# Character Creation Challenge 2025: Day 20 - Frisson - Dr. Herbert West (not that one) tags: #articles/CharacterCreationChallenge/2025 #game/rpg/frisson > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] ## Game of Choice It's actually kind of a relief to get back to simple, straightforward, uncomplicated horror as a genre in the context of RPGs. It's literally where I came from. The first game I ever GM'd was **[[Call of Cthulhu]]**, and I couldn't get away from it for literal decades. I suppose in a lot of ways thematically and setting-wise I never have, though now the mechanics of BRP actually cause me physical and intellectual damage on exposure. My SAN is extremely low. I think of it as a simple memetic hazard of exposure. Regardless, we are not talking about **CoC** today. Thankfully so. ![[Frisson (cover).jpg|400]] Instead, what we have is an extremely lightweight framework called **[[Frisson]]**, which is intended more as a way for you to build your own horror setting with appropriate mechanics than it is giving you a fully formed game. Though there is no reason that you couldn't run whatever horror setting you wanted within this framework, including **Call of Cthulhu**, if you were so inclined. In fact, I might even suggest that. Hell, let's *do* that! Now to be clear, **Frisson** does not come with mechanics for psychic powers or magical spells, though only a couple of minutes of thinking will make it obvious how they should be implemented if you were so inclined. It's really intentionally geared toward more grounded horror in the mode of MR James or other stories in which normal people are exposed to the forces from outside our reality and have to deal as best they can. You want to go for a sense of creeping, slow, ominous horror, rather than things that jump out of closets and try to claw your face off. To that end, the game specifically says that when you roll dice it should be one at a time, probably starting with the least effect and working your way up to the most in order to build that sense of impending resolution. I appreciate a game design that knows how it wants the feeling of play to progress, and **Frisson** does. Let's do a quick mechanical rundown just so everyone is on the same page. Most die resolutions are done with 2d10 versus a target number set by a character's ability. There is a list of about 20 abilities to choose from and you'll notice that I didn't say that there were any controlling attributes or characteristics. It's a straight-up list of what are effectively broad skills. Roll 2d10 versus your ability and take the highest die that is lower than the value, and that is your effective roll. If you roll both die over your effective ability, that's a bust — a failure. If you have things that give you a bonus or an advantage, they usually give you an additional d4 or d6 for the pool, and thus more chance to get at least a basic success. If there are factors of the situation working against characters that allows the GM to roll opposition dice, and whatever the highest die the GM rolls subtracts from your final success level, you can also get success boosts from various situations, and that raises your success level by one. Straight up. If you roll your ability on both d10 that counts as a success boost called *"Pushing Your Limits."* Your personality and background traits can also give you success boosts. That's essentially every mechanic in the game except for harm, and we'll talk about that during character generation. If you're the kind of person that likes really minimalist systems that you can build off of at need but don't feel compelled to have every jot and tittle pre-determined, this could work for you very well. We've run down the mechanics and talked about the game itself. Onward! ## Acts of Creation You've probably figured out that this is going to be another mechanically minimalist character generation process. I have a definite preference for mechanics light systems after decades of things which require a master's degree in engineering or sociology to figure out.^[**[[Aria - Chronicle of the Monomyth|Aria: Chronicle of the Monomyth]]**, I'm looking at you. I still love you.] The great thing about mechanically minimalist architectures is that nothing stands between you and getting right into playing a game, either as GM or as a player, aside from 15 minutes of character generation. Maybe less. When people talk about the fact that they never seem to have time to get involved in a game, I often wonder how much of that is because they just don't have the time to deal with the mechanics, both the setup time as a player and as a GM, and during the game itself because that is its own cognitive load. Not our problem here in **Frisson**. ### Look Behind You There's a good place to start here in the game, and it's with deciding on the character's background. It's their occupation, their clusters of skills that they make use of on a day-to-day basis. In practical terms, you can activate your background once per scene, either as a stand-in ability for a roll at rating 5 (a guaranteed middling success), or you can cash it in for a one-shot per scene success boost. Of course, you have to justify that within the terms of the fiction, but that's part of the fun, isn't it? In our case, we are going with the traditional 1920s era **Call of Cthulhu** set in the American Northeast, somewhere between North Carolina and Maine. I'm feeling very traditional in an ironic sort of way, so we'll be playing **Dr. Herbert West**, but not *that* Dr. Herbert West.  He's a professor of biology and chemistry at [Miskatonic University](https://miskatonic-university.org) in Arkham, Massachusetts, with all that implies.^[Alma mater of such luminaries as [Dr. William Weir](https://youtu.be/OVlnER8SxfQ), among many others.] No, seriously, he's not *that* Dr. Herbert West. He gets that all the time and it annoys him. Stop it. ### Ready, Willing, and Able Next up, *abilities*. We get 25 points to spend, spread throughout them however we like, with every rating starting at 2. So anywhere we invest a point starts at 3. 3 and 4 are amateur level, 5 and 6 are considered professional, and 7 through 9 are expert heading up into world class. We also get specialisms, but we'll talk about that in a little bit. The game is good enough to point out some abilities that are going to be very important that you probably want to put points in: - *Composure* is your ability to withstand mental stress. You're not going to want to leave that at the default of two - *Reflexes* is your physical reaction speed, which is going to be how you avoid physical harm most of the time - *Endurance* is how you soak physical harm and exhaustion You don't want to sit here and listen to me mutter to myself for the next ten minutes as I allocate points. In part because that would look really strange in text. I'll just put this together and come back with the list of abilities. - Medicine: 6 (4pts) - Culture: 5 (3pts) - Composure: 8 (6pts) - Awareness: 4 (2pts) - Endurance: 4 (2pts) - Observation: 6 (4pts) - Science: 6 (4pts) Not surprisingly, Dr. West has a very high skill in medicine as well as significant talent in science. He's no hack when it comes to understanding political history, geography, and the other aspects of a properly collegiate education. He's more aware and observational than the average individual on the street. In fact, medicine has trained him to be a keen observer of the state of man in particular. However, what really stands out about him is his absolutely unflappable demeanor. He has seen some truly terrible things in his time practicing medicine, and very little is capable of shocking him at this point, no matter what goes into or comes out of a human body, tentacles included. ### Short Bus Special Here we come to *specialisms* which are effectively foci which apply to your abilities. You weren't limited to sticking them only on your high-ranking abilities either. Putting one on a lower-ranking ability can mean that you have a particular interest or fixation on part of something that you're not otherwise very good at. Every character gets two specialisms at creation time, though you can trade one ability point for two more specialisms. We aren't doing that. When making a check against an ability in your field of specialist knowledge, add one to your ability rating. That's not all, however. Having a specialism which covers something particular can essentially allow you to do things that others without it cannot. A general knowledge of science wouldn't necessarily allow you to identify lab chemicals by smell (despite the fact that doing so is a generally terrible idea), whereas someone who took chemistry as their science specialty certainly could. Doctor West is going to take a specialism in Culture of **Teaching**, reflecting his time as a professor. He is also taking a specialization in Science of **Chemistry** for obvious reasons. ### Insert The Song *Zombie* Here Every character in **Frisson** has a literal **Thing in Their Head**. More accurately, *three* Things in Their Head, though you only get to start with one. This is a short phrase reflecting a belief, drive, motivation, phobia, delusion, insanity, perversion. It's something that is prominent in the character's psyche, as the text says. There is no list; they are completely free form. You can call on the Thing in Your Head once per scene to get a success boost, as long as you describe how it affects the character's behavior. This applies to things that would normally be considered negative. You can acquire more Things in Your Head during play, but there's more on that in the text that we aren't going to cover in character creation. The thing in Dr. West's head is **"They really are out to get me."** He's not paranoid. That's probably an accurate observation about the world. How could this possibly go poorly? ### Initiate the Eschaton **Initiative** may be one of the simplest things to figure out when it comes to the mechanical turn order of any game system I've ever seen. Start with your Reflexes rating. In our case, it's 2. Add 1 if your background involves dealing with active physical threats. Ours does not. Add 1 if your Fighting is 5 or more. Ours isn't. Add 1 if your Awareness is 5 or more. Ours isn't. Our initiative score is *2*. That's it. ### Under Pressure, Pushing Down on Me Let's talk about **stress**. This goes indirectly into that discussion on harm that we were going to get to earlier. A character has four tracks, each with three boxes. They are *Shock*, *Bruising*, *Lethal*, and *Mental*. - *Shock* is the transient, lightweight, quick-to-get-in, quick-to-burn-off version of harm. Scares, scrapes, cuts, bruises — things that you get over in short order. - *Mental* is the longer-term psychological damage. When someone tries to kill you or you see a ghost or someone's head turns all the way around and stares at you, that would be a good time to resist mental stress. - *Bruising* is physical harm that wears you down but isn't likely to kill you. Punches, blunt weapons, getting slammed around, exhaustion, that sort of thing. - *Lethal* is exactly what it says on the tin. Stabbing, punctures, toxins, radiation (in sufficient amounts), the stuff you really don't want to have. When the GM tells you that you have encountered a threat, you roll to see how well you can cope with it, using endurance or composure most of the time. The threat gets rolled as the opposition die. If the character wins they take a point of shock but if the threat wins they take a point of one of the other forms of harm. If one of the tracks fills up, bad things happen. - Shock gets full and you can no longer resist threats with shock. - Bruising gets full and you're on the edge of unconsciousness and you can no longer take big actions. You're going to pass out. - Lethal gets full and you are really close to dying. You can no longer take big actions and someone needs to stabilize you with medicine or you're going to die outright. - With mental, the character is disturbed and out of control. You know what this looks like: your character has gone temporarily insane. I don't *hate* this system but I don't *love* it. What I appreciate about it is that you can never take more than one point of harm unless the threat gets a *thorough result* (essentially a critical success, I glossed over it earlier). You know exactly how close you are to any of the types of harm/failure at any given time. It's unlikely that you are going to misjudge how close you are to insanity, death, or unconsciousness. What I don't like about it is that you have four separate tracks with three of them having longer-term effects and one of them intending to be the dynamic, transient one, but it overlaps with one of the other three. Shock and bruising are clearly connected to the same concepts in the game space. If it were up to me, I would unify the mental harm and the physical harm tracks. Instead of fully filling out a box on taking harm, I would require it to be fully filled in with an X to initiate taking the more severe conditions. Both shock and bruising would be part of the physical versus mental tracks, but only do a single slash "/" in a box. I might increase the number of boxes on each to five to help balance that out. Then you would trigger the shock and bruising conditions as "Shocked" or "Bruised" when the physical or mental track filled up with forward slashes. And if you overfill the track, slashes start to become full X's starting from the beginning of the track. But that's just how I would refine things. ### Pack It Up Equipment is the easiest of any of this. You have whatever common items that are used in the practice of your background. Plus, you can also have two less common but not hugely expensive things. Basically, you have what it makes sense for you to have. Dr. Herbert West has a fully appointed medical bag, which he used quite often in his medical practice but hasn't more recently in his teaching practice. He also has access not just to the university chemical labs but his own personal lab, which may not be as well appointed but is a bit more private. That's it; we're done. --- - **Name:** Dr. Herbert West (not that one) - **Background:** Professor of Medicine and Chemistry at Miskatonic University - **Abilities:** - *Medicine:* 6 - *Culture (Teaching):* 5 - *Composure:* 8 - *Awareness:* 4 - *Endurance:* 4 - *Observation:* 6 - *Science (Chemistry):* 6 - **Initiative:** 1 - **Things in Your Head:** - *"They really are out to get me."* - **Stress Tracks:** - **Shock:** [ ] [ ] [ ] - **Mental:** [ ] [ ] [ ] - **Bruising:** [ ] [ ] [ ] - **Lethal:** [ ] [ ] [ ] ## Exunt No, I didn't have an actual character sheet to put together digitally. This is the kind of game you don't really need one anyway. It would be unnecessary overhead. Just write that stuff down on a piece of lined notebook paper and get to playing. I think the most impressive thing about this game is not really the mechanics or the structure. It's very upfront about being not ready for prime time yet. What really impresses me is how much of the text is devoted not to mechanics or to lists, but to talking about how to generate data right feeling about why things are the way they are. It wants to do something very particular in its structure and in the way that things come together. I didn't make reference to **Call of Cthulhu** lightly. I would say that **Frisson** actually puts its finger on the nature of most of H.P. Lovecraft's storytelling and more directly and more accurately than **CoC** does, which is a fairly large admission. There isn't the bulk of a lot of mechanics or fiddly bits getting in your way. It is intended to be fast and straightforward and comprehensible at a mechanical level so that you can focus on experiencing or building the those emotional beats of increasing ominous threat. You could easily play out Lovecraft's expedition to Antarctica. It would make perfect sense to be running from a shoggoth in an under-ice tube, losing your everloving mind after having blown a Composure test. It just works. I do have *one* quite serious problem, but I suspect it's minor in the grand scheme of things. However, I see it happen often enough that I need to comment on it: If you're going to have example characters, make *sure* that their point costing matches your character generation system and that it's obvious how those numbers were arrived at. Neither of the example characters given at the end of character generation here actually have 25 points of allocated abilities, which is quite frustrating when you get down to it. That means you need to check your example characters every single time you update the mechanics in your text, even if you don't think that you changed anything that would modify the point accounting. Check them anyway. Maybe that's just my own personal hobby horse, but — there you go. Should you pick this up? Absolutely, if you are looking for a lightweight moody horror framework to play games in. Let's be honest, almost everyone does. Tomorrow we are going to get absolutely mythological on someone's ass.