Alternately: “Shapeshifting otherkin save London from ancient evil”

Game: Fireborn
Published: 2004, Fantasy Flight – line cancelled 2006
Books Used: Just the Player’s Handbook. The Game Master’s Book is almost entirely setting fluff, and Book of Aspects was (sadly) never published.

Wow, it’s been far too long since I’ve done one of these. In my defence, I spent much of May either in a funk or in a mental haze brought on by allergy issues. However, I’m back on the ball now – something I’m sure you’re all thrilled to hear.

One advantage of this challenge is that it forces me to return to games that I glanced over, possibly mined from, and promptly left on the shelves and spared nary a second thought. I actually picked up Fireborn shortly after its release based on RPG.net buzz – and because it seemed to have an interesting premise: an urban-fantasy game midway between Shadowrun and World of Darkness, only with a cinematic combat system seemingly inspired by fighting videogames and mechanical support for flashback scenes where you play your character at the height of their former incarnation’s glory, in a time of mythic fantasy before the last Ice Age wiped clean humanity’s slate.

Oh, did I mention that you get to play a dragon?

Setting

Well, okay… Technically, you only play a dragon during the flashbacks to the high-fantasy “mythic age” (think Hyperboria, Atlantis, Lemuria or Mu). In the modern world, it’s early in the 21st century, and humanity is dealing with the social and financial ramifications of a new power source: sorcery. Seemingly overnight, tabloids went from reporting on the Royals’ sexual liaisons to running lurid photos of werewolf attacks in the slums, corporations began funding research programs into the market viability of goods created ex nihilo though the application of this new (or rather, very old) technology and people found themselves crossing themselves when crossing dark tunnel mouths – just in case.

However, life for your average Londoner is largely unchanged. People still go to work, pick up takeout curry on the way home, fall asleep in front of the television … the whole nine yards. Though under the hum and bustle of everyday life, there runs a current of fear and apprehension – as if the world is slowly remembering why our ancestoAs if a threat older than man or dragon both, and powerful enough to end an age, hungered once again.

Purple prose aside, that’s where you come in. You play a scion: human-born, but more than human. You, and your compatriots, bear the essences of the mighty dragons who ruled the last age. In time, you will learn to shape your bodies and your will to regain this lost heritage. Though research and through recovered memory, you will race to piece together the secrets of Earth’s forgotten past – hopefully in time to prevent the cycle from repeating. However, it won’t be easy. Your adversary is already awake, and Those Who Dwell Below are already plotting the world’s demise.

Alongside this desperate struggle, characters relive scenes from the mythic age in the form of flashbacks, where they play their characters’ former incarnations at the height of their power. For example, a character and her friends might find themselves engaged in a running firefight inside a tube station, chased by cultists enslaved by an evil sorcerer, only to have the train arrive in a wave of blood, gore, and inky black spines – at which point they flash back to the mythic age, where they banded together to root out a nest of these things at the behest of their human wards. Suddenly, their characters remember how to fight these beasts: cleanse them with fire!

Overall, the setting works well enough. Magic aside, it’s basically our world, five minutes from now and seen through the lens of an action movie. As we’ll see in the combat section of this write-up, rooftop swordfights interspersed with bouts of parkour wouldn’t be out of the question for scions. Instead of Dragon: the Burninating, think of it as Shadowrun immediately after the Awakening and directed by Corey Yuen.

System

Fireborn uses what Fantasy Flight refers to as the “Dynamic D6″ system (henceforth DD6). Instead of traditional attributes, characters have four statistics, rated from 1-6 and based on the classical Greek elements. These serve as their dice pools for mental and physical actions, each subdivided into ‘active’ and ‘reactive’ tasks. For example, a PC might roll their Fire (active physical) pool to throw a punch, or their Earth (reactive mental) pool to resist a conman’s spiel. Fours or better are treated as successes, and dice don’t explode.

So far, it’s a pretty barebones dicepool system. What’s unique is how DD6 treats skills. Instead of directly adding to your pool, skills indicate the maximum number of dice you’re allowed to move from your other pools into the one that’s being tested. So to make that jump, you could use your Athletics skill of 3 to move two dice from Water (representing your balance and coordination) and one die from Earth (your ability to push through the pain of landing and keep going) into Fire before rolling. Here’s the catch, though: these dice remain in their new pools until the start of your next turn. So part of the strategy is wrapped up in properly managing your focus so that you don’t leave yourself venerable in any one area.

Thankfully, you have an edge: scions can make these pool alterations (called stance changes) twice per turn, rather than just once like mere mortals. So conceivably, you could flow dice from Air and Water to Fire in order to skewer some punk on the end of your sword, then free the blade and flow dice back to Water in time to block his friend’s tire iron.

This brings us to…

Combat

Fireborn, like Burning Wheel, uses scripted combat. Within a single turn, a character may attempt a single Physical Action, a single Mental Action and as many Reactions (be they mental or physical) they like, with a cumulative -1 die penalty to all reactions after the first rolled for a given aspect.

So what do I mean by “scripted combat?” I’m glad you asked, because this is probably one of the coolest things about the DD6 system. Instead of limiting characters to a single physical act per turn or relying on narrative stunts, Fireborn instead lets players declare their action as a set of specific moves, sort of like a combo in a fighting game. Generally, characters are allotted a number of moves per action equal to their base Fire score, they can use a give skill up to its rating in a combo and they’re allowed to shift a number of dice equal to the lowest-rated skill in the set.

For example, let’s say that a scion is standing on a rooftop overlooking an MP’s entourage, while on the next roof over, an assassin is setting up her rifle. On his turn, our scion could make a combo of (Dash + Jump + Fire Pistol + Power + Foot Strike) in order to run to the building’s ledge, jump across the alleyway, fire on his target in midair then land with a powerful mulekick to her chest. Let’s say that Athletics is his lowest skill, at 3. He’d have to roll (Fire + Athletics dice allocated from other pools) in an attempt to meet or exceed the combo’s length in successes (more, if the GM is feeling mean. Jump technically only allows you to cover 2 feet per success). Actions read from left to right, with one or more successes allocated to each move. Therefore, if our character only earned three successes on his roll, he’d be able to pull off the running jump and the midair gunshot, but not the finishing kick.

Defensive sequences work essentially the same way, with one caveat: the sequence must contain at least one defence action for each attack (jump, crouch, spin, dodge, weapon block, etc.). If successful, defensive actions subtract from the attacker’s net successes, effectively rewinding his action back to the first undefended attack. However, active defence rolls cannot rewind movement actions made before the first attack. Therefore, even if the assassin dodged the gunshot in our first example, the hero would still land on the rooftop beside her.

The game does feature martial arts, and they’re treated like a fighting game character’s combo list: specific move chains, which “pay off” with a special effect: be it extra damage, a status effect or even instant death. As an example, the third action in the Gun-Fu style – a move referred to as “Taste Recoil” – is a point-blank gunshot followed by a strike upside the opponent’s head with the same pistol. In mechanical terms, it’s a (Fire Pistol + Ready + Power + Pistol Strike) which applies a -2 die penalty to all the target’s mental actions in addition to its base damage. The Ready move represents the delay and concentration necessary to bring a weapon to bear after using it once in a given turn. Larger and heavier weapons require more Ready moves in order to use multiple times per turn.

Beyond their basic fighting styles and skills, scions have access to a “karma pool,” which functions much like Essence in Exalted. Characters can spend points from their pool on a 1-to-1 basic to provide autosuccesses (up to their base Attribute score), manifest draconic traits (claws, wings, armoured scales) if they’ve unlocked them or to power other supernatural abilities. It’s one more edge possessed by player characters, reflecting their superhuman nature.

All told, it’s a fairly unique and interesting take on the cinematic action genre. Moreover, it runs pretty fast as well; especially if you print out a set of cards listing the actions, their linked skills and any special rule requirements. (available in the errata document)

Character Creation

For our sample character, I’m imagining a Jason Statham type: a gruff, direct individual retired from the underworld with no bullshit tolerance and a cache of illegal firearms under the boot of his black cab – just in case his former employers come knocking.

Step 1: Aspects

As a scion, we’re given 28 points to buy dice in the four base Aspects, on an ascending cost scale. I want our hard boy turned cabbie to be fairly dynamic in combat and stubborn as a mule, though I also imagine that he’s not the quickest wit. He can drive the Knowledge like no one’s business, but he probably loses out at quiz night nine times out of ten.

To reflect this concept, I set up his pools as:

• Fire: 5
• Water: 4
• Air: 3
• Earth: 4

Step 2: Background

Next, we have to pick a background – representing our character’s life before the mantle of adventure descended upon him. This will give us his starting skill ranks, his edges, wealth and a number of points for purchasing fighting styles.

For our character, the choice is obvious: the Thug package is exactly what we’re looking for.

Thug gives us 4 points in each of Melee, Ranged and Stamina, 2 points each in Trickery and Will, our choice of the Action Junkie, Brutal and Follow-through Edges (we’re going with Follow-through so he can add his extra net success to damage without using Press moves), a starting Wealth of 3 (upper lower class) and 3 Fighting Style ranks.

Step 3: Sire

Every scion must choose a sire to represent their draconic heritage. These mythical dragons embody the varied nature of the beast’s aspects: from the wise councilor and collector of war to the brutal warrior who burns everything in his path. While not his literal ancestor, a sire represents a character’s guiding principles. More importantly, it also provides us with another Edge, more Fighting Style ranks and a bonus to our starting Karma.

For our character (let’s call him Travis), we’re going to go with Caronach, the Serpent of Lough Derg: the embodiment of patience and resiliency in the face of adversity.

While she doesn’t grant us any additional Fighting Style ranks, she does give us an Edge important to our character concept: Resilient, which grants us one extra Minor Wound and increases our ability to keep going through a beating.

Caronach also grants her patrons +5 bonus karma, which we’ll record later.

Step 4: Dependent Traits

Now we have to compute secondary traits. Most of these are simple uses of Aspect pools, which are covered in the rules governing action scenes, so I’m only going to touch on three in detail: our character’s health chart, his karma pool and his bonus skill points.

Health Chart

For health, we can take up to our Water in damage without actually taking any penalty dice. We can also completely soak any damage equal to less than twice our Water as a minor wound, up to a number of times equal to our Earth score (+1 thanks to our edge). From there, the damage thresholds continue to climb equal to our Water score, assessing a cumulative +1 Wound Die at each step, starting with 1 WD at double Water and up to a max of +6 WD. We can sustain a maximum of 6 WD before we’re down, 7 before we’re dying and 8 before we’re taking that last dirt nap. In game terms, this means that a point-blank shotgun blast will likely blow us back to slide unconscious down the side of a building, but it won’t kill us outright – keeping with the game’s action movie tone. Worn armour, of course, directly reduces damage.

In our case, Travis can ignore any attack hitting for up to 4 points of damage, has 5 Minor Wounds and his damage track increases by steps of 4; meaning his health chart looks something like this:

• < 4 = no effect
• 4+ = minor wound (5 boxes)
• 8+ = 1 wound die
• 12+ = 2 wound dice
• 16+ = 3 wound dice
• 20+ = 4 wound dice
• 24+ = 5 wound dice
• 28+ = 6 wound dice

As you may have guessed, wound dice act as a penalty to all rolled actions.

Karma Pool

As I mentioned before, scions have access to karma – the breath of the Earth – with which they can supplement their abilities and power their magics. A character’s starting karma pool is equal to 5x his base Earth score, plus any points granted by his sire. Travis, for example, begins play with 25 karma points.

Bonus Points

Next we’re given the sum of our base Fire and base Water, and of our base Air and base Earth to spend on physical and mental skills respectively. It’s one point per skill rank, up to a maximum of 4 ranks in any skill. If we need to, we can also ‘cross-spend’ points between physical and mental for double the cost.

Travis has 9 bonus physical and 7 bonus mental ranks. Since he’s already maxed out on his combat skills and stamina, let’s give him 3 points each in Travel, Quickness, and Athletics. On the mental side, let’s give him a rank of Medicine (since I’d imagine he’s able to patch himself up after a throwdown), four ranks of Senses and a rank each of Interaction and Stealth

Step 5: Finishing Touches

As a scion, we’re also granted an additional Edge – in our case, we take Arsenal to reflect his underworld connections for the weapons he keeps in a hidden compartment under the luggage area of his cab.

We also have 3 ranks to spend on Fighting Styles, which we use to take Street Fighting and Entrapping Defence. This gives us a grab bag of dirty tricks, groin shots, joint locks and throws – appropriate for a brutal character like Travis.

We could write up his draconic form at this point, but that’s usually done after the character experiences his first flashback, since its traits are really reflective of the character in play. Besides, I think this is long enough.

If you guys want me to, I’ll follow up this post with one covering dragon creation.

Character sheet:

Travis, ex-gangster turned cabbie and occasional world savior
Fire: 5
Water: 4
Air: 3
Earth: 4

Karma Pool: 25
Edges: Follow-through, Resilient, Arsenal
Health Chart (see above)

Skills:
* Melee: 4
* Ranged: 4
* Stamina: 4
* Senses 4
* Travel 3
* Quickness 3
* Athletics 3
* Trickery: 2
* Will 2
* Interaction 1
* Medicine 1
* Stealth 1

Wealth: 3
Fighting Styles:
* Street Fighting
* Entrapping Defence