How To Play Ecryme Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for Ecryme. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own Ecryme game at home. I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections. Game category Traits, skills, and specializations Rolling dice Spleen and ideal Difficulty and margins Self transcendence How to attack Impacts and dying Armor Effects Surprise Healing Helping allies Building a character Game category. The first edition of Ecryme was released in French in 1994. Twenty years later, a second edition was released, which is what I’ll be talking about today. The word ecryme is the name of a mercury like liquid that covers most of the surface of the planet. Only small dotted islands of land are left. This game’s world has 1800’s technology: mass production, steam power, and dirigibles. Air ships and steam trains link the industrial cities on the islands. Bridges lift the trains above the ecryme. The people of this world try to avoid falling in. Most people who come into contact with the dense, motionless ecryme, the flat silver ocean that lacks waves, are corroded by the contact, blistering like being splashed with acid. Those who survive sometimes get unpredictable cephalic powers, which is the game’s magic system. The general mechanic of Ecryme is that you roll six sided dice, add modifiers from your character build, and compare that to the difficulty of the situation or to an opponent’s roll. Outside of combat, you roll two six sided dice, add them together, and add the skill from your character sheet that most closely matches what you’re trying to do. If a trait applies, add it, too. When your character has a specialization that applies, you get plus two to your roll. The sum is compared to the difficulty of the task. Eight is the lowest and sixteen is the highest difficulty score. If your dice roll plus skill plus trait plus specialization is lower than the difficulty, then you failed. If your dice roll plus skill plus trait plus specialization is equal to the difficulty, there is some kind of complication. If your dice roll plus skill plus trait plus specialization is higher than the difficulty, you succeeded. Combat is similar, except you roll four d6 and add your skill. Pick two dice to put into success, which is their word for attack, and two dice to put into reserve, which is their word for defense. If your success attack is higher than your opponent’s reserve defense, you hit them. The amount your success attack went over their reserve defense becomes the damage impact of the attack. The Ecryme rule book comes with a ton of prebuilt character sheets for you to play as or use as pre statted non player characters. I’ll list some. There’s an aeronaut, an archivist, a sword duelist, a wandering mapmaker, a military officer who specializes in explosives, a courtesan, a stilt walker, a glider pilot, a wealthy merchant, an ecryme diver, a preacher, a fugitive, a scholar, an ecryme flower harvester, and more. Traits. Characters in Ecryme have traits that describe their physical appearance, personality, and social connections. Trait numbers range between negative and positive three. A normal person who is a nonplayer character averages about zero. A plus one means that your character has a little bit more of that trait than the average person. A plus two means they have a lot more than a normal person. A plus three means your character is extremely whatever that trait is. A negative one means that your character has a little bit less of that trait than the average person, a negative two means they have a lot less, and a negative three means they’re extremely lacking in whatever that trait is compared to someone normal. For example in the trait of height, a tall person would have the number one, a very tall person positive two, and an abnormally tall person positive three. Every character in Ecryme has two points overall in traits. This can be any combination that equals two. For example, your character could have a single plus two trait. Or they could have two plus one traits. Or you could have three plus one traits and one negative one trait. As long as the character has two points in traits overall, you’re good. There isn’t a set list of defined trait words in the Ecryme rule book that you’re limited to using. A trait can be anything you want. You the player name the trait that best defines your character, and you pick which combination of traits equals plus two overall. Skills. Every character in Ecryme has fifteen skills. Unlike a trait which can be anything you want, every character has the same list of skills, just different personalized numbers in each of them. The fifteen skills are clustered into three categories: physical, mental, and social. The physical category’s five skills are athletics, driving, fencing, brawling, and shooting. The mental category’s five skills are anthropomechanology, ecrymology, traumatology, traversology, and urbanology. The social category’s five skills are quibbling, creativity, loquacity, guile, and performance. The skills are all used offensively and defensively, so for example the medicine skill traumatology can be used to heal or to make someone sick. The guile skill is used both to hide and to search. Each skill has a number between zero and ten. Starting characters have thirty points distributed amongst those fifteen skills. This is the same pool of points that can be spent on specializations. You can perform a physical or social task that your character has zero skill points in, you’re just less likely to be successful than a character with five or ten points in that skill. Mental skills represent your knowledge in that area, so if your number is zero you know nothing about it and can’t attempt a roll. For starter level characters, no skill will be above five points. Traumatology? Traversology? I didn’t find some of the skill words self explanatory, so here is what the fifteen skills are used for. Athletics is used when your character runs, climbs, jumps, etc. Driving is used when your character drives a car, pilots an airship, rides a horse, etc. Fencing is when your character is dueling or fighting with any sword, dagger, or bladed weapon. Brawling is used for weaponless combat and fighting with improvised weapons like wrestling, boxing, arm locking, or tripping an opponent. Shooting is the skill used to fire long range weapons. Anthropomechanology is used for understanding, using, and repairing machines such as clocks, locks, vehicles, etc. Ecrymology is the skill used to understand the natural world like flora, fauna, geology, meteorology, etc. Traumatology is medical knowledge and the character’s ability to do surgery, know pharmacology, take the right dose of medicine, etc. Traversology is your character’s skill at knowing about the traverses, the bridges that span the world, and also includes geography, map making, and the construction of bridges. Urbanotechnology is how much the character knows about the city, such as the local slang and dress codes, the richness of their social and professional contacts, knowledge of local history and religion and culture, etc. Quibbling is the skill you use when arguing with or persuading another person, giving commands, interrogating, intimidating, bartering, etc. Creativity is how much your character values creating and crafting, and includes activities like painting, throwing clay on a wheel, forging, sculpting, writing stage plays, etc. Loquacity is the suave counterpart of quibbling, when your character tries to be charming, tries to make a good impression, collects gossip, investigates, lies, spreads false information and is believed, etc. Guile is how well your character can camouflage themself, hide, search without being detected, sneak down an alley, pick a lock, perform sleight of hand, etc. Guile is used both to hide and to search. Lastly, performance is the skill your character uses when singing, acting, playing instruments, etc actions in front of an audience. There is also another category of skills, but sort of like how in other games not every character is a spell casting wizard, not every character will have this category of skills called cephaly. Cephaly is a mind power that people in Ecryme can get by coming into contact with the liquid mercury ecryme the game is named after. The five cephaly skills are elegy that creates illusions, entelechy which is your power level and the combat skill you use for facing off against other cephalic beings, mekany that remote controls machines, psyche that remote controls living beings and people, and scoria which is divination. If you want to be a cephal in Ecryme, the different difficulties and ways you can use your cephalic skills are listed on page 267 with some examples of what you can do at different difficulty levels. For example shrinking something is a difficulty of ten, and controlling your target is a difficulty of eleven. Not every character has magic, so you might not use that list at all. Specializations. When a skill has at least five points, you can choose to spend one point during character creation to get a specialization in that skill. Specializations are specific activities your character excels at. Some examples for the athletics skill could be running or climbing or carrying. The driving skill could have a specification in a type of vehicle, like an airship or a train. For the creativity skill, you could get specific about the type of art your character is creative in, like painting, po
