Boons & Banes #

Depending on your outcome, you may gain one or more boons to spend on the Boons Table or one or more banes for the GM to spend on the Banes Table.

With a roll’s final outcome, the GM refers to the Outcomes Table to determine whether you earned boons or incurred banes, keeping note of any multiplier the outcome may list. If the outcome results in boons or banes, the GM then refers to the Difficulty Table to see how many, multiplying the total by the multiplier in the Outcomes table. Boons from drive are not multiplied in this way.

When selecting boons or banes, the target of the effect does not need to be the player character rolling, as long as the alternative is narratively justified. For example, if a player gets a critical success, they can spend the resulting boons to raise the morale of a nearby ally, restoring their stress or giving them a positive condition. Similarly, you can use boons to grant a positive condition to yourself or any ally or grant a negative condition to an enemy.

In the case that you apply drive to a roll and succeed at a cost, you gain both boons (from the drive) and banes (from succeeding at a cost). In this case, you can spend your boons first, and then the GM spends banes.

Tension #

As a bane, the GM can choose to add one or more points of tension to the session. You can represent tension with any kind of tokens clearly visible at the center of the play area. When there’s tension in play, any failure can result in worse consequences. At any point when inflicting banes, the GM can choose to add any points of tension to increase the number of banes inflicted. For example, if there is three tension in play and a player’s roll results in a failure or lower, the GM can choose whether to spend each of those points of tension to add an additional bane for each tension spent (in this case, up to three).

Story Rewards and Complications #

When a player selects the Gain a story reward boon option, they may spend any amount of boons they have to gain a surprise narrative benefit of the GM’s choice, roughly proportional to the amount of boons spent. For example, a story reward could earn a player a new ally, a shiny piece of loot, a convenient discovery, or decreased difficulties for the rest of the scene.

Similarly, when a GM selects the Complicate the story bane option, they do the same with narrative obstacles. For example, a story complication could introduce new danger to a scene, force the players to make a difficult choice, or even give the players a negative reputation in the future.