Undead Resource Management
Nazgul from Bakshi's LotR adaptation
Back in April I teased the very beginnings of my TTRPG pet project YADN - You are a Death (K)night. A game for roleplaying powerful, undead wraiths like the Nazgul or The Ten Who Were Taken…if they had killed their master(s) and regained their free will at the 11th hour.
I’ve been iterating on the basic resource management that I think I can share a sneak peek! Dice pools, resource trackers and boxes await you…
[This post was originally on Substack. Now it's here!]
Rules & Fantasies
Malice is the physical stat, covering strength, resistance to harm and intimidation.
Gloom is the social stat, covering social interactions, determining how many minions you can have under your influence, and resistances of the mind.
Dread is the magic stat, covering casting and resisting sorceries, as well as keeping one’s soul in one piece. This becomes important for resisting effects especially dangerous to the undead, as well as resisting stress metastasizing into Conditions.
It’s a D6 dice-pool system , with 5’s and 6’s as successes. Players add together a pool of D6s based on their stat and accompanying bonuses, like having assistance, relics or powers to your aid.
I’ve really been enjoying the process of tying together the myriad fantasies I want to meld together, and how to facilitate those with rules:
Power Fantasy as Villains
Stress Mechanics
I love the idea of getting to engage in power fantasy, playing as archetypal fantasy villains with a capital-V…
I also love the kinds of rules systems that have evolved out of the horror genre, what I see as a great shift from sanity to stress: leaving behind the baggage of equating breaks in sanity with real mental illness, and instead centering a horror game on nonspecific, fictional compulsions.
Unknown Armies is the best example, representing stress to a PC in five distinct categories, and having the nuance that being hardened to one kind of stress helps you deal with certain problems (for example, being hardened to physical violence makes it harder for you to socially interact with people).
Stress is also a point of relatability here. Few can relate to forging evil weapons and dispensing riddles to passing strangers, but many, many people can relate to being overstressed and burnt-out. Stress, anxiety and burnt-out are such fundamental components of being alive today that they can be a lifeline to relate to incredibly specific and weird fictional characters, ala YADN.
Powerful undead, dealing with nuanced stress mechanics.
So, what kind of rules can facilitate both fantasies?
Wraith Resources
The core idea I’ve been toying with is representing accumulating numbers through a series of checked boxes. A resource tracker of several boxes, where 1, 2, 3 are kept track of through crossing a box off with an ‘X’. Then, as resources continue to rise, you double back and fill in boxes that are already crossed-off, to represent how close one is to a maximum. This works for any resource, but the main two are physical wounds and stress.
Here’s what I mean:
Empty becomes crossed-out becomes filled-in.
This is functionally similar to having a blank space on a character sheet to keep track of “I have 2 wounds, now I have 4 wounds…” but stores the information in the form of a visual reminder. With a set maximum through this method, you can visually see how close you are to the end.
A tracker that has 3 boxes would look like □□□ → ▣▣▣ 3 resources.
When 3 becomes 4, the player starts back at the beginning and fills-in the first box, which would look like → ■▣▣.
5 total resources would look like → ■■▣ and 6 would be → ■■■
Using this formula to keep track of information has a clear drawback, which is that it creates a defined limit rather than letting you count up an increasing number. The benefits to this - displaying resources by crossing-out boxes and then doubling back to fill them in as the number rises - really excites me, and it’s what the YADN system of resource management will be built on.
Debuffs can be tied to a specific number of resources, displayed right on the character sheet. Instead of, through written explanation (like I’m doing now) and having to remember, “At 12 Wounds, my character is Ruined” or “How much Stress do I need before I gain a buff, 13 or 14?” they are always in front of the player. Tying this idea to the boxes, status conditions happen when a box goes from crossed-out to filled in. Going from ▣ → ■ always does something, good or bad:
I think the potential design space around this is really interesting. Building off of it, players are able to more clearly visualize the tie between game mechanics on a sheet and the fiction being told at the table.
This allows for more frequent opportunities for players to make decisions, ideally dramatic ones. In my mind, a hallmark of good game design is allowing players to make meaningful, dramatic decisions, and resource management of wounds and stress is a way to bake that into its core.
Things always happen when boxes go from crossed-out to filled-in.
Earlier I described the downside that boxes (rather than a pure ascending numerical value) have a set limit, that the tracker can only have so many boxes. Here that drawback becomes a beneficial part of the design, a character having multiple tracks; by allowing one to completely fill up, further ticks or points spill over onto the next track.
You get too wounded, all further wounds = stress. You get too stressed out, all further stress = Torment. Three torment(s), and you DIE!
Here’s the stress tracker, which is bundled with torment, the means by which a PC can truly perish:
A YADN character has 10 boxes of stress. This means that they can be inflicted with a maximum of 20 stress at a time, before they start being straight-tormented back to their grave.
When they fill-in the boxes at the 3, 6 and 9 mark - or, having 13, 16 or 19 total stress - they gain additional dice to their dice pool. Wounds only cause your character to cascade, but there are partial benefits to being so stressed out that you perform a little better. At first you get an additional die to your Malice pool, then a die to your Gloom pool, and then a die to your Dread pool.
This is inspired by the Alien roleplaying game. Like Unknown Armies, it has a more nuanced system for replicating what stress does to a person. As you become more stressed out, adrenaline dice increase your chances of success. They also put you at greater risk of panicking!
Riffing on this (since panic doesn’t necessarily fit power fantasy), you gain these “stress dice” pretty late, when the tracker goes from crossed-out to filled-in, like all the other status effects. Your PC can accomplish more, but you’re flying really close to the sun when you do.
Torment is the one exception to the rule of YADN boxes: they just fill-in. 1 Torment and it becomes harder to resist spiraling, harder to resist one tracker spilling onto the next. 3 Torment and you are well and truly dead.
(Of course, death is just another resource for the UNdead. I’m still brainstorming its implementation, but a YADN player character can die six times before they’re fully consigned to Death’s Kingdom. It’ll likely be as close to leveling up as I’ll get!)
This is still heavily work in progress, but starting with this idea of trackers has opened up some really compelling design-space. Here are more of these trackers together, color-coded in a kind of character sheet to further build on.
For a wraith stolen from Death by powerful spells, wounds are way less important than stress. We’ve got this cascading stress mechanic where: wounds → stress → torment → death, but astute readers will follow that a character can have far more stress at one time than wounds.
Wounds heal way faster. A minor rest (which’ll be called a Lull, I think?) refreshes all the wounds you have, reversing the boxes: ■ → ▣ → □. This same rest doesn’t touch stress, and you’ve got to bed down in a dark crypt for a day before a couple points of Stress get refreshed.
This helps to simulate the fantasy for these types of characters: if you’re basically a zombie, you can take quite a few stabs before your situation becomes truly dire.
And then, your body ruined, it’s the cascading damage to your mind that’s the real threat to your safety. When your willpower is bogged down by torment, then you can truly slip back into the grave you crawled from.
(There’s another resource, Anguish, which will be a topic for another article. Anguish builds up as an ascending numerical count, potentially spilling over when a PC becomes Burnt-Out or Ruined, leading to Conditions: the game’s nonspecific roleplaying quirks. Needs further refinement! I have to workshop how Anguish happens through the course of the loop)
Gameplay Loop
The gameplay loop of YADN involves going out and surviving terrible, calamitous injuries that would take out living people. While the dead flesh knits itself back together quickly, stress has a habit of accumulating over time, only going down 1 per night spent ranging out from the player’s collective Stronghold of Ultimate Evil™.
Withstand grievous injuries with ease, build up stress and work to relieve it individually and as a group of wraiths bound together by your terrible fate.
As stress builds up it becomes more and more likely that a PC picks up a Torment, and Anguish, both of which can only be healed by returning to said stronghold for a full rest back home.
All PCs in YADN are going to have these resources: Wounds, Stress, Torment and Anguish. I don’t foresee that any playbooks will have fewer or additional boxes, but they might have additional status conditions! I’m early in the brainstorming stage for YADN’s playbooks, but The Brutish warrior playbook will likely have a new status condition that gives it access to more damage once it is sufficiently wounded.
Terminus
YADN has a long way to go. For now it’s a solo passion project, but it’s gone from a rough jumble of pure vibes and ideas into something unique. I rely on comparisons to Tolkein’s iconic villains for an easy benchmark for those familiar with fantasy (and with the recent LotR and Magic: The Gathering crossover, Ringwraith memes are having a renaissance), but I can’t wait for the day when it gets its feet from under it.
Thanks for reading! Sharing my thought process and game design journey has been really helpful in understanding it for myself.
And above all, keep being creative!
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