Stu

This on-going set of scenarios is a sincere, heartfelt ripoff of the old TV show Millennium. The show followed the investigations and probable mental deterioration of Frank Black, a possibly psychic former FBI profiler and potential recruit for a millennial apocalypse cult. A little dark for network TV, the show only ran three seasons.

Player characters will be members of the Ouroboros Group, a private investigation and security firm with some heavy expertise in criminal psychology and a reputation for solving cases with occult or outre angles. The scenarios operate in the present day, in a world very close to the real one. There may be supernatural powers and principalities, but it's not a Harry Dresden-style spooky disneyland where wizards advertise in the paper and werewolves run for mayor. The setting shoots for low-key, gritty psychological realism.

The rules system will be Nemesis, freely available here. Nemesis is in the One Roll Engine family of games, which also includes Reign, Godlike, and a few other titles. ORE uses a pool of d10s to resolve actions. You roll the dice and look for matches. The number on the matching dice tells you how well you did, and the number of matching dice tells you how quickly you did it. Sure, it's a gimmick, but it's engaging and fun. Nemesis also includes the Madness Meters, a feature imported from Unknown Armies. Rather than a simple system for modeling deteriorating sanity, as in Call of Cthulhu, the Madness Meters track four aspects of mental trauma. As characters confront awful things in the game, they become traumatized or hardened. Players must adapt their style of play as their characters are changed by their experiences. It nicely models the gritty psychology of the setting.

These scenarios will be played on quiet evenings at the shop, so they will not be obscenely perverse. But due to the dark subject matter, I'd be uncomfortable playing with kids or especially goofy adults. I will unquestionably be running some awesome fun Chill or Call of Cthulhu soon, and will be delighted to scare the boojoobies out of an all-ages group, but this isn't the game for that.

If this sort of thing sounds fun, PM me here and we an talk about characters. It seems like it might take longer to pull this one together than Vampire Wars, or some of the other, more pregenerated scenarios. These will be custom jobs. I'll keep posting for those as we take our time on these.