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TOFFY BRATSFOREONS

Everyone dreams of having loving parents. And Toffy’s parents love each other very, very much. Probably a little too much, honestly. After a successful and fulfilling childhood of torturing and “executing” various small, furry animals, Toffy graduated to a young adulthood of torturing and executing people. The utterly banal “cleverness” and petty mundanity of his arrogant sadism have made Toffy universally beloved, if nowhere other than in his own mind. Toffy’s mother has arranged any number of weddings for her precious little angel, but Toffy feels like marriage would be the death of him and has been deftly postponing the happy nuptials by completely alienating every single one of them.

CERIOUSLY BANNISTER

Ceriously is the only daughter of Trywin. Despite the recent death of her husband, King Bobby Bratsforëöns, she has been coping with what is certainly immense grief with a stiff upper lip. The support from her brother Shamey during this time of trouble has also been remarkably stiff. All she cares about now is making sure that her children – Toffy, Malteaser, and Toblerone – can all enjoy the lives they so richly deserve. And if anyone gets in the way of that, Ceriously has a cannister of whoopass and wildfire with their name on it.

Malteaser’s recent nosebleeds are a little troubling, but she’ll be fine. Probably.

SHAMEY BANNISTER

King Hairy McDragonface was caught with his pants down when he was stabbed on the Porcelain Throne by Shamey Bannister. This low blow echoed throughout the Umpteen Kingdoms and Shamey has been known as the Kingslayer ever since. Shamey remains a member of the Kingsitters, and his twin sister often remarks how handsome he looks in the all-white cloak and gold armor.

TYPSION BANNISTER

The Red-Faced Baron of Boobies and Booze! Also known as the Little Lusher and the Green Fairy, Typsion is the youngest child of Lord Trywin. He has always used his clever wit to overcome the prejudice he’s had to deal with his entire life. And, if that fails, he’ll just get people drunk enough that they forget how short he is. His sister Ceriously refuses to drink with him and also refuses to ever let him forget how short he is, so Typsion tries to avoid her as much as possible. But not as much as he avoids his father: Typsion likes to marry random women he’s just met in an Elvish Chapel on the Jester’s Landing Strip and then see how long it takes for his father to figure it out and issue an edict annulling the wedding. It’s a petty sort of revenge, but it’s the only thing Typsion is capable of. At least for now.

TRYWIN BANNISTER

Trywin is the richest and most powerful man in the Umpteen Kingdoms. Historically, the Bannisers’ power derives from the intersection of several influences: First, their long-standing support of the UKSPCD (the Umpteen Kingdoms Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Direcorgis; a Bannister always spays their pets). Second, the strategically advantageous position of their capital Castle Rock (from which they regularly export moody writers of bestselling horror fiction). Third, the constant and untiring support of the Tinfoil Bank. Trywin has made it clear that he intends to fully restore the luster of the Bannisters’ name, starting with the spaying of all the werewolves of House Remus (as remembered by the tragic song “Full Moons of Castamere”) and culminating with placing his grandchildren on the throne by virtue of marrying his only daughter, Ceriously, to King Bobby Bratsforëöns.

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(click for PDF)

When Robin D. Laws first designed Feng Shui, Jackie Chan, John Woo, and The Matrix had not yet brought the pulse-pounding action of Hong Kong cult cinema into the Hollywood mainstream.

I discovered the game way back in the summer of 1997: I had taken a hiatus from RPGs, but had maintained my subscription to Dragon magazine. That summer, I realized I hadn’t received an issue of Dragon for several months, and I went online — revisiting my old Usenet and FidoNet haunts — to figure out why. I quickly had my answer: TSR had gone bankrupt. But in the process, I was drawn back into discussions of RPGs. Two of them were burning up the discussion groups at the time: Heavy Gear and Feng Shui.

At the time, I was living with my dad in Mankato, MN. I biked from our apartment building down to a hobby store in “downtown” Mankato. The hobby store had exactly one magazine rack of RPG titles, but by some miracle it was well-stocked: I grabbed copies of both Heavy Gear and Feng Shui. This was a seminal moment in my life, as Heavy Gear would ultimately prove to be my doorway into the RPG industry. (A tale I’ve told elsewhere.) Feng Shui didn’t feature as prominently in my work, but it played a really important part in reigniting my passion for RPGs. It’s a truly great honor that I’m now it’s caretaker.

Back in 1997, however, Feng Shui also kindled my love for Hong Kong cinema. Using the bibliography Robin D. Laws had placed in the back of the book as a map, I spent the rest of my summer biking to Suncoast Video and picking up VHS copies of whatever films I could get my hands on. As such, Feng Shui 2, by necessity, can’t recapture the wonder of the original game for me: The original Feng Shui wasn’t just a really cool game; it was the gateway to an entire medium of film I had never seen before.

But Feng Shui 2 is still frickin’ awesome: The rip-roaring, time-leaping magic of the Chi War is just such an innately awesome premise for a game that just flipping through the book is enough to get me amped about playing.

Which, of course, brings me to a cheat sheet for the system.

WHAT’S NOT INCLUDED

These cheat sheets are not designed to be a quick start packet: They’re designed to be a comprehensive reference for someone who has read the rulebook and will probably prove woefully inadequate if you try to learn the game from them. (On the other hand, they can definitely assist experienced players who are teaching the game to new players.)

The cheat sheets also don’t include what I refer to as “character option chunks” (for reasons discussed here). In other words, you won’t find the rules for character creation here.

HOW I USE THEM

As I’ve described in the past, I keep a copy of the system cheat sheet behind my GM screen for quick reference and also provide copies for all of the players. Of course, I also keep at least one copy of the rulebook available, too. But my goal with the cheat sheets is to consolidate information and eliminate book look-ups: Finding something in a half dozen or so pages is a much faster process than paging through hundreds of pages in the rulebook.

The organization of information onto each page of the cheat sheet should, hopefully, be fairly intuitive. The actual sequencing of pages is mostly arbitrary.

Page 1 – Basic Mechanics: This includes the core dice mechanic, plus the difficulty table, an Action Value reference for when your need to improvise GMCs, and the mechanics for Fortune, Impairment, and Boosts.

Page 2 – Skills & Other Checks: These rules round out the basic mechanics.

Page 3-7 – Combat: The core combat experience is contained on a single page, with additional options and guidelines laid out over the subsequent pages.

Page 8 – Vehicles: Primarily the rules for chases.

Page 9 – Chi War: Rules for sorcery, supernatural creatures, transformed animals, mutants, and feng shui sites.

Page 10 – Enemies: A one-page quick reference for GMs looking to build fights and create stat blocks on-the-fly.

OTHER THINGS TO PRINT OUT

You might also want to print out copies of:

• GMC names (Feng Shui 2, p. 220-221)
• Vehicle Table (Feng Shui 2, p. 156)

And you don’t need to print it out, but before playing you might want to take a guided tour through the Select Filmography, updated with all the awesome flicks of the last 20+ years and still found tucked away tidily at the back of the book.

BLUE MOON RULES

One unusual piece of slang you’ll find here is “blue moon.” This is taken from the chapter “Blue Moon Rules” in Feng Shui 2, of which Laws writes:

This chapter gives you the rules for situation that come up only once in a blue moon. These edge cases and special situations may arise in your game once or twice.

I found this distinction remarkably valuable, and in preparing these cheat sheets I have greatly expanded the scope of the rules covered by the “blue moon” designation. Essentially, if you look at a section of the cheat sheet I have:

(a) Specified the core mechanics of a given topic; and

(b) Designated everything else as “blue moon.”

For example, there is a page titled “Combat.” In my opinion, everything you need to run combat encounters in Feng Shui 2 is located on that page. Then there’s another page labeled “Blue Moon: Combat.” That page contains a lot extra rules that you’ll use only to respond to very specific situations in combat. A third page is labeled “Blue Moon: Weapons,” and contains a bunch of weapons-specific rules that you can use to spice things up.

You can see a similar distinction on the page of the cheat sheet dealing with vehicle chases: The “Vehicles” section contains the core gameplay loop for chases; the “Blue Moon: Vehicles” section of the page contains a bunch of additional rules that can be injected into that core gameplay.

I actually find this distinction so conceptually useful in organizing and focusing the cheat sheet that I think you’ll likely see me using it again in the future with any number of other games.

MAKING A GM SCREEN

As with my other cheat sheets, the Prince Valiant sheets can also be used in conjunction with a modular, landscape-oriented GM screen (like the ones you can buy here or here).

Personally, I use a four-panel screen and use reverse-duplex printing in order to create sheets that I can tape together and “flip up” to reveal additional information behind them. This is the screen arrangement I’m currently experimenting with:

• Panel 1: Basic Mechanics (with Skills & Hazards behind it).
• Panel 2: Combat (with Blue Moon: Combat & Blue Moon: Weapons behind it).
• Panel 3: Vehicles (with Keeling Over & Vehicle Table behind it).
• Panel 4: Enemies (with Chi War & Hong Kong GMC Names behind it).

FURTHER READING
So You Want to Be a Feng Shui Player?
Feng Shui: Filling the Shot
Feng Shui: Using the Shot Counter
Prep Notes: Hong Kong Task Force 88

SANSERIF SNARK

When Sanserif was a little girl, her mother Waitin told her that if she kept rolling her eyes like that it would make her head fall off. If she ever sees her mother again, Sanserif would like to tell her that it’s definitely not rolling your eyes that makes your head fall off. Or your whole body fall through a giant hole in the floor for that matter. Whatever. Look, the point is that Sanserif spent her entire childhood dreaming that she would grow up to be part of Fairytale Gloom and this is NOT. WHAT. SHE. WAS. PROMISED.

ARIAL SNARK

Arial was a no-nonsense girl who grew up wanting three things: First, a sword. Second, a second sword. Third, to stab people with her swords. In any rational world, therefore, Arial would be super happy with her life, but somehow it hasn’t turned out like that. She misses her dad. She misses Syriously Forreal (no relation), who taught her the Art of the Pincushion. She even misses her dumb sister, Sanserif. Fear cuts deeper than a sword, but a sword will do in a pinch.

JOSH FROST

Josh’s father was [SPOILER] and his mother was [SPOILER], which makes him [SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER] and he also [SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER]. He got very cold, but he got better. He died, but he got better. He’s probably going to get married, but he’ll get better.

HEAD SNARK

Head Snark, Lord of Winterstumble, Lord Mount-a-Pair, Warden of the North, Foot of the Ruler to King Bobby Bratsforëöns, and Kind of Slow to Notice Things. He and Bobby were both fostered to Johnny Errant, who taught Snark everything he knew and taught Bobby how to drink, hunt boar, and woo women. (Johnny wasn’t actually good at any of those things, which explains a lot about Bobby.) Snark is survived by his wife Waitlin and his loving children Rockwell, Sanserif, and Arial.

GLUTEN SNARK

Gluten was introduced to the wonders of absinthe by Typsion Bannister. When he goes on a bender with the Green Fairy, he often suffers from what he refers to as his “greensight” and has some difficulty distinguishing delusion from reality. That’s probably how he ended up falling out of that window, honestly.

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REFERENCE – TWIN CITIES 1925

NOTABLE NEWSPAPERS:

• Minneapolis Tribune (since 1867)
• Minneapolis Daily Star (since 1920)
• Minnesota Pioneer (since 1849, first daily newspaper in Minnesota, morning paper)
• Saint Paul Dispatch (since 1868, evening paper)

TRANSPORTATION: Twin Cities Rapid Transit operates 524 miles of electric trolley lines, laced between Minneapolis, St. Paul, and into the suburbs as far as Anoka and Lake Minnetonka. (Map above.)

UNIONS: Minneapolis’ reactionary, anti-labor employers organized into the Citizen’s Alliance. They blacklisted labor organizers, hired spies to keep tabs on “radicals”, crushed strikes, maintained scab registries, etc.

The Minneapolis CLA (Communist League of America) is led by Carl Skoglund, a Swedish socialist who immigrated to America in 1911, and Vincent Ray Dunne. These Trotskyists undermined the business-friendly leadership of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT). The first strikes would not actually happen until 1934, but the union-business espionage ran rampant through the ‘20s.

Source: Red Teamsters

FARMER-LABOR PARTY: Founded in 1918, by 1925 the Minnesota Farmer-Labor party – operating on a platform of farmer and labor union protection – was beginning to dominate statewide elections.

• J.E. Meyers is the mayor of Minneapolis. He ran as a member of the Loyalty Party, focusing on a patriotic platform of supporting America’s World War I veterans.
• Laurence C. Hodgson, a former newspaper reporter and poet, is the mayor of St. Paul.

GENERAL RESEARCH – HAMSA

Occult 1 / Library Use: The Hamsa symbol, also referred to as the Hand of Fatima and the Hand of Miriam, is a protective sigil or charm taking the figure of a hand with an eye in the center of its palm. It is supposed to guard against the “evil eye” and is widely recognized throughout the Middle East and North Africa, with some scholars believing it to have originated in Carthage.

GENERAL RESEARCH – TANIT PARASITES

Lab Analysis (Chemistry/Medicine): The purplish color in the whiskey / denatured ethanol is due to a contaminant. This appears to be bacteriological in nature.

• If analyzing raw ethanol, this will be remarkable because alcohol is generally antibacterial – it destroys cell membranes, penetrates the bacteria’s cytoplasm, denatures its proteins, coagulates the enzymes, binds water (dehydrating the cell), and dissolves fats, leading to massive cell dysfunction and death.
• Closer inspection of the bacteria reveals it to be disturbingly unusual: The cell envelope is shaped like a symmetric hexagon. Its internal structures are simplistic, similar to those of a prokaryote (the first form of life on Earth) and lacking anything suggestive of an internal nucleus. It’s possible that this is some atavistic remnant of an alternative evolutionary path.
• Chemistry 1 / Medicine 1: The hexagonal cells interact strongly with each other, forming honeycomb-like lattices and, due to their symmetrical nature, capable of forming tightly-packed, perfectly tiled structures similar to hexagonal crystals. Within these larger hexagonal bio-crystals, the individual cells appear to take on specialized functions – although its impossible to determine exactly what those functions are, it would seem they serve a function similar to organelles. Thus, in relation to the prokaryote-like individual cells, the bio-crystals are analog to more complex eukaryotic cells – although organized in a way seemingly completely alien to terrestial biology.
• Chemistry 2 / Medicine 2: The interactions between the cells within each bio-crystal seem to possess a neuronal character – perhaps synapse-like micro-structures could explain the coordination between the various “organelle cells” of the crystal, in a fashion similar to a nervous system or brain tissue.
• GM Note: If investigated in a later time period, researchers might detect electrical signals “disturbingly reminiscent of human brain activity”, but neither the equipment nor knowledge of the human mind necessary for this conjecture exists in the 1920’s.
• Organic Tissue: If exposed to organic tissue (whether human or not), the tanit parasites will swarm – forming a kind of purple halo around the tissue. (Investigation of this specific phenomenon with Chemistry or Medicine would suggest that this is stimulating biocrystal growth, as described above – and functionally reducing those point spends by 1 point each.)

Tophet Serum: If dosed with tophet serum, a character must make a 2 point Stability test each day. If they succeed on three tests in a row, the effects dissipate and no further tests are required. (During this time, they will begin to manifest hallucinations, motor apraxia, and alien hand syndrome.)

• If the character is Shaken by tophet serum, they begin to manifest symptoms of dissociate personality. (The bicameral division of their mind is breaking down, their perception of self is evaporating, and the Tanit consciouness is striving to take sole control of their body). This takes the form of a Driver that can impel actions (i.e., Tanit’s consciousness is taking control). As with any other Driver, obeying the driver restores Stability per the normal rules, but also prompts a 7 point Stability test (due to Possession).
• If the character is Blasted by tophet serum, in addition to permanent mental illness they also develop an Eye of Tanit on their left hand.
• A character who is rendered Incurably Insane by tophet serum has become a fully-realized host of Tanit.
• Non-Human Hosts: Unknown effects.
• GM Note: Those who observe the progression of tophet serum may realize that virtually everyone who drinks it will, in fact, be lost to the Tanit consciousness. Realizing that hundreds of serum-tainted whiskey bottles have been sold (and presumably drunk), they may make the intuitive leap that Barca has successfully created hundreds of fully-realized Tanit hosts. (Cthulhu Mythos could also provide a similar revelation.) Where are they? Some might be lost to insane asylums, but most are just quietly continuing the façade of their mortal lives – an invisible army of sleeper agents who will continue to pursue the eventual re-awakening of Tanit throughout the 20^th century.

Go to Part 3: Arrival at Hill House

Justin Alexander is… the Voice of Gloom.

If you’ve ever wondered what my voice sounds like in real life… this is not it. Generally speaking, any way. If I’m specifically doing these character voices, then, yes, this is what I sound like.

You know what I mean.

Any way, you should check out this trailer: Nicolas Gluesenkamp has done some marvelous work animating Brian Patterson’s beautiful and hilarious art.

A GAME OF TRANSPARENT PARODY AND MISERABLE MONARCHS

From the frozen lands of the Snark to the torrid intrigues of the Bannisters, there is one truth that echoes through the Umpteen Kingdoms: Gloom is coming…

Epic Fantasy is Ghastly

Prophecies of doom. Protagonists slopping through the wilderness. Battles of blood and mud. At least in Gloom of Thrones you know the story will get an ending.

Tell the Tale of Your Noble Family

Plague them with mishaps like Seduced by a Sibling or Tumbled from a Tower while heaping happy events like w̶e̶d̶d̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ and family reunions onto your opponents to raise their Self-Worth score.

Award-winning Gameplay with Clear Cards

Unique transparent cards let you play multiple cards on the same character, determining their ultimate fate while still allowing you to see straight through their machinations!

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