(click here for PDF)

I routinely prep these cheat sheets for RPGs that I run or play and share them here on the Alexandrian. But for those who haven’t seen them before: These summarize all the rules for the game — from basic action resolution to advanced combat mechanics. It’s a great way to get a grip on a new system and, of course, it also provides a valuable resource at the table for both the GM and the players. (For more information on the procedure I follow when prepping these cheat sheets, click here.)

This particular set of cheat sheets has been prepared for Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars: Force and Destiny roleplaying game. Force and Destiny is the third game in a trilogy of Star Wars games that FFG has produced — the others being Edge of Empire and Age of Rebellion. There are a few minor differences between the games, but they’re 99% identical and you should find that these cheat sheets prove valuable regardless of which system you’re running with only a few minor changes.

I’m a fairly lazy fellow, though, so I’m not going to be making those adjustments for the other games. In order to make it easier to customize these sheets if you’re playing one of the other games, I’m also making the original Microsoft Word document available:

Force and Destiny – System Cheat Sheet (Word)

You’ll also need these fonts:

(FFG Star Wars Fonts)

(Without the fonts, the Word file is just going to look really, really weird.)

Over the next couple days I’ll also be posting a review of FFG’s Star Wars games and possibly a short scenario I designed for Force and Destiny.

HOW I USE THEM

I keep a copy of the system cheat sheet behind my GM screen for quick reference and I also provide copies for all of my players. Of course, I also keep at least one copy of the rulebook available, too. But my goal with the cheat sheets is to summarize all of the rules for the game. This consolidation of information eliminates 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 is designed to be fairly intuitive. The actual sequencing of the pages is mostly arbitrary (although topics are obviously grouped together if they require multiple pages):

PAGE 1: Fantasy Flight’s Star Wars RPGs use a lot of symbols. A lot of symbols. So those are all summarize here, along with the basic difficulty tables, and the core check mechanics. Heart of the system, basically. New players will need to know all of this.

PAGE 2: The core of the combat mechanics. New players will need the left column and the right column. For the maneuvers listed in the middle column, you’ll also need to discuss Move. I also recommend discussing Aim and Taking Cover (without which, PCs are going to have a really rough time of it in combat).

PAGE 3: Advanced combat options and the Recovery rules. You’ll want to include a brief coverage of the Medicine skill in your initial system briefing. (Players always want to know how they can get their hit points back.)

PAGE 4: This page has all of the effects you can purchase using advantage, triumph, threat, and despair for both personal combat and vehicle combat. This is an oft-referenced page and you’ll probably find yourself using it more than anything else in the cheat sheets.

PAGE 5: All the disparate Force mechanics brought together in one place. This can be thought of largely as the Force and Destiny specific page. It’s the one you’ll want to swap out if you’re playing one of the other games (or supplement if you’re combining all of them together).

PAGE 6: Equipment & Environment. ‘Nuff said.

PAGES 7-8: All of the rules for Vehicle Combat. Took a lot of experimentation to figure out how to organize this information so that (a) it would all fit on two pages and (b) players could instinctively know where to look for something without a lot of practice. (For the most part, players can mostly focus on the first page, while the GM will need to more frequently reference the second. The exception are the damage and repair rules.)

PAGES 9-10: Critical Injury and Vehicle Critical Hit tables. Also ’nuff said.

PAGE 11: Skill Guide. This collects all of the guidelines given for using skills and resolving skill checks (except for skill uses that are summarized elsewhere in the cheat sheet, like using Medicine to treat injuries). Incredibly useful when adjudicating actions.

PAGE 12: Item Qualities & Skill List. Kind of a final catch-all. I kept trying to get the Skill List onto the first couple of pages, but it just wouldn’t fit. No system cheat sheet would be complete without a complete skill list, though: When I’m running a system for the first time, the biggest struggle is figuring out what the skills are so that I can call for the right skill checks. Much easier to just take ’em all in at a glance.

MAKING A GM SCREEN

These cheat 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.

• Panel 1: Basic Mechanics (with Skill Guide and Skill List behind it)
• Panel 2: Combat (with Combat Options/Recovery and Attack Effects behind it)
• Panel 3: The Force (with Starships and Vehicles and Vehicle Combat Checks behind it)
• Panel 4: Equipment & Environment (with Critical Injuries and Critical Hits behind it)

Your mileage may vary here. I’ve also experimented with:

• Panel 3: Starships and Vehicles (with Vehicle Combat Checks and Equipment/Environment behind it)
• Panel 4: The Force (with Critical Injuries and Critical Hits behind it)

FFG STAR WARS – FURTHER READING
Review of Force and Destiny
Force and Destiny: System Cheat Sheet
FFG Star Wars: The Big Fix
Star Wars: Red Peace

Go to Part 1

And at long last, the Hexcrawl essay draws to a close. As a final parting gift, I offer up two cheat sheets for running your own hexcrawls.

The Basic Cheat Sheet offers the stripped down core of the game structure. If you occasionally found your eyes glazing over during the previous 12 installments, this is probably the cheat sheet for you: Just basic navigation, encounter checks, and hex movement.

The Advanced Cheat Sheet is the full package: It includes the full watch checklist, the robust encounter system, the ability for characters to become lost, all the modes of travel, terrain modifiers, foraging rules, and tracking. The whole nine yards. (The tenth yard is the one where you make an awesome campaign out of it.)

Of course, you can also selectively pick-and-choose from the advanced elements, deciding what stuff you want to incorporate into the basic system.

(click for PDF)

(click for PDF)

Addendum: Sketchy Hexcrawls
Thinking About Wilderness Travel

FURTHER READING
Thought of the Day: Hexcrawl in the Underdark
Check This Out: Hexcrawl Tracks
Check This Out: Hexcrawl Sighting Distances
Game Structures
Thinking About Urbancrawls

(click here for PDF)

I’ve done several of these cheat sheets now, but for those who haven’t seen them before: I frequently prep cheat sheets for the RPGs I run. These summarize all the rules for the game — from basic action resolution to advanced combat options. It’s a great way to get a grip on a new system and, of course, it also provides a valuable resource at the table for both the GMs and the players. (For more information on the procedure I follow when prepping these cheat sheets, click here.)

This set of cheat sheets is for Kenneth Hite’s Trail of Cthulhu. I’ve talked about the GUMSHOE system in past, including what I consider to be its flaws and limitations. Have I been converted? Hmm… not exactly, but I’m not going to get into it here. (Partly because I want to let those thoughts finish baking before sharing them.) So why have I prepped a system cheat sheet for the game? Well, partly because Hite’s really good at what he does: The Stability/Sanity mechanics are fantastic (particularly the metagame methods of playing out long-term madness). And the method used to present the Mythos by treating it as a catalog of mysterious possibilities instead of an encyclopedia of cemented facts is just flat-out excellent and is possibly enough to recommend purchasing the core rulebook even if you never intend to play the game at all.

But the major reason is Eternal Lies, a mega-campaign designed for the game by Will Hindmarch, Jeff Tidball, and Jeremy Keller. My great love for The Masks of Nyarlathotep and the influence it had on my node-based approach to scenario design may be well-known to readers of the Alexandrian, and Eternal Lies, while having very little directly in common with that campaign in terms of setting or plot, manages to capture perfectly almost everything that I love about its structure while, in my opinion, improving the actual content within that structure. I’ll also be talking more about Eternal Lies at some point in the near future, but the key element here is that it’s prompted me to run an entire Trail of Cthulhu campaign and that means I need a cheat sheet.

Which means that you get a cheat sheet, too.

HOW I USE THEM

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 summarize all of the rules for the game. This consolidation of information eliminates 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: The core mechanics coupled to a list of the investigative and general abilities. Being able to rapidly identify pertinent investigative abilities that might be able to pull information out of a scene is pretty much the heart and soul of the GUMSHOE system, so I put these lists front-and-center for easy reference during play.

Pages 2-3: I’m not 100% satisfied with the sequencing of information on these pages. (For example, the stuff on “Explosives” should conceptually come under “Combat Options” instead of proceeding it.) But I made some compromises to make everything fit onto two pages instead of three, and in actual play this doesn’t seem to have a significant impact on ease of reference.

Pages 4-5: Similarly, my original intention was to get all the Stability and Sanity rules on one page, but they just don’t fit. So Sanity spills over onto its own page, but fortunately the remaining space is filled up nicely with the rules for Tomes and Magic.

Page 6-7: I knew the “Explosives” table was going to be part of the cheat sheet as soon as I read it in the rulebook. (Explosives may not come up frequently, but that table is too finicky for me not to want it at my fingertips whenever it comes up in play.) I wanted the references for “Credit Rating” handy because it felt important to keep that contextualized. The page on “Firearms” got added later based on the fact that I kept reaching for it during actual play.

MAKING A GM SCREEN

These cheat 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. My Trail of Cthulhu screen currently looks like this:

• Page 1: Basic Mechanics (Credit Rating/Explosives printed on the opposite side, Firearms behind it).
• Page 2: Basic Combat (with Physical Injury/Recovery/Other Danggers behind it).
• Page 3: Stability
• Page 4: Sanity/Tomes/Magic

I hope you find them useful!

(click for PDF)

The Strange is the new RPG from Monte Cook Games. The basic concept of the game looks something like this:

You may be familiar with the Fermi Paradox, the mysterious paradox which exists between the fact that conditions for intelligent life appear to be plentiful while intelligent life itself appears to be extremely rare. What we’ve discovered is that another scientific mystery — the existence and source of dark energy — is not so much a mystery as it is a smoking gun. We now know several key things about dark energy:

• It forms a vast network which exists as a fractal substrate beneath the surface of reality as we understand it.
• This network is, in fact, artificial. We don’t actually know why it was built, but we can tell that it’s the result of alien technology we can’t even begin to understand. This network is commonly referred to as the Strange.
• The dark energy within this network is drawn to sentient life. When large populations of sentient life are present (like, say, a world with 7 billion people living on it) the concentration of dark energy rises precipitously.
• Large concentrations of dark energy within the network cause the spontaneous creation of alternate realities based on the collective subconscious of the population. These realities are recursive instantiations of the “prime world” and have become referred to as “recursions”.
• Unfortunately, large concentrations of dark energy also attract the attention of beings we refer to as “planetovores”. We refer to them by that name because the first time we encountered one, it attempted to eat the planet.

Other threats to humanity also exist in the Strange or emanate from recursions. For example, one of the many recursions in the shoals of Earth is the world of Ruk. It turns out, however, that Ruk is not a recursion of Earth: It was actually spawned from an alien world and then cast adrift through the Strange. Many people on Ruk, however, don’t like being stuck in Earth’s “gravitational pull” within the Strange and want to escape. Unfortunately, the only way they know of accomplishing that is to blow up the planet.

I’m still processing all the awesome material that’s been coming out for The Strange since the beginning of August, but I’ve also been running demo scenarios for Monte Cook Games. (I’ve run those scenarios for 20+ people now.) As a result, I’ve prepped one of my system cheat sheets for the game. This actually proved relatively simply, since the mechanics of The Strange are virtually identical to the mechanics in Numenera. (Somewhere on the order of 99.99% identical.) Where the system differentiates itself are the character creation mechanics (which use the same structure, but with a completely different set of content) and the incredibly clever mechanics by which you “translate” from one recursion to another. (The short version is that all characters in the system are summarized by their type, descriptor, and focus. For example, you might be a graceful paradox who solves mysteries. When you translate from one recursion to another, the core of your character — your type and your descriptor — remains the same. But as you are translated into the symbolic reality of the recursion, your focus changes. So the graceful paradox who solves mysteries on Earth becomes a graceful paradox who embraces Qephilim ancestry on Ardeyn and a graceful paradox who metamorphosizes on Ruk. It looks simple, but in actual play this simple mechanic — and the clever character sheet that makes implementing it a breeze — is addictively awesome.)

HOW I USE THE CHEAT SHEET

As with my other system cheat sheets, this one is designed to summarize all the rules of the game — from basic resolution to advanced combat options. I’ll make stapled copies of these sheets available to the players and also keep a copy behind my screen for quick reference: Serving as a comprehensive system reference, the sheets cut down on the amount of time required for rulebook references. The organization of information onto the cheat sheets should, hopefully, be intuitive. The actual sequencing of the pages is mostly arbitrary:

Page 1: For The Strange, the difficulty table is the heart of everything. Once you understand that, the special rolls, GM intrusion, and the concept of advantage/disadvantage 90% of the rest of the system actually becomes irrelevant. This page is likely to become superfluous quickly. You’ll note that I included examples of GM intrusion: This is unusual for my cheat sheets, but so much of the Cypher System is designed to empower strong, flexible rulings by the GM that providing this kind of idea fodder feels right to me and has proven useful during play.

Page 2: The core of the combat mechanics. If you’re teaching new players the game, you really only need to walk them through these first two pages. (I’ve been adding another column or so of additional material at the beginning of each subsequent section, slowly adding more tools to the players’ toolboxes.)

Page 3: The extended combat actions and options. The rules for “Trading Damage for Effect” are technically an optional rule, but I’ve found them too invaluable not to include here. (Compared to the draft version of the sheet, you may also notice that I’ve pulled out the guidelines for simplifying multiple enemies and the boss package you can use to buff NPCs. Very useful stuff for the GM that’s buried deep in the rulebook.)

Page 4: A collection of miscellanea. Optional rules are off on the right, but I haven’t used them yet in my own game. (You’ll also note a couple of house rules tucked down in the corner. These are still being playtested, but I think they’re useful.)

Page 5: Everything that you need to know about cyphers and the Strange. The big thing here are the translation mechanics, which you can use to really emphasize the important difference between translating through the recursions of the Strange and the kind of “teleportation” effect that players might be imagining from shows like Sliders or Stargate SG-1.

Page 6: Hazards & Combat modifiers. ‘Nuff said.

MAKING A GM SCREEN

These cheat 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. For The Strange this is pretty straightforward. My screen looks like this:

• Page 1: Basic Mechanics (nothing behind it)
• Page 2: Combat (nothing behind it)
• Page 3: Combat Actions (nothing behind it)
• Page 4: Miscellaneous Rules, with The Strange printed on the opposite side and Hazards & Combat Modifiers behind it.

PLAY THE STRANGE

My only regret right now is that I’ve got enough gaming projects on my plate right now that I don’t know when I’ll be able to prep anything for The Strange beyond the introductory scenario and the demo scenario I’ve been running. But, like Numenera before it, this game already has my official “I Had a Ton of Fun Running That” seal of approval. So I recommend grabbing a copy ASAP and digging in.

FURTHER READING

The Art of GM Intrusions
The Strange: Fictional Linkage
The Strange: Violet Spiral Gambit
The Strange: Eschatology Code – Prep Notes
The Strange: Mastodon – Prep Notes

(click for PDF)

I’ve done several of these cheat sheets now, but for those who haven’t seen them before: I frequently prep cheat sheets for the RPGs I run. These summarize all the rules for the game — from basic action resolution to advanced combat options. It’s a great way to get a grip on a new system and, of course, it also provides a valuable resource at the table for both the GMs and the players. (For more information on the procedure I follow when prepping these cheat sheets, click here.)

This set of cheat sheets is for Better Angels, a One Roll Engine game from Greg Stolze and Arc Dream Publishing. The core concept of the game is that supeheroes and supervillains have their powers because they’re possessed by angels and demons, respectively.The conceit that makes this compelling, however, is that the supervillains are actually trying to mitigate the evil of the demon inside them: See, if a demon ends up inside of a goody two-shoes who refuses to do any evil in their name, the demon gets bored and leaves. That’s a problem, because every time a demon shifts to a new host there’s a chance they’ll end up inside of someone who is truly evil: A Jeffrey Dahmer or a Hannibal Lector with the powers of a demon is capable of truly despicable acts. So if you end up with a demon inside of you, the argument goes, the best course of action is to keep them entertained with evil acts that are big and splashy, but ultimately not all that harmful to the people around you.

In other words, you do all the wacky stuff that pulp era supervillains did: You kidnap the Statue of Liberty and hold her for ransom. You have whales swallow explosives. You burn down the mansion of Big Bank, Inc.

The problem, of course, is that demons are actually pretty good at that whole “corroding your soul” thing. So while you’re trying to do splashy-but-limited-damage evil, the demons are actively working to make you compromise just a little bit more; sacrifice morals you thought were sacrosanct; cross lines you promised to never cross.

And, mechanically speaking, what makes this concept really pop and turned the game into a must-play for me is that each player is responsible for both their Mortal character and for the Demon of the character to their right. This dual-role dynamic forces the conflict between Mortal and Demon into the open and the rules of the game expertly model the ethical battlefield / minefield that the characters are all trying to traverse on tightropes.

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: I’ve adopted the green/purple distinction between Strategies and Tactics from the Better Angels rulebook. Understanding the explicit sinister/virtuous antithesis between each Strategy and Tactic is the core of the system and that’s headlined here along with an overview of the incredibly simple ORE mechanic.

Page 2: And here you’ve got pretty much every other mechanic in the game. (New players mostly just need to understand the “Damage” column here; everything else is relatively nonessential for launching your first session.)

Page 3 / Page 4: Demonic Prerogative and Domain of the Human cover everything you need to know about playing each of your characters. For Better Angels to really work, the players all need to understand the full dynamic of the game’s central conflict. (It’s particularly important to grok the methods a Demon has for mechanically corrupting their host and the methods a Mortal has to maintain or regain their moral equilibrium. Being clear on each side’s “end game” is also important.)

Pages 5-7: As I’ve discussed in the past, I generally don’t put “character option chunks” in the cheat sheet. The superpowers in Better Angels, however, are generally pretty streamlined. As a GM I also found it easier to parse NPC stat blocks with a power cheat sheet. And, last but not least, players found it useful because the effect of each power in Better Angels varies based on your current stats (and those change frequently and rapidly); so it’s not like other games where you can really familiarize yourself with your current powers.

Page 8: The ability to construct devilish devices (a.k.a. supervillain death-rays) is something I saw new players overlooking, so the full procedure gets highlighted here. (This isn’t “first session critical”, but it’s something I’d consider reviewing at the start of the second session.)

Page 9: This page has all the mechanics the GM needs in order to run angelic NPCs / superheroes.

WHAT’S NOT INCLUDED

These cheat sheets are not designed to be a quick start packet: They’re really useful as a tool for an experienced player teaching the game to new players, but you’ll find it really difficult to learn the game from scratch by just reading through them. (They are an adjunct to the core rulebook, not a replacement.)

You also won’t find most of the optional rules for the game.

MAKING A GM SCREEN

These cheat 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. For Better Angels my screen looks like this:

• Page 1: Basic Mechanics (with Demonic Prerogative & Domain of the Human behind it)
• Page 2: Other Mechanics (nothing behind it)
• Demonic Aspects (with both pages of Demonic Powers behind it)
• Angels (with Devilish Devices and the logo sheet behind it)

I hope you find these useful!