Props

Here are some rules of thub to help you muddle through...

Healing

There are many ways to help you reduce your character’s disadvantage (physical or otherwise). Bed rest, magic potions, dermal regenerators, medics, clerics, therapists, healers, shamen, a quest... your GM will let you know what needs to be done and how long it takes.

Excessive amounts of disadvantage

There will be situations where the amount of disadvantage points your character has accumulated exceeds all of your cliché advantage. Now what?

This is a very subjective and situational thing for the GM to deal with. You could have them pass out, slip into a coma, or keel over dead. It all depends on the circumstances. Was it the shock of bad news, the effects of being under water too long, or being struck by lightning that put them at that level of disadvantage?

Give the Mountaineer (1) character 20 points of disadvantage and have them wake up in a full body cast when they fail during their attempt to climb dead man’s peak or just have them fall to their death?

Perhaps it depends on how many times the GM hinted at how bad an idea it would be.

Magic

The short answer is bake it into your clichés and specializations and use them like you would any other cliché. For example a:

Tyrannical Halfling Pyromancer (3)

• with a penchant for BBQ

says a lot about what kind of magic that character is likely to throw around. It would not be surprising to hear them declare “Swear allegiance on to me or perish in flames”.

The long answer is that the GM needs to decide how magic works in their game so that they can help their players come up with clichés that make sense.

There are lots of great ideas on how magic could work (tons of fantasy fiction to borrow from) but one I quite like is based on the universe’s appetite for a story. Tell it a good one and you might just get the effect you were hoping for. Tell it a bad one and you will quickly discover how harsh a mistress the universe can be.

The nice thing about this idea is that it can be at the heart of other systems of magic. Energy manipulation, dark rituals, praying, singing and strumming, magic words and wand waving; these are all ways of telling the universe a story. Consider the following example based on this idea of how magic works:

When Lazlo, a

Magical prodigy whose brilliant mind was blown discovering magic’s true nature (4)

and his party wander into the middle of a field and spook a

Winged viper hoard (1)

turning the sky dark with flying snakes, Lazlo casts a spell by asking the universe, in his surfer dude’s tone of voice, “Wouldn’t it be cool if a gust of wind like blew all the snakes away?”

The universe isn’t all that impressed so the GM adds 2 dice of temporary disadvantage to the casting.

The player decides that extra effort is needed and trades 3 inspiration points for 3 dice so a total of 5 dice get rolled (4 for the cliché + 3 for extra effort - 2 from the GM’s disadvantage). When 3 sixes and 2 fives turn up the GM declares the spell wildly successful. “There might be one or two snakes left in the grass but otherwise it's a bright and sunshiny day”.

Psionics / mind powers

Just another kind of magic.

Supernatural powers

Same same but you might have more clichés with greater advantage.

Faster than a speeding bullet (6)

More powerful than a locomotive (5)

Able to leap a tall building in a single bound (5)

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? (4)

Villains and Non player characters

If you haven’t guessed yet, it’s all done with clichés and specializations. For simple villains you could go with:

Goblin (1)

or

Orc Chief (3)

although it might be good, as a GM, to know what the difference is between the two so that the villain consequences you choose for them make sense. The cliché advantage in this case should be used as a measure of how much disadvantage the villain can take and possibly how much disadvantage it can deal.

For an NPC you could start with

Cleric (2)

but as the game goes on and things happen they could become

Belligerent Cleric (2)

or even

Belligerent Cleric with bad people skills (2)

Poisons

This would be another kind of general disadvantage and handled as such. Depending on the poison the disadvantage could be fixed or increase over time. If player’s have a relevant cliché or specialty they could have a chance to fend it off or be immune altogether.

Curses

A special kind of disadvantage that can be treated as general or specific disadvantage.

Magical makeup

When under the influence of clerical blessings or bardic song characters might see a temporary increase to the advantage of their clichés where applicable. This bonus should be based on the how well the cleric or bard does their thing. It could be that others receive one extra die for each full success die the cleric or bard got when they rolled their clichés.

Enchanted weapons

Extra special bonus gear will have an advantage that gets added to the player’s cliché roll when applicable.

Extraordinary dice

Completely up to the GM but when a player rolls a 5 dice cliché and all the dice come up the sixes that is significant and should be rewarded somehow. Perhaps in this case the character’s cliché advantage increases by one or they receive five inspiration points.

By the same token, rolling all ones is significant in not a good way and could result in a similar loss of cliché advantage or points of inspiration.

Also the GM could consider the quality of the roll when deciding consequences. Lots of sixes and the player’s plan works out even better than they described. Lots of ones, even worse.