Chapter 8: Running the Game

In the world of Monsters & Magic, your character is your entryway to your world. It’s your in-world persona, through which you’ll tell a story.

Session 0

Things to do at Session 0

Fronts

A front is a piece of your story that doesn’t wait for the party. Something out there wants something, it’s working to get it, and it gets closer whether or not anyone stands in the way. Write one down and you always know what the world is doing while the party is somewhere else.

Run up to three at once. Past that they blur together.

Building a Front

A front is five things, and it fits on an index card.

Driver

Who or what is pushing this. Name one. If you can’t, you’ve got a situation rather than a front.

Goal

What the driver is trying to achieve.

Methods

What it’s doing to get there. When you need the front to do something and nothing’s written down, its methods tell you what it would do.

Milestones

The things that happen on the way to the goal.

Cast

Everyone else tangled up in it. Add names as they come up in play.

Leave a field blank when you don’t have an answer. The game will hand you one.

Milestones

How many milestones a front has comes from how far it reaches.

Scope	Milestones
Local	2-3
Regional	4-7
Worldwide	8-12

Milestones aren’t a sequence. They’re a pool—when one lands, pick whichever fits what’s going on and cross it off. Rewrite the ones you haven’t used whenever the party changes the picture. You never need more than the next one written down.

Two things hold for all of them. The party has to be able to notice it, whether they see it, hear it, or hear about it later. And a milestone that’s happened stays happened—stopping the front afterward doesn’t put the lights back on in that district.

When the last milestone is crossed off, the driver gets what it wanted.

Driving a Front

Cross a milestone off for free when play has already made it true. The party left the city for a month and nobody troubled the Choir while they were gone, so a district going quiet after dark follows on its own—you’re marking what happened, not making it happen.

When it doesn’t follow yet and you want it anyway, spend Doom. The price is 1 more than the number of milestones already crossed off that front, however they got crossed off. The first one you buy costs 1. Buying one on a front with six already gone costs 7. Spend whenever you like.

Early on a front is cheap to push, so shove it into motion and find out what the party does about it. Late on it isn’t—the last milestone of a worldwide front runs 8 to 12 Doom by itself, which is most of what you’ll take in between long rests. With three fronts running, the oldest is always the dearest to push, so the newer threats are the ones you drive while the mature one advances through play.

Encounters & Treasure

Building encounters is straight forward: add up the number of players that will be in the encounter, that’s your challenge rating (CR) budget. Each monster tier has a different CR: buy monsters from different tiers until you fill your CR. This should result in a combat that feels challenging and rewarding but should not be deadly. If you want something to feel easier, decrease your CR budget, harder, increase your CR budget. You should aim to have around 4-5 of these on-budget encounters per long rest.

Tier	Challenge Rating	Gold	Finds	Max Roll
Easy	½	7g	1	13
Moderate	1	15g	1	16
Hard	2	30g	2	18
Very Hard	4	60g	3	20
Apex	—	150g	5	20

The gold is the total for the whole party, handed out as coin and gems. Finds is how many times you roll on the loot table, and max roll is the highest result those rolls can give you—anything over it is crafting material instead. What a weak thing drops is mostly raw material and the odd bit of kit; the good stuff lives at the top of the table, and only something dangerous reaches it. Save rare finds for Hard and Very Hard encounters.

Loot Table

When you need to know what an encounter drops, what’s buried in a hoard, or what a shop has on its shelves, roll 2d10 for the kind of item, then decide whether what they find is common or rare. The roll tells you what it is; you decide how good it is.

2d10	Chance	Item
2-3	3%	Tool or instrument
4-5	7%	Armor or shield
6-7	11%	Weapon or conduit
8-9	15%	Supplies
10-11	19%	Crafting material
12-13	17%	Adventuring gear
14-15	13%	Wealth
16	5%	Healing potion
17	4%	Rune or seal
18	3%	Potion or spell scroll
19	2%	Wand
20	1%	Wondrous item

Wealth is coin and gems, 2d10 × 5g of it on a common find and 2d10 × 25g on a rare one. Wondrous items, runes, seals, potions, spell scrolls, and wands each carry their own common and rare entries—pick from whichever half you’ve settled on. A common healing potion is a health or greater health potion, a rare one a Potion of Invigoration. Supplies are supplies, and are always common—they turn up 1d10 at a time.

Crafting Material

Which stock you’ve turned up is its own roll, and a rare find is likelier to be something exotic without being guaranteed to. Roll 2d10 on the table matching the find. The cheaper the material, the more of it lies around, so ordinary stock sits in the middle of the spread where the dice land most often and the dearest sits out at the ends. Junk and standard stock come 2d10 units at a time, rare stock 1d4.

2d10	Common find
2-3	Metal
4-6	Textile
7-8	Stone
9-13	Junk
14-15	Stone
16-18	Wood
19-20	Metal

2d10	Rare find
2	Fadeite
3-5	Mithril
6-8	Stone
9-10	Metal
11-12	Wood
13-15	Textile
16-18	Elementalis
19-20	Fadeite

Worked Equipment

A smith can work a weapon, a conduit, armor, or a shield into something finer, along with the gear you wear rather than carry—an amulet, a belt, boots, bracers, a circlet, a cloak, gloves, goggles, a hat, a necklace, or fine clothes. Some of what’s out there already has been. Roll 1d10 on the table matching the find; anything not on those lists is always as printed.

1d10	Common find
1-8	As printed
9-10	Mithril

1d10	Rare find
1-3	As printed
4-9	Mithril
10	Masterwork

Something worked that way has slots in it, and what’s been sitting in a vault for a few centuries rarely has them empty—set a rune or a seal into whatever you hand over.

Conditions

Tier	Conditions	Description	Fatigue
Minor	hastened, prepared, prone, protected, restrained, slowed, sundered	Single-stat shift, self-clearable, or micro-buff	1
Major	blinded, charmed, doomed, empowered, frightened, impaired, inspired, invigorated, invisible, quickened, weakened	Persistent mechanical shift with no self-clear, but still allows actions	2
Devastating	petrified, stunned, unconscious	Full action denial	4

inspired is single-use (clear it to gain and immediately spend a Luck Point) rather than a persistent state, but it is priced as Major (2F): a free Luck Point — advantage, a threshold bend, or a spotlight steal — is a major-tier effect, not a micro-buff. Generally speaking, if a condition is applied to more than one creature at a time, it costs the full fatigue for the first creature, and then half fatigue for each additional creature.

Conditions typically are applied in one of two ways: if there’s an attack roll, it gets applied automatically on a strong hit, with a lower-tier or alternate action happening on a weak hit.