Act Under Pressure

This covers trying to do something under conditions of particular stress or danger. Examples of acting under pressure are: staying on task while a banshee screams at you; barricading a door before the giant rats catch up; resisting the mental domination of a brain-worm; fighting on when you’re badly injured.

• Complete success: you do what you set out to.
• Mixed success: you succeed, but the GM is going to give you a worse outcome, hard choice, or price to pay.
• Failure: you do not accomplish what you set out to do, and the GM takes a hard move against you.

Kick Some Ass

This is used when you are fighting something that’s fighting you back.

Cost: you expose yourself to danger. The enemy harms you (except in certain circumstances).

• Complete success: you inflict harm, and gain one of the following bonuses:
  • You suffer -1 hit in return
  • Grant advantage to your next move in the encounter, or give it to another PC
  • You force the enemy where you want them
  • You inflict +1 hit
• Mixed success: you inflict harm and suffer it in return.
• Failure: you inflict no harm and suffer it in return. Enemy can force you into a disadvantageous position.

Brace For Impact

Whenever you suffer 1 or more hits, you may roll +Tough to reduce the damage.

• Complete success: Reduce damage by 1 hit (minimum 0). You acquire a bruise or cool scar.
• Mixed success: The hit is reduced by 1, but only after describing some minor, lingering injury or resource cost suffered instead.
• Failure: The hit stands.

Take a Shot

Use this move when attacking with a ranged weapon outside of reach of anyone who would fight back. If inside that range, use Kick Some Ass instead.

• Complete success: you inflict harm.
• Mixed success: you inflict harm, but only if you agree to one of the following:
  • Attack inflicts -1 hit
  • You also harm an ally within range (if applicable)
  • Your weapon jams and has to be cleared using Act Under Pressure
  • You run out of ammo and have to either find some, get some from an ally, or spend a Resource
• Failure: you don't inflict harm, and the GM can take a hard move.

Read a Bad Situation

Roll +Sharp to read a bad situation.

• Complete success: gain 3 data points (see below).
• Mixed success: gain 1 data point.
• Failure: you learn nothing useful, and GM can take a hard move such as:
  • You reveal information to your enemies
  • You get a false reading that misleads you

Data Points:

• What’s my best way in?
• What’s my best way out?
• Are there any dangers we haven’t noticed?
• What’s the biggest threat?
• What’s most vulnerable to me?
• What’s the best way to protect the victims?

Note your data points, as you can invoke them in the future. For instance, if you ask "what's the best way in?" and the GM replies "the wall looks easy to climb", then you could invoke that Data Point later to gain advantage to Act Under Pressure to climb said wall. Data Points can only be invoked once.

Manipulate Someone

This move is used when you want someone to do something for you and they don’t want to do it. To get them to do what you’re asking you’ll need a good reason. What counts as a good reason depends on what you are asking for and your relationship with them.

• Complete success: they’ll do it for the reason you gave them. If you asked too much, they’ll tell you the minimum it would take for them to do it (or if there’s no way they’d do it).
• Mixed success: they’ll do it, but only if you do something for them right now to show that you mean it. If you asked too much, they’ll tell you what, if anything, it would take for them to do it.
• Failure: they won't do it, and the GM can take a hard move such as:
  • They take offense, souring future relations
  • They retaliate, suspecting your motives
  • Someone else notices and thinks ill of your actions

Protect Someone

When someone else is about to suffer harm, and you can conceivably intervene, use this move and roll +Tough.

• Complete success: you deflect the attack harmlessly.
• Mixed success: you protect the subject, but you instead suffer the damage.
• Failure: you fail to protect the subject, and the GM can make a hard move.

If you have any supernatural Powers, you can invoke one of them and roll +Weird instead of +Tough, if it makes sense. For example, you could use Frost to create a wall of ice, blocking an attack, but you probably couldn't use Fire to block it (although maybe you could at least cause some harm to the attacker or give them an opportunity to decide not to attack).

Bond With Someone

When you have a moment to truly connect with someone--be it a long conversation on a cloudless night, or an intense firefight forcing you into close quarters, or a shared dreamstate caused by an evil psion--you can roll +Heart to bond with them.

• Complete success: take +2 Bond, and the target's relationship with you permanently improves.
• Partial success: take +1 Bond.
• Failure: you gain nothing.

Use Magic

If you have supernatural Powers, you can roll +Weird to try to do something with them other than the default use, as stated in their description.

Cost: Use Magic always has a Cost, chosen by the GM (see below).

• Complete success: it works just as you wanted (choose an Effect below).
• Mixed success: it works (choose an Effect), but you must also choose a Glitch.
• Failure: you do not achieve the desired effect, and the GM takes a hard move to describe how your magic gets away from you.

Effects

• Inflict harm (1 hit, ignore armor, magic).
• Do one thing that is beyond human limitations.
• Bar a place or portal to a specific person or a type of creature.
• Trap a specific person, minion, or monster.
• Banish a spirit or curse from the person, object, or place it inhabits.
• Summon a monster into the world.
• Communicate with something that you do not share a lan- guage with.
• Observe another place or time.
• Heal 1 hit from an injury, or cure a disease, or neutralize a poison.

Glitches

• The effect is weakened.
• The effect is of short duration.
• You take 1 hit (ignore armor).
• The magic draws immediate, unwelcome attention.
• It has a problematic side effect.

Costs

• It requires a rare or unusual material component.
• It takes a long time to cast, and you must be protected while doing so--any interruption will cause a Glitch.
• You need one or two people to help--you can't cast it alone.
• You need access to knowledge (books, a mentor, something) to cast it successfully.
• You must expend a great deal of magical energy, causing disadvantage to all uses of your power until you rest.

Enemies

Most ordinary enemies will drop after only 1 hit. Rarely is 1 hit instantly lethal, but most combatants are not prepared to fight to the death despite injury. They will typically flee, faint, or falter in some manner.

Certain elite enemies will take the same 3 hits that PCs do. Rarer enemies--usually exceptionally large or supernatural ones--may take even more hits to defeat.

Damage

As a rule of thumb, PCs will not attain weapons or powers inflicting more than 1 hit every time they are used. If these existed, they would automatically be the best choice in the game. Rather, stronger weapons or powers should work as follows:

• To do anything better than a typical lethal weapon (e.g. more damage, longer range, etc) requires a tradeoff.
• One simple tradeoff is that a very heavy weapon (e.g. missile launcher, heavy machine gun, etc) is unwieldy, and causes disadvantage to hit, in addition to being annoying to lug around.
• Another is that the weapon or power is volatile, and has a greater than average risk to harm the wielder or their allies.

Ordinary Equipment

Resources are particularly powerful or useful things--not ordinary equipment. If you're in a modern game, a handgun is not a resource, it's just a gun. A "resource" version of a gun would be a cool, extra-powerful gun you couldn't normally acquire (maybe it's magical, or uses restricted military tech).

Acquiring ordinary equipment is done through a move called Acquisition, using a special stat called Wealth, which I'm not really going to get into for now since the first game isn't going to offer a lot of shopping opportunities.

Resources

Anything more useful than what you can buy in a store with petty cash. Examples:

• A new vehicle
• A cool weapon (with advantages over a standard one, such as extra range or damage)
• A safehouse
• Access to a restricted facility which can offer repairs, trades, and services not normally available
• An ally, minion, or servant
• A trove of information that could be used to extort someone

Resources have a value measured in Resource Points, which are equivalent to Build Points. In fact, you may spend Build Points to acquire resources at a 1 for 1 rate. You may also be awarded Resources by the GM as a consequence of your actions in the game (for example, after saving the Don's daughter from a ravening monster, he grants you access to his safehouse where you can discreetly trade and repair your illicit goods and equipment).

I'll get into more detail about what this all means. For now, here's probably the first one everyone cares about:

Weapons

Ordinary weapons inflict 1 hit. Ranged weapons are also ranged (duh) and ammo-dependent. That's all.

A cool weapon can have more bonuses, based on its RP value:

more to come...

Armor

quick version:

• ordinary armor grants advantage to Brace For Impact for a specific scenario; that is:
  • combat armor protects against normal weapons encountered in combat
  • space suits protect against jostling, loss of pressure, moderate radiation, etc, that you might encounter in space or starship combat
  • medieval armor protects against medieval weapons (and lesser)
• 1 RP = 1 damage reduction to a specific damage type:
  • kinetic (bullets, fists, swords)
  • thermal (plasma, fire, cold)
  • EM (electricity, radiation)
  • What is damage reduction? Well, when you use Brace for Impact with damage reduction, you can reduce the damage of any attack by the armor's DR, but a failure on Brace For Impact means the armor is damaged and no longer offers DR until repaired.
• 1 RP = 1 extra hit that your armor can tank instead of you

Experience

Whenever you fail at a move, mark +1 experience. This is not used to "level up", as that is determined by the GM based on story beats and is synchronous for all PCs. Rather, Experience is an expendable resource that can improve the results of your actions.

How it works:

• Use any move
• On failure or mixed success, you can spend 1 experience to argue for an improvement of one catgory (failure->mixed, mixed->complete)
• To do so, explain what you experienced in the past and how it gives you insight into this specific situation
• You don't have to catalog the situations that granted you experience...when you gain experience, it becomes abstract.