Umbra

Umbra Actual Live-Play Report - April 20th, 2022

Today I got to run Umbra for the first time.  Several members of my rpg group and I were able to squeeze in a brief, two-hour gaming session today.  Since it was not our whole crew and we were sneaking in just two hours of gaming time on Zoom, the group wanted a game system that was extremely fast to set up and to play.  I’d prepared a Cthulhu Mythos mystery published for another Cthulhu-themed rpg (‘Whispers in the Mountains,’ featured in the ‘Cthork Borg’ rpg core book) a system with a more traditional character sheets and more dice mechanics.  Given our time constraints and that we had to make characters instantly on the spot, it seemed a situation tailor-made for Umbra to power our game.   Given Umbra's minimalist approach, virtually any adventure or scenario for any other game system can be utilized with it, with no stat block or dice mechanic conversion headaches.

I told the group (3 players and myself as Referee) that all they’d need to do is grab a single 6-sided die, that they begin with 5 Stability points representing both physical and mental toughness, and to pick an occupation and a name for their character.  I quickly gave them a rules-briefing: roll a 1 or 2 on the 6-sided die to succeed in a task, or roll 1-3 on the 6-sided die if the task fell within their occupational skill set.  Skill dice rolls would only be attempted during stressful moments, not for every little thing that a competent adult or professional could routinely accomplish.  The players seemed sold on the immediacy of character creation, swift ease of Skill Test rolling, and how characters rely on their Stability to stay in the game, both mentally and physically.

What follows below contains some mild spoilers for the first part of ‘Whispers in the Mountains,’ so if you intend to play through that Cthork Borg adventure, reader be advised, there be spoilers ahead!

The scenario starts in the 1920s, in Bangor, Maine.  The players immediately dreamed up appropriate characters:

‘Claire,’ a backwoods villager woman (hearty Maine type with a pick-up truck, tools, and lots of warm flannel and wool clothing)

‘Ashton,’ a troubled young man of means on the verge of going criminal out of boredom

‘William,’ a mild-mannered druggist who owns the town pharmacy.

Each character received an identical letter from the principal NPC – let’s call her Agatha – stating that if they were receiving this letter, she (Agatha) was in trouble, and could they essentially come rescue her from her current predicament. 

Each character invented a connection to Agatha, herself being a fit older woman who writes freelance journal and magazine articles for a living.  William declared himself to be a personal friend of Agatha’s as well as being her druggist.  Ashton became Agatha’s nephew; it would be adventurous to pull his aunt out of whatever trouble she’d fallen into.  Claire decided that Agatha was her neighbor and friend. 

The scenario hook set, the characters first checked with Agatha’s adult daughter to confirm that she was indeed missing, and what sort of activities Agatha was up to before her writing these 'help' letters.  Agatha’s daughter stated that her mother went up to a tiny village way up in the northern Maine woods – a former lumberjack camp and mining site – to research the peculiar folklore of the region.  She’d not been seen since.

The players drove Claire’s truck to the tiny village, deep in the expanse of northern forest.  They talked to the local police, who seemed friendly, and located Agatha’s rental cabin, which looked like Agatha had never been there.  Except she had!  Ashton discovered a tightly folded note in a ceiling nook, written in Agatha’s hand, that she felt the village was turning on her.  Ashton noticed that Agatha’s cabin had iron nails tapped into the earth in a ring around the cabin. 

The three investigators decided to spend the night in their own rental cabins on the same property.  That night, the wind was full of awful hoots, whispers, and gibbering from the woods, sounds unlike normal animals, and certainly not people.  Time to test Sanity!  Each investigator rolled their dice, hoping to get under their full 5 point Stability score.  Claire and Ashton passed; William failed, rolling exactly a 5, dropping his Stability to 4.  He had a terrible night pacing his cabin in between fitful bouts of nightmarish sleep, with something nameless and terrible chasing him through the woods in his dreams.

The next morning, emerging into the light, the investigators were shocked to find that Claire’s truck had been disabled.  There were also raw, bleeding animal hides crudely tacked to nearby trees in a gruesome display.  At the sight of the damage and the weird carnage, each investigator made a second Sanity (Stability) roll.  As before, Claire and Ashton passed, while poor William the druggist rolled a 5 again and lost another Stability point, bringing him down to 3 Stability.  Umbra rules state that there’s an option to roll a Skill Test once per day to recover a single Stability point.  Since this was Day 2 of the investigation, William’s player rolled a Skill Test, but again rolled high, a failure.  William’s Stability remained at 3 on the second day of the investigation, the character still haunted by the ghastly sounds and sights of the cabin grounds. 

Realizing that something in this village was very, very wrong, the characters decided to hike a half hour into the village center, steal a car, and drive it back to the relative safety of their own homes…essentially abandoning Agatha to the forces of darkness.  I suspect this is because our two hours of real game session time was almost up, and the players wanted to see if they could get their characters out of the creepy village relatively unscathed in the short amount of remaining session time we had. 

Ashton was able to find a car downtown, and expertly hotwired it.  As a ‘troubled young man,’ stealing and hotwiring a car would be within his occupational abilities, so Ashton’s player got to roll 1-3 on that Skill Test, rather than the standard 1-2 result needed for success.  He had to roll the dice because there was some stress involved…stealing the car in broad daylight, people around who could see him, not a lot of time to retry if he initially failed.  Luckily, the roll was low, and Ashton got the car going.  He picked up the other two characters, and they beat a hasty retreat back to home.  Poor Agatha!

Overall I was very favorably impressed with Umbra’s simplicity and ease of use.  My players did not mind that their characters would not be receiving “mechanical boosts” or “character sheet improvements” … that it’s not that type of game.  The odds to pass/fail Skill Tests – and the infrequency of actually rolling the dice – both worked out fine, allowing the story to flow very quickly.  We only had two hours of real time to explore a mystery (well, the start of a mystery), with Umbra…yet we got in a few tense rolls and told a story together with ease. 

Should we play another time, William will be able to recover from his shock before a return to mystery, and all the characters will be steeled for what may be before them.  The players could even decide to swap out characters for more ‘action types’ in attempting a deep woods rescue.  A player decision to swap out characters in Umbra has no mechanical bearing on the game, other than occupations helping improve Skill Test chances.  No experience points or character sheet accountancy work to do, making it easy to swap in new characters.  Overall, Umbra delivered quite nicely in our moment of need: a fast, fun, simple yet elegant game system that could get us right into the story in a short window of time.  I think that Umbra as a game system would also work just as well for longer tales, with characters growing diegetically in the game world itself through shared experiences and knowledge, rather than skill marks and bonuses to scores on a character sheet.  Umbra delivers, and much fun was had.

olá henriique, eu estou fazendo uma tradução do seu sistema (mesmo sabendo que você fala português) para uso com alguns amigos que não dominam a língua inglesa. tem algum problema em fazer isso? 

Lembrando que vou dar todos os devidos créditos a você

Hi Henriique - This game is terrific!  With my personal downloaded copy, I took the liberty of tidying up some of the text for clarity and flow.  I also added an optional rule in the 'Final Considerations' section to include the possibility of recovering Stability points for longer-term campaign play.  If you would like, Henriique, I can email you my slightly edited version.  I hope you don't mind my taking this liberty.  It really is a gem of a game, so I gave it this light editing touch to help bring out its wonderful qualities.  All best, - Brian C. (mograg@hotmail.com)

This game looks fun!  Two quick questions regarding the Sanity rules: 

Question 1: As written, you must roll below your Stability score to succeed in a Sanity roll.  If you roll higher than your Stability score, you fail.  What happens if you roll your exact Stability score?  Is that a success or a failure?  

Question 2: As written, if you roll high, you reduce your Stability to 1 point.  Should that instead be reduce your Stability by 1 point?

Thank you for this fun game, and for helping to clarify the Sanity rules for me.  

All best,

Brian C. in Massachusetts (mograg@hotmail.com)