The Old World: Grim and Perilous

Chapter 11
Grim World of
Perilous Adventure
In this chapter you, the Game Master, can find
guidelines, optional game mechanics and ideas
on how to use the rules presented in the previous
chapters. The Old World is a really capacious
setting and allows you to play a wide range
of adventures, from classic dungeon crawlers,
through city adventures, court intrigues, investigations,
exploration and typical rogue stories.
Genesys will be great at each of them, as long
as you try to keep them in an adventurous tone.
Due to such a wide range of themes that you
can successfully use, treat this chapter as a set
of guidelines rather than rules carved in stone
and take whatever fits your stories best.
Three Tones
The Old World has many shades and every
Game Master probably perceives them a bit
differently. It is full of stories not only about
heroes, but also about simple people who
struggle to survive in gloomy and dangerous
reality. To meet the various playstyles, we
have defined three tones of the Old World,
each with some modifications to the rules.
Adventurous
This tone is about ordinary people in extraordinary
situations. The characters were not born to
be great heroes, but circumstances force them
to overcome their limits. Many of them will die,
but just as many will become heroes of tavern
tales. It offers tough choices as well as epic moments
and is full of black humor - this is how
we usually play. It is the default tone in The Old
World: Grim and Perilous, so it does not introduce
any changes to the rules.
Grim and Dark
This tone is the gloomiest of those presented.
It is often a fatalistic story about simple people
who live in a brutal world, whose goal is not heroism
but to survive the next day. Wounds are
festering, poverty is palpable, and every skirmish
is extremely dangerous. To play in this
tone, use the following rules:
• Remove wizards from the pool of available
specializations. Sorcerer is still available.
• High Elves are no longer a playable species.
• Decrease the corruption threshold of Player
Characters by .
• Increase the difficulty of Fear checks by one.
• Increase the difficulty of Medicine checks
to heal wounds by one (but not the difficulty
of healing Critical Injuries!).
• Each Critical Injury a character suffers from
adds + (instead of +) to any subsequent
Critical Injury roll.
198 The Old World: Grim and Perilous