Character Options & Motivations
I usually get nervous when I have to check on rules from this chapter. It always feels a little more like a grab bag than is comfortable.
Resources and Obligations
Oh boy. So, Resources are things external to your character that they can call upon in one way or another to arbitrarily "solve"... "situations". They're rated 1 to 6, and also sorted into categories. The inverse is Obligations, which are external factors that hamper your character. They are also rated 1 to 6 and come in categories.
Resources
Resources are rated higher if they're the kind of thing that one might assume would be more helpful in a wider variety of situations.
The starting amount of resources are talked about a bit, but that actually varies based on your campaign setup. The important part is that the initial Resources you're assigned by the campaign mode are supposed to be "free", and you can "pay" for more by taking an Obligation of equal rank if you want additional Resources (if your GM allows it).
Assets are combat backup, basically. They're rated based on how well they can fight and also how much you can tell them the truth about monsters. It's very easy to understand this resource.
Contacts are anyone who provides goods and services that aren't just publicly available. Contacts are higher rated if they are better connected and/or shadier. Simple enough.
Destiny is "magical methods of problem solving", which mostly means magical items, but also means ownership of (or at least free access to) magical places. Now, there's some examples here (two per rank), and there's some writeups in a later chapter (six items from ratings 1 to 4; three places at ratings 3, 4, and 6), but you would be forgiven if you quickly got stumped about what to take with this resource that fits well into the After Sundown universe. More so than any other Resource, this one can do with more examples.
Finances is mortal world money and/or money analog. Bank accounts, land, gold, drugs, that sort of stuff. Another obvious and easy one.
Languages lets you speak additional languages. It's pretty stingy on the amounts, and
Daniel Jackson's "I speak 23 languages" would basically never work. Most Europeans are actually kinda boned by these rules. Which strikes me as odd because this game is often otherwise quite international compared to most TTRPGs.
Science as a resource lets you work for the CSI and stuff like that. Fun fact, a friend of mine went to Hamburger University, one of the examples on this list, just last week.
Secrets is described as currency for the monster world. It's... not
entirely clear what you'd do with this stuff. Presumably you'd buy supernatural goods and services, but there's not much mention anywhere of what the supernatural market is like, so other than "more is better", it's actually the vaguest of all the Resource categories.
Obligations
Obligations are not handed out by default in an Origin Story game, but with an In Media Res game you are told to take one Resource from 1 to 3 and an Obligation to match. The rating of an obligation reflects how much it restricts your actions.
Addiction is for any compulsive action, not just drugs. Drugs, gambling, drugs, gaming, drugs, drinking, and drugs are all potential addictions. They're rated by how much it prevents other goals, rather than by strict health impact.
Debts is when you owe someone something. Probably money, but maybe not. They're rated based on how
intrusive the collectors are, rather than the amount you owe. One might assume that you owe a sufficient amount though, because you'd rather put up with the collectors than pay off the debt.
Duty is any time people are counting on you. It's worth more when it interferes more with your unrelated goals. Some players will cleverly realize that if they decide to
not have any unrelated goals it's a lot like they're not taking an Obligation at all.
Enemies are for when Team Rocket is after your Pikachu. There's some person/group, they show up with some sort of frequency, and they try to ruin whatever you're working on. The more they do this, and the more effectively, the higher rating the enemy. Maybe they don't even want to kill you though. They probably want to kill you though.
Stalkers are people who gather information about you but don't do anything specific about it (though they'll presumably do something with it eventually). The intensity of the Stalkers affects both how well they're able to collect the info and how much you want them to not ever have that info.
The Problems
I think there's a few issues here worth talking about.
First of all, obviously, a lot of these categories are actually pretty nebulous about the specifics despite having a strong theme. At the levels that players are supposed to be selecting on a regular basis (1 to 3) there should be like ten examples (or more) to give people a better idea of what they might pick, not just two.
Another thing is that
Status is a positive thing that you can have which
is external to your character but which
is not actually a Resource category. The Advancement section later in this chapter gives it that name, so I'll use the same name. What I mean is that there's no actual Resource that lets your character legitimately say "My name is Fox Mulder I'm with the FBI.", or be a licensed Lawyer, or a licensed Doctor, or a tenured Professor, or anything of that nature. Or any supernatural equivalent such as a Covenant Glossator or a World Crime League Minister. And that wouldn't really be a problem, except we're already trying to codify so many other things in this abstract why, so why aren't we putting that as a category your character might have? I think I might know part of the answer, and that's the next problem.
One thing is that I've read it several times and
I still don't quite know how these Resource things specifically work. The more times I read them the less I'm sure how they work. Some categories imply that you get particular groups of people or things to hold on a selection by selection basis (eg: Destiny 1 is a magic sword, and if you get
a second magic sword you should maybe write down another line of Destiny 1) and some groups imply that you'd only ever have one entry per category and then you'd abstractly be able to "do stuff" by calling upon that category using your rating (in an unspecified way). Finances says that it's only your biggest ticket item. Contacts implies that it's only your "main" contact you list. Secrets says it's like shadow Finances. Languages says that you "should be allowed" to take it more than once, which heavily implies that in Frank's mind you are normally
not allowed to take the other categories more than once.
Now, After Sundown is a "serial numbers filed off" version of "Alternate World of Darkness", which was itself a "serial numbers left on" iteration on World of Darkness, but particularly Old World of Darkness. I never played oWOD, only nWOD, so maybe Resources were some mechanic in oWOD that's totally obvious to people that have played it. In nWOD, Resources is just a trait that gives you normal person money. There wasn't any of this category stuff. If this is all somehow totally obvious to oWOD players, that's great. That needs to be explained
here though. I've walked two groups through the character creation process, and this is
always the biggest pain point of the whole thing. Of course, this is exacerbated by the fact that the example characters given later in the book don't even have resources listed. They just have specific equipment like "shotgun with sand shells" and stuff. There's a "creating a character" explanation much later in the book, and it does have Destiny being picked twice, but none of the other sections that I'm wondering if you're supposed to be allowed to pick twice get picked twice, which could just be because that's how the chips fell or it could be because you can't. The Finances selection taken is just "she has a big trust fund", without even a mention of a particular "big ticket" item.
What I want to see are specific rules about how Contacts are better or worse than a Background. Finances are something you could maybe figure out on your own with web searches in terms of values and prices, but what does one begin to use Secrets on? What happens if you eliminate an obligation that was the balance to a resource? Do you arbitrarily get a new obligation or have you "earned" the ability to have the resource as obligation-less? Can you pick a resource category other than languages more than once? These are important things to know.
Motivations & Passions
This section starts off with a frankly bizarre and unexpectedly sizable paragraph about how this is all just a game, and that bad things that happen to your character in the game don't actually happen to you in real life. Also about how pronouns might be used.
Then we hear about how everyone has Passions, Ethics, and Ideologies. Except that NPCs that come up unexpectedly might not have them established. Which makes sense, since they came up suddenly and all that.
Losing Control talks about the mechanical effects of a Frenzy, and how you resist it and all that. It's not completely clear but I think that humans don't get Master Passions and don't normally have any chance to go into a Frenzy unless you use an ability on them that forces a check against a specific Frenzy type. Notably, life among mortals causes supernaturals to have a check each month, with an increasing threshold each month, until they
do eventually flip out, which resets the counter. So, gives an explanation for a lot of those random murders going on despite everyone supposedly subscribing to the Vow of Silence.
Then we get walked through the Master Passion types one at a time. There's not much design here and so there's not much to say. It's well done descriptions and all. Some of them mention "despondency" as being a separate thing from a "frenzy", but there's only rules for Frenzy, so I don't know what went on there. They probably use identical rules and different themes is all. Notably, each Master Passion has three skills you can use to resist or end it, and there's 6 MPs and 21 skills in the game, which means that three skills aren't spoken for yet. We could theoretically come up with one additional Master Passion and just give it the last three skills, but most of the big emotions are taken anyway.
Driving Passions is fine and all, but it sorta sucks that the word "Passion" is shared between both Master Passion and Driving Passion. You can't just put "Passion" on your sheet, and you can't really just put "Master" and "Driving" either. I feel like that naming issue can be cleaned up with a thesaurus and a little time. Anyway, a Driving Passion is a medium term goal, and if you do something in service to your Driving Passion you get a point of Edge back. If you accomplish your Driving Passion then you can pick a new one. Also you can pick a new one if circumstances change a whole lot on you suddenly.
Ethical Taboos talks about Ethics, which are things that you don't want to personally ever do. If someone tries to mind control you into doing them then you get +1 or +2 hits to resist it. Many examples are given, and you can pick more than one, or come up with your own. It can be as complex as you want, because people are complicated and all that.
Ideologies are things your character likes and dislikes very strongly, to the point where it affects the thresholds to influence them. They might or might not contradict with your Ethics and Passions, and if they do it's all sorta fine because that's honestly how some people work. They're ranked like 1 to 6 (or more I guess) on the "honor" and "despise" list, though the particular ordering might never matter. I assume it's just so that you know what to favor if two picks accidentally come into conflict somehow. Also sometimes your ideology can change around if you go through, say, some sort of horrible magical transformation/realization.
Character Advancement
We're told that advancement is cool, but that too much advancement can make you run out of things to have as challenges. This is all true.
Acquisitive Advancement is when you pick up new Resources, Status, and Obligation at the ends of Chapters and Chronicles. The term Chapter seems to mean "game session" and Chronicle seems to mean "adventure". This section actually says something that I consider to be shocking, which is that if you get something clear like "a stack of 100,000 dollars", that you should take the time to turn it into the less clear description "Finance 2 (Cash)" later on. I guess that can come down to style, but that sounds crazy to me.
Transformative Advancement mostly describes the whole process of applying a supernatural template to an existing human character. However, it also says that you can get Potency points and Elder powers for existing for centuries. If you're not up for that, you can just "skip ahead" by killing someone with the Potency or Ability that you want to steal and then eating their soul to get the power. Of course, the one thing that kings can agree on is that you shouldn't be allowed to kill the king, so it's viewed as being a borderline sociopathic thing to do, very frowned upon by other supernaturals, and all that.
Karmic Advancement is the thing that we really all want to hear about. Players get 2 karma each session, and can hand out a karma token to anyone other than themselves as well. Also you might have banked karma. Then tarot cards are drawn, and each card has some sort of advancement on it, and you go around bidding on cards until all the cards are gone. No card can go for less than 1 karma.
So, first of all, randomized advancement is cool. Big props to Frank for going in that route, and I just want to say that I do like it before I tell you that I don't like it.
The first problem with this is that actually having a tarot deck is not particularly common. Using a website is often ornery, and when I had to do an end of session the other day I ended up doing a 52 card deck and ignoring the Page results. For the Major Arcana picks I had a player roll a d30 and reroll when they got too high a result. Not terrible, but maybe include that in the table next time or something.
The question becomes how the sorcery things work. You're supposed to have to have a book or whatever to learn a sorcery, so do you get the book and then later get the card, or can you just hold on to a card result until you find a book, or what? I'd like clarity on this issue, because I know how I'd run it, but I'm a sucker for having an official word to compare my own opinion against.
And there's no cards to gain Elder abilities of any sort, so if you Titan yourself by killing someone with an Elder ability do you learn that new ability without having to get a specific card for it? One might assume. If so, do Basic and Advanced abilities
also fall out of the corpse for you to learn without needing a karma card for it?
Notably, there are cards to teach you new languages, but no card to gain or improve any other type of resource.
Advantages and Disadvantages
This section has a big grab bag of benefits you might want to have, and drawbacks you can take to get them. You can also get an advantage via a karma card, so you might have some without any drawbacks. They're each generally smaller than the effect of a magic ability, though a few are cool enough that you'd actually want them alongside your magic abilities, which is nice.