# Character Creation Challenge 2025: Day 31 - Infaernum - Caerdwyn Meyers, Apocalypse Wasteland Scrounger tags: #articles/CharacterCreationChallenge/2025 #game/rpg/infaernum > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2025]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] ## Game of Choice Guys, the time has come! It's the 31st of January, the last day of **Character Creation Challenge 2025**! I'm free! I'm free! Free at last, free at last, thank God I'm free at last! I suppose that's a little bit unfair, actually. It's always a positive pleasure to put together characters in public with other people and see what they have going on, what games they bring to the table, and to see if I can actually pound out characters and backgrounds every single day. And we *have* done it every single day of this month, without missing one or having to double up, making it to the end of the line every single day usually not long after midnight. If you've been playing along and participating in **CCC 2025**, let me know in a reply wherever you happen to see this posted. Be proud of what you've been accomplishing. Amusingly, we are actually revisiting a game that [[RPG A DAY 2024 - RPG with good form|we brought up in RPG A DAY last year]]. How can that be, you may ask? Well, they finally managed to get out the PDFs for their Major Arcana tarot deck and the custom deck of poker cards — which means those went into my collection at an appropriate place for them to be next. Where are we going, you may ask? The only answer I can give you is *straight to Hell.* ![[Infaernum - Deck Back (illo).webp]] ![[Infaernum - Tarot Death (illo).webp]] ![[Infaernum - Tarot Back (illo).webp]] It's **[[Infaernum]]**! If you don't remember **Infaernum**, let me remind you about what it is: it's the end of the world. When I say time has run out for the world, I mean it in a very literal sense. There are six days remaining. Fallen Ones, creatures from hell itself, have swarmed the earth and murdered most of humanity. There was one last bastion in which you lived and fought — before it fell before the might of the unholy. Somehow, you survived. There's little that you can do now save to attend to the words of the last prophecy, which state that there is a place reserved for those able to resist, a Promised Land. Looks like it's going to be a long week. ![[Infaernum - Six Days (illo).webp]] ![[Infaernum - Six Days - Old School (illo).webp]] On the left here, you can see the opening spread from the core book. You probably get the feeling that it is more than a little inspired by **[[Mork Borg]]**, and you would be correct. Areas can be pretty brightly saturated and layout is deliberately ragged, but I don't think it goes quite as hard entirely into unreadability, which is good because I would actually like to use the book once in a while as a functional and useful text. That said, they do helpfully include an *"old school"* layout, which is purely text with no art at all. Quite frankly, I think it works as an actual play document far better. Given my other public statements on the influence of **Mork Borg** and how much I think it has really eroded the idea that texts should be firstly usable, that should come as absolutely no surprise. What is surprising is that the erratic hyper saturated version that we get from **Infaernum** proper doesn't put me off of it completely. There's enough about it that is compelling that I think helps make up for the areas in which it becomes too fancy for its own good. ![[Infaernum - Old School Version (cover).jpg|400]] Though even the old school cover flirts pretty hard with extreme metal band album cover unreadability, I can't lie. Let's run through the mechanics really quickly. They very much depend on freeform interpretation of oracles a lot of the time, which is just fine with me. Your core mechanic is to roll 3d6 when you intend to do something and aren't sure about what might happen. - Every 1 that you roll means that you get a *doom*, a bad thing, a pretty negative effect. They accumulate. - Each 2 or 3 means you get a *neutral event*, which is a thing that comes in to complicate the issue but not necessarily make you fail. - Each 4 or 5 is a *deed*, which is a positive effect, something that is in line with what you wanted. - And every 6 you get is a *miracle*, a complete success possibly even ordained or blessed by God. If what you're doing is in line with your fortune, which is one of the things that will come up with during character creation, our personal expertise or power, then miracles cancel dooms. If what we're doing has to do with our misfortune, which is something that we are deliberately bad at or is a curse, then dooms cancel miracles. Also, if you roll three 6, you're dead. Not metaphorically dead, but completely dead. (Yes, there are some optional rules that you can bring in from the extended rules set that can help you mitigate this, but I believe you should absolutely play this game as just the core at least once and probably several times. There are a lot of optional extended rules and all of them are really intriguing in their own way, but get used to the core loop.) That's essentially the core of the entire mechanical architecture. You've noticed that I haven't actually spoken about the setting in and of itself per se, and that's because there really isn't a lot in the context of the game. There is some implication that the basic game is intended to be some level of high fantasy. In fact, you could easily read it as being the **[Elden Ring](https://en.bandainamcoent.eu/elden-ring/elden-ring)** setting — something very Souls-like at the very end of time. Which is, in fact, incredibly cool and may catch people by surprise. But the *first* time that I read through the book, I was firmly under the apprehension that it was a modern game. And honestly, aside from the junk generation step in character generation, which does make slightly more sense purely from a fantasy point of view, it's certainly not obviously and necessarily so. If you use the *zero randomness* generation system (which is what I plan to do here), none of that even comes into play. Do you want to run the last days of 1920s Arkham before the great old ones truly come into their own? You could do that. Do you want to run a game set on the last human outpost on a Dyson sphere surrounding the last dimming star before the final descent of our universe into entropic collapse? You could do that too. As long as there's a good excuse for the Four Horsemen to show up in one form or another, and you're staring into the end of the world coming at you like a bright light through a tunnel on train tracks, you're good to go. ## Acts of Creation Speaking of the zero randomness character generation system, let's pull that out here. And also the title page for one of the expansions that we are absolutely going to bring into play. ![[Infaernum - Zero Randomness.webp]] ![[Infaernum - Cyfaernum (cover).jpg]] Oh yeah we're going straight to balls out **Cyfaernum** cyberpunk apocalypse where the four major megacorporations literally are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There is a resistance fomenting which would love to save humanity from the radioactive disease which has affected the Old World, probably created and certainly already cured by the megacorps. But it's on the resistance to try and save humanity. Unfortunately for them, the hidden headquarters of the resistance has just been attacked by an army of agents sent by the megacorporations to wipe them out, quite successfully. The prophecy of the Promised Land is an algorithmic prediction of the possibility of finding a cure. The megacity that you live in covers the entirety of the Earth's oceans and the land itself is poisonous and deadly. Is the cure out there? Or is it hiding in the corporate towers? Or down in the dirtiest parts of the metroplex? That is an excellent question. Let's get to the character generation, shall we? ### Who Are You? Who who, who who? You know what? Let's get crazy. I'm imagining one of those '90s cyberpunk/wasteland movies, of which there were a ton of really good ones. The kind where you can tell that they wanted to rip off **Mad Max**, but they couldn't really afford to. Technology does what technology does and the entire thing is probably metaphorical, but you're not sure it's consistent enough to really carry it off - but you're having a good time, so it doesn't matter!  Yeah, like that! (**Hardware** is one of my favourite movies, in fact.) Maybe with some elements of **Dark City** thrown in for extra spice.^[Jennifer Connoly is always extra spicy.]  In the pursuit of that feel, our character's name of **Caerdwyn Meyers**, **a scrounger** of the poisoned wastes outside the City. ### Fortune Favours the Bold *What are we better at than anyone else?* Our Fortune, in the parlance of the game. Meyers is good at **finding** things; he knows where they're likely to be hidden and he knows how to look. ### The Misstep *What are we worse than most people at?* Our Misfortune, as it were. Meyers likes the big deadly empty because he can get away from humanity, which he finds to be composed of **lies**. He hates lies and is bad with lying himself. ### Junked Up *What equipment do we carry?* It literally is referred to as *junk* in the text. We actually do have a six element set of examples here, so I'll drop a die and see what comes up. *Vehicle customized with vertical/horizontal nitrotech and assisted steering.* I think I will take that. Perfectly sensible for a guy who spends a lot of time out in the wastes to have a vehicle to get around, and clearly it has some serious boost capabilities. Is it a flying vehicle? No, I don't think so. I *do* think it's probably a big bulky vehicle that you wouldn't expect to be able to make 60-foot jumps, however. Since you usually have three pieces of junk, I'll also grab *a heavy gyrojet pistol* because self-defense is important and *some cool mirrorshades*. Cyberpunk is simply not complete without cool mirrorshades. ### Blessed-Be the Colt Peacemakers *What's our blessing?* We have something special besides our junk. Pleasantly, we have a table here, too. *Projection mod, capable of altering one's appearance and the appearance of nearby elements.* I actually quite like this as it fits in neatly with our ability to hide. I imagine this to be sort of a field effect chameleon job, allowing us to blend in with the environment, change colors, pick up on lighting, that sort of thing. Not really usable to appear to be someone else, but particularly good at keeping you out of sight when someone is looking for you. ![[Infaernum - CCC2025 - Caerdwyn Meyers, Wasteland Scrounger.webp]] ## Exunt And that's it. We're done. The character is assembled. One of my favorite things to come out of the modern era of game design is a simple axiom: *"Play to find out."* The idea that you shouldn't know everything about your character from the jump, but instead get down the most basic elements that you will need to build off of that tell you enough about who the character is and what they can do and then let the story inform you about who the character is through the choices you make for them. That's powerful stuff. It flies in the face of a lot of old school game design in some essential ways, though hearkens back in an ironic sense to one of the things I've always found distasteful in RPG design: level systems. *I hate levels.* The one thing that they enforced, which I vaguely approve of, is that you have to only have a basic sketch of a character to start, and you will discover more about who they are as play continues. Making that so transparently mechanical... That I'm not crazy about, which is why I'm not one of those old school guys. **Infaernum** is an amazing game and it definitely leads from an extremely minimalistic core outwards and gives you some insane options. But before we get there we should probably talk about the fact that there's only six days left for the world to exist. ### I Feel Fine Here is where things may be unusual from your experience. That is to say, there are literally only six in-game physical days between you and the end of the world. Judgment Day. The Last Trump.  Every day, there is a set of questions to be answered and a situation to be dealt with. Though that situation is extremely broad and open to interpretation. For example, the first day is the day after the last bastion of humanity has fallen before the forces of evil (or in our case, the day after the resistance headquarter has been taken out by agents). So the questions center around the people who survived with us and what the last bastion of humanity is like. Of the people who are by our side, who values strength? Who values skill? Who values wisdom? More broadly, what was the last bastion of humanity like? What are the fallen ones like and what can they do? Where are you and where are you going to? *Day one* is about searching for clues about the Promised Land and surviving in order to go seek it. As you can see, it's extremely broad and very much open to interpretation, especially given your access to the noun verb oracles which should feel very familiar at this point. *Day two* is your first encounter with Pestilence. Not just the pestilence of the setting in general, but the actual manifestation of the rider on the white horse, one of the four. There is a random table which can guide you into what you're going to have to deal with in this day, all of which play to the themes of pestilence, infection, and purification. As well as a quick table which tells you what happens if you accumulate six dooms and stumble across Pestilence himself. Let's just say that those curses are pretty unpleasant. And so on up until the end of all things followed by *Judgment Day* itself. This is going to be way more structured a mechanism of play than a lot of people are used to. Yet while it simultaneously puts a hard constraint on the things that you can accomplish or try to accomplish before the next major change comes along, it also is incredibly open and lets you deal with these problems however you like. It's relentlessly high pressure in terms of always feeling oppressive, with the threat of accumulating dooms, or possibly just rolling three sixes, always overhead like the sword of Damocles. It pushes you into continually trying to race the clock because the clock is so prominent in your view. Simultaneously, it's immensely open and includes a ridiculous number of supplements which were released one by one when the game was originally published in Brazil. ### Expansive Vistas Yes, this is a game that originally came out in Brazil and drew itself a very enthusiastic audience which led to the Kickstarter and an English language release. As part of that release, included are all of the supplements that came out. All given the same beautifully aggressive visual style as the core book but most of which change some elemental part of the game in an unexpected way. Let's run through some of them: **Souls:** This actually leans into being a Souls-like kind of game. Destroying a fallen one can give you a soul that you can burn to turn a doom into a neutral event or a neutral event into a deed. As part of that, you can randomly decide what the challenge level of the thing you're going up against is, and that level is reduced by rolling deeds and miracles. If you were looking for more information on how to structure the conflicts, this is that supplement. **Rifts:** Were you looking for something like a mini dungeon crawl in your apocalypse? Because we have them. Each of these rifts contains a series of challenges which have a randomly generated difficulty, as well as an artifact which you might be able to get out of it if you are resolute and quite lucky. Needless to say, these things are probably going to start collapsing around you as you're working to get the legendary artifact at the core, so you might want to hurry. **Colossus:** Was your apocalypse missing giant horrific near-kaiju monsters that are terrifying pillars of absolute destruction? Well then, here you go. Each colossus has four cards associated with them in the four cardinal directions, and each of those cards represents one of its powers: a doom. Rolling a doom while fighting the colossus from one of those directions turns up that doom, as determined by the card underneath you, and bad things are more than likely going to go off all over the place. Taking a colossus out leads to the characters being able to absorb one of its dooms as a ritual that they can inflict on others by burning two miracles. **Cults:** Maybe the idea of being on a strict and hard timeline of six days doesn't appeal to you, but you also want a really good excuse to play **Infaernum** co-op with your friends. Certainly, being a member of a cult in the aftermath of the Great Tribulation would be an excellent setup! Effectively, this allows you to play a series of one-shots in a thematically connected way and provides you the tools to be able to put that together on the fly. **Masters:** Look, I'm not going to lie to you, this basically *implements Pokémon in **Infaernum***. You can summon them, figure out their powers, and have them fight one another. It's Pokémon, there's just no way around it. It's truly insane, but here we are. **Territories:** This turns part of the game into a hex crawl by generating a map from draws from the poker deck. You can have challenges, Colossi, rifts… all the things that are in the previous supplements can show up on the map. **Domains:** This is simultaneously something *like* the **Territories** supplement, but takes things in a somewhat different direction. It also changes part of the premise. The horseman manifested, but no great apocalypse ever came to be. Instead, humanity divided itself up under the influence of the heralds, and no information about the Promised Land has proven to be true. Like **Territories** you use cards to build the map, but you take out all the Aces, Twos, Threes, Fours, Fives, and Sixes of all suits to make a special deck and then lay them out in a particular pattern around the bastion. As you explore, you turn up the card and its suit determines whose domain it's part of — Pestilence, War, Famine, or Death. The card's rank determines what kind of event is going on there. Oh yes, and your character is sympathetic to one of the factions. Should your particular horseman show up, it clears out your dooms but you don't receive a curse. And *that's not even all of the supplements in the book.* There's still the one which uses the poker deck to do all forms of resolution and one which uses the Major Arcana only from the tarot to do inspiration generation. Look, I'll just sum it up simply: **Infaernum** is a fantastically fascinating game which leverages a truly minimalist resolution core against a very structured default play loop and turns up something which has more flexibility than most games I've had the pleasure of experiencing. It's very flashy in design without being unreadable. It's full of random generation oracles and tools that you can use to inspire you, which add to the flavor. There's a ton of supplements in the core book which allow you to change vast swaths of the game in accordance with your needs and desires. Look, go out and bring it into the world then come back and tell us about it. ### AND WE'RE DONE! I can't tell you about what we're going to post tomorrow because Character Creation Challenge 2025 is over. This is the last entry for this year. I'm going to take a little bit of a break from writing over the next few days and let things gel in my head and come back around to some creative ideas. Then we will probably revisit things that we did this month because there are some interesting character concepts we played around with but didn't have time to pursue. If you have a preference on that or a suggestion, feel free to let me know. I want to hear what you think. If I've introduced you to a game that you've never heard of, tell me that too. For now, I think it's time to invoke Judgment Day. I hope you all fare well.