# Day 15: Fear and Panic - Cade Fortenot, Shadetree Mechanic tags: #articles/CharacterCreationChallenge/2026 #game/rpg/fear-and-panic > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2026]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] Just as a heads up about how fast things move, remember how [[11 - Elegy|we did *Elegy* on day 11]]? Well, the author has put out an update to the beta with a few fixes and a little bit of expansion. None of them really touch on the issues that I had with the game during character generation, but things are proceeding apace. I just thought you might want to know in case the ideas intrigued you and you wanted to know if there were in fact updates and fixes coming. I like it. There was a time we didn't get any sort of updates or dynamic expansions at all to games in process. In fact, we never saw games in process. Ultimately, I think this is going to lead to better games in general. Others may disagree. ## Game of Choice There's been a surprising amount of horror in this list so far, which shouldn't really come as a surprise to people who follow some of my work. Horror and horror themes are fairly prevalent, not because I'm afraid of the world, but because I'm not. We have to cultivate the absences somewhere, right? ![[Fear and Panic (cover).jpg|400]] *Fear and Panic* is a fairly lightweight system with a book that only runs 44 pages. Luckily, it doesn't try to make up with crunchy fiddliness what it lacks in complexity during character generation, though you're going to see a part that I'm not exactly thrilled with. You'll know when we hit it. Flashbacks may occur. There are percentile and skill systems in here is what I'm saying. You know how I feel about skill systems. ## Acts of Creation I've got the book open. I've got a blank sheet. Let's get stuck in. *Fear and Panic* is a game about normal people in bad situations. It's clear about that up front, and there's no reason to try and break the mold here. It is flexible about what time period and where, so if you wanted to run a horror game set in Caesar's Rome, you certainly could, and this would be a system that would mostly work for that. We're just going to go with modern supernatural horror, and we're going to set it in Monroe, Alabama. No, not **that** Monroe, Alabama. The **other** Monroe, Alabama—the small town, if you can even call it that. Almost just a split in the road, as my parents used to say. Small town southern charm, with a bit of Southern Gothic under the skin. It's a good setup. Where did I come up with that? I just pulled it out of my brain. Who else would talk about Monroe, Alabama? ### Name Back to the old school standard. Put your name at the top of the sheet. - **Name:** Cade Fontenot If you've never met people from Alabama, this name is going to seem a little weird. If you have, you probably know this guy. ### Description - **Description:** Cade is built like a cypress stump—short, broad-shouldered, and deceptively difficult to move. His skin has been tanned to the color of an old leather boot by years of Alabama sun, brown against the silver-grey stubble across his jaw. Your almost stereotypical tough old bird. Except maybe not that old. Early 50s? It's not the years, it's the mileage. ### Scars and Fear Nothing to do with these during character generation. Fear is how scared you are, and you actually want Fear because you can spend Fear to do things in the game. Scars are what happens when you pick up unpleasant side effects of Fear rolls. Everyone needs a little psychological trauma, right? ### Skills Okay, see, you knew there was inevitably going to be something that irritated me, and here it is. It's a skill list. It's a set skill list, except for your career and your hobby. I appreciate the fact that we can come up with whatever we want for those two, but for the rest, there's a fixed list. However, at least we don't have to do a lot of deeply fiddly point accounting. It's just a **little** bit of point accounting: - 2 skills start at 60 - 3 skills start at 50 - 4 skills start at 40 - 3 skills start at 30 - 2 skills start at 20 - Everything else starts at 10 You remember [[02 - The Burning Wheel#Skills|how much fun I had assigning skill points in *The Burning Wheel*]], right? Yeah, I'll be back in a minute. | Skill | Value | | --------------------- | ----: | | Career (Car Mechanic) | 50 | | Hobby (Bass Fishing) | 30 | | Athletics | 40 | | Book Learning | 10 | | Brawl | 40 | | Convince | 20 | | Drive | 60 | | Endure | 60 | | First Aid | 10 | | Focus | 50 | | Hack | 10 | | Intimidate | 20 | | Make | 30 | | Notice | 40 | | Operate | 10 | | React | 30 | | Repair | 40 | | Research | 10 | | Science | 10 | | Shoot | 30 | | Sneak | 10 | | Superstition | 10 | | Survive | 50 | | Throw Money | 10 | It's not the worst time I've ever had in my life, but let's be frank: **skill lists are the devil**, especially when it comes to percentile systems. The fact that you only have to allocate them in blocks of 10 points is kind of nice, but it's still unnecessarily fiddly. Honestly, you could divide everything by 10 and instead of rolling versus d100s, roll versus d10 and be ahead of the game with simplification. Do I really care about the difference between 50 and 60%? Only 10%. Cade here is a good old boy of the classic bent, a shade tree car mechanic who likes to go bass fishing in his time off. He is a great driver and a solid dude with the kind of focus that comes from laying on your back in the grass under the trees while the ants crawl on you. He's very perceptive because have you ever tried looking for a screw in the grass under a car? He's spent enough time in the woods to be good at survival, even if he's not particularly good at being a bass fisherman itself. And the rest sort of just falls out relatively comfortably. As character concepts go, it's nice and tight. And while it is a skill system with all the problems that come with that, like skills of differing broadness given the same value, it's not terrible. I can live with it. ### Menace and Escape We do have a couple of derived attributes which are fairly important in play, but a little wacky. In order to calculate our **Menace**, we need to add up our Brawl, Shoot, and React. If it's under 120, our Menace is 4, and if it's over or equal to 120, our Menace is 5. Poor Cade only brings that to 110, so he only has Menace 4. Athletics, Endure, and Sneak go into figuring out our **Escape**. Same drill, same breakpoint at 120. Goddamnit, Cade. 110 again; just short. That's us with an Escape 4. This man is just on the cusp of greatness and getting screwed over at every turn. He's not the best at fighting. He's not the best at running away. He's just living his life. Weirdly enough, that also fits the character concept so far. I bet this guy lives in a trailer park. ## Exunt That's it. We're done. Character creation complete. ![[15 - Fear and Panic - Cade Fortenot, Shadetree Mechanic.webp]] I will say this, it is fast and easy to put a character together. But, looking through the system, it's also fast and easy to die really horribly in a big hurry if you're not careful and you're not actually using your Fear to help adjust your rolls. Of course, using your Fear risks taking Scars, but that's the implicit trade-off. I really have to look at this in comparison and context with other percentile-based horror systems. And when we say that, what we're really saying is, how do I feel about this character generation process compared to *[[Call of Cthulhu]]*? The answer to that one is easy. I would rather do this any day of the week and twice on Sunday than wrestle with *Call of Cthulhu*'s BRP system, which is definitely overly fiddly and just not that much fun. In fact, I'd rather use the mechanics in *Fear and Panic* than those in *Call of Cthulhu* because conflicts are abstracted a lot further and more is done with single die rolls. *Call of Cthulhu* is a classic master of the field, but mechanically, I just don't want to do that to myself anymore. It was the first RPG I ever ran for people on a regular basis, and if I never see the backside of that system again, no tears will be shed. Go pick up *Fear and Panic*. Use it to play horror scenarios in your choice of setting, whether it be modern, sci-fi, or historical. I think that you'll find that it works out pretty well. This is another one of those games that won't cost you a lot of money and give you a lot of playtime. A simple $5 bill will put this in your pocket. I'd say it's worth that for sure. Tomorrow, we are off to the high seas. You know what that means. You're probably going to get to experience at least one sea shanty.