Doktor James’ Kastle of Katastrophe is designed as an adventure with combat, exploration and roleplaying to stop a powerful supervillain but it can be played as a single encounter skirmish, a multi encounter delve, or even as a full campaign with persistent heroes, a plot and a wider world to explore.
Once you have a group of people prepared to play with you, one of you should be designated the Game Master (or GM). Its their job to paint a picture of what is going on around you. Whilst you will play specific characters, the GM will be playing everything else you encounter. It is therefore encouraged that you be extra nice to them
The GM will present the situation in front of you and then it is your job as players to tell them and the group what you want your character to do. To keep it fair, whenever there is a chance you could fail at something you will need to roll some dice to see if you succeed. For example if you try to blast a robot with a fireball, its possible you could miss so you would need to roll some dice to see if you do or not. This is true, not just for the players but also your enemies, if they are trying to hurt you. This is covered in more detail below.
The rules below are very simple but if you are running the game and your players think of something fun or interesting or out of the box then you should be able to bend the rules to make it possible, unless of course it makes absolutely no sense. The rules are designed to add structure for the fun, not to stop the fun altogether.
The prewritten adventure is currently not included on this site but you can use these rules to play your own adventures that you have written to battle Doktor James.
The most important part of any roleplaying game is of course rolling for stuff. For this game you will only need a six sided dice. If you have even more then thats great!
The amount of dice you roll will depend on your attributes which are at the left of your character sheets. The thing you will need to roll most of all will be whether or not you hit something when you attack them or to see if you get hit yourself. As such there are four dice "pools" which dictate how good you are at something.
These four dice pools are called Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence and Resistance. Heroes (and enemies) can only roll one of these if you have at least one dice in the pool as shown in the examples here.
It should be noted that certain special abilities can add dice to your pool under certain conditions. For example the "Just Good At Fighting" character has a special attack called "Strikeback Action" which adds an additional dice to the strength pool if you attack someone who has hit you since your last turn.
Assuming you can't talk your way out of a fight then you will most likely be getting into lots of scrapes and as such should know how to do that.
When a hero or enemy is attacking they will need to roll a number of six sided dice equal to the amount in the appropriate dice pool. For example if you are trying to punch someone and you have two dice in your strength dice pool then you will need to roll two six sided dice.
The defender of the attack will then need to roll the number of dice in their resistance dice pool and compare dice.
The attacker and defender need to see what the highest number they have rolled is. If the attacker has matched or exceeded the highest number rolled by the defender then their attack is successful. If the attacker's highest dice is lower than the defender's highest dice then the attack misses
Check out these examples and see if you can work out whether the attacks hit or miss.
Attacker
Defender
This is your bog standard attack. It will use the dice pool from either Strength, Dexterity or Intelligence and there wont be anything fancy on top of it. Every character has their own version of this and the main difference will be the range of each attack.
This is a special kind of attack (you may have guessed by the name) which will allow you to enhance your abilities under certain conditions. These normally will override the usual rules to let you do something a bit better such as an area of effect attack, a long range attack or the like.
Bonus abilities are usually passive abilities (which means they dont affect attacking) which allow you do something cool such as being able to ricochet arrows around corners or being able to jump over obstacles with ease or the like. Be aware of these as they will almost certainly add extra super heroey elements to battles.
Outside of hitting things your characters might also have other skills which will come in useful. Acrobatic skills or technological skills or perhaps just knowing things about stuff. To work out if you are successful at these things you will need to do a skill check.
Firstly the GM will need to decide on a difficulty for the thing you want to do. For example, 3 if its really simple to achieve or 6 if its something super hard.
Then you roll your dice. You get one dice to start off with. If you have the appropriate skill symbol (see below) on the bottom right of your character sheet then you can add an extra dice. On top of that, if you have any natural ability then you can add on the appropriate dice pool. For example if you are trying to do a backflip you would get one dice to begin with, plus one dice if you have the acrobatics skill, plus the amount of dice you have in your dexterity pool.
If the highest number on your dice is equal to or greater than the difficulty that the GM has set then you succeed at what you were trying to do!
Base (1)
Skill (1)
Ability (2)
The most important of all the stats, Health will tell you how many hits you can take before you get knocked out. There are no deaths in this game, just temporary unconciousness. Its a superhero game. If you were killed you'd be brought back later on anyway.
All of the heroes have three spaces for there health. When you take a hit you put a cross in one of the squares. If all of the squares have a cross in them then you have been knocked out I am afraid!
Depending on how tough an enemy is they will have a different amount of health as shown in this example.
If an attack lands its very simple. Generally you just do one square of damage. Some attacks can do more than one square of damage but that will very much depend on those special attacks.
To make things more fun, if a player manages to do damage to an enemy, why not reward them with a sweet or other treat.
Being able to take only three hits will mean that finding ways to heal yourself is super important. Luckily there are lots of ways to heal yourself and even luckier, they are all displayed here for you with nice symbols and things.
You might find medicine on your journey. You can use it as your action and it will heal all of the damage on whoever takes it. Once you've used it however, its gone for good.
If you happen to have access to magic you can spend an action in combat to heal one health box for one of your companions (or enemies if you are so inclined). Outside of combat you can heal everyone quick sharp!
If you got them healing skills you can spend some time trying to heal up a bit. Only if you have the time to spare of course!
If you have plenty of time on your hands and a nice bed then getting eight hours of sleep will heal all your wounds. Delicious delicous sleep.
Battles and how they are structured are probably the most complicated part of the game and the part you will most likely spend most time doing so we've broken it down into eight simple steps.
The GM tells you that you are about to do a fight. They set up a map for you and place your tokens to show you where you are in relation to all the enemies.
One member of your team rolls a six sided die. The GM also rolls one for the enemies. Whoever's is highest gets to go first.
A round is the length of time for all of the team to have their turn to do something and for all of the enemies to have their turn to fight back.
Each player and each enemy has one turn during the round. You as players can decide which order you go in. Each turn you have an action you can do and movement.
Actions can be any of the following, attacking an enemy, healing an ally with magic, taking your movement again (if you don't make it to where you want to be with your normal movement), using a skill or using an item you have found (such as medicine).
You can move up to six squares in any direction including diagonally. If you can fly you can also move upwards! You can use your action to do this again if you like.
The combat ends when either all your enemies are defeated, you and your allies have been knocked unconcious (uh oh!) or if you have managed to run away or end the combat peacefully.
You get to search the bodies, do some looting and possibly are given bonus treats depending on your performance and how much of a pushover the GM is.