Thank you for your post Bruno. This is an early playtesting version of CairnHammer. I have a good 70 pages or so to add but you can definitely use what you want to make your own Grimdark hack. The license will be the same as the Cairn rpg. Text licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0 If you could add something along these lines to whatever product you use it in I'd be thrilled:
Some text from CairnHammer by Andrew Cavanagh CC-BY-SA 4.0 EpicEmpires.org
A Jenga tower usually collapses after about 30-35 pieces are drawn. Here's one way to simulate that.
A d6 dice pool. Every time you use a card you roll 1d6. If you roll a 1 you lose one die from the dice pool. On average it takes 6 rolls of a d6 to get a 1 so to simulate a jenga tower you want a dice pool of 5-6 six sided dice.
Here's a simpler method that only requires one six sided die.
Write down on a sheet of paper the number 5. Roll 1d6 each time you draw a card. If you roll a 1, reduce the number by 1. When you reach 0 it's the same as the jenga tower collapsing.
5 dice will give you 30 rolls on average before you reach 0. 6 dice will give you 36 rolls. You can increase the average number of rolls very easily by increasing the number you start with. Increase by 1 to increase the average number of rolls by 6.
One idea. Write down the numbers 1-60 on a piece of paper. Starting after the first turn, each turn you cross the lowest number off the list. Each turn you roll 1d100. If you roll any of the crossed off numbers that's the same as a tower collapsing.
This gives you a 1% chance of disaster after the first turn going up 10% after 10 turns, 20% after 20 turns, 30% after 30 turns, 40% after 40 turns etc.
When I saw this I had horrible memories of the psionics rules in the first edition of AD&D (they were disastrously bad). But you avoided that catastrophe by using the core ShadowDark rules. I love the mind blast.
