Naming The Faceless: A Dungeon Game
Naming The Faceless is a series of posts where I grab an RPG and roll up a character in it, blogging about the process. It’s intended to be a brief, non-exhaustive look at how players approach RPG texts, and also just a way for me to have a bit of fun blogging without feeling like I have to write An Article. You can find all of the posts in this series here.
Today I’m indulging myself by rolling up a character in my own system. A Dungeon Game is a Pay What You Want dungeon crawler intended to be very fast to pick up and play. My goal is for you to be able to make a character in about 5 minutes. Part of the reason I’m using my own game today is because this is my website and if I want to advertise my own things here I’m damn well going to do that, but part of it is that it’s been long enough since I made a character in the system that I think I’m able to approach the process almost like a new player would.
To that end, I’ll be using the PDF version available from itch rather than the free web version, which matches the print edition. People making use of the web version are more than likely going to be people who know me and my work and thus are at least a little bit au fait with OSR-style games. Conversely, people with the print edition are incredibly likely to be people I’ve given it to at conventions and zine fairs, and they’re much more likely to be coming to the game without any prior experience. I want to make sure that the text is easily navigable and makes sense.
I’m going to attempt to approach this is the same way I approach all the other books I look at on this blog, but since it’s my game it’s inevitable that I’m not going to be able to be entirely objective here. Yes, I’m my own biggest critic, but I’m also very close to the work. There’s a reason we pay editors rather than self-editing everything.
Let’s begin.
The first page of the game tells us that we are Adventurers who possess 2d6x10 silver pieces “which you can use to outfit yourself prior to the start of the adventure”. There’s a link to the Equipment section in the PDF, as well as a page reference for it (since we obviously can’t yet hyperlink a physical book). I’m very glad that I’ve chosen to do this sort of intertextual referencing throughout the book, though I do wonder if having this link to the Equipment section before any other part of character creation occurs is a smart idea. Will players roll their silver and jump straight to Equipment without making the rest of their character? Possibly.
Anyway. I have 70 silver pieces.
Below the introductory paragraph is a step by step guide to character creation:
- Roll Attributes
- Roll an Extra
- Determine Health
- Roll an Occupation
- Choose Scars
- (Optional) Learn rituals
- Name yourself
- Spend your silver
Let’s go in order.
Step 1: Roll Attributes
There are three attributes, Agility, Brawn, and Cunning. They do mostly what you’d expect them to do in this sort of game, with Cunning covering all of the traditional “mental” stats and being used for magic. It’s also used for things like spotting hidden things and being sneaky, rather than the more traditional dexterity stat (which is, obviously, Agility) so that it’s not just spellcasters who might want to have a good Cunning.
As is tradition, we generate them by rolling 3d6 in order. We then have the option of swapping two results, though I never do.
My attributes are:
Agility: 8
Brawn: 8
Cunning: 15
Since I know that I’m going to want to interact with the Rituals later in character creation (partly because magic is fun and partly because I want to play with every part of this process) I’m actually pretty happy that I have a high Cunning here.
Looking at these scores, and knowing how the game works, I do wonder if 3d6 down the line makes for slightly too-weak characters. It’s not a huge issue because Exertion exists, which lets you turn failed rolls into successes, but maybe it’s something that could be addressed. An easy fix is to change the weighting of the options in the next step, which I think I might next time I update the game.
Step 2: Roll an Extra
After rolling our attributes, we roll an extra. There’s no explanatory text here, just a list numbered 2 to 12. I would hope that new players can figure out that they need to use 2d6 to roll this, but there’s no explanation here. (The game began life as an incredibly stripped-down game aimed at people very familiar with OSR play, and has slowly morphed into something where I’m explicitly targeting people new to the genre entirely, so there are very likely more moments that just this one where the text is at odds with my current intentions about what it’s doing).
I rolled an 8, which gives me “+2d6 x 10sp”. If I were to change the weighting of this table it would instead increase one of my attributes by +1d3, but I’ll make this character as-written for the time being.
I roll a 7 again, giving me 70 additional silver pieces for a total of 140sp at the start of play.
Step 3: Determine Health
To determine our Health we roll 1d6 and add half our Brawn (rounded down). I rolled a 5 and have a Brawn of 8, so I start with 9 Health.
Step 4: Roll an Occupation
Our characters weren’t always adventurers, and we roll on this table to work out what we did before we started killing things for money. We always roll with advantage when performing tasks related to our occupation (and “advantage” is defined here in a footnote). Another editing note for myself here is that this text uses the word “vocation”, and it should be replaced with “occupation”.
I roll a 6, which means I used to be a courier.
Step 5: Choose Scars
Scars are the first unique part of the game we’ve hit in this process. Every character begins play with one historic Scar, and you’ll gain more of them each time you reach 0 health. The more Scars you have, the more chance you have of dying due to violence.
There’s an explanation of how Scars work in combat here (“Once per initiative round you can modify a roll you make in combat by +/- X, where X is the number of Scars you possess”) alongside a footnote explaining why it’s phrased as either a plus or a minus (“The rules for rolling dice in combat are on page 23. Because you’re often trying to roll between two numbers, it’s sometimes beneficial to reduce the result of your roll rather than add to it.”). The way Scars function in play is one of those things that seems more complex when it’s explained than it actually is in practice, and it’s a part of the game that I think some people do bounce off when trying to learn it from the text. I’ve done my best here to make it clear and I think the footnotes and internal links to the place where you can learn more about it help, but this is one of those areas where I’m too close to the text to know how well it’s working.
Anyway. To generate our Scar we roll 1d6 to select a body part, and then another 1d6 to work out what actually happened to it. This is the first time we’re going to have to flip pages, but thankfully it’s all linked and referenced for us.
My first roll is a 6, meaning my Scar is on my torso. My second roll is a 2, which says:
“Most bruises heal. This one didn’t. The skin where you were struck is permanently stained a dull shade of piss-yellow, with hints of brown and flecks of purple.”
Since I was a courier in a past life I think the obvious explanation for this is that I was kicked by a horse. That’s a fun little roleplaying thing (and has also reminded me that I need to write stats for horses, and that I need to make them horrible, because horses are terrifying animals).
Step 6: Learn Rituals
Our next step is optional, and it’s where we decided whether we want to try and learn magic or not. All characters can learn magic, but it carries a risk. You can start play with as many Rituals as you dare to learn, but trying to learn them might kill your character during creation. Here’s how it works:
To learn a Ritual, follow this procedure:
- Decide which aspect of yourself you will sacrifice to learn the Ritual: Health, Agility, Brawn, or Cunning. Roll 1d3 and reduce your max Health or chosen attribute by that amount. If this reduces your health or attribute to 0 or lower, you have died. Make a new character.
- Roll 1d3 to determine what kind of Ritual you know: Phrase (1), Sigil (2), or Ceremony (3).
- Roll 1d20 once on each of the Word Lists on the next page to determine the words that form your Ritual.
- Repeat this process for as many Rituals as you would like to attempt to learn.
Since Cunning is used to cast Rituals, and mine is quite high (15), I’m going to try and learn at least one. My Agility and Brawn are both sitting at 8 and I really don’t want to reduce them any further. I can choose to sacrifice some health, though, and that’s appealing. Maybe I’ll try to learn two Rituals, spending Health for one and Cunning for another.
My first 1d3 roll is a 3, reducing my Health from 9 to 6. I roll 1d3 again, getting another 3 to determine that I’ve learned a Ceremony. (The difference between a Phrase, Sigil, and Ceremony isn’t described here and the text also doesn’t tell us where we can learn this, so I need to fix that). Then I roll 2d20 on the next page to find that the Ceremony I know is “Rotting Peace”. It will be up to me to figure out what this does in play.
Back to the start of the process. Another 1d3 and my Cunning is reduced by 1 to 14, which is an excellent result. This time I learn a Phrase, “Concealing Stone”. I’m tempted to press my luck and try to learn a third Ritual, since I have Cunning to spare, but I think I’ll stop here and instead be content with the fact that I have a nice high score with which to try and actually use these things in play.
Step 7: Name Yourself
This is the point at which I wish I’d written some name lists for this game, because I’m always bad at naming characters. A quick visit to an online random name generator gives me “Diya”.
Step 8: Spend Your Silver
The final step is to spend my starting silver. The equipment page tells me that I have Inventory slots equal to my Brawn (8) minus my armour’s AC. I guess the first thing I want to do is to buy some armour so that I know how much stuff I can carry.
Right now the only difference between Light, Medium, and Heavy armour in the game is the cost and the AC it provides, plus how that impacts your ability to carry equipment. Since I’m quite weak I don’t really want to grab Heavy armour, because that would reduce my inventory down to a single slot. Likewise Medium armour will only give me 3 slots to play with. So instead I’ll spend 30sp on Light armour, giving me an AC of 3 and 5 inventory slots to fill. I have 110sp left to spend, and that itself is going to take up another inventory slot, so unless I spend everything I actually only have 4 slots to play with. Thankfully my main weapon won’t take up a slot, since I’m carrying it.
I spend 8sp on a Medium melee weapon (we’re going to call it a staff, since we get to skin our weapons in whatever manner we want and I’m basically playing a wizard) and then I also spend 12sp on a Large ranged weapon (which is slow to reload but ignores enemy armour).
I also buy a small metal mirror (10sp), 50 feet of rope (10sp), and a flask of holy water (25sp), leaving me with 45sp remaining and a full inventory. I haven’t got any food with me, so hopefully one of my companions will be bringing some along.
If I wanted to I could spend 10sp on a second backpack, which would give me another 4 inventory slots (half my Brawn) but also give me a -2 penalty to initiative rolls. If my Agility weren’t already quite low I’d be tempted to do that, but it is, so I won’t.
And that’s it. I have a character.
Going through the process was pretty painless, and didn’t require any flipping back and forth through the book, which I’m considering a win. You can actually make most of your character just by reading the book in order. It’s only once you’ve learned Rituals and it’s time to equip yourself that you suddenly have to jump forward in the book to the Equipment section, and there’s no real guidance for players. I might spend some time writing some start equipment sets at different price points that mimic some traditional classes, since your “class” in this game is largely defined by what you’re carrying and whether or not you decided to learn any magic. But all in all I’m happy with how this works, and with how fast it is. Doing this has also helped me identify some things I might want to change, both about how some things are written and how the book presents its information, so this was a valuable exercise.
Next time I’ll go back to looking at a game I didn’t write. Please do suggest something if you feel like it!