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Chapter 0: Introduction

Just to clear stuff up

This is a Role-Playing Game

A role-playing game, or RPG, is a tabletop game played with a group of friends in which you each get to play as a fictional character of your own design. You can, depending on your chosen setting, slay dragons, fight crime, explore the galaxy, or anything else you can imagine. The rules here provide a framework for your adventures. One person, the Game Master (or “GM” for short) controls the Non-Player Characters (“NPCs”), provides the story, and referees rules disagreements.

What you need to play:

  1.   This rulebook
  2.   Standard gaming dice (or computerized dice roller)
  3.   A d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20, and d%
  4.   A scatter die or other means of determining random direction, like a spinner (or just spin a pencil or bottle)
  5.   Character sheets
  6.   Pencils and erasers
  7.   Smiles!

What would help play:

  1.   A grid to play on. Either a large chart, or some graph paper. You can use miniatures, scrap paper, toys, or whatever to represent your characters on the map. Another good idea is to laminate it and use a dry erase marker to draw terrain and characters on.
  2.   A lot more d6s. However many you have, you probably could do with more when someone breaks out the Extra Attacks on Burst Fire.
  3.   Cut out some common blast template areas (such as spheres, lines, and cones of scales 1 and 2) from the Template section of the appendix

Rule Zero:

All rules in this book are optional rules that the GM can choose to throw out the window. He or she is the final arbiter of all things game-related.

Rule Zero-Point-Five:

There are two types of rules: RAW and RAI.

RAW stands for Rules-as-Written, and they are exactly what is written down word for word in this book.

RAI stands for Rules-as-Intended, and their what we, the writers, are clearly getting at when we wrote the rules.

At some point in your game, the RAW won't fit the situation. Either it will let your character do something clearly ridiculous, or allow some loophole combination that makes your character a living God, or will prevent your character from doing something that any real person could do.

The rule of thumb is this: RAI trumps RAW, always. For example, we never specify that humans have two arms, two legs, and two thumbs- or for that matter, that they don't have wings or laser eyes. By RAW, they have an unspecified number of limbs and noses. Use common sense here:

Humans rarely have more than one nose.

Rule Zero-Point-Seven-Five

Or, as we call it, the Anthropic Principle. In this context, it goes as follows: if there were some way to bend the rules such as they were never intended and become a superpowerful demigod of destruction, an NPC would have done it thousands of years before.

And he wouldn‚t let you do it, too.

Since no NPC has done that, clearly it is impossible; and you are mistaken about the rules ƒ and in any case the GM has the final say.

The Text:

  1.   So as to avoid all that annoying "he/she" or "him or her," this book mostly uses "he" to describe living things. This is not because we're assuming everything in the universe is male or supporting some sort of patriarchal conspiracy, but because it saves on space and headaches. If English had a gender-neutral third person pronoun we'd be on that like blood on a Vorpal Blade.
  2.   We will use the terms "creature," "player,"
    "character," and "hero" interchangeably. They all mean the exact same thing.
  3.   Sometimes we'll refer to your character as "you" and sometimes as "your character." We mean the same thing either way, so don‚t worry about it.



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