Gully Toads

Introduction

Your world is ending — it tears itself apart as comets crash towards its surface.

You are trailblazers, delving to the bottom of dungeons to open infraplanar doorways so you can all escape.

Explore environments, overcome strange foes, and develop your skills independently.

Gully-Toads uses an innovative D6 dicepool system.

No magic, no hitpoints, no class.

Task resolution

1. State your intention and your action. The gamesmaster says which skill to test
2. Roll 3D6, less one dice for each wound you have
3. Discard any dice that roll higher than your skill. If you discard all dice this way, the action fails
4. If at least one dice remains, the action succeeds. Tick that skill, if it has no ticks beside it.
5. If the extent of your success matters, sum the remaining dice

Some situations have thresholds you need to meet for your action to be impactful:

• Casual = 3
• Complex = 6
• Incredible = 10

Gerund tries to shoot a walking fungus. They have a hurt skill of 3 and roll 4, 4, and 3. The 4s are discarded, so the shot succeeds. However, 3 isn’t enough to meet the fungus’ armour threshold of 7, so no wound is caused.

Character Creation

There are nine skills, each of which is detailed below.

Set two of these skills at 3. Set three of them at 2. The remaining four are set to 1.

Choose your starting items.

Decide upon the reason you are a Gully-Toad — whether or not you tell this to the other players.

Give yourself a name. This isn’t quite Earth.

Skill breakdown

• Hurt causes harm to others or destroys objects
• Heal tends to and removes wounds
• Recover relates to your own resilience
• Conceal hides yourselves or objects
• Flee enables you to get away safely
• Seek locates people or objects and can be used to uncover information on the immediate physical environment
• Frighten overwhelms another’s mindset
• Persuade brings folk to your point of view or inclines them to help you
• Reassure both can calm folk who are panicking and sets a success threshold against persuasion or fright

Advancement

Improve your character by spending a week honing the skills you’ve tested in the wild.

For each skill you have ticked during task resolution, roll D6. If the dice equals or scores higher than the skill, increase that skill value by one.

Once this process is complete, erase all ticks.

Suffering harm

If you are on the receiving end of a successful attack, you gain a wound with a value equal to the sum of the attack roll.

With three wounds, you are knocked out. Roll D6 on the Death and Dismemberment table, adding the largest wound value you have:

• 2–5: surge: clear all but your greatest wound and increase your recover skill by one
• 6–9: shaken: clear only your greatest wound and increase your flee skill by one
• 10–13: shattered: clear all but your greatest wound and decrease any skill by one
• 14–17: broken: circle any wound and clear the others (circled wounds can never be removed)
• 18+: dead.

For each wound, roll one fewer dice when resolving tasks.

Persistent Harm

Wounds caused by poison or disease worsen over time. When this happens, roll a check with 3D6, counting the wound value as the skill. This sum becomes the new wound value.

Recovering from harm

• During combat, you may spend your turn to recover from wounds incurred during this fight.
• As soon as the combat ends, you may recover once for each new wound.
• Outside of combat, you may heal wounds.

In these cases, the value of the wound is its success threshold.

• Alternatively, you may rest for as many days as the value of the wound to remove it

Equipment

Choose an item from each of the following lists:

Weapons

1. Scythe {spread}
2. Spear {precise}
3. Pickaxe {harmful}
4. Doppelhander {harmful/spread}
5. Blunderbuss {ranged/spread}
6. Musket {ranged}

It’s assumed you keep enough ammunition on you. This is not a game of managing resources.

Defence

1. Fused platemail {heavy}
2. Heavy furs {heavy}
3. Brigandine armour {light}
4. Strap + padding {light}
5. Beartrap {devious}
6. Ghillie suit {precise}

Miscellaneous tools

1. Aerosol
2. Chalk
3. Lodestone
4. Glowing lichen
5. Pitons
6. Trail mix

Equipment often has tags:

• Devious equipment uses conceal to cause damage instead of hurt
• Harmful weapons double the value of any wound they inflict. Apply this multiplication only after beating the success threshold
• Heavy armour sets a success threshold of 6 against wounds
• Light armour sets a success threshold of 3 against wounds
• Precise equipment enables you to set any of your dice to 1 instead of rolling them when testing a skill
• Ranged weapons enable you to hurt targets at a distance
• Spread weapons inflict wounds on those adjacent to the primary target equal to half that value. These new wounds must still beat the success threshold for the new targets

Combat

1. Combatants declare intent to flee or fight. Check morale if necessary
2. Initiative! Roll D6: 1–3: monsters first 4–6: players first
3. Active combatants get one action. They are resolved in this order: Recover / Missile / Move (inc. flee) / Melee
4. The other side acts (as point 3)
5. GM recaps the current situation. Return to point 1 if combat continues

Morale

Most monsters will avoid fighting to death and may stop after:

• The first of its group is killed
• A group takes more wounds than how many combatants it started with

On point 1 of the combat procedure, the GM rolls 2D6 for each monster. If the sum of these dice is greater than the monster’s morale score, it will either (D6):

• 1–3: flee
• 4–6: surrender

Morale is the only time you sum dice values before comparing to another value

Reaction rolls

When characters come across new monsters, roll D6 to determine their temperament:

• 1–3: selfish
• 4–5: helpful
• 6: hostile

A simple way to remember this is SELF / HELP / HURTS

Random encounters

For each room the characters enter, roll D6. On a 1, there is a random encounter. There’s a 1-in-6 chance that this is a group the players have already encountered.

Make these random encounter rolls if players tarry in one location too, such as if they are testing a skill (heal, seek, et cetera.)

Monster statistics

Monster stats are less complex than PCs. The important scores to note are HD (Hit Dice) and ML (morale).

If monsters are competent at a task, consider their skill in that task to be two higher than their HD. Otherwise use their HD as skill value.

To randomly determine monster stats, roll 2D6. The lowest of these dice is their HD. The sum is their ML.

Monsters that are difficult to hurt might have hit thresholds of 3 of 6. In these cases, clever PCs who target a specific area will bypass this protection.

Monsters suffer harm in the same way as PCs:

• Most monsters die after taking three wounds
• Weak or swarming monsters die after a wound
• “Boss” monsters use the death and dismemberment table in the same way as PCs

Opening the Way

Portal devices

At the bottom of dungeons, Gully-Toads can find infraplanar portal devices. All PCs are able to activate these — a check is never required.

The open portal cannot be closed again. Friend and foe alike can pass both ways — though portal devices cannot be carried through open portals.

What’s the landscape through this portal?

1. Wide, flat lowlands
2. A single island
3. A foetid quagmire
4. A barren ridge
5. Deep woodland
6. An urban sprawl

The Deadline

As the game continues, the world comes closer to destruction.

Keep track of a simple calendar, beginning September first, and assuming each month to have twenty-eight days.

Each new month, on the night of the new moon, another tragedy strikes.

These will be more frightening and closer to home for each month that passes.

You’ve got six months.

You can pick up a pdf of this game, including a series of names from Grant Howitt, from DTRPG