🇬🇧 Empathy

As easy as it gets: this is a dark themed investigation game based on the Breathless SRD, where you play detectives struggling to keep up with cruel killers as they attempt to preserve their own empathy! 

Your only job is finding the truth. You can be a lone wolf or the member of a team of Detectives, specialists and agents investigating macabre plans and murders as they spot hidden webs linking the crimes to a wider scheme.   In a dystopian world where society is falling apart, you decided to stick to your vocation, amongst criminals, renegades, cults… And heroic people like you want to stay, protecting the weak and keeping the off limits zones as safe as possible! Preserve your empathy or lose everything!

This game offers a solid Breathless experience with a few mods!

No Rolls for Clues
This is not a mod, since finding clues should always be granted: you never roll for clues, as long as you describe your actions to find them. The GM will customise answers and explanations using your Role as a guideline. This doesn't make your Skills useless, though: you might still roll for quality (i.e., analysing a substance to get extra info,  or pressing a witness with questions to make it recall faster). 

Empathy & Trauma
With Empathy, you can pull of awesome feats feeding on failures... Trauma is acquired for precious rerolled and whenever you fail to unveil the secrets behind a case or you hurt innocents! Trauma is a free form narrative mechanic with a twist: if you ever end a case with 5 Trauma, you break and must leave the story! 
You still have the chance to enforce your empathy and clear a single point of Trauma in your whole career by performing an heroic deed! 

Edges instead of Items
In Empathy, you live in an dystopian society: you might need favours more than guns, or you might discover the extreme utility of an invitation. You can have up to three edges at a time, each with its own rating. 

Stims
As I did in Psychosis, you can carry a single Stim, consumable items with unique property, like clearing Stress, resetting a Skill or your Stunt. You are encouraged to crete your Stims with the GM and they even have a chance to stay: roll a d6 when you use them; if you roll a 3+, you keep the Stim! 

Stunts & Truths
Inspired by the great work René-Pier (Fari RPGs) made in  Renegades, I decided to allow for a secondary option for your Stunt slot: you can cross off your Stunt as usual (perform an over the top action using d12) or Reveal a Truth, adding important notions to the fiction! The slightly anti-heroic nature of this game, makes this option pretty intuitive: you can change a whole story with a single shot, or through a quick flashback about that guy you know...

Three Skills
I opted for a three skills system: you have Prowl (for physical effort), Think (for mental effort) and Sway (for social effort). It's a bit easier to track and will make Refocus (catch your breath) more frequent. 

The downloads include:
- the game (4 pages, cover and sheet included)
- character sheet as a standalone file

Have fun and... Take a Deep Breath!