A look at the cards will tell your new characters where they’ve been…and the GM where they might be going…
When making new characters, a clever way to generate some neat background history is offer them a quick game of mystic monte. Players can draw up to five cards. Each card will give them either a failed or hardened notch in a madness meter. I’ve used this system in games where I want only one or two players to be an Adept or Avatar so this is a good street-level resource. Its up to the GM whether he lets the player come up with the explanation to the Madness and which meter it goes into…or if he does all the dirty work.
The color of the card tells you if its a Hardened or Failed Notch. Red = Hardened Black = Failed.
The rank tells you how big the check was. 10s count as either 1 or 10s. Aces are used later.
Jack= +10 skill points in a skill of the player’s chosing…or 20 points of the GM’s chosing.
Queen= You are somehow connected to one of the organizations in the Occult Underground. Maybe you used to work with a Max Attaxer. Maybe your Aunt got new life with TNI.
King=You know an honest-no-shit Adept or Avatar OR you have a mystic artifact in your grubby little hands.
Ace=You ARE an Adept or Avatar. congratulations.
Joker:=You are one of the rare few that’s both an Adept and Avatar..if you choose. You can chose to not beat the house and just play one.
Any suggestions/additions? What do you think, sirs?
Neat one. I am definitively using this someday.
There’s a thread on RPG.net here that deals with something vaguely similar, which would compliment this very nicely.
Kinda neat. Remniscent of some of the stuff from Deadlands. An interesting idea.
Ever since using this as a player and getting 5 failed notches to start the game, I’m gonna use it whenever I run UA.
Nice one, U could complemet this by using the system from the original Twilight 2000 rules.
I can imagine this for quick games or for dealing with what to do when everyone wants to play an adept or an avatar, but I like to think about my characters as people and dislike subjecting that to random chance.