To Be Resolved

Poker RPG Character Generation: Creditor

What Makes a Lost Soul?

Last post we talked about your Past Life/failed job that serves as a character archetype. If the Past Life represents some overarching approach to how you solve problems, today we're going to talk about what gets you into problems.

Bottom Line Up Front

Your Creditor is your point of contact into the world of the supernatural. Everyone has some level of sensitivity to the other dimensions of reality, but the modern age of rationality and secularism have trained it out of most of us. In a moment of either weakness or lucidity, you made a deal with something more powerful than you recognized and shattered your personal veil. You have a contract with your Creditor that must be fulfilled to return your soul. Your Creditor is knowledgeable about their domain and is always willing to share useful, if cryptic and annoying, information with you. Investing in your Creditor makes you more like them and opens the door to more powerful abilities.

What Does this Mean for the Game

Mechanically, your Creditor conveys a Domain of Knowledge (usually something more specific and otherworldly than your Past Life), a limited-use Combat Ability, a Faux Pas, a Type of Contract, and Characteristics. Domain of knowledge and combat ability are self-explanatory, but faux pas is to emulate one of my favorite mechanics from His Majesty the Worm, Bonds.

Bonds are interpersonal relationships between player characters and run the gamut from enemies to lovers; the special sauce is that role playing bonds is the only way to recover resources while camping. You can think of a charged bond as a hit die in D20 fantasy games. Josh makes the extra flavorful statement that bonds are charged when you play them to the hilt or they put you in danger. This qualifier puts a great incentive in front of the player: do you want to avoid a dangerous situation, or do you want to role play this relationship and earn another use of magic next crawl? Hence, the Faux Pas axis of your Creditor is a role play condition to recharge abilities lent to you by engaging in their interests at your own detriment.

Type of Contract is another role playing prompt, but it is more like a Character Arc in Cypher or a Character Quest in HMTW. It is a longer-form project or objective for a player character to aim for or set goals against in play. If a player character achieves the condition set by their contract, they have the option to regain their soul and retire from the campaign, or they have a chance to “double-or-nothing” and continue playing under a new contract with the same Creditor or draw for a new one. During the process of character creation, players should work with the GM to make the contract specific and measurable.

Characteristics of your Creditor are part of what I anticipate would be the progression track of investing in or advancing your relationship with the Entity. I’m picturing a short table where at different points on the advancement track you either get a strict mechanical upgrade to your Creditor’s ability or you get narrative/diegetic benefits. We’ll look at a sample case or two for this but I haven’t decided on an advancement structure yet!

My goal is for at least 13 Creditors so that we can assign each one to a rank, and then at least four points of differentiation for each rank so that we can determine a PC’s Creditor with a single card draw without risking two players in the same party having an identical relationship. They’ll have different Past Lives and different Special Interests too, but if Chris McDowall can write 72 unique knights, myths, and seers then I can think of 13 spooky things. The three sample cases I have drafted so far are described below.

Rank Ace: Corporate Interests

When you were the other half of the last pair of players at the table, you thought you saw a normal human dealing that hand. Hard to get a read on them though. Not many distinguishing features. Just a tidy suit, a loosened tie, and…brown hair? Maybe a streak of gray? It’s hard to remember now. You thought it was a morbid joke when they asked you to ante up your soul to stay in the game, but you were feeling hot and you agreed. In reality, you made a deal with an avatar of extractive capital.

Domain of Knowledge:

You came to the next morning with a deep understanding of the industry and practices of:

Combat Ability: Corporate Espionage

Pick three cards from foe’s hand and swap any number of them with cards from your hand. Limited use, recharged via faux pas.

Faux Pas

Advocate for your corporate interest in an inappropriate social situation.

Type of Contract

Permanently improve the position of your corporate interest in the region.

Characteristics

As you progress on this track, your character becomes less visually distinctive. They become more effective at blending into a crowd, regardless of the clothing they wear they are perceived as wearing something business casual. Maybe eventually your shadow becomes a pool of blood, still working with this one.

Rank 3: Ghost

There are spirits still anchored to this world years after the death of their physical bodies. When the positions of the moon and stars are just right, they sometimes settle in for an earthly pleasure that has been otherwise denied them. For many phantoms and wraiths, this is a classic haunt. You, however, crossed paths with a ghost looking to settle a score over a hand of cards.

Domain of Knowledge

You have an uncanny knowledge of the experience of death and an awareness of the afterlife.

Combat Ability: One for the Grave

For one round, when you RD, you can select cards from the discard pile rather than drawing from the deck. Limited use, recharged via faux pas.

Faux Pas:

Physically (and ideally publicly) re-enact a moment from your Ghost’s life or the moment of their death. Your ghost’s cause of death was:

Type of Contract:

Fulfill the ghost’s unfinished business.

Characteristics:

As you progress on this track, your character becomes less physically tangible and able to make themselves vanish in plain sight.

Rank 11 (Jack): Devil of Wrath

Wrath is typically not an emotion borne of passion. Wrath is a simmering, active feeling that emerges from a long period of pressure. Wrath devils do not waste their time with flares of frustration and acts of anger, they are patient bureaucrats who lie in wait to hitch a ride on truly wrathful souls. They themselves are often meek professionals who are primarily motivated by a desire for general order between the material and the immaterial.

Domain of Knowledge

Wrath devils are deeply and toxically empathetic, knowing exactly what makes specific mortals most angry.

Combat Ability: Uncontrollable Rage

For one round, exchange all RD for additional HS; you must make an action with the intent to harm another creature. After you play your hand, deal 1 additional damage for each card left in your hand both to yourself and to your target(s). Limited use, recharged via faux pas.

Faux Pas:

Completely blow your stack in a social situation and suffer the consequences, good or ill.

Type of Contract:

Different wrath devils are subject to different whims in their quest to seek an equitable balance of sin and virtue. Your Creditor may want to see:

Characteristics:

While wrath devils themselves are mild-mannered, lost souls who invest in a relationship with a wrath devil become progressively more choleric and hotheaded…literally. Their skin becomes untenably hot and their behavior becomes progressively more obsessive.

Takeaways

One thing I'm working on for the Creditor concept of characters is making sure that each Creditor provides something interesting to role play with, both mechanically and narratively. When we first started brainstorming rules, I was thinking about Jokers in Balatro as an axis of character progression. Jokers showcase some interesting ways of fussing with how you can tweak the rules of poker, and the fanart showed how people inferred flavor from them.

I still think Joker-style abilities provide great customization, but my gut feeling is that I want to at least start with Creditor abilities as a limited-use active ability. Passive features that modify cards and modify hand conditions seem so powerful that I haven't found a satisfying time and place for where they should factor into our game.

Thanks for reading!