meal they eat. For every extra half meal over six, the character must roll against their CON to see if they can eat it. Once they fail this CON roll they cannot eat any more for the day.

If the characters CON CDF minus effectively brings their CON to zero, every two days they will loose one Hit Point if they do not bring their CON CDF up.

Foraging

Characters may forage for food and water to offset what they need to bring with them. A skilled forager can find enough food for a day in a matter of hours while a novice forager may only find a half meal a day.

For every two hours of foraging or each Surmount Point they pass, the player may roll against the character’s foraging skill. Use the table below to determine how many half meals the character finds.

However not all environments are the same and many harsher environments will have a difficulty modifier for the foraging roll.

Dessert -50
Tundra -40
Plains -30
Winter Forest -30
Swamp -20
Forest -0
Jungle +10
Urban +10 (lots of food in garbage and dumpsters)

Another aspect of foraging is that some of the food may be unfamiliar to characters not native to the environment and not accustomed to foraging. Foraged food can include bitter roots, insects and in an urban environment food taken from the trash. To a character without a foraging skill, they must make a PSY roll (or generically willpower) to be able to eat the food.

Conclusion

In a game about survival, food and water are critical elements of the tension of a story. If the game is not about survival, this is all unnecessary complexity. Make sure the survival aspect of the game is important to your story before using these rules or they will only slow down play. Conversely, if it is important, give the players time to think about their choices and make it part of the story.

Player – Yeah, we’ve got food.

GM – You have enough for the whole trip?

Player – Um, yeah, sure we do.

No one wants to deal with tracking consumables. It’s not fun. Most consumables just get ignored anyway. The player says “I’ve got a hundred, if I don’t bother to erase one or two, it won’t matter.” The GM says “Okay mark it off your equipment.” and hopes the players are keeping an exact accounting. It’s good enough in most games because the players are usually good about being accurate with Hit Points and money but if you try to add any more accounting and everyone starts to gloss over it as unimportant.

But what about when those consumables, like food, is important to the story of a survival game? Even if you tell players it’s important, they don’t want to have to deal with it. Maybe it’s the modern day concept of food that makes tracking food hard. After all if you’re hungry, just pop over to the kitchen and eat something.

The GM can try to keep track of it but it’s not a lot of fun and for some reason the players feel that the GM is just trying to doom them by forcing them to run out of food. The players don’t buy into the idea of food scarcity.

Breaking it down

One of the problems in tracking food is that we don’t eat in units. We eat in meals but how much is a meal? How much volume, how much mass? Backpackers have to think about this question a lot and usually think about how much food they need for the day in terms of mass (or weight). Backpackers fine tune their food for the most calories for it’s weight and it would make sense that an adventurer would do something similar. Ultralight backpackers talk about carrying 0.7 Kg (1.5 Lb) of food per day but most backpackers say that’s too little to subsist on comfortably. It does give us a good baseline though of what a minimum for an active person’s needs.

So then, if we just go by mass, if a character carried 25 Kg of food, they could carry 35 days worth of food. Unfortunately, that’s pretty unrealistic. The reason is that although the food is light, it’s bulky. In my experience when I would go backpacking we could carry four days of food comfortably and we figured that if we wanted to, we could conceivably pack for eight days but that would be almost all we were carrying besides our tent and sleeping bag.

This is our second benchmark then, lets say 4 days of optimally chosen food takes up one third of a large backpack but only has a mass of 2.8-4 Kg.

So what does that do for us? A large backpack represents almost the limit of what a human can practically carry as far as bulk. The GM can now say “How much of your pack(s) are you devoting to food? Four days takes up a third of the pack.” Negotiating a pack’s contents should be a little more manageable for the players. Now everyone knows they can travel for four, eight or twelve days. Just don’t forget to bring water. . .

Next up, Rationing Mechanics.

For an explanation on how to use these stats, check out the original Survival Games post.

Swamp
Water soaked ground, small islands, shallow water, along with plant and animal life all make survival in a swamp hazardous. Although there is plenty of water around, it’s unlikely that it’s drinkable without treatment.

Surmount Method: Slogging through mud and mire, mapping out safer paths, travel by boat.
Surmounting Attribute: Constitution

Surmounting Attribute: IQ (for mapping)

SP 1 per Km

Hazards

Exertion
For every failed Constitution roll the characters face an exertion hazard. While moving through mud the character has to exert themselves this leads to muscles getting tired. They get a -2 CDF to Str and a -2 CDF to Con (or 5-6% of the attribute).  CDF penalties accumulate until the characters can recover for a period of time. While recovering, the player rolls for the character’s Con. A Full result means 1 point of Str and Con are recovered. A 1/2 result means that 2 points are recovered. A 1/4 result means 3 points and a 1/8 result means 4 points recovered. If the CDF penalties exceed their Con the character must be rescued off the rock face or fall if they fail another Str roll.

Exposure
When using Con as a Surmount attribute, the characters are charging through water and mud. Boots and cloths become heavy and wet making travel more difficult -2 CDF to Str and a -2 CDF to Con. Being exposed to the contaminated water also exposes the character to disease (see disease rules The Artifact RPG).

Random Hazard

For every survival round the GM should roll once on the following table.

Roll 1D100

Insect Bites
Biting insects swarm the characters. They may just be a nuisance (CDF -1 PSY per bite) or they may carry disease 5% chance. Each character can roll against Reflex to avoid or swat the bugs. On a failed roll 2d10 insects bite the character. On a full success roll 1d10 insects bite the character. For a 1/2 column the character gets 1d6 bites. For 1/4 and 1/8 rolls the character gets no bites. Specially designed clothing with netting over exposed skin or vac-suits will protect against bites.

Poisonous insect Bites
Venom usually causes irritation and pain at first (CDFs -1 PSY -1 CON per bite) but if bitten repeatedly can cause illness or death (CON CDF drops CON to zero) and they may carry disease 5% chance.  Each character can roll against Reflex to avoid or swat the bugs. On a failed roll 2d10 insects bite the character. On a full success roll 1d10 insects bite the character. For a 1/2 column the character gets 1d6 bites. For 1/4 and 1/8 rolls the character gets no bites. Specially designed clothing with netting over exposed skin will protect against bites.

Animal Encounter
The characters are traveling toward an animal that is sleeping or hiding so does not hear them coming. The startled animal may attack. GM’s choice of animal.

Confusion
The lead character must make a Land Navigation skill roll or the party is thrown off course for a period of time. Add 2d6 to the remaining SP of the obstacle.

Animal path
A number of animals travel through the undergrowth and have cleared a path. All characters get to reduce twice the SP this survival round.

Rain
Rain makes surfaces slick, makes clothing heavy, makes soil muddy and may damage unprotected equipment causing rust and corrosion. Characters get a CDF of -5 to PSY and -1 to CON.  Characters can protect against this by making shelter.

Defenses and Weaknesses
30% Chance Weakness: Boat
Using a boat doubles the SP that can be reduced per roll when using IQ as the Surmount Attribute.

Defenses: Land Vehicles
Moving a land vehicle through dense undergrowth requires 10 x the number of SP.