Final Days

A competitive meta-setting for any roleplaying game

"Hey, you wake up. Wake up. You'll learn; sleep isn't worth much to a dead man. Good, you're up. And not even a crazed look in your eyes anymore... Hmm... where to start, where to start. Well, I know you know you're dead. That's why I didn't make a fuss when you left right after that car hit you, so you could fly around like a madman actin' like you think a ghost should or somethin'. You needed a bit of time to lose your marbles and find 'em all again.

"Death. Everyone's gotta go sometime, right? No, kid, everyone has to go at their time. The world has a specific timetable for all of the souls on it, and everyone adheres to the master plan. Death is very precise like that. Usually. Once in a while, though, death forgets to change the batteries in his watch, doesn't carry the one on his cosmic chalkboard, or writes up some destinies in ink instead of pencil, so mistakes are made and they slip through the cracks.

"You, kid, are a mistake. You fell through the cracks. I did, too, a long time ago.

"Just like the IRS, time's caught up with you. You should have been dead a while ago. And maybe it was destiny's fault that you didn't go earlier, but destiny doesn't own up to his mistakes well, and he's right pissed at you. You've got back taxes on that eating and breathing that wasn't supposed to be yours before you can move on to whatever's after this. No, I don't know what is.

"Stick out your hands. Just do it. Lemme look at them. See, see that bright red line on your palm? That's your lifeline. Look, yours should've ended here. Stop it; it won't rub off. Anyway, but the line keeps goin' out. Not too long, though, so it looks like you were supposed to die, hmm, I'd say, two-and-a-half years ago, kid. Lucky. Some people got to play our game for years or decades, like the ones that shoulda died when they were babies. A few have even more time than that.

"So how do you work off your time in our humble purgatory? Being incorporeal and all, kid, we've got an important power that wasn't there when we were weighed down by our flabby physical bodies. You can possess other people, taking control of their consciousness until you've either succeeded or failed at your job.

"Well, it's sorta like that. But this is real life, you idiot. Go float into someone's living room, Casper, and watch it on reruns if you want. But you're not gonna get many pointers from it.

"What was I... so, your job is to pay your Debt, the time you weren't meant to have. Just like when your fate got screwed up, they'll be another person or two who are supposed to die at the same time as the person you're possessing. They'll probably have a Spirit inhabiting them, too, trying to get that one to die the "right way," just like you with yours. And on top of that, they'll usually be a Spirit or two inhabiting the Catalyst types, the friends or enemies of the Hazards - like being an extra. Part of the supporting cast. When you're working as a Catalyst, you can reduce your Debt by helping the Hazard meet their death. Every little bit helps, huh?

"What? Trust me, you'll know 'em when you see 'em. Hazards glow bright red to us, Catalysts a yellowish color. When you inhabit a Hazard, you'll usually know exactly how they're supposed to die. Sometimes you don't and you gotta walk around inside their head for a while before you can figure it out. Catalysts got a good idea how all the Hazards in a given situation are supposed to play out. Problem with being a Hazard is you don't know how the other Hazards are supposed to die. Unless the other Hazards are inhabited by Spirits you trust to tell you the truth most of the time. You see, Spirits tend to team up into little groups that go around looking for Hazards. A co-opetition type thing. We figure it's better to know what you're up against than have some punk ghost swoop in and screw you up at the last second. And, besides, like I said, if yer smart and work together you can sometimes figure out a way to fulfill all the destinies, despite fate's mixups. So if you want to join us, you're welcome. Just warning you though - sometimes it's every man or woman for themselves.

"In a nutshell, kid, some time ago you came up on Terminal Road, looked left, turned right, and cut off some guy behind you. You were blind-sided, like the rest of us, but you've still gotta pay for that."

The Game

Final Days is intended as a competitive / cooperative ("co-opetition") meta-setting, a "Hogshead New Style" type game. While the text here alludes to a modern-day atmosphere, it can be run "on top" of any campaign or genre, supposing it involves mortal beings.

Each adventure, the players take their Indebted Spirits, the ghosts of someone who lived longer than destiny intended and now must pay back that Debt, by possessing people (also known as "inhabiting") near the point of their own time to die and ensure it happens as destined. One of the player's Indebted Spirit inhabits a Hazard, someone whose death (like the characters at a previous point in their lives) is teetering on the edge of destiny. It is the Spirit's responsibility to make sure the Hazard dies, and dies the way he or she is "supposed" to. Other players' Spirits inhabit Hazards involved in the same situation as well, though, and are trying to do to the same. The rest of the players inhabit friends, foes, and bystanders of the Hazards (known as "extras" or "Catalysts") and try to help one or more of the destinies to play out. If the players work together well, they may be able to have both or all of the Hazards meet their destined death, and everyone will succeed. Most likely, however, the destined deaths are incompatible, and the inhabiting Spirits will jockey to ensure their Hazard's fated death.

When designing the adventure, the game master (called the "Funeral Director") decides when and how the Hazards are destined to die, and how these destined deaths conflict with each other. At the end of each session, the Funeral Director awards or revokes Debt based on if the Hazard died and how in sync the death played out with destiny. Once a Spirit's Debt has been repaid, they can move on to their final resting place.

The amount of Debt given out on average can vary widely, depending on the type of Final Days campaign that is being played. Some may want to use the Indebted Spirits in an ongoing, indefinite campaign, and so will give relatively small rewards. Other may play Final Days as a short break in between campaigns, lasting only a few weeks. They might give out a lot of Debt to bring the game to a solid conclusion. Others might just play this game as a one-shot when they don't have their regular game master, and so ignore the Debt system altogether.

That said, below are rough "standard" Debt awards for inhabiting a Hazard. (As explained in the "Characters" section below, a typical amount of Debt a Spirit begins with is equal to the number of months she lived past her destined death.)

The Funeral Director reduces Dewey's possessor's Debt by six, as his inelegant death was in relative harmony with the one destiny had intended. Huey's inhabiter loses a measly one point, as Huey did die at the right time by the right hand, but the way it occurred flushed poorly with the desires of fate. The Spirit possessing Sharon actually gains three Debt because Sharon did not die. In fact, one day destiny will discover Sharon's continued existence and poor Sharon will probably become an Indebted Spirit herself.

The Funeral Director also lowers Debt for the Spirits who play Catalysts in a Hazard's destined death. The truer to destiny the Spirits play these supporting roles, the more Debt they pay off. It is usually considerably less than what a successful Hazard inhabiter will lose, though. Which Hazard a Catalyst's Spirit is considered to be supporting is a matter of Funeral Director discretion; sometimes, it may switch several times over the course of an adventure.

The Characters

The basis for the each player's character, the Indebted Spirit, is determining how and how long ago the Spirit was supposed to die. There's no restrictions on this, though it should probably be worked out before hand with the gamemaster. Characters that should have died two months ago aren't going to last very long before their time is paid off, while old men that were supposed to have passed on when they were toddlers have a long way to go. The amount of Debt of each Spirit is equal to the number of months it lived beyond its time. The guy who had a heart attack on his 42nd birthday, but should have died in the bus crash when he was six, has got a hefty 432 Debt to work off.

Being a universal meta-setting, The abilities and statistics of the Spirits in Final Days are completely dependent on the game system being used. The Spirit raises and lowers the inhabited body's attribute scores, adds new skills and diminishes others, and gives the person new abilities or handicaps they didn't have before.

Starting Spirits do little to improve the bodies they inhabit. Speaking generally, beginning Spirits would increase their subjects attributes by ten percent, give or add to three skills while decreasing two other ones. Superhero or other high-powered genres might add a power or ability that the mortal didn't have before.

With Marcus in control of the girl, she's slower, a little less willful, could wake up a graveyard if she tried skulking around, and just doesn't lie very well. But she can shoot a gun now, looks a lot meaner, and can cut a deal with just about anyone.

As determined by the gamemaster, after each successful inhabitation (i.e., the person is brought to rightful death), the character can take part of an attribute, a skill, or an ability and add it to their Spirit to carry on with them to the forthcoming inhabitation. Perhaps every point of Debt reduced earns the Spirit a skill point or percent to take, every three an attribute point, or every ten an ability or power to draw from the possessed. As all of the numbers-related aspect of Final Days, this "experience building" is influenced heavily by the genre and game system being played.

The Adventures

While the complexities of creating a Final Days adventure, which is essentially an adventure-within-an-adventure, might seem daunting, the co-opetitive nature of the game means that the Funeral Director really doesn't have to do much pre-planning to set everything up. In fact, depending on how many non-player characters are involved and can be inhabited as Catalysts by a player's Indebted Spirit, the Funeral Director might not have to act out any NPCs at all.

Scenarios where some sort of heroic redemption at death is available for one or more of the characters would be a standard adventure for Final Days, though not everyone's fate is intertwined with a heroic ending.

The setup of a Final Days adventure consists of the following steps:

1. The major plot. What and/or where is the overriding scene of the adventure? A drug deal gone bad, a warzone in Sudan, a collapsed cave, etc.
2. The amount and descriptions of the Hazards. How many players can inhabit Hazards in this adventure? It can be as few as two or as many as everyone is the party. Stats for the Hazards need to be made for the Spirits to modify, and and a cursory background and description should be jotted down.
3. The death the Hazards are destined to have. The most important part of the adventure is deciding the who's, when's, where's, and how's of each Hazard's death. Do they all have the same destined death, which will result in a very competitive adventure where only one Hazard will be able to succeed? Or do their deaths merely overlap or contradict one other, so some cooperation and creative roleplaying can result in honorable deaths for them all?
4. The NPCs. Stats and motivations for anyone else involved in the adventure. These characters, especially the ones that players choose to have their Spirits inhabit as Catalysts, should be able to have a large influence on the adventure at hand. In fact, the Catalysts might be the only thing keeping a Spirit possessing a Hazard from "cheating," i.e. making sure their characters die, though not in the way they should.
5. Information. Each Spirit inhabiting a Hazard needs to be secretly given some amount of information about how they're supposed to die. Often, every Spirit knows exactly what their own Hazard's death is supposed to be, though sometimes it can be a little more fuzzy and it will have to come out during the game. Hazard-inhabiting Spirits don't get to know how other Hazards are supposed to die, until (or unless) the other player's Spirit tells him herself. Catalysts, on the other hand, get some or all the information about each of the Hazard's destined death, right from the start, to do with as they please.

That's all that should be needed to start each Final Days adventure. The players' interactions with each should create and resolve the story. Like a umpire at a baseball game, the Funeral Director should be there to set up the game, keep the game moving smoothly and by the rules, and keep score for the end of the game.

Given the meta-setting nature of Final Days, adventures can be highly variable. Some example scenarios for a modern-day campaign, minus stats and detailed backgrounds, are below.

#1 Robbery Gone Wrong

PLOT: A man bungles an armed robbery at a gas station and has wounded the clerk and is holding the customers inside. The police have surrounded the building, and the SWAT team is on their way.

HAZARDS: Three; the robber, the clerk, and a female college student held hostage.

DEATHS: The clerk is meant to die saving the girl from the desperate robber as the SWAT team is about the come in. The college student, paradoxically, is meant to be taken hostage and killed accidentally by a SWAT snipers. The robber is meant to escape the situation until two hours later, where he, while trying to carjack an elderly man, is killed by the driver's concealed pistol.

NPCs: Catalysts include any of the customers inside the gas station (there can be as many as the Funeral Director wants) and the police hostage negotiator. People involved that can't be inhabited as Catalysts include the SWAT teams and police officers.

INFORMATION: Any Catalysts know exactly how each of the Hazards are supposed to die. All three of the Hazards know their own deaths, though none of them start with any information about the other ones.

#2 Terminally Ill

PLOT: Two terminally ill patients at the same hospital are hours within dying, unless they receive a kidney transplant or heart transplant, respectively.

HAZARDS: Just two; Both of the patients are Hazards.

DEATHS: Guess what? Both are destined to die and save the other. Neither is destined to commit suicide.

NPCs: Any of the doctors, nurses, or any of the family members of the two patients are all able to be Catalysts.

INFORMATION: Each Hazard knows his destiny - to save the other patient. Each of the catalysts knows both of their destined deaths. No one, including the Catalysts, know about the "no-suicide" clause of the destiny, however. This means that this adventure could end very quickly with very little Debt removed, or some even gained.

#3 Hunters Hunted

PLOT: A man takes his wife and brother out bear hunting deep in the woods. They've gotten lost, and are running low on supplies.

HAZARDS: Two; the husband and the brother.

DEATHS: The husband, Mark, is slated by the halls of fate to be killed through poisoned drinking water from his wife, Ellen, without ever knowing about the affair. His brother, Allen, is destined to be shot in the head with his own rifle. Mark's also supposed to be shot in the head from that same rifle, though, knowing damn well all about the affair. At least one of Mark's deaths will have to give.

NPCs: There are three large bears. Any or all of them can be Catalysts.

INFORMATION: Both of the Hazards know how they are supposed to die, but they don't know who's supposed to fire the gun (in either of the firearm deaths.) Mark also knows he's supposed to be killed by Ellen, as well. All of the bears know everything, though none of them can communicate with people.