DaimonGames : yet another design blog

Some questions and answers with Gregory, from his last adventure with City of Judas.

The first question was about equipment, with characters looking for a map and for gifts to present to the elders of the village they were traveling to…
Gregory added a nice touch by asking that the gift roll would be made at the end, when actually showing up at the presence of the elders.

NOTA : I, at first, thought they should have gotten a map but then thought that those items were rare and mostly very expensive at the time so I decided that, as rookies still, the IF wouldn’t invest so much in them…for now at least.
I called for a Equipment move and Azim scored a 7-9, so he could find a map but had to pay some extra gold for it (-1 equipment).

As for Grégoire, he had the very good idea to buy some presents for the Bersaba’s authorities, so both of them spend the rest of the first day around the numerous bazaars and souks of Jerusalem. They even witnessed to a christian flagellant procession towards the Mount of Olives.
NOTA : concerning the Grégoire’s request, I didn’t want to have him check his equipment move now as I thought it would be more funny/interesting to have it roll when he’ll give it to the village’s elder. I thought that maybe he could have choosen poorly the gift and maybe anger the Elder if he rolled 6- for example.

I think the call to roll Equipment at the end of the trip might be interesting, but you need to remember that the score might change.
Now, if you roll it from the start, the player knows if they have enough (i.e. spending two holds for a significant purchase), if the present is nothing special (on a 7-9) or perhaps just totally wrong on a 6-… so the player knows, the character doesn’t, so they’ll present their gifts also on a 6-.

If you and the players would like to roll only at the end of the mission, write down the score of Equipment, reduce it of 1 (for the usage), then roll at the end - or even write a little custom move for it!

Then there was a question about poison:

So…the map was really usefull to them as Azim’s player described how it’s got many places indicated to rest during the hottest part of the day and to find good shelter for the more than chilly nights (probably a map maide by an old pilgrim) but one day as Azim was looking at it at mid-day, he didn’t notice the scorpion crawling under the map and before he realized it stung him.
NOTA : the scorpion was the consequence of his 7-9 face danger test, it was a soft move at first as Azim spotted the crawly but failed at another Face Danger+Edge check. So I turned it into a hard move and had him loose 2 or 3 health (I don’t really remember how much it was).
BTW, how do you guyz rule the effects of poison? Do you give it a straight number of damage like I did? I thought that maybe one could give as well the Unstable condition even if Health is superior to 0? What do you think?

When I got to the scorpion under the map I was like WTF! but I think the scene of the characters having to stop for Azim to recover was very good, so that was a great call.

For poison you can use the move from the reptiles on page 129: 1 harm ap and marking Unstable, indeed.
But that’s not written in stone: it’s just a handy tool. The option of inflicting a bit more harm, forcing a day of rest, instead of Unstable is totally fine.

The questions above emerged while Gregory was playing this adventure of COJ (you can read the actual play here on the blog)