See Page XX: Creating Scenario-Specific Yellow King Cards

A column about roleplaying

by Robin D. Laws

As more Yellow King Roleplaying Game scenarios appear, you’ll see single-use Injury and Shock cards keyed to their specific details.

These might refer to the entities that out the cards. Or they could require characters to interact with the particulars of the mystery in order to discard them.

Prepare in advance for scenarios you create by building scenario-specific cards.

For example, in my playtest of the This Is Normal Now sequence, a foe from the book, the fleeners (p. 46), had different Injury cards than canonical ones given in the book. Fleeners are irritatingly terrifying minion figures made of animated papier-mâché. With their keening cry of “fleener fleener fleener” they harass the enemies of their masters, inducing unease and reporting back to headquarters with supernatural senses.

In our series, they served a politician benefiting from Carcosan reality alteration. By the time the investigators discovered this, multiple investigators were wearing another aspect of his conspiracy, a sinister Fitbit-like device called an Urchin, on their wrists. In the game book, the Injury cards they dish out in combat need to fit any number of situations GMs might use them for. At my table, they could key into this other plot element, like so:

CLOGGED SINUSES

Injury

Non-lethal. -1 to all tests.

Discard when you fail a test by a margin of 1.

FLEENER EFFECT

Injury

-1 to Focus and Presence tests if any character in the current scene has expressed a view the fleeners’ master would agree with.

Discard by freeing yourself of an Urchin.

Clogged Sinuses reflects what happens when you fight a papier-mâché enemy: it falls into dust even if it beats you, creating a cloud of not entirely ordinary dust that gets literally up your nose.

Fleener Effect is an oddball example of an Injury that exacts a psychic toll. Events in the game had already established the extraordinary lengths characters had to go to to get Urchins off their wrists. Worse, if you receive the Fleener Effect and don’t have an Urchin already on you, you have to acquire one, put it on, exposing yourself to its various ill-effects, and then get it off again, in order to discard the card.

Or you can wait until the end of the scenario and discard it then, as it is not a Continuity card.

Tying cards into ongoing sources of fear in your game gives them an extra frisson. The awful cries of foxes became a motif in my game. Now that I look back on it I wonder why I didn’t incorporate them into a card effect. So many ways to unnerve the group, so little time…

When tying a discard condition into specific story events, ensure that the condition can be achieved. You want the player holding the card to feel pressured, but not entirely forced, to make the attempt. Focus on actions that are risky or hard to achieve, but that they might want to perform even without the card. In this example, getting rid of an Urchin is a good thing in its own right.

Players simply resign themselves to the risk of holding onto a card, and its ill consequence, if you attach too unpleasant or challenging a discard condition to it. A card that gives them the option of, say, killing a particular innocent GMC, feels too much like a force.

Here’s an unfairly manipulative version of a custom card:

MURDEROUS THOUGHTS

Shock

-2 to Focus tests.

Discard by killing sweet Sally Murdoch.

The fear of turning evil is a horror staple and within bounds, but your custom card should invoke it without nakedly jerking the player around. Instead you might consider a choice the character which, though queasy, the character can recover from:

MURDEROUS THOUGHTS

Shock

-2 to Focus tests.

Discard by confessing your unwelcome homicidal impulses to a therapist, authority figure, or Sally Murdoch herself.

When using discard effects to nudge players further into the story, couch the condition vaguely. This allows players to think they’ve cleverly solved a problem. Overly clear descriptions risk the feeling that players must pixel-bitch their way to one predetermined cut scene. Perhaps include a couple of possible scenes that fulfill the conditions.

Like so:

CAGED

Shock

Lose 1 Health and 1 Composure at 6 AM each day (world time.)

Discard when you escape, taking a wrongly convicted prisoner with you.

This version might seem too restrictive:

CAGED

Shock

Lose 1 Health and 1 Composure at 6 AM each day (world time.)

Discard when you escape, taking Albert Chen with you.

Or it might work fine, especially if the players are already thinking of rescuing Albert by the time the card appears. That way the discard registers as a bonus incentive toward an existing goal, not a hoop to reluctantly jump through.

Create your own custom cards with these templates, formatted for Adobe Photoshop and the open source GIMP image editor:

For licensing reasons we can’t supply fonts. The card header is a Garamond font, which you probably already have in some form. You’ll want to play around with the size, based on your specific version of the font, and the length of each card title. My version has it a default of point size 32. The body text is P22 Mayflower Smooth, by default at point 22 in this template.


 

The Yellow King Roleplaying Game takes you on a brain-bending spiral through multiple selves and timelines, pitting characters against the reality-altering horror of The King in Yellow. When read, this suppressed play invites madness, and remolds our world into a colony of the alien planet Carcosa. Four core books, served up together in a beautiful slipcase, confront layers with an epic journey into horror in four alternate-reality settings: Belle Epoque Paris, The Wars, Aftermath, and This Is Normal Now. Purchase The Yellow King Roleplaying Game in print and PDF at the Pelgrane Shop.

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