'Barbarism is the natural state of mankind,' the borderer said, still staring somberly at the Cimmerian. 'Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.'

-Robert E. Howard
Beyond The Black River

Corrupt Cliffs

Corrupt Cliffs
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Thursday, November 8, 2018

Dealing with Complications in Conan 2d20.

One of the things I struggle with is complications. I end up saving it and saving it and never using it enough. At the end of the session I have a pile of 20+ doom.

Adding to the mix one of my players I had for my recent GMing at a local convention is a large fan of Star Wars and Genesys and we got to talking.

If you are unfamiliar with the Genesys system, the quick and dirty is that you roll sets of opposed dice. They have two symbols, one determines success and one determines advantage, The opposed dice to these are failure and threat. Threat cancels advantage and failure cancels success. It is common to succeed and have threat in this system. This is much like we see in Conan 2d20 where we can achieve success with complications. In Genesys the idea of succeeding with complications is far more common than we see in Conan, but it can't simply be stored to never be used, it effects the story then and there.

So to help me out, and maybe YOU if you are reading this I am creating a series of cards meant to be randomly drawn or picked, if you like, that have some ideas on what a complication can do. These are largely based on the idea that we can save 2 doom instead of using a complication. ie Increasing the difficulty of a skill test costs 2 momentum, and so a complication might increase a players next skill test by 1.

Anyhow, without further ado here is the list of cards for combat encounters.

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