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Threads and Shadows RPG |
BASICS• T&S Rules
• Character Sheet
• Past Games
• Future Games
TABLES & CHARTS
• Damage Quickfinder
• Hitpoint Table
• Magic Tiers
MISCELLANY
• SIZ Matters
• WSJ Faces
• Table of CoC skills collapsed into T&S skills
IntroductionThe Threads and Shadows system is derived from the fourth edition Call of Cthulhu rules. Chasoium's Call of Cthulhu (CoC) is a lightweight percentile-based system with many appealing attributes. It's quick to learn, and easy to play; its fundamental mechanic — roll your skill or less on D100 — is fast and novice-friendly. Cthulhu also has some deficiencies which Threads works to address. Start with the rules and character sheet (top links on the left). This is version 3.5 of the Threads and Shadows rules.
Why a New System?
There are some things about stock Call of Cthulhu that don't seem right straight out of the box — the base pistol and rifle skills (20% and 10%), for instance: pistol is the harder discipline — we swapped them almost instantly in play. And then there are things that creep up on you — the fact that there are six different doctoring skills (Anatomy, Diagnose Disease, Pathology, Surgery, Treat Disease and Treat Poison); a separate skill for every type of firearm (Pistol, Shotgun, Rifle, Musket, Machinegun and Submachinegun); and the fact that you can't knock someone unconscious without beating them almost all the way to death. Combat is a pain in the neck with half actions and thirds actions — based on what model of gun you're firing. Oh, and the magic system is so sketchy as to be unusable.
My first step down this path was reworking the hit point system. I yanked out straight hit points and replaced it with a body/stun system, then I made determinations as to how much body and stun different types of weapons do (e.g. a club does 75% of its damage as stun, 25% as body; a knife is the opposite; and guns fall in the middle). Play testing demonstrated that we could now have a realistic fist-fight, and knives got a lot nastier.
Next up for revision was the magic system. I have always pulled in monsters from beyond the Lovecraftian cannon. I wanted that reflected in the system, so Cthulhu Mythos got deleted in favor of Otherworld. The two premises that underpin the new magic system are: First, sane people don't believe in magic. You have to be a little crazy, in addition to being knowledgeable, in order to believe that magic will actually work. Second, magic in the Threads & Shadows universe is slow ritual magic. It's not the expelliarmus! wand-zapping magic of the Harry Potter universe. The magic system is level based à la D&D. Everyone starts at Tier 0 (no magic sensitivity), but once you cross that line to Tier 1 things get decidedly different.
The last to major revisions came at the same time: skill collapsing and a shot-based combat system. With help from Brian Rogers, I condensed forty-three skills into nine. Skill points go farther during character creation, and you'll never have your doctor faced with the situation of being able to diagnose a rare tropical disease but have no chance of treating it. We also chopped the basic combat round system right out of Feng Shui and welded it into Threads. It's a nice fit, combat resolves more quickly, and characters making melee or hand-to-hand attacks have more choices.
So, give it a read. If you liked playing Call of Cthulhu, I think you'll like this even more.