To make things easier on myself, I'm gonna try to rip elements of other systems from their original context and chassis and weld them to each other as much as possible. The core such things, I think, are Pendragon, Unknown Armies, Legend of the Five Rings, and Exalted (though that last, at least, might better be called an inspiration rather than a direct contributor). Oh, and D&D itself, of course, primarily of the 3.x editions (particularly Pathfinder), as I am of the age wherein I was graduating high school when 3.0 came out, causing me to totally imprint on it as the height of D&D design. Now that we’re two whole editions beyond that point, I think I can safely call myself a grognard now? I also have no idea what this GURPS 4th edition nonsense is, and am wary of Savage Worlds “fixing” the gloriously broken and baroque Deadlands system. But back to Middens & Morals . . .
Interestingly, the famous Monty Python scene actually serves as an almost spot-on inspiration for this Heartbreaker game. We know from our meta-knowledge that King Arthur is, in fact, the glorious sub-Messiah of Britain, paragon (and advocate) of chivalry, chock-full of virtue, second only to Galahad and the foolish Percival in these respects. But different meta-knowledges tell us that the man working in the shit is absolutely 100% right. The system of Heavenly virtue King Arthur represents, while striving for and achieving the best of what humanity can be, is based on “outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic an' social differences in our society!” and on “violence inherent in the system.” Other media inspirations can include A Song of Ice and Fire (though with less rape, thank you), particularly storylines like Sansa’s and the Hounds and Jaime’s, and Paul Verhoeven’s first English-language movie Flesh+Blood from 1985 (when I was three!). There’s only one rape in that last inspiration, but that can easily be too many for many people, so trigger warning. I’ven’t seen Robert Bresson’s 1974 Lancelot du Lac or Aleksei German’s 2013 Hard to Be a God, but they sound like they could help inspire the kind of mood I’m looking for. Bookwise, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are perhaps the paradigmatic encapsulation of Middens & Morals’s intended blend of things, perhaps especially when read alongside one of my all-time favorite books (and one of two books that I’ve ever intentionally stolen from a library) Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics, by Susan Signe Morrison. I also rather enjoy, and will likely be baking into this Heartbreaker project, John Boswell’s Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe and Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch. Like Lancelot du Lac and Hard to Be a God, Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes seems like it will also be of use to me once I read it. Finally, I would also like to direct you to what is now a vast literature by pagan/polytheist/occultist anti-capitalists concerning the spell of disenchantment capitalism cast over the world and the resultant activist praxis of re-enchanting it.
I’m having some trouble identifying any sources beyond these, however. Do any of my (possibly imaginary) readers have any ideas?
In order to ensure that I got my ideas out, I copypasta’d the text from a number of my source RPGs and then blended them together and modified them to fit my vision or Middens & Morals. That’s (mostly) what will follow for several posts. Please don’t hate (or sue) me!
When generating a character, start with your character’s concept. Do you want a character who goes toe-to-toe with terrible monsters, matching sword, shield, and sanity against claws and fangs? Or do you want a mystical seer who draws his powers from the great beyond to further his own ends? Nearly anything is possible. Once you have a general concept worked out, use the following steps to bring your idea to life, recording the resulting information and statistics on your Middens and Morals character sheet (we often like to call it a “midden sheet”), which I will create . . . at some point >.<
Step 1—Determine Traits: We start by ditching the traditional six ability scores of D&D. We're not concerned here with where someone's talents lie or what muscles are best developed in their body. Power in this system comes from madness and virtue. Here I hit the first possible Heartbreaker moment (hey, it keeps me honest about what this is): I'm replacing the faux-simplicity of six attributes with a total of 36 >.< Lemme explain. I’m thinking I’ll rip the Virtue system out of Pendragon, giving us 13 pairs of traits (we'll call them Virtues, no matter what we may think of them). That covers the quest for holiness half of Middens & Morals, so I’ll turn to Unknown Armies for the other 10 traits. In that game, the madness meters are a way of describing how traumatized a character is by the events around them, and they come in two varieties: hardened and failed, measuring five types of trauma (5x2=10, obvi). These thirteen opposed pairs of Virtues and five pairs of Traumas determine your character’s most basic personality and are used to decide a wide variety of details and statistics. Some class selections benefit greatly if you have better than average scores for some of your traits.
Step 2—Pick Your Race: Next, pick your character’s race, noting any effects your choice has on rolling with your traits and any other racial qualities. There are seven basic races in Galatia to choose from, although your GM might have others to add to the list.
Step 3—Pick Your Class: A character’s class represents a profession, such as fighter or wizard. If this is a new character, they start at 1st level in his chosen class. As they gain experience points (XP) for defeating monsters, they go up in level, granting them new powers and abilities.
Step 4—Pick Skills and Select Feats: Determine the number of skill ranks possessed by your character, based on their class, each of which utilizes a different trait to determine that number (and any other bonuses, such as the bonus received by humans). Then spend these ranks on skills, but remember that you cannot have more ranks than your level in any one skill (for a starting character, this is usually one). After skills, determine how many feats your character receives, based on their class and level, and select them.
Step 5—Buy Equipment: Each new character begins the game with an amount of money, based on their class, that can be spent on a wide range of equipment and gear, from chainmail armor to leather backpacks. This gear helps your character survive while adventuring. Generally speaking, you cannot use this starting money to buy magic items without the consent of your GM.
Step 6—Finishing Details: Finally, you need to determine all of a character’s details, including their starting hit points (hp), Armor Class (AC), saving throws, initiative number, and attack values. All of these numbers are determined by the decisions made in previous steps. A level 1 character begins with maximum hit points for their Hit Die roll. Aside from these, you need to decide on your character’s name, physical appearance, chivalric domain (the battlefield, the home, or the heart), and religion. The former two don’t have any game-mechanical effects but can certainly affect the narrative of the game! The latter two, however, identify the goals your character strives for in terms of their traits, and what the benefits in game mechanics of achieving those goals are. It is best to jot down a few qualities of their personality beyond those which have a mechanical effect in the game as well, to help you play the character during the game. Determine where your character grew up and their resulting native tongue. A character knows a number of additional languages equal to five less than one-sixth the sum of their Lustful, Energetic, Deceitful, Worldly, Trusting, and Failed Isolation (if the result of the calculation is negative, that character only speaks their cribtongue). Some characters may want to take otherworldly or magical languages; they may only take one such per point of Hardened Unnatural they possess.
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