JACQUELINE BRYK 1

An Ce (order #15396504)
 DEBT IS ONLY THE BEGINNING
written by: Jacqueline Bryk
edited by: James Mendez Hodes and Felix Warren

Originally Designed for: Avery Alder’s “Rentpunk” Game Jam.

Republished through DrivethruRPG thanks to support from the

following: Josh Boyum, Ashly Morton, Randal Milholland, David Felt,
Rae Wilson, Gare Reeve, Craig Eisenberger, Katriel Page, Devon
Martinez, Fish, Alden Strock, Andrew Sirkin, Satyros Phil Brucato, Hel
McGee, Rose Bailey, Marshall Bradshaw, Natalie Walschots, David
Leaman, Stephen Dewey, Jessica Price, Morna Callahan, Blaine Rineer,
and all other patrons of the Damocles Thread Development and
Jacqueline Bryk Patreons.

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 “Welcome to 282 Caduceus Avenue! Here are your keys.
This one’s for the front door, this one’s for the mailbox,
this one—ignore this one. You probably won’t need it.”

“What’s that noise?”

“Don’t worry about it, dear, that’s just the

cacodemon in the basement. You’ll get used to him. Now
about this pipe, it leaks…”

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 INTRODUCTION
The classic image of a mage is a wealthy scholar, usually male, sequestered away in an ivory tower.
Surrounded by books, familiars, and strange instruments of all sorts, he is content to perform his experiments and
work his rituals in pleasant solitude, knowing that the outside world will never intrude on what is truly
important.
Would that you could have that. Ivory towers don’t come cheap nowadays. You’ve maybe heard of a friend of
a friend who crashes on his uber-rich friend’s ivory-colored silk couches, but you couldn’t afford so much of a swatch
of the couch fabric, let alone the penthouse in which the couch sits. There are still some mages in the one percent.
You’re not one of them. The best you can do is throw yourself on their tender mercies.
Maybe you’re an apprentice. Maybe you’re running from something, or someone. Maybe you just needed a
cheap spot to crash until you can finish school in the city. For whatever reason, you found yourself signing your soul
away on this lease to one of the fat cat casters. It’s not too bad, you have hot water and a bed of your own and maybe
even a kitchen. It’s within your price range, which is a miracle. Good thing, too; if you don’t make rent by the end of
the year, it’s gonna be your ass handed over to the Goetia or the Faerie Courts or
whoever’s weird sigil was on the contract you signed.

But hey, you’ve dealt with worse, right?

HOW WE ROLL
This is a one-die roll-under system meant to deal with the problems of living in a low-rent situation--plus
magic. Any action you take is a single roll on a d10 against one of your three stats. If you roll under the number, you
succeed. If you tie or roll over, you fail. Spirit pacts, drugs, and other influences can subtract from your roll and make
the action easier to perform. When creating your character, you have ten points to spend among your three stats. No
stat can be below 1.

Every session is one month of game time. Game runs from the move-in in January to the end of the year.
At the beginning of the first session:
• Have a table of 1 GM and at least 3 players.
• Spend your ten points among your Money, Matter, and Magic stats.
• Mark down Astral and Dream Work as your first Magic path.
• Buy as many more Magic paths as you have points in Magic
• Flesh out your character with “Who are you?”
• Flesh out the neighborhood with “Who are They?” and “Where is here?”

At the end of each session:

• Give one experience point to each player
• Ask each player to nominate another player for something cool they did -- that player gets an extra experience

At the beginning of each session:

• Subtract two from your Money to pay rent.
• Add paychecks from any part-time jobs to your Money stat.
• Add any bonuses to your Matter or Magic stats.
• Buy an additional stat bump or path of magic with your experience point(s)
Stat bump = desired level in experience
Path of magic = 5 experience

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 MONEY
Cash is king. Everything and everyone costs something. Your money stat goes down by two at the start of every
session, so unless you pick up a part-time job or come up with a really good plan, you’re going to be shit out of
luck.
• Roll Money to: convince a cop, convince your landlord, convince a supernatural, make a deal
• Money changes when you: pay rent (-2), buy good food (-1), buy ritual supplies (-1 to 3), see a doctor (-2),
get fired (-1 to 3), get a mundane job (+1 to 3), get a supernatural job (+2), relieve someone of their posses-
sions (+1 to 3)

MATTER
Corpus sana, mens sana. A mage is (usually) only as good as her body, and casting is much harder when you’re
cold, tired, or hungry.
• Roll Matter when: in a mundane fight, running away, eating questionable food, casting from the body,
drinking heavily, tripping balls, pulling an all-nighter, braving the cold, not eating, fighting off an illness or
addiction
• Matter changes when you: get hurt (-variable), get sick (-variable), starve (-variable), freeze (-1 to 3), cast
from the blood (-1), ritually fast (-2), don’t sleep (-1 to 3), develop an addiction (-2), die (-all of it), see a doc-
tor (+variable), take your meds (+variable), eat good for a week (+1), take a mental health day (+1)

MAGIC
You couldn’t be a mage without magic, right? What most people don’t realize is that magic isn’t about fireballs
and teleportation. Magic is all symbols and bargains and sacrifice.
There are eleven, very general, paths of magic in this game. All mages start with Astral and Dream Work for
free. All paths are detailed under “How do you do it?”
• Roll Magic when you: cast, wrestle for control of a dream or astral demesne, create a demesne, bully or coax
a supernatural
• Magic changes when you: drop to or below 3 Matter (-5), cast (-1, does not go down until after the roll),
create a demesne (-2), maintain a demesne (+1 per month), make a spirit pact (+1 to 3), ritually fast (+2), trip
balls (+1), use ritual tools (+1 to 3)

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 WHO ARE YOU?
Your character is an impoverished mage, trying to hack it in the big city. You don’t have much to your
name, but luckily, an older, wealthier mage is willing to lease you a room or apartment for an absurdly low rate.
The contract comes with the smallest of snags--if you haven’t paid your share by the end of the year, you become
the plaything of some power your landlord contracts with. Oh, and you should probably keep on your landlord’s
good side, lest they decide to sell you out anyway.

• Your Name: Obviously. This can be your birth name or a chosen name. You probably won’t have a title, not
yet.
• Your Face: Maybe you’re apprenticed to your landlord, or you’re a student at a completely mundane school
who happens be a mage. Maybe you’re a checkout clerk who considers three hours of sleep a full night’s
rest. Maybe you don’t have a job, and this is the first time you haven’t had to drift from doorway to doorway.
This is who you are in daily life.
• Your Secret: Your family is cursed. You killed someone while possessed. You’re running from someone
who’s coming to collect what’s theirs. This is your darkest secret and possibly your fatal flaw. Only share this
with your GM, other players shouldn’t know what it is until it inevitably comes up over the course of game.
• Your Friends: How do you know the other characters? How does this affect you? Who depends most
strongly on who? Why are you not just hiding in your apartment and starving to death?

WHO ARE THEY?

There are two major forces your character has to contend with as a renting mage: your landlord and your
friendly neighborhood supernaturals. There’s also the entity or entities who hold your contract…

• The Landlord is going to be one of your most important NPCs. This is the person who all but holds power
of life and death over you, and who will determine whether or not you’re being handed over at the end of the
year. At the beginning of the game, the players should decide if they all share the same Landlord or if they’re
split up among several. What drew you to become a tenant of your particular Landlord? Why are they inter-
ested in you? And what sorts of things are they asking you to do at odd hours of the night?
• There’s a haunted house down the street or sentient crocodiles in the sewer tunnels. The Fae own a night-
club and the demons run the bodegas. Angels might even take an interest. Anywhere a wealthier mage has
influence, there’s bound to be some supernatural leakage. Players should decide where, who, and how
much, and the GM should feel free to put a couple of unexpected actors in as well.
• For that matter, who are the mundane actors in this neighborhood drama? Wandering around smelling like
blood and roses while wearing pounds of occult jewelry is going to get you noticed, especially if you have a
non-magical part time job. Does one of the characters have family near by? What about enemies?

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 JACQUELINE BRYK 7
An Ce (order #15396504)
 WHERE IS HERE?
You can’t have an apartment without a neighborhood. The players and GM should work together to
create or embellish a neighborhood during the first session.

Some questions to keep in mind:

• What resource is the mob looking to acquire?
• Who do the cops watch?
• Where does the portal lead?
• Where is neutral ground?
• What does the weird noise at night sound like? What do people think it is?
• Where can you score?
• Is it a food desert?
• How do you get underground? What’s there?
• How obvious is the supernatural? Where?
• What is the biggest place of worship?
• Where does your landlord live?
• Where do the characters hang out? Where did they meet?

HOW DO YOU DO IT?

Being as this is a game about mages, magic is going to be one of the most important elements. There are
eleven paths of magic:

• Astral and Dream Work: The only free path mages get; if you can survive the Astral intact without wards or
blessings, you get to continue learning magic. Astral and Dream Work allows you to move around through
spiritual demesnes, dream worlds, and stranger places. With a little time and effort, a mage can also build
their own demesne--or steal someone else’s.

• Invocation: Yanks a supernatural out of their demesne and forces them to appear at the place of your choos-
ing. Not recommended without wards up first, as then the supernatural is there and not happy about about
it.

• Evocation: Like praying, but with less begging. Evocation allows you to communicate with astral and dream
entities without taking either you or them out of their comfort zone.

• Divination: Reading cards, tea leaves, the stars, sticks, etc. to discern someone’s true intentions, find out
the most likely thing to happen as a consequence of any given action, or get advice.

• Energy Work: Directly moving around the energies of an area to heal or drain a person or an object, or diag-
nose curses and illnesses of the body. Energy Work can restore Magic points, but can only restore Matter if
used in conjunction with mundane medicine or therapy.

• Cursing: Making someone’s day a whole lot worse. A curse can steal someone’s voice, cause many sorts of
illnesses and addictions, slowly drive someone insane, make a person or place more vulnerable to posses-
sion, or any number of other things. What a curse cannot do is kill people. Furthermore, if you curse some-
one and don’t roll a 1, it will rebound back on you in some way.

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 • Imbuing: Spell jars, spite cakes and other magical items. Imbuing allows for delayed magical effects that
happen when you’re not present and can be combined with any other magical path (for example, a cake that
when eaten allows you to discern lies). You can also use Imbuing on its own to possess someone with an
opposed Magic roll. Be careful, though. Failing a roll to possess someone can crack their psyche in interest-
ing ways, and if you roll a 10 or they have a ward against possession, they know exactly who tried to possess
them. There are three different kinds of possession:

Bodyriding: You don’t control the actions of the person you are possessing, but you can experience
everything they experience. They are not aware of your presence. A successful Energy Working can tell
you’re there.
Obsession: You don’t control the actions of the person you are possessing, but you are the devil on their
shoulder. For every point of Magic in your pool, you can make one suggestion that then cycles through
their head with all the maddening power of a stuck song until either they fulfill it, a month passes, or
someone exorcises you. Each suggestion takes one exorcism to erase. The victim is unaware of your
presence unless they can use or are diagnosed with Energy Work.
Possession: Classic, complete bodily possession. You control the movement, speech, and thoughts of
a person. It takes a month to prepare this sort of possession. The victim knows you’re there, but unless
they can also engage in Imbuing or Banishment, can’t do anything about it. You can leave the person at
any time, but a Magic roll is required every month to maintain the possession. Energy Work and
Divination can diagnose a possession and who the entity is.
Thanatophagy: Known also as “death eating”, “skin eviction” or “what the fuck, you sick bastard”, this
is the last resort of a dying possession entity. The caster, with an opposed Magic roll, can attempt to kick
someone else in the scene out of their body and into whatever afterlife awaits them, while the caster takes
over the body. This roll must be at least four under the caster’s Magic score. If the caster or entity is
successful, the body now belongs to them and will slowly change over the course of a year to fit the
self-image of the new owner. A thanatophage cannot be exorcised once they’ve taken a body.

• Blessing: Making someone’s day a whole lot better. A blessing can make someone luckier, protect them from
an illness, gentle the effects of a mental condition, remove a curse, etc. It cannot resurrect anyone. If you
don’t roll a 1 when blessing someone, one of your ritual tools goes missing for the rest of the session and you
lose the bonuses you would have gained from it.

• Banishing: Evicting a supernatural from the material plane, whether they like it or not. Supernatural enti-
ties are not happy when banished against their will, as it is not a gentle process. Banishing can also evict a
possessing power from an afflicted person (an exorcism). If you don’t roll a 1 during a banishment ritual or
exorcism, that entity will remember your face.

• Warding: Making a supernatural stay out once you’ve kicked it out. Placing wards around a person, object,
object or place prevents the target from being possessed or imbued. Depending on how much lower your
roll was then your Magic stat, a target can be warded against a certain number of things (for example: if you
rolled a 2 when your stat was 5, your bedroom door can be warded against 3 things)

JACQUELINE BRYK 9
An Ce (order #15396504)
 SO NO SHIT, THERE I WAS...
Debt is a game about phenomenal cosmic power in an itty-bitty living space that’s underheated and
overpriced. That element of hardship is not to be overlooked. Even the most powerful mage still has to deal
with the problems with the flesh, and magic can be much more difficult when you have to choose between an
imbued ritual knife and food for the next three days. Flesh can also be bought and sold, whether directly or in-
directly. Characters are at constant risk of being evicted, abducted, or otherwise losing autonomy in some way
or another Stories should focus around these sorts of questions and problems, as well as the effects of players’
relationships with other characters and NPCs.

Here are some story seeds to get you started:
• Your asshole landlord won’t answer his phone. Your heat is off and the window won’t close. The lights
flicker. Your door doesn’t lock properly, and you’re pretty sure the hole in the wall is where the smoke
detector used to be. And is that...blood dripping out of the shower?
• You took a job bouncing for a new bar--everyone knows it’s safer to take a mundane job that doesn’t pay as
well. Right? Of course right.
• The screams from the subway station are loudest around Midsummer.
• Lucky you, you have a cute neighbor. You’ve gone out for coffee once or twice and they’ve been receptive
to your flirtations. You planned to ask them out last night, but...something seemed off.
• Oh god. Oh god oh god. You can’t stop thinking about that cop after your last arrest. Their face keeps
flashing through your mind, begging, pleading for...something. What the fuck is wrong with you?
• You’ve discovered a demesne local to your building. It almost definitely wasn’t there yesterday, but it looks
like it’s been abandoned for hundreds of years. Whose is it, and why hasn’t it vanished yet?

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 DOING THINGS A LITTLE DIFFERENTLY
Not everything is going to go according to plan. Here are some variant rules for play when you hit those
little snags.

• Collaboration: Classically, magic is better when performed in a group (referred to as a rite or a sabbat).
Funnily enough, lying to cops, getting into fights, and paying rent are also much easier when done with
other people. When you and another player or players roll for the same action, choose one player to roll.
Every player who collaborates subtracts one from the roll--so if you roll a 7 when casting a rite with two other
people, your roll goes down to a 5.

• Casting from the blood: Sometimes mages have to cast when they’re tired, sick, or their magic is otherwise
hampered. Casting from the blood is when you power your spells with your own injury rather than a reserve
of magical energy. You lose the same number of Matter points when you cast from the blood as you would
lose Magic points if you were casting normally, and you don’t have the possibility of side-effects.

• Cut/Brake: Sometimes, things get a little too intense for the players. Sometimes you just want a little less
description of a particularly nasty scene. Cut/Brake is a technique originally used in Nordic freeform LARP-
ing to make sure all the participants are safe and comfortable. Saying “Brake” means “slow down, I am ok
with this level but I don’t want to go too much farther” and “Cut” means “stop, I need a minute”. Uses of
Cut/Brake should not be punished.

• Graduated successes: Sometimes, a simple success/failure isn’t enough. You want to know exactly how
much you succeeded or failed by. A handy rubric is provided below.
One: perfect success. You escape unscathed, your casting has no backlash and is noticed in a positive
way, you make a deal that does nothing but benefit you. Get a -1 bonus to your next roll with this stat.
Ten: abject failure. You get critically injured, your casting rips open a portal to somewhere unpleasant,
the cop “accidentally” brutalizes you during your arrest. Get a +1 penalty to your next roll with this stat.

• Success:
Success by 1 to 3 under: You succeed, but the danger is still there, someone saw, or the casting is not as
strong as you’d like it to be.
Success by 4 to 6 under: You succeed at your normal skill level. There are no unusual drawbacks or
benefits.
Success by 7 to 9 under: You succeed with style. The casting is a little stronger than normal, your deal
comes with a nice bonus, your right hook knocks your assailant out.

• Failure:
Failure by 1 to 3 over: You fail, but forgivably. The casting fizzles with no side effects, your landlord says
no but ask later, you get a mild hangover.
Failure by 4 to 6 over: You fail. The casting goes in the wrong direction, you offend the demonic mob
enforcer, you become addicted to a strange hallucinogen.
Failure by 7 to 9 over: You fail painfully. Your casting catches the attention of the entity who holds your
contract, your landlord refuses to answer your calls and “forgot” to turn on your heat, you wake up
naked in the middle of a crowded street with a massive hangover and no memory of how you got there.

JACQUELINE BRYK 11
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 “DO NOT ENTER THE BASEMENT!
DEATH UPON YOUR HOUSE! DEATH
UPON YOUR--”

“Shut up, Avaritia, I know it’s you.”

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