The Game: Darkest Days
The Publisher: Bell Moon Games
Degree of Familiarity: None
Books Required: Just the one
So, this is a new experience for me. Most games I have on PDF, I got from bundles, because when I back RPGs on KS I almost always plump for a physical copy. I opened up Darkest Days to read it today, discovered to my pleasant surprise it was only 112 pages, and then googled it to find the publisher and discovered that I did back Kickstarter like two years ago. I had no memory of it.
But reading it...I dunno, I kinda like it. The idea is that you're a dead hero who has been resurrected to deal with an evil infecting the land, a la Altered Beast. The aesthetics of the game feel very Dark Souls to me, but I admit that's knee-jerk because I haven't actually played that game or any of its look-alikes like Bloodborne. But Darkest Days couches a lot of its stuff in video game terms; talks about "boss monsters" and the like. I think for a short campaign it could be pretty cool.
So let's make a character!
OK, someone really needed to go through this book with an eye for, like, explaining things. It's not actually hard but it's not well described. Basically, you can pick a template, but all the template gives you is equipment, which gives you bonuses to skills but that bonus is separate from the actual points ("pips") that you have in those skills. Characters get 5 pips to spread around, but that's never explicitly stated except here:
"Upgrade" implies a change to the character post-creation. "Will be a permanent bonus" implies something that happens in the future. But fortunately, there's a character sheet with everything filled out, and this is all simple enough that it wasn't hard to suss it out.
So appearance and even species don't mean much here. As such, I'm going to take more inspiration from ol' Altered Beast up there and say that my character is a werewolf. Rather, was - he died, killed by the heroes of his age when his savage rage became too great to contain. Now he has been resurrected to fight an even greater evil, like John Spartan in Demolition Man, I guess. His name was Gerrit, and he once again walks beneath the full moon, ready to hunt and taste the blood of enemies on his teeth! Arroooo!
Ahem. Anyway. Gerrit is long and lean, dirty and scarred. He doesn't wear armor because that means it'll just strangle him when he changes). I think that means I want the Warrior build.
Hmm. As written, I get a two-handed weapon, but for Gerrit I think I want fang and claw, so I'm going to split that into +1 to Attack and +1 to Precision. Oh, wait, this is equipment bonuses. Hmm. Equipment is defined as anything you're carrying around. OK, let's do this - Gerrit has a length of chain attached to his wrist, locked with magic meant to keep him in his grave (it didn't work, but the lock won't open). That gives him +1 Attack and +1 Precision.
Cool, now I get 5 Pips to throw around. Well, I definitely want one in Vigor. I'll put one in Attack, one in Defense, and one in Precision. But where to put the last one? I'll put it into Attack to represent Gerrit's wolf-like savagery.
And that's it, y'all. Might have to give this a try at some point, hopefully the system actually works at the table.
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