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But then I encountered a number of people who, in asking for new systems or free ones, had not heard of it. So I figured what the hell.
Nemesis is available as a free download from the Arc Dream website. It was created by Dennis Detwiller and Greg Stolze, two alumni of Unknown Armies and Delta Green.
It is also the free variant of the One Roll Engine (ORE). I am a fan of the ORE, and so feel free to factor this into your assessment of this review.
I will, however, say that Nemesis was my first experience of the ORE, and drove my interest in the rest of it.
So now, on to the actual game.
Entry Drugs.
Nemesis is a clean, well-formatted read. It lacks artwork, but the style is good and it's easy to read - and very printer friendly.
It opens with first-contact with the One Roll Engine, before branching out into any content specifically regarding being part of the horror genre.
(A Tangent!
One thing I will say to get it out of the way is that Nemesis is a general system with a general setting. It is a great toolset, designed to run anything from the grittiest CoC or Delta Green scenario through to smacking around Lovecraftian horrors a la Hellboy - and that's if you don't decide just to use it as a basis for non-horror gaming.
This connects with something I'll expand on later: With the modular-rules available online, you can easily take Nemesis and use it for Cyberpunk purposes or one of a huge selection of others. It's not just for horror. I've just started a campaign using it to run Dark Conspiracy.)
Back to the point: The One Roll Engine.
The surface of the ORE is not vastly different from the approach taken by the White Wolf Storyteller system, in that you use d10s, you get one dice for each point in Stat Skill, and that each Stat or Skill typically goes up to 5. However, the resolution mechanic within that framework is completely different. You're looking for matching numbers, so that if you roll five dice and get 3, 5, 2, 8, 5, then you have a success. More than that, the roll tells you several things. It would be described as a result of 2X5. 2 is the Width, 5 is the Height. Width governs how fast the result is, whereas Height controls how well something was done. Which is more important depends on context. The description is that for a foot race, someone who gets 3X1 will be faster than someone who gets 2X10. They'll be wrecked and have run in an undignified fashion in comparison to the slow-motion perfection and Chariots of Fire music of Mister 2X10... but still won the race. You also never roll more than 10 dice, as that would guarantee success.
In combat, the same approach applies, and this makes combat quick and nasty. There's no seperate Initiative roll. People announce what they're doing starting with the person with the lowest equivalent of Perception. This means that the most perceptive person in the conflict has the most complete comprehension of the unfolding situation when they choose what to do. Then everyone rolls dice at once. The GM resolves what people decided to do in order of Width, with Height (and other elements) as tiebreakers if necessary. Height also decides the hit-location, and Damage is worked out from Width.
That's a lot of information from one roll, and it works out well. It does take some time to shake down. In my experience that's mainly while all the people in the game are getting used to rolling dice at the same time and announcing in a largely set order.
I really like this style of resolution, because it fixes problems I've had with Initiative systems. In Shadowrun for example, I regularly ran into situations where incredibly fast people in the PC group were waiting on information. The old "I'll shoot them as soon as they're threatening!" conundrum... since that means that people who are way faster than the bad guys have to wait for the bad guys to do something, and thus lose their speed advantage. Or the PCs - not unreasonably - get bored waiting and just start shooting.
With this system, the information you get and your capacity to act on it are seperated. I approve of this. It's also a system where having the consequence of your combat actions happen first is a Very Good Thing: If you get shot or hit, you lose one Width from your successful roll and if that reduces you to under 2... it's no longer a success.
One of my players pointed out that telegraphing your actions in RPGs is a bad thing, whereas having the consequences of your actions happen first is a good thing. The ORE is a great solution for both elements of this.
The default system does mean that there isn't a great variance of damage, since it's tied to Width and that is generally 2. However, Hit Locations mean that the same amount of damage means very different things depending on where you get hit. For example, a baseline human will not survive a hit in the head from a rifle. Bang, dead.
Combat is nasty, vicious and quick to resolve. Called shots to body-parts and multiple actions are all resolved elegantly, with a penalty which becomes less problematic the better you are at the skill. This means that while the damage itself doesn’t shift very much, a more experienced character will be able to do that damage more often or to more vulnerable parts of the body without much more difficulty than a normal shot.
There are also two forms of special dice. Expert dice can be bought for Skills, and you set them to your desired number before rolling the rest. They also buy off penalties for multiple actions or called shots. Trump dice are the name for Wiggle dice from Godlike or Wild Talents. You set them after the rest of the roll, ensuring some level of success. They are tied to when someone or something has a supernatural level of a Stat.
The Madness Meters.
Borrowed and expanded upon from their debut in Unknown Armies, the Madness Meters are four spectrums of mental stresses that characters may be exposed to. Violence, the Unnatural, Self and Helplessness. In an elegant development from UA, the meters within the ORE are tied to different Stats, meaning that someone with strong resilience towards Helplessness might be weaker towards Violence. No one is equally strong against all stresses.
Each meter can have Hardened and Failed notches. Hardened notches are a mental callus: you won’t be phased by stresses of equal or lesser Intensity than the number of Hardened notches you have in a meter. Failed notches represent occasions where you’ve snapped in the past, and have developed eccentricities regarding that stress. If you have five Failed notches in a combination of Meters, you’ll develop permanent mental or emotional problems. Hardened notches are also Not a Good Thing. The more you have, the more normal people are going to recognise that you’re Different from normal. I have a PC with many Hardened notches to Violence in my Dark Conspiracy game, and he’s pitched someone who, if he was at a high-society soiree and was told that his brother had been shot, would most likely respond with “Really? What with?”
The system also means that if PCs are exposed to a stress above the Intensities they’ve encountered in the past, they will change. They will either get a new Hardened notch or a new Failed notch, but they can’t remain unchanged. Also, there is no point at which the character becomes unplayable. This means that the evolution of characters is a great focus for potential roleplaying and storytelling potential, without fear that your PC will suddenly become an NPC if they slip too far. The system mechanically avoids a death-spiral of madness, too. However many notches you’ve Failed don’t make it harder to avoid more.
The descriptions of the different Intensities on the Meters are usefully detailed, as are the discussions of where someone might be after N many Hardened or Failed notches. One problem is that the Intensities described for the Unnatural are extremely tied to the Lovecraft mythos, but this is a minor problem. Also, the descriptions of Hardened and Failed notches exist in a separate, modular download – also free – because they didn’t fit within the initial Nemesis release.
Character Generation.
Character Gen is one of the few places where Nemesis gives itself some issues. The layout of the game is clean and sensible – but motivated by other forces than a simple Character Gen guide.
The game opens with a discussion of the principles behind the ORE, then goes into Stats and Skills, then into Madness Meters and Combat. Each element does flow into the next… But means that you begin Character Generation at the end of the book and immediately go back to the beginning to look up Stats and Skills. Some of the descriptions for Skills could be clarified. For example, three dice in a skill is described as ‘Average Training,’ and detailed as ‘Can detect a tap on a phoneline.’ It may be average – for someone with Professional training. This was a point I needed to clarify when my group reached Character Gen.
I like that it’s suggested you start with Traits – the equivalent of Merits or Flaws – rather than seeing what you can cram in after your stats. It’s also a context where players might have to decide between a level in a skill, or whether they want the Good Childhood trait. However, within the book itself there are not a great number of Mundane traits. Most of them fall within the Supernatural umbrella, and will not apply to most investigative PCs, although this very much varies with your style of game.
I also like that this (and the rest of the ORE) are systems where buying up stats and skills at character gen costs the same as it does to raise them with XP. This means that there’s no tactical messing around with placing points for some kind of price-benefit.
The list of skills is perhaps too wide, with different skills that would seem to overlap. It also means that characters proficient with multiple types of fire-arm will find the process expensive. This issue is fixable with adapting the number of points given out at character generation.
The other quibble I have – and it is a minor one – is terminology. The game suggests different levels of points to hand out for character gen depending on what style of game you want – gritty adventure through to four-colour superhero – but the number of points is described as ‘number of dice.’ This isn’t really a problem, until you get to the point of explaining to players than a single dice in a Stat costs two dice… and things become confused. I just skipped that step and called them points. YMMV.
The fact that you have an overall pool of points for the entire character is very open. Some of my players found this hard to get inspiration from, as they’re used to systems like Unisystem for BTVS, where you distribute N number of points between Stats, Y between Skills, and then have a pool of freebie points to bulk things up. I suggested that they put down the Stats and Skills that fitted the character, and then at the end we could see if anyone was far outside what worked for the rest of the group. As always, whether this is an issue will vary wildly depending on who you game with and your personal approach.
Most of these were not problems for me or my players, because I just decided to approach or describe things differently for us.
Yeah, But I Thought This Was a Horror Game?
At a baseline, Nemesis is designed to be a system pitched towards swifter resolution of Delta Green or Call of Cthulhu style games. It includes antagonists from the Mythos such as Shoggoths and Deep Ones, and an appropriately hideous list of suggested Spells with consequences to match.
Most of the examples of how rules play out within the game involve fighting cultists and ghouls, or using magical artefacts to save the world at terrible cost.
If you’re looking for another approach to DG or CoC, look no further, this is what you want.
I haven’t focused on this element as much in the review due to the number of people recently who’ve said they were interested – until they realised it was horror. It’s more than that, but handles those elements well because it was built with them in mind.
A Living, Breathing System.
One of the core reasons I wanted to write this review is that the game has changed quite dramatically since it was initially released, and this is due to the degree of ongoing support it is receiving from its fanbase.
Project Nemesis would be a good first-port of call, for example. It contains ongoing discussions of the ORE rules, along with a wide and growing variety of rules modifications and resources for Nemesis itself. From the sound of this review, do you think that weapon damage is too static for your liking? I can think of two different approaches available on Project Nemesis, with discussions as to why people went for them and why. If you find that the list of mundane Traits is limited in the core Nemesis book, there are more available online.
I decided to fix the problem I perceived with the over-broad skill-list by using a rules modification which placed Firearms under one umbrella, with potential specialisation underneath it.
There is a great deal of contact between discussions of the wider ORE on RPG.net and resources that are placed on Project Nemesis, as well as contact between the Wild Talents mailing list. The forums are also great places to ask questions or pitch rules-modifications for feedback.
Essentially, Nemesis has a significantly increased toolset today than it did upon initial release, and I can’t imagine that won’t be equally true six months from now.
It’s also an environment in which people are adding playable modules over time, as well as exploring new rulesets like China Bright, for a cyberpunk exploration of the ORE.
Conclusions
Nemesis is free, and a great, clearly written system. It’s not perfect, but I’ve seen far less perfect books that cost much, much more.
It’s weaknesses, however minor, are being corrected or at least supported by a broad and growing pool online enthusiasts who are happily building new tools and corrections for the game.
It has one of the smoothest and most flexible combat systems I’ve ever encountered, making combat resolution fast for the first time in years.
It’s modular with any of the other ORE games which are out there, any one of which could inform it by adding rules or other structural elements.
And it’s not just horror.
For example, Godlike uses the ORE to model Superheroes in World War 2. Nemesis would be a great model for normal people in WW2, right down to the Madness Meters being right there for how badly they start to get chewed on by the experience of war.
It’s free and there’s no reason not to explore it.
