Spoilers ahead for Galileo 2: Judgement Day.
The chase through a dark forest in G2JD is an homage to Slasher movies. Creating the mechanics for the chase became my own personal Slasher, and dogged me like LaChappa running from Jason Vorhees.
The first draft of Galileo 2: Judgment Day had a simplified chase; survive 5 rounds, three fails and the Automaton makes an instant grapple attempt at you — if successful, you both stop running, and the next round if he wins initiative or maintains the grapple, you get twisted up into a human pretzel.
Each round of running had its own unique obstacle. It felt very 5e. It wasn’t perfect; it was on rails, and didn’t plug and play neatly into other scenarios where players ran off the rails.
My editor wanted to see a system to handle the running so that Referees could improvise. Totally. Made sense. My wife and I put the kids to bed, walked the dog, then from 9 PM to 2 AM I grinded it out until I fell asleep at the laptop. Nobody told me to do it like this. I took the initiative. This book is my first published work, I wanted it to be great. It also had a tight but vague deadline of “get it done ASAP so it can go to Gen Con.”
First I needed game mechanics. I started with the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Player Core Book, Rules & Magic, which has two sections on running.
In the Encumbrance & Movement section, Running speed is the same as Exploration speed but is done in a round, not a turn. Example: a character wants to run. Look at the encumbrance & movement chart, say they’re lightly encumbered, they can run 90’ a round, which is fine if nobody is chasing them. What if somebody with the same movement speed chases them? It’s two people running at 90’ forever.
That’s what Pursuit is for. The Pursuit section on page 61 proposes a roll off between the chaser and the runner, each side rolling 1d20 + 10% of their Running speed (+9 if you have a 90’ Running speed). No Initiative, just roll your d20s. Simple enough for me.
Agh, I’m having flashbacks of running The God That Crawls and not being aware of these rules. Everybody ran 3-4 squares away, when they could’ve run so much more, and possibly saved themselves from a gooey death.
Initial Encounter distance is 3d6 x 10’. Okay, perfect, first establish encounter distance, then begin a Pursuit. It all looks neat when written on the page, it’s from official books, that’s one night of writing. Believe it or not that did take me like… 5 hours.
The next day I sit with my daughter to watch Sleeping Beauty, when something starts bothering me, I don’t know what, it’s just an itch somewhere in my subconscious. I keep seeing numbers in my head: 3d6 x 10’… 1d20s… why is that bothering me so much?
I get up, sit down at the laptop, and start running numbers. It hits me. It’s an unplayable turd when you actually try to use that system. It’s a game of duelling calculators that was about as fun as passing a kidney stone.
Here’s how the game goes:
1. Encounter Distance: 3d6 x 10. Lets say it’s 120’. You see the Automaton at 120’.
2. He rolls 1d20 + 9… 19. Subtract 19 from 120. 101.
3. Players roll their 1d20+10%. Now there are 5+ different numbers to track.
4. Automaton rolls 1d20+9, subtracts that from each of the new numbers.
5. Roll 1d20+10%. Add that.
And repeat for fucking ever.
No shade to LotFP, it wasn’t in the OSE rulebooks either (unless it is and being sleep-deprived and ADHD meant I skimmed it — which never happens). Maybe it’s a gap in OSR gaming. I’m sure there are brilliant hacks out there, but I couldn’t bring myself to invest time late at night to scour the internet for something workable. I had to just make something up.
First, lets just look at the numbers I need to create a system for. What’s the distance? Point A in Arcetri, point B in Ponte Vecchio. Approximately a half an hour walk by road according to google maps. But this is off-road, cutting through forests and farms. Lets call it 1 km.
Some hypothetical math… I failed math in high school… am I going by 10 second increments of running at 90’ per 10 seconds, or uhh… square root of pi… calculator says it’s anywhere from 37 to 170 rounds.
Oh. Easy! 37 to 170 rounds of edge of your seat dice rolling… a true OSR fan would love that challenge. Just kidding. Trash it and move on.
New Problem: Distance is too great for counting by rounds.
Solution: Count by turns.
Well, you can’t run-for-your-life by turns.
Okay, what if it’s treated like a hex-crawl? Or like Final Fantasy, where you’re running on a world map then uh-oh — random encounter! — whoosh you’re zapped into some kind of a generic gladiator ring to do battle. Unlike Final Fantasy, what I’d be doing is zapping player characters into a mini-map running challenge, where distance doesn’t affect travel.
Divorcing the concept of running in encounters from traveling toward your destination solves this problem. Good. Travel and Running are separated, moving on.
Last Problem: A quick and dirty pursuit that doesn’t bog the game down with math.
My wife suggested that the automaton only runs at one speed because he’s a tireless robot. That… makes perfect sense to me. That sets a static difficulty class to beat, and is a lot less dice rolling. Lets make it DC 12. Characters may get a modifier if they’re more or less encumbered than the Automaton. An unencumbered character gets +3, a heavily encumbered player gets -3, and a severely encumbered gets -6. That’s still in line with the movement bonuses as per Movement & Encumbrance from the player core book, too.
What happens if on a failed roll? There needed to be building tension, and that required a sense of distance — getting smaller each round as your impending doom closed in. I wanted to avoid measuring by feet, remembering the duelling calculators. How about a made up unit… paces? Perhaps 30’ per 1 pace, which isn’t how paces are measured in real life, but the term has dramatic tension, “he’s 3 paces away, now 2.”
The Pace Chart shows where you are in relationship to death or escape. At 1 pace, failure means a grab attempt. At 7 paces you’ve escaped the encounter. The further you are, the easier Stealth checks are — on success you’re safe until you’ve moved again.
It was a choice to not have failed Stealth checks result in a foregone conclusion, it may result in a lucky escape because the Automaton has to make a Search check. The Automaton is tracking multiple targets, line of sight is easily broken in a forest, and it’s a little fried from previous damage. A successful Stealth check means you’re immune to Search checks, but an unsuccessful Stealth check means you have the choice to gamble, as opposed to being promised you’re next. It works even better if the Referee should rolls all Stealth checks and gives no indication of success or failure.
The playtest worked out great for everyone aside for the last person running from the Automaton, that person was always fucked, even if it created a heart breaking series of narrow escapes from grapple attempts. One playtest resulted in a runner evading 10+ times before finally dying. It was a heartbreaking self-sacrifice, the runner pulled the Automaton 7+ paces away from their friends, so they all successfully escaped.
That inspired me to add Stamina mechanics, to give it a sense of limitations. You have X number of tries before you run out of gas. Stamina is just your Constitution Ability Score, so if you have a Constitution of 12, you have 12 rounds of running before you’re gassed and any further rounds of running require a save versus Poison or take 1 damage. Then resting a turn regained 2 + Con Mod in Stamina, and somebody with a -2 or -3 mod would have to sleep it off.
To replace Encounter Distance, each encounter at 1d6 Paces, re-rolling 1. 4+ means the players get a shot at a Surprise round. The Automaton is too loud to surprise anybody. It worked, quick and dirty.
For reference I’ve included the tables below, though it may not be exactly what you see in the book.
Travel Table
Run Tables.
Run 1d20 | Normal Run (1 Stamina per round) | Sprint (2 Stamina per round) | Automaton Stops Running (1 Stamina per round) |
1 | -2 Paces | -2 Paces, 1 damage | No Change |
2 – 11 | -1 Paces | No Change | +1 Pace |
12 – 17 | No Change | +1 Pace | +2 Paces |
18 – 19 | +1 Pace | +2 Paces | +3 Paces |
20 | +2 Paces | +3 Paces | +4 Pace |
Forest Hazards (page XX) | Roll 1d6 = X, where X= # of rounds before rolling another forest hazards check. | Roll every round sprinted | No roll |
1 Pace | 30’ or less | Stealth not possible | Automaton Search roll automatic success |
2 Paces | 31’ – 60’ | Stealth 1-in-6 | Automaton Search 5-in-6 |
3 Paces | 61’ – 90’ | Stealth 2-in-6 | Automaton Search 4-in-6 |
4 Paces* | 91’ – 120’ | Stealth 3-in-6 | Automaton Search 3-in-6 |
5 Paces | 121’ – 150’ | Stealth 4-in-6 | Automaton Search 2-in-6 |
6 Paces | 151’ – 180’ | Stealth 5-in-6 | Automaton Search 1-in-6 |
*Encounters beginning at 4+ Paces allow the players to roll for a Surprise Round
The Pace table has an equivalency in feet to aid for theatre of the mind.
To reiterate, escape is achieved by reaching 7+ paces, a successful stealth check (and not moving again), or getting lucky with an unsuccessful stealth check. The Automaton’s search has a 6 pace radius, and automatically detects anyone moving in that range.
Dear Reader, I hope this system recreates the fear of a Crystal Lake camp counsellor for you and your players!
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