Apocalyptic Breathless roleplaying with supernatural elements · By
This game is absolutely fascinating. I love the atmosphere of the setting, and the way you have incorporated alchemy into character advancement.
One thing I would have liked to see is just a little bit more of guidance on Deals. The game only says that they are unpleasant. This level of mystery is great for a Player but, as a GM, I've no idea what I'm supposed to be offering my Players. Any suggestions?
It really is basically narrative.
The stress is the mechanical cost, which can and should be something that players are worried about if the GM decides to limit how often they have downtime.
The entities that grant Deals are big on being in charge. The favors they do are essentially effortless for them (at least as far as we think of effort), though they may have a toll on the physical world at large when physics gets too wonky. Deals are ostensibly a way of proceeding through the Work and bringing about a better world, but Letters from December is set in the end-game of a world where it's too late for that and even if entities understood and agreed to their purpose most have given up on humanity keeping their side of the bargain.
Deals have three possible functions from the entity's side of things.
1. A symbolic gesture of gratitude.
2. A psychological preparation on behalf of the player's character to prepare for an encounter with their entity.
3. An entity's one-sided dominance struggle manifesting in various ways.
So, for instance, a relatively benign entity may request a sacrifice (by burning incense, an animal, etc.) in exchange for power to keep their human charges from becoming complacent. Until this is met, the character can't get another Deal. For game purposes, this was left out because I didn't want to create this imbalance, but the trade-off you get for this is that there isn't any psychic horror element to it. Incantations, vows, and oaths have a similar effect and can be accomplished instantly, though the former might be too easy.
If you go this route and have narrative requirements, you may wish to remove the Stress from a Deal, though be forewarned that it's going to be hard to play with a group of people each doing their own Deals (unless you retain the option to pay off deals with Stress, which I think makes more sense at the time the Deal happens than afterward). You could say that if someone still has a quest or sacrifice to perform they can spend 2 Stress for the next deal, then 1 Stress for each after that until the quest/sacrifice is finished.
An entity with a less human personality may have various preparation rituals. Something like the ingestion of psychoactive drugs may contribute to the ego death required to fully engage with such a being. These aren't well-developed in the world because the entities the characters I've explored all have fairly human-like personalities, but this could even involve entering a trance or frenzy, or even just engaging in extreme physical exertion (like lifting a massive stone).
These may not even be strictly unpleasant, from a human perspective, but they're costly and taxing enough to justify a point of Stress from the in-game perspective. If it might require odd or rare materials, these may manifest around the player character when they're seeking a Deal from their entity as a sort of handshake agreement. If the character ever misuses these gifts they may forfeit their ability to get more in the future.
Finally, there are the human-but-malevolent entities that just enjoy kicking people around. These can be harder to use at the table for safety reasons, but in the fiction Letters from December is based on they include:
• Drinking the blood of defeated foes (as in Cost)
• The entity manifests and taunts and belittles the human partner for not being good enough to manage on their own
• Visions in which the entity tries to force the human partner to share their nihilistic worldview (in an alternate timeline where the Destroyer succeeded, he could serve as an entity and this was his preferred approach; the Cult of Hunger still has lingering after-effects of this in Letters from December)
• Demands for various demeaning, risky, or antisocial acts in exchange for assistance
These entities use their human partners as tools, but they don't really have anything they want from them. Instead they're amusing themselves at their partner's expense.
The relationship between entities and their human partner(s) is semi-symbiotic. Entities can only really interact with the physical world through humans, but they don't always care to. Humans with a connection to entities can use them for power, but the entities can span the whole spectrum from being amused, too alien to comprehend the situation, lazy and indifferent, or actively detesting the pests who are taking them away from their own routine. However, no entity really wants their partner(s) destroyed.
Nominally, the goal of an entity is to guide their human partner(s) through the Work, and some do, but most of the ones with an intelligible personality are bored of doing this after millennia of false starts or scared that the Destroyer might actually purge them from existence. While the Destroyer has failed, the entities don't know this and players are unlikely to figure it out. Entities advance ahead of their partners while the Work develops, and become more personified as the process continues. However, this won't grant a personality to a truly strange and alien entity–it instead becomes more predictable and less erratic, and may begin conforming to its partner's expectations of it.
Of course, all of this can be adapted as you want at your table.
