QUEER WOMAN FEELING TERROR SINCE 1992

TRANSSEXUAL GAME DESIGNER

PROJECT: MARK OF AUGURY

"Your Order of Execution is at hand.
Who will be at the end of the sword?
The monster you seek,
Or the monster you are?"

Mark of Augury (working title) is a gothic horror ttrpg where players are conscripts of the Church, branded with the (currently titular) Mark of Augury and given an Order of Execution that sentences them to death, to be fulfilled either in the line of duty or when they no longer serve their purpose.

The conscripts are tasked with rooting out heresy, abominations, and all forms of devilry. These threats draw heavily from gothic and weird-science fiction, such as the grandmother of science fiction, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Fromsoft's Bloodborne, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I'm intentionally avoiding Lovecraftian or Cosmic Horror in this game, even as I draw from works like Bloodborne, as, while I enjoy it, I find that it dominates much of horror games as of late, and I want to maintain the particular dread I personally enjoy of gothic fiction.

Design-wise I look heavily towards both Evil Hat's Monster of the Week and Chris McDowall's Mythic Bastionlands. MotW is possibly my favorite ttrpg that I've ever run, and while I haven't had the time to play MB, the mechanics and presentation struck me in a way few designs have before.

Let's talk about the actual design

While I haven't quite figured out how I want to do character creation, but I've settled on a handful of general character mechanics. You have three main attributes, or 'Merits': Volition (VOLT), Lucidity (LUCI), and Somatics (SOMA), and, for lack of a better term, three health bars: Breath, Blood, and Frenzy, plus a death counter referred to as your Three Gates.

The three attributes function as point pools that can rise and fall over the course of a game, and are used in dice rolls. When you make an action under pressure or which requires skill, you'll roll xd6 against the stat, where x is the level of difficulty, and try to roll at or under the current score in the appropriate attribute. These attributes do not automatically "heal" over time and you need to use specific items or complete certain actions in order to recover them.

Volition. Your morale and force of will. Acting with bravery, withstanding fear. If this hits zero, you cannot enter or maintain Frenzy.
Lucidity. Your clarity of mind. Acting with caution, coordination, and on-the-fly thinking. Your ability to connect the dots and to plan an escape route.
Somatics. Your body's physical responses, sensing the innate vibrations of the world. Sensing and reacting to danger, enduring pain, empathizing, and surges of adrenaline. If this hits zero, you fall unconscious.

Your 'three health bars', or maybe 'Stations', can be placed into two tiers: Breath and The Other Two.

Breath. Both your first line of defense against harm and a resource to be used. This is where I took my favorite mechanic, Bastionlands' Guard stat, and made it a core part of my game's more stressful situations. When you take damage, the first pool to be hit is your Breath. When your Breath hits zero, you are considered 'Out of Breath' and your other two health pools start being affected. The genius of Chris McDowall's Guard stat, however, is that in his game when you are out of danger, your Guard refills immediately, kinda of like Halo's shield. So if you are able to briefly barricade yourself in a room or hide in an alleyway away from danger, your Breath refills immediately. You can also spend Breath on Effort towards certain player actions to raise the target number on a roll, making yourself momentarily more vulnerable in return for better chances against your obstacles.

blood & Frenzy. Now this part took a lot of brainstorming to figure out how to make combat be simple yet involve a lot of risk and reward. Blood and Frenzy are two sets of bars that begin at zero and max out at a specific number.

When you take a hit from an enemy while 'Out of Breath', roll a 1d6 for Blood and 1d6 for Frenzy. Blood always goes first. If blood fills before Frenzy, your Somatics score drops to zero. Whenever Somatics drops to zero, you roll 1d6 against Volition to see if you stabilize. If you fail, you mark off one of your Gates. Once all Gates are marked, and they cannot be unmarked, you die.

However, if Frenzy fills first, then your Lucidity drops to zero and, until you are 'Out of Danger', your Breath cannot be reduced by any means except for Big Damage (a mechanic to be described later, but in short is used for overwhelming force); this includes no longer being able to spend Breath on Effort. Once you are 'Out of Danger', your Volition falls to zero.

Blood and Frenzy both reset to zero upon any state of unconsciousness, including rest. Your VOLT, LUCI, and SOMA stats, however, do not. This means, that unless you receive some medical intervention, your Somatics will remain at zero. Each night that passes while your Somatics are continuously at zero, you must roll 1d6 against Volition again to see if you mark off another Gate.

This, I hope, creates a situation where being In Danger means you are constantly weighing your options: do you play as a skirmisher, dipping in and out of danger so that your Breath remains topped off, or do you stay in the fray, tanking hits with the gamble of unlocking the short-term god mode that is Frenzy? Of course, I think I might run the risk of creating a Dominant Strategy with the skirmisher archetype, but I will probably need actual playtesting to work out the kinks on that one.

Merits and Actions

The Merits described above: Volition, Lucidity, and Somatics, are the point pools you use when performing an Action.

Actions are the things you do that have any sort of obstacle to success, whether it is because you are In Danger (a hostile enemy that is able to immediately harm you), Under Pressure (not In Danger, but under the looming threat thereof), or it Requires Skill (such as typically needing to practice it have have the knowledge of how to do it properly).

Each Action is associated with a Merit, and when you are performing that specific action, you roll xd6, where x is the difficulty set by the Game Master (GM) for this task, and try to roll at or under your current score in that Merit (not your maximum). Some actions have the '+Effort' tag, which means you can spend one point of Breath to add to the target number for your roll (this does not add to the Merit's pool, its just a bonus for this roll). Effort can be applied before or after your roll.

Your Actions are:

Clash. VOLT, +Effort. Fighting your enemy head-on. You will always take damage doing this, even if you succeed on your roll.
Induce. VOLT. Persuade, coerce, deceive others to your will.
Overcome the Odds. VOLT, +Effort. Used for when you are acting in a way that is not covered by other Actions, but still need to perform a feat.
Get a Read. LUCI. Observing clues and discrepancies in your immediate area and coming to a logical conclusion through logic and deduction.
Interface. LUCI. Working devices, machinery, contraptions, etc. Lets you pick locks, disarm traps, and more.
Maneuver. LUCI, +Effort. Attacking indirectly, whether through a sneak attack, setting off a trap, or using the environment to cause harm without putting yourself in harm's way.
Sense Danger. SOMA. Pick up on the subconscious clues that alert you to possible danger, react to threats automatically when surprised, allowing you to get in a free hit if an enemy gets the jump on you.
Empathize. SOMA. Ascertain another's intentions, see through lies.
Escape. SOMA, +Effort. Used to get yourself Out of Danger, whether that means running away, hiding, barricading yourself, or otherwise to relative safety.

To determine difficulty for combat the GM starts with the base level of 2d6 for Easy. Enemies have a difficulty rating from 0-4, meaning when you attack them ou add that number to the dice pool. If the players are outnumbered, then you can add another die to the pool.

So for example, you have three players currently engaged with five enemies. Four of the enemies are level 0 while the fifth is level 2. Vera chooses to attack one of the level 0 enemies, so she will start with 2d6, plus 1d6 for being outnumbered, ending up with a dice pool of 3d6 to roll against Volition for a Clash. Ophelia decides to Maneuver around the level 2 enemy and cut a rope holding up a chandelier above him. Her dice pool is 5d6 against her Lucidity, because she's trying to take out a more capable enemy who is surrounded by his allies who could possibly give him a heads up or push him out of the way.
Also, to clarify Effort rules, let's say that her Lucidity is at 10 and she rolls an 11, so she spends a Breath to bump up her target number to 11, making her attack successful.

You can also lower the difficulty by one die outnumbering your enemies.

Updates: Feb 19th, 2026

I'm not entirely sure I want the Actions listed above in the game, but we'll see. I feel like any of the ones regarding social aspects are maybe not fun for roleplaying.

Character Creation

I want to give the players the sense that they had their old lives taken from them when they were marked for Execution. So to do this, the first thing players do is pick a Background.
There are six categories for backgrounds:

Criminal, caught in the act.
Low Class, an easy scapegoat.
High Class, made an example of.
Veteran, broken and discarded.
Academic, shunned for heresy.
Clergy, proving their penance.

After being given their Order of Execution, all are branded with the Mark of Augury and are designated as the lowest caste in society. When you pick one of these backgrounds, players are encouraged to expand on their story: What kind of veteran were you? What was your field of academics? These can come into play later. Something important to consider is why you were given a death sentence in the first place.

Each background comes with a collection of skills. During character creation players will choose one skill for themself from their background's list, and then one skill for another player at the table, using any skill from any list, so that each character begins with two skills. Whenever you roll for an action, if your skill would come in handy in that situation, you can reduce the difficulty by 1d.
You can then roll for your stats and a unique keepsake that could prove either useful or completely useless during your prolonged execution.

Finally, you either roll or pick your Wonder. A Wonder is a unique item that the church possesses that they bestow upon their condemned servants to use in the line of duty, and they are often as dangerous to the users as they are to their foes. You can think of your Wonder as your character's class, as it defines how you primarily deal with threats. You only get one.

For example, a player character may be welded into Razormail, an item of extreme penance that covers their condemned head to tow in sharp, jagged metal. They are given no other weapons, and are encouraged to grapple and shred their enemies to death with their twisted iron bodies.
Another player may be blessed with the Leechmind, a modified brain worm that has a symbiotic relationship with the person it infects, allowing them to harmlessly house within their bodies hundreds of leeches that they can control with their mind.
Wonders are all either strange, gross, painful, or some combination thereof.

TRANSSEXUAL GAME DESIGNER

PROJECT: MARK OF AUGURY

PROJECT: MOLE