DROWNING AND FALLING: THE FANTASY ROLE-PLAYING GAME OF ADVENTURE AND DEATH FROM DROWNING AND FALLING * * * COPYRIGHT NOTICE The Drowning and Falling Role-Playing Game text is copyright 2006 Jason Morningstar. Additional bits of fiction, where attributed, are copyright their respective authors. The cover and interior art are copyright their respective artists. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Feel free to share and modify this game, but consider giving ORBIS some loot if you do. The art is expressly *not* Creative Commons licensed - please see the "About the Artists" section to contact these guys if you like their work. * * * CREDITS Off-hand inspirational comment: Andy Kitkowski Game design: Jason Morningstar Book design: Patrick Murphy, a Mad Irishman production Production Editor: Steve Segedy Copy Editor: Autumn Winters Art Director: Remi Treuer Cover art: Jason Turner Interior art: John Hill, Eric Poole, Dalton Sharp, and Remi Treuer With major contributions by Joshua BishopRoby, Piers Brown, Alex Fradera, Christian Griffen, Bryan Hansel, Maura Hogan, Scott Morningstar, Clinton R. Nixon, Dev Perkayastha, Eric Provost, Lisa Provost and Remi Treuer. Additional ideas and pithy suggestions from the good people of story-games.com, including Brendan Adkins, Adam Biltcliffe, Eric J. Boyd, Stuart Broz, Paul Czege, Chris Goodwin, John Harper, Jonas Karlsson, Andy Kitkowski, Levi Kornelsen, Judson Lester, Ben Lehman, Tony Lower-Basch, Matt Machell, Dave Michael, Bradley Robins, Jeffrey Schecter, Brennan Taylor, Graham Walmsley, and Fred Wolke. * * * BENEFICIARY All proceeds from sales of this game, after taxes and production costs, will be donated to ORBIS International. The mission of ORBIS is to eliminate avoidable blindness and restore sight in the developing world, where 90% of the world's blind live. They do this in part by operating a completely awesome flying eye hospital in a converted DC-10. Visit ORBIS on the Web at http://www.orbis.org/ to learn more. If you bought this game, you've already helped them out! * * * INTRODUCTION There is a world far from here - a world like our own, but completely different. A gritty medieval world of magic and mystery with enchanted creatures, drowning, and falling! Are you brave enough to face the danger? Do you enjoy killing monsters? Do you like acquiring treasure? Do you have good balance and a decent Australian crawl? If so, prepare to test your mettle against the sorts of devilish challenges your friends tend to create, because only the best heroes will emerge victorious in the savage world of Drowning and Falling! * * * THE SAGA OF FYREN CLOUDFLOATER, By Bryan Hansel Fyren Cloudfloater stood at the edge of the precipice and stared down into the rushing water below. Behind her, slowly climbing down the cliff that separated her and her men from the safety of the plateau, a mass of an amorphous blob slowly climbed down. Fyren pulled her mace from its sheath with a quick jerk and loud swoosh, and the sound of the mace rung into her ears and into her mind. She remembered back to her childhood when the mace now in her hand belonged to her father, Besyrwan the Waterwalker. On the last day of her father's life, Fyren watched him walk across the water and before she could warn her father, she saw a cliff shark fall out of its nest and land in the water. The wave quickly splashed, rolled, and turned as a frothy white bubbling gurgle until it rolled over her father. Besyrwan was no more. Days later, the waterlogged corpse floated to the shore and Fyren retrieved the mace, her father's mace. It was that fateful day, when her father drown from the wave created by the falling cliff shark, that Fyren vowed to carry her father's mace and fight the forces that would cause the drowning and falling. Awaking from her remembrance, Fyren took a final look into the Canyon of Falling Rocks and turned towards the blob -- now closer. She knew in his heart that if this blob approached any closer, she would be forced off the cliff, and she would fall to her death in the frothy whitewater below. Would she drown or die from the fall, she didn't know, but Fyren didn't want to find out. At the top of her lungs, Fyren called out, "Men, fight! Fight for your lives, or I'll throw you over the edge myself." The other adventures pulled their swords and axes and readied their spell books. They all joined the battle cry, "I will not drown or fall!" They rushed the slowly climbing amorphous blob with Fyren in the lead. * * * PREPARING FOR THE GAME The Drowning and Falling Role-Playing Game is best played with a bunch of people - you and all your friends. Playing with three is the bare minimum, and it really starts to get fun with five or six participants. As a group, you'll need: A place to play. Some post-it notes for finished challenges and treasure. A standard deck of cards for creating challenges. Snacks. Each player ought to have: A pair of standard six-sided dice. A pencil. A Drowning and Falling Characters Sheet, or some scratch paper. Group preparation consists of giving each player some playing cards, with which you will all create challenges by writing them on post-it notes. The rules for creating challenges are in Part Six: Underworld And Wilderness Adventures. Individual preparation consists of making up a character, and then making up a few more as backups. It's pretty easy, so always try to keep a spare around - that's why it's called a characters sheet. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * PART ONE: MEN AND MAGIC The life of an adventurer in the Drowning and Falling Role-Playing Game is fraught with peril - deadly peril that can kill you! The characters sheet includes space for multiple guys, and you might want to roll up a few in advance, just to be sure. Everybody plays one at a time, though. * * * MAKING UP A GUY Every character in the Drowning and Falling Role-Playing Game is as unique as a snowflake - having fifteen different traits makes it possible! These fifteen traits are divided into two categories - helpful and harmful. * * * GENERATING YOUR TRAITS Trait generation is random. Roll a six sided die for each trait and write the result next to it. For your ten helpful traits, higher is better. For your five harmful traits, lower is better. If you are lucky you will have a better character than your friend who is unlucky. It is all in the implacable hands of fate! If you have fifteen dice handy, you can roll all your traits in one gigantic mega-throw! Just toss them all, then line them up based on the distance they fell away from you, and write the result starting at the first trait (Brave) and continuing until you get to the end. If you want to have some kind of equitable and balanced point-allocation system, go ahead and get your friend's buy-in and make one up - but know that you'll be missing out on rolling a bucketful of dice for every character. A final word of advice here - don't share your characters sheet with other players. Eventually they will create evil wizards, and any information you give them will be used against you. * * * HELPFUL TRAITS The helpful traits are: Brave, Cool, Mysterious, Blessed, Fast, Agile, Alert, Observant, Tough, and Strong. Brave reflects the character's raw courage. Use it when bravery is called for! Cool is that certain quality that the really cool kids possess. Mysterious refers to a character's air of mystery, or aura of mysteriousness. Blessed is the degree to which the Gods favor a character. Fast indicates the character's raw speed, and also whether he is fast or not. Agile comes into play when feats of agility, dexterity, nimbleness and adroitness are called for. Alert provides guidance on a character's general state of readiness for sudden trouble. Observant is all about being observant, and observing things. Tough is a measure of a character's ability to absorb punishment - a measure of toughness, if you will. Strong is pretty self-explanatory. Do I really need to get into what being strong is all about? * * * HARMFUL TRAITS The harmful traits are Pathetic, Unlucky, Clumsy, Oblivious, and Weak. Pathetic includes all things dorky and embarrassing. For example, if your character plays role-playing games other than The Drowning and Falling Role-Playing Game, his Pathetic is probably high. Unlucky refers to general ill fortune. The character with a high Unlucky will be a cosmic whipping boy. Clumsy refers to a character's lack of agility, dexterity, nimbleness and adroitness. Oblivious is a measure of all-around cluelessness, absent-mindedness, and lack of observational skill. Weak, like strong, is pretty self-explanatory. * * * WHAT'S UP WITH THE WEIRD COMBOS? Clumsy-5 and Agile-6? It happens. It is your duty as a role-player to find an exciting reason why your alter-ego, your virtual champion, would be simultaneously fabulous and lame. Embrace contradiction! In play, all of your helpful scores are going to spiral down like airplanes on fire anyway. If it really bothers you, choose a character class that allows you to change one of the scores you don't like. * * * HIT POINTS: STAYING ALIVE Your hit points are equal to the sum of the five highest helpful traits, resulting in a number between five and thirty, hopefully closer to the latter. This is the number with which all characters...
Trwa_Restrukturyzacja