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<chapter xmlns:aid="http://ns.adobe.com/AdobeInDesign/4.0/"><section><h1>What is
this?</h1>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">It’s a game of normal people caught up in the strange dark
truths of the universe. It’s based on Apocalypse World by way of World of
Dungeons.</p>
<p>This document is incomplete. It presumes that you’ve read Apocalypse World
(and/or Dungeon World, Monsterhearts, Sagas of the Icelanders). This document only
describes how this game differs from AW. If you're not familiar with those games,
you can read Dungeon World for free at http://book.dwgazetteer.com/.</p>
<p>A good way to describe what the characters do: you know how in The X-Files
Mulder and Scully are always showing up to different places where strange things
are happening? You’re going to play the people in one of those places, but Mulder
and Scully are never going to show up and save the day. Good luck.</p>
<p>You'll need one GM and 3-4 players.</p></section>
<section><h1>Settings</h1>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">Each game of Black Stars Rise takes place in a setting,
which is made up of <strong>careers</strong> the players can choose from and
<strong>setups</strong> that the GM can use to launch a game. The choice of setting
and setup is up to the GM. This preview contains one setting: Hinnom Valley, a
small town in America.</p>
<h2>Careers</h2>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">A career describes what a player character does. Like many
people, a player character's abilities are largely defined by what they do. A
career provides values for the three basic stats (Sharp, Steady, Fit), moves,
lifestyle, recovery, and advancement.</p>
<p>Each player chooses a career from the available careers at the start of play.
Every career not chosen becomes an NPC (and potential replacement PC).</p>
<h2>Setups</h2>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">A setup serves to launch a game into motion. It provides a
general idea of the situation the PCs find themselves in. Each setup has some
choices for the GM to make, as well as some decisions for the players to
make.</p></section>
<section><h1>Getting Started</h1>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">Getting ready to play Black Stars Rise requires a little
time before the session, plus a half-hour to hour at the start of play.</p>
<h2>0. Before The Session</h2>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">Before sitting down to play, the GM should read over this
document. The players can read it too, if they like—there are no secrets here—but
they don't need to. The GM will also need to print materials: the setting (one
sided), the basic moves (two sided), and the breaks (one sided).</p>
<h2>1. Present the Setup</h2>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">The GM presents the setup they've chosen. They should make
sure to touch on a few key points:</p>
<ul><li>The player characters are normal people with no previous contact with
anything beyond the real.</li>
<li>The player characters are caught up in the setup, we're here to see how they
come out of it. They may try to get out, try to get to the bottom of it, or just
try to survive—whatever makes sense for the player characters.</li></ul>
<h2>2. Choose Careers</h2>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">Each player chooses a career from those available. Once
every player has a career, the GM takes the other careers and makes them NPCs. The
GM should make sure that each non-player career turns into an NPC—as the players
make their characters, find ways to connect them to the NPCs. GM NPCs, even when
based on a player career, don't need to be made like player characters—they don't
get stats, moves, etc. The GM uses the career to suggest the NPC, but the career
sheet is only needed if the NPC becomes a player character.</p>
<h2>3. Choose Stats</h2>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">Each career provides instructions on how to set the three
core stats.</p>
<h2>4. Choose Moves</h2>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">Each career has a selection of moves, the player gets to
choose two.</p>
<h2>5. Hand Out Basic Moves</h2>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">The GM hands out one basic move card of each type to each
player. Each move card has two sides: a normal side and a wounded side, marked by a
splatter. Make sure to hand out each card normal side up—the players don't get to
look at the other side until a move or the GM tell them to.</p>
<h2>6. Introductions</h2>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">Go around the table having each player introduce their
character. The GM should ask follow-on questions about anything pertinent—where
they live, family, etc.</p>
<h2>7. History</h2>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">The characters are bound together by history. Each
character has history statements. Each statement gives a particular bonus based on
the history those characters share.</p></section>
<section><h1>The Basic Moves</h1>
<p>The most basic move is Take a Risk, which is a lot like Defy Danger or Act Under
Fire. It’ll cover most everything the players do.</p>
<p>Providing <strong>Aid</strong> to someone else is a specific case of taking a
risk, and usually grants the person being helped a +1 on a 7+ (with complications
on a 7–9). If a move tells you to take +1 to aid, that means you get +1 to take a
risk when helping someone else.</p>
<p>Keep it Together and Suffer Harm are reactive moves. They happen when something
happens to the characters—facing something horrifying or taking damage,
respectively. Failing at these moves can have profound effects for the
characters.</p>
<p>Study happens when a character carefully studies a person, thing, or situation.
Think of Study as their character’s logic and knowledge: you are the players’ eyes
and ears no matter what, the Study move is their characters’ knowledge, deduction,
and intuition.</p></section>
<section><h1>Lifestyle &amp; Buying</h1>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">Each career lists a lifestyle which describes the money
and resources the character has so long as they are employed. These careers are all
middle class or well-off, but you can assume there’s rich above that, and
struggling below, plus more.</p>
<p>If a character is ever cut off (due to being fired, disowned, absent, or
otherwise) the GM will mark down their lifestyle to a lower category. If this
endures for a while the GM may remove their lifestyle entirely—at this point
they're essentially broke and credit-less.</p>
<p>When a player wants to buy something above their lifestyle the GM will tell them
one or more of the following:</p>
<ul><li>The best you can manage is a cheaper version</li>
<li>Buying it will temporarily lower your lifestyle for weeks/months/a year.</li>
<li>You’ll have to secure a loan first, maybe from ________.</li></ul></section>
<section><h1>Damage</h1>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">The players will probably end up fighting something, or
themselves, sooner or later.</p>
<p>Weapons and their damage potential are measured in dice. Light weapons are
smaller or multi-purpose: a pistol, a baseball bat, a crowbar, a knife. Light
weapons deal one dice of damage.</p>
<p>Heavy weapons are larger, tougher to conceal, and sometimes illegal. They’re
clearly weapons: a rifle, a sword, a pitchfork. Heavy weapons deal two dice of
damage.</p>
<p>Special weapons fit neither category. Sometimes they’ll do 3 or more dice of
damage. Sometimes they’ll have +x damage.</p>
<p>When rolling damage, roll all the dice and take the best one.</p>
<h2>Armor</h2>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">Some humans (and many stranger things) have armor. Armor
reduces damage. For humans, just about any normal gear (bullet proof vest or the
like) is 1 armor at most, except maybe magical protection. The average human has no
armor.</p>
<h2>NPC Damage</h2>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">Each NPC has a Threshold. Damage below their threshold is
relatively minor, over the threshold is serious business.</p>
<p>When an NPC takes damage, subtract their armor (if any). If any damage remains
after armor, the NPC takes a condition appropriate to the situation of the GM’s
choosing. If the damage after armor is greater than the NPCs threshold, they take
one more condition for each point over.</p>
<p>Conditions can be whatever makes sense. Sometimes a condition will take an NPC
out of the fight immediately. A player taking advantage of one or more conditions
gets +1 to any rolls involved (it’s +1 no matter how many conditions). An NPC with
a number of conditions equal or greater than their threshold is almost certainly
dead, though they may be dead before that (if they get the dying condition and
aren’t treated, for example).</p>
<p>Example: Sam shoots the mad cultist bearing down on him. He rolls 4 damage. The
cultist is a typical human: 0 armor and threshold 3. Since some damage gets past
the armor, he takes a condition, and the GM decides on “Winged: blood spilling down
a gash in his forehead.” The damage after armor is one greater than his threshold,
so he also gets “Disoriented.”</p>
<h2>Player Damage</h2>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">When a player character takes damage the GM will tell them
the worst it could be:</p>
<ul><li>0 for the untrained with a light weapon</li>
<li>2 for the dangerous with a light weapon</li>
<li>4 for the untrained with a heavy weapon</li>
<li>6 for the dangerous with a heavy weapon</li></ul>
<p>The player takes this as a modifier to their Suffer Harm roll. One possible
result of a suffer harm move is taking wounds.</p>
<p>Wounds are always applied to moves. When a move is wounded, flip it over to its
wounded side, it can’t be wounded again.</p>
<p>Medical aid, human companionship, or the passage of time may enable a move to
return to its unwounded side. Otherwise it stays wounded indefinitely. The details
of recovery are described in each career.</p>
<p>Note that usually only the basic moves can take wounds, and that generally the
wounded version is worse for the player than the unwounded.</p>
<p>Example: The cultist carries through onto Sam on momentum alone, driving a
dagger into him. The GM says this is 0 damage, so Sam makes the Suffer Harm move
with no modifier. Unfortunately he still rolls a 5. The GM describes the dagger
digging into him, and the blood that starts to leak out, telling Berkowitz to wound
his Suffer Harm card. He flips over his Suffer Harm card and finds the other side
not to his liking.</p></section>
<section><h1>Breaks</h1>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">Possibly more dangerous than physical harm are breaks. A
break is a mental mishap—think "break with reality" or "breakdown." Breaks are
printed by the GM. When a move or the GM tells a player they gain a break, they
draw one from the top of the break deck.</p>
<p>The card will describe what happens. Some may be instantaneous: some missing
time, maybe. Others will stick around, like compulsion or disorder.</p>
<p>Breaks that stick around may be cured with time and treatment, as prescribed by
the GM. Good luck with that. Humans are complex piles of irrational and poorly
understood mental mechanisms.</p></section>
<section><h1>GMing</h1>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">For the most part, GM as you normally would AW or DW.
That’s hand waving a huge amount that’s actually changed, but this is a playtest
document. A few important twists:</p>
<h2>Ask Questions and Use The Answers</h2>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">Still do this, of course, but think carefully about what
you ask the players about. Freely ask them about their characters’ normal mundane
lives, and use that everywhere. Let them have typical human possessions and
relationships, let them fill them in.</p>
<p>Then, when the strange mythos comes up, don’t give them so big an input. Still
ask them questions (about how their character is reacting, what they least want to
happen, etc.) but don’t let them fill in the mythos for you. It’s big and scary and
most importantly unknown.</p>
<p>Within the normal confines of life let them fill in as large an area as you
please, detailing as much of the setting as you want, the more the better. Beyond
the normal life it’s your domain.</p>
<h2>Honestly Portray A Twisting World</h2>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">Your job as the GM is to show the players a world where
ordinary people see their understanding of the world twist into something stranger.
Note “twisting,” not “twisted.” It may be twisted, sure, but more importantly its
changing and uncontrollable and therefore scary.</p>
<p>You don’t need to think of story or drama or any of that. The characters are
poised at the edge of the unknown, interesting things will happen.</p>
<h2>The First Session</h2>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">Start the first session with encroaching weirdness and
steadily dial it up. With the help of the setup, place the players in the path of
strange occurrences and let them play out what their characters would do. They’re
under no obligation to investigate—running away (or at least trying to) is a
reasonable response, but one that comes with its own dangers. The setup will
embroil them in weirdness—getting out will be no easy task.</p>
<h2>Make NPC Triangles</h2>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">Your NPCs—both those provided by the unused careers and
others you create—are your greatest tool in forming a real world that can fall down
on the player characters. Without NPCs, the player characters are vortexes of
strangeness floating in a void. NPCs allow you to both see how far the player
characters will slide and show the strangeness around them without confronting them
directly with it.</p>
<p>If every strange thing happens to the player characters they'll quickly become
overwhelmed and cut off from normal life entirely. Confronting your NPCs with the
odd feels more like real life—the players are in the midst of big events, not the
focus of them. They allow you to spread around the weird. How does the barkeep
react when the strange stuff his regulars have been complaining about happens to
him too?</p>
<h2>Advancement</h2>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">Most advancement will be descriptive: if the characters
somehow gain new training or position, they get the matching move.</p>
<p>If a character achieves some considerably victory (saving something they care
for, getting to the bottom of a mystery) you can give them an advancement. Each
advancement lets them choose one new move from any playbook in play. The person
playing the character from that playbook gets first dibs—if the Doctor and
Detective both have advances and they both want the Forensics move, the Doctor gets
it.</p>
<h2>Campaigns</h2>
<p aid:pstyle="noindent">Campaigns are made up of arcs; arcs are made up of
sessions.</p>
<p>A session is one night of play. It’ll usually involve the same characters for
the entire time, but if someone dies that character’s player can make a new
character and start playing them immediately.</p>
<p>The first session and setup establish some odd goings-on. The process of dealing
with those (by trying to unentangle the characters from them, getting to the bottom
of them, or otherwise) makes up an arc. There’s no set arc length, just look for
when the setup has been clearly dealt with, at least for these characters.</p>
<p>The end of an arc is a fine place to stop, but you can also keep a campaign
going. To build a campaign, start a new arc with a new first session. Use a new
setup, new characters, a new location, and maybe even a new time. The player
characters will likely know nothing of the previous arcs, but we as the players and
GM will get to see how this incident relates to other earlier arcs we’ve played.
For example, after dealing with the old man’s death (and the captured spirits he
was tending) we might jump to 130 years earlier when the mansion is being built
under mysterious circumstances.</p>
<p>As a GM, whenever you start a new session or arc assume it's taking place in the
same world as every previous game you've run. Slowly, over time, you'll develop the
big picture—and the players who play with you regularly may start to see it
too.</p></section></chapter>