Brittania World

Setting

It's been two generations since the Romans pulled out. In your grandfather's day, a merchant could take his cart from one end of the island to the other without fear. The Legions maintained the roads and kept bandits at bay. But now, you can't ride out of sight of the town walls without guards, and you may as well plan on conquering the land as try to cross the country. The one is as easy as the other.

Much knowledge has been lost. The Romans could make true steel, but now, even where there's a forge hot enough to produce it, the smiths can do no better than brittle steel or hard iron. A few isolated sites have preserved great horse bloodlines, but most places you go make do with ponies or small-framed riding horses. War and famine have eliminated many settlements and vast tracts of land lie fallow. Famine and disease threaten everyone, though not every season. There's no true security of person or property. All that matters is the reach of your arm.

I will be inspired by history but I honestly don't care much about verisimilitude. If they could get away with it in a B-movie, it's good to go here.

House Rules

You only get XP for rolling a highlighted stat once per scene.

Healing times without an Angel are ambiguous in the book. The default rate for healing damage at or below six o'clock will be one slice per five days. However, I don't want damage to take six months of real time to heal, so if our sessions aren't covering much game time, I reserve the right to shorten that to one slice per session.

Gear & Weapons

Horses replace cars. Knives, swords, bows, spears, and other primitive weapons replace guns. AP just means your weapon's forged better than the ordinary stuff.

I'm messing with range a little to make the weapons more distinct. The new "arm's" range category refers to anything that gives you a significant range advantage over a short sword. If you're at a reach disadvantage, you'll need to overcome it via the Act Under Fire move or some other cleverness. On the other hand, if you slip up and let someone get to knife range, you'll struggle to effectively employ your bastard sword and may need to use a similar move to get some distance. These weapons also have important meaning in the fictional world. If you show up to a negotiation with a short sword on your belt, you're cautious. If you show up with the biggest sword in all the land, it's an implicit threat.

Since arrows are bulky but I don't want to worry about counting them, attacks with ranged weapons add a fifth option to seize by force, "you have plenty of arrows left." If you don't choose that as one of your two or three, you're out of arrows for the moment.

Common Hand Weapons

• big scary knife (2-harm hand)
• many knives (2-harm hand infinite)
• short sword / arming sword / gladius (3-harm hand)
• hand axe (3-harm hand messy)
• Long sword / bastard sword (3-harm arm)
• Spear (3-harm arm)
• Dane axe (3-harm arm messy)

Items with identical stats may still have different game effects. Many knives look more effective than a big scary knife, but if you put your knife to someone's throat and say, "tell me where you buried the hoard, or I'll watch you bleed to death," the big scary knife works better. It's scarier. It says so! The difference between that and many knives says a lot about your character.

Common Ranged Weapons

• short bow (2-harm close)
• long bow (3-harm close/far)
• crossbow (3-harm close/far reload)

Since the crossbow has to be reloaded anyway, it doesn't have the "out of arrows" issue that bows do. Since a crossbow gets mechanically cocked, you might choose one despite the reload tag because of its speed and resulting flexibility, especially at close quarters.

Armor

Good leathers give you 1-armor. Multiple layers of heavy boiled leather, a metal breastplate, or a mail coat all amount to two-armor. Articulated plate really belongs to the late Middle Ages, not the post-Roman period, but it would be 3-armor if you found or made some.

The Psychic Maelstrom

In the standard setting, the apocalypse has created some sort of ongoing psychic turmoil, which affects everyone, though in different ways. In this hack, call it the spirit world instead. The Romans imposed the forms of worship but suppressed actual faith and devotion, which had the effect of eliminating the numinous from everyday life. Now, the old religions are back, and for some people, they work just fine. Prey to the old gods, or your ancestors, or the spirits of the land and sky, and things might happen. They might even be good things. You're free to tweak this and say that your character experiences it differently.