Labyrinthiathan

[CodexArcanum]

My game is done and sent. I don't have webspace right now, so I regret that I cannot post it for you all to read right now. As soon as it is up on 1km1kt, however, this thread will be the place to leave comments and questions on it.

In the meantime, here's a small sample for you to snack on until the main course is ready.

EDIT:
Arggg! I forgot one vital source in my biblography-type thing. Wikipedia was a great help on the game, as well as Wikitionary and Wikiquotes. So I'd like to post-mortemly thank Wikimedia for helping out so much. Sorry I forgot you in the pdf.

EDIT:
It's up! Download here, if you want.

Feel free to just post that "Hey, I downloaded it." I'm going to be reviewing other people's entries as I get around to them.[/url]

[CodexArcanum]

For Those Who Judge and Are Judged in Turn
For those who will dare this journey, welcome to a roleplaying game of horror and mystery. Labyrinthiathan is an idea that I have had in the back of my mind for some time, and I'm glad that an opportunity has come for me to express it for the world.
The basic premise of this game is that some terrors are just too big for one group to handle. The idea is that over a series of games and generations of characters, the players might solve the mystery at the core of the game.

Theme:
At the height of the Civil War, a band of disparate travelers find themselves trapped in a strange mansion, which is bigger on the inside than it is on the out. The greatest threat of all, however, may be neither the House nor the horrifying Beast who rules it, but the other forlorn travelers themselves.

Ingredients:
Companion – No one person can stand alone against the horror of the House. You need your friends.
Accuser – But they may not need you, and when the others start vanishing, who will take the fall.
Invincible – Compared to a single human life, the mystery of the labyrinth is unfathomable and invulnerable.

Rules Limitation:
The basic dice mechanic of the game yields at least three pieces of data with but a single roll. In a combat, it actually yields 5: damage, hit location, did-I-hit, initiative, and fatigue state.

The Arcane Deck is homemade.
The Arcane Deck sort-of uses color.
The sample scenerio makes use of premade characters.

[CodexArcanum]

Since it hasn't been posted yet, here's yet another decent into madness for you: my dice mechanics. Enjoy.

Facing the Dark
In this game, a single mechanic is used for situational resolution, roll three 10-sided dice. As mentioned in the materials section, two of these d10 should be similar, while one should be noticeably different. It will be called the odd die for simplicity's sake.
Whenever a roll is made, the player and the Beast will want to take special note of which die is highest, which die is lowest, and which die falls to the middle. Matching pairs and triplets are somewhat special and will be covered just after this part.
For almost any test, the resolution is basically the same. Combat and conflicts in general have a very slight rewording, but are also handled in much the same manner. The first thing to know is that there are two components to a situation in regards to finding if an action is successful or not. The first is difficulty, the second is degree. Difficulty is how well the character must do to complete an action successfully, and degree is how well or poorly the character succeeds or fails at it. Before going into that, though, you should understand how to read the rolls.
The lowest die represents speed. The higher this die reads, the faster the the character is able to perform the action. In a conflict, this determines whose action is resolved first. In a non-conflict where timing is important, subtract this number from 10 to see how long it takes. The units depend on the situation. Reloading a weapon takes only seconds, but fixing a complex device might take hours. In addition, the Beast can artificially inflate the timing to make situations more interesting. For example, jumping a great chasm only takes seconds, but the Beast might set the timing in minutes to represent the time the character spends building himself up for the jump.
The middle die represents quality. It is this die which determines success or failure. The base difficulty is a 6. If this die can roll a 6 or more, then the action is a success. Some things can make this easier or harder. If the task being attempted is in line with the character's Edge, then reduce the difficulty by 2. On the other hand, if the task could be hindered by the Flaw, then increase difficulty by 2. In addition, certain elements of a situation, such as a particularly difficult or easy task, might raise or lower the difficulty number. Certain items can also help in some situations.
The highest die represents endurance. Every action taken requires the investment of energy from the person doing it. Within the confines of the mystery, every action can have deadly consequences. The Beast is watching, and if the highest die falls below your character's fatigue level, something bad happens. The player's, however, should never know their fatigue, just that the highest die should always be as high as possible.
The odd die serves two special roles. First, the number shown on it (no matter whether it is the highest, lowest, or middle die) tells some special data about the action. For most normal actions, there is nothing special to tell. In combat, the odd die tells what location you hit at. Consult the chart to see what location this might be, based on the form of combat. Physical combat is probably the most common, but the Beast might engage in many forms of combat against the players, at any time.
The position of the odd die also says something. If the odd die is the highest, improve the degree by 1. If the odd die is lowest, make the degree worse by 1. If the odd die is the middle, do nothing extra with the degree.
Degree tells how well a character does. A successful action is an automatic degree of success of one, just as a failed action automatically has a degree of failure of one. A degree of zero is a neutral result. So, if a character fails an action, but the odd die is high, then the degree is zero. The character does not succeed at what was attempted but nothing really bad happens. Likewise, a successful action that has the odd die as the lowest might succeed, but nothing extra or interesting will happen, because degree is zero. The Beast might also choose to allow no success in such a situation, but with no penalty. Shooting a gun and getting a degree zero can be a miss or a hit, but if it is a hit, it does no damage.
Degree of one is a normal success or failure, with some minor consequence. Successfully shooting a gun will hit the enemy (for one point of damage), failure will miss. Degree of two is more powerful, more interesting. A successful gunshot of degree two does two damage, hitting in a vital location. A failure of degree two is most likely some bad problem, like the gun misfiring and taking an extra turn to clean out. Degrees of three and higher are very special. They are likely to be turning points in the game. For each degree of success, do one point of damage in an attack, or get one bit of descriptiveness added to any other action. A test to pick a lock that score a degree 4 succeeds, and does so quietly, quickly, and the guard on the other side is asleep. (1 degree for success, 3 specials). A failure gets the same treatment, only the degree is now the number of bad things that happen.
Doubles are a bit tricky, because they remove the middle die and make just highs and lows. When you have a double, just treat the matched number as both middle and low or high, whichever the two are. So if you roll 5, 3, and 3, then you have a speed and a quality of 3. The fatigue check is at 5. If the odd die is a three, then degree is degraded by 1, because it is technically the low die. In addition, because doubles are a rare result, draw a card from the Arcane deck and let it's interpretation guide the result of the action. Due to the power of the cards, a failure can become a lucky success, or success can be snatched away.
Triples work much the same way, but are even rarer. With a triple, all results drawn from that roll are equal to the matched value (hope you rolled high!). In addition, two Arcane cards must be drawn and read together. Also, because there is no high or low die, the odd die cannot be used for degree modification. Rather, the degree is always at 3. With a triple-matched roll, the results are either spectacularly great, or abysmally horrible.
This mechanic is the core resolution for the entire game. Anytime the result of an action is in dispute, the dice are rolled to see how it turns out.
Combat is handled much like any other action, with a few quirks. The first is that in combat, action happens quickly. To keep things straight, conflicts are broken down into turns. The people involved in a conflict first state their intent, then roll dice all at once, then resolve the actions. Declarations are made in order of who has the lowest value for the card in the Self position. It then goes up in order until the person with the highest value has declared his intent. If two people are tied for value, then resolve in order of the element the card is linked with. Fire goes first, then Air, then Water, then Earth, and Spirit goes last.
Once declarations are made, everyone rolls. Resolve the actions in the order of whoever rolled the highest speed value, and down. If there is a tie here, the whoever declared first is resolved last.
In combat, many actions can be taken, but the only two that are really operate any differently than normal are Attack and Defend. An attack is an attempt to harm another. As mentioned earlier, the odd die determines hit location (if a hit is made) and the degree is how much damage is done. Defense works exactly the same way, except that degree is how much the damage is reduced by. If the degree is reduced to a negative, then the attacker fails. At degree of failure of two, the attacker is stunned and the defender gets a free attack against him. Of course, defense is rendered useless if the attacker is faster, since the attacker gets the hit in before the defense is ready. Whenever a successful attack is made, raise the difficulty of the target's actions for that round by 1. That means if the defender got a 6, but was hit, then he now fails, since the difficulty is now 7. For defenders, this is an obvious result, but it can mean dire straights for someone attempting and barely succeeding at another action. When defending against multiple targets, the defender must divide up any degrees of success between all the attackers.

[JenniferS]

[CodexArcanum]