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My own home game has magic locked behind physical items: 6 particular types of jewels that spellcasters need to have in a particular combination for a specific spell effect. I really like the idea of having more than one way to use the physical magic item, though. I already had "use a specific combination for certain spells" and "use a specific combination for magic items or constructs" but you took it a couple steps further by tying it into the economy and afterlife. It's a very interesting development that I look forward to seeing. 

I find the idea of combining magic, money, and afterlife in one physical substance with many methods of use to be very fresh and exciting. I can't wait to see the final zine.

I'm a big proponent of saying "you succeed without a roll because you have relevant expertise and there's no serious pressure", so that's a good move. 

Handy is basically a more limited version of Jack of All Trades. Handy lets you add another practical skill in which you use your hands (mechanic, carpenter, etc), but Jack would let you add any vocation. Jack is an opportunity to have your armored juggernaut warrior say "Yes, I've read a book or two. Before I joined the army, I actually went to medical school."

Eventually. I'm looking into various options now. The layout will need to be redone to adjust the colors and ink coverage values for print. 

There's nothing wrong with your reading skills. In an older version of the layout, the war rigs were on the vehicle chart but I moved them to the armor section to emphasize that it's a suit that you wear and not a vehicle that you drive. Learning to move and fight normally in a rig is more a matter of athletic adjustment than learning a piloting skill. 

I'll be fixing some errata and uploading a corrected version of the book soon. Standard rigs have a fuel tank that holds 12 slots of fuel, like the ruggedized motorcycle. The Warrior starting packages should also state that any vehicles or rigs start with half a tank. The vehicles & travel section on page 52 still includes the fuel expenditure of rigs: they're very efficient, but don't carry much with them. If you have a player that likes to count all the copper pieces, they can have some logistical fun in figuring out when it's better to make the war rigs walk or ride in the back of a truck.

The "cargo box" war rig mod is big enough to hold a 5-gallon jerry can and I would allow a player to use it as an extended fuel tank by doubling the cost to account for extra fuel lines and such. (Or they could just keep a jerry can in there and get out of the rig to refuel.)

Sorry to leave you hanging. I thought I replied to this already. I'm working on putting together a sheet right now. I hope to have it up by this weekend, but I can't promise anything because I'm juggling several different things at once right now.

There usually aren't contested rolls. Instead of "PC rolls to sneak and tries to do better than the NPC roll to spot", it's just "PC rolls to see if they can sneak past a guard".

It's up to you if you want to add extra difficulty modifiers to the PC roll. Outside of combat, I usually just use 5 difficulty levels:

1. Easy enough that you can do it without a roll (because you have suitable skills, equipment, or circumstances in your favor).
2. Easy, but not guaranteed, so roll with advantage.
3. Normal
4. Hard, so roll with disadvantage.
5. Too hard. "You can't get there from here" so try something else.

For sneaking specifically, some people might ask "Shouldn't it be harder to sneak up on soldiers who are on guard duty than just a normal person?" My reply is sneaking past guards is the normal use case for sneaking, so it's just a normal roll with advantage or disadvantage for anything really unusual. 

Disadvantages would be things such as a monster with unusually keen senses or guards after an alarm has been raised so they're actively looking for you. I don't worry too much about the difference in difficulty of sneaking up on NPCs with Wisdom 11 vs 14. If you want difficulty ratings, you could just use NPC Ability -10 as the difficulty (so you would need a successful roll higher than 4 to sneak past the Guard with a 14).

For advantages, I like to leave it up to the players to think of ways to tip things in their favor. Some things I've seen include timing the guard patrols to pick the best moment to run for the fence instead of just trying to jump from shadow to shadow like a ninja, throwing meat as a distraction for guard animals, and using a slingshot to throw a pebble to make a noise for guards to investigate "over there".

The defense roll for armor is the same as any other roll: 3d6, take the middle die, add a relevant bonus, and succeed on a 5 or more (or another number if the GM decides it should be higher or lower). The defend action is an action that blocks damage by parrying, dodging, etc. 

Armor works like the defend action, but it doesn't count as one of your actions. You can still add a bonus if you have one that is relevant to using armor. A "wizened sage who brews potions" would just roll the bones and hope for the best, but a "brave knight who slays dragons" would add the +2 bonus for being a knight: he knows how to roll with the blow and tuck his arms in (to avoid exposing the less armored spots like the inner elbow and armpit) to get the best use out of his armor. 

Regarding "exploits" versus "experiences": it's mostly a branding thing. The word "experience" has been an abstract number in games (both tabletop and video games) for several decades now. It's the default understanding of "experience". It really needs a different name to avoid confusion, just like games that require you to spend points to attack call them "action points" or instead of "hit points". 

https://brianbinh.itch.io/robots-and-ruins

https://brianbinh.itch.io/3-bones

It's quite an inspired little system. All the pieces fit together perfectly. I used the Action and Challenge dice system for Robots & Ruins for the #rpglatamjam. I might have a few more uses for it too.

I finished my game based on the Ruled by Night SRD. Ash Island is a game of personal survival horror on a fog-shrouded island inspired by Silent Hill (among other things). 

I finished my game based on the Ruled by Night SRD. Ash Island is a game of personal survival horror on a fog-shrouded island inspired by Silent Hill (among other things). 

I added the Flame token for fleeing. 

Unpaid testimonial: I highly recommend Affinity Publisher for layout. I opened the "Violence" flowchart in my diagramming app, edited that bubble, and saved the change. Then when I opened AfPub to update the PDF, it automatically updated the flowcharts from the newly changed, external file. I didn't have to redo any pages. I just had to export them again as a new set of PDFs.

For the character holder with my flowcharts, I think it would be better just to include a link here with a note saying "These flowcharts make an excellent addition to this cheatsheet". I'd rather people get them directly from here.

I'm working on using the SRD to make a game and just noticed that the Light and Heavy Opposition boxes on the Stealth flowchart are reversed, so I uploaded corrected versions.

I'm working on using the SRD to make a game and just noticed that the Light and Heavy Opposition boxes on the Stealth flowchart are reversed, so I uploaded corrected versions.

Hey, I made some flowcharts to help me better follow the flows of the Stealth, Guile, and Violence processes. I posted them here if anyone else is interested in them.

Hey, I made some flowcharts to help me better follow the flows of the Stealth, Guile, and Violence processes. I posted them here if anyone else is interested in them.

Three Bones v1.1 fixes a typo, a minor layout item, and adds in a line about damage (under the Defend action) that got accidentally cut in editing. 

"Three Bones plain.txt" is a plain text file of the game with a written description of the map for those who prefer to use a screen reader.

I spent some time with Inkscape, GIMP, and Scribus tonight and put together a deluxe version with some more creature art. My favorite are the dust goblins. I might have to make a bestiary at some point.

Welcome, Batjon! Yes, you absolutely can make those changes for your chronicle. In the book, this is explicitly laid out on page 6. You don't have to start with the first generation of the family to be cursed. Part of the normal family and character generation process is deciding how long ago the curse began, so it is fairly typical to be at least several generations removed from the first Rookwood to bear the curse. The book is set up to allow the Chronicler and players to decide the family history and the starting time and place together, but it also says the Chronicler may decide one or more things in advance in order to do research and prepare reference materials. If you want to make all the decisions yourself before starting, you can do that. Although, I would recommend leaving a few things to be determined by the players, because it can help get them more invested in the campaign. (Some players prefer to focus entirely on playing their character and they don't want to know about or control anything that their character doesn't. The only input they want to have over the setting is whether or not to play in it. They might prefer it if you decided everything in advance and just threw them into the setting to explore everything without any "spoilers" from seeing behind the scenes. You know your players better than I do, so you'll have to do what's best for your particular group's style.)

The default setting assumes that the Rookwood family are somehow cursed with dark Gothic powers that slowly consume them, but you can alter that a lot and still benefit from the game's dramatic systems. There will be an expansion called "Rookwood Roots" that demonstrates how much you can change the game to fit other settings and other families or close-knit groups that aren't necessarily blood relatives (see Update #15 on the Rookwood Kickstarter page). If "The Curse of the House of Rookwood" can be used for Philippine revolutionaries, a team of mutant superheroes, or a starship crew, then it can easily handle a family with a vampire great-uncle which is already fairly close to the default game setting.

If you want to make vampirism the family curse, you can customize it however you like. That's a very versatile curse! You could decide that the vampirism comes with a specific set of powers and weaknesses or you could go the Anne Rice/White Wolf route and say "there are a few things they all have in common, but the gift is different for everyone" so each vampire can have their own unique talents. The same for lycanthropy. Will it be the classic Lon Chaney/"Teen Wolf"/Chewbacca-style wolfman or the "American Werewolf in London/Paris" type or even the traditional type that just looks like a regular wolf? Is silver a weakness or is that just an invention of the movies? If your players want to figure these things out in play, then I would suggest making some minor changes to the standard vampire and werewolf just to give them some surprises. It's almost a cliche at this point for vampire movies to include a scene where someone explains vampires with the introductory phrase "Forget what you've seen in the movies", but that can be fun in an RPG because the players can discover the new facts themselves in play instead of having them explained to them as a passive audience. One of my favorite scenes in "From Dusk 'til Dawn" is when they decide that they are dealing with vampires and try to figure out what to do. "Forget about what you've seen in some movie. What do we know about these vampires?"  

Keep us informed and let us know how it goes. If you have any questions or cool ideas to share, post them here and the community can help out. (I just recommended Rookwood in a Dark Shadows thread on rpg.net, so if that's where you found out about Rookwood, it would be good to post about it over there too. That forum is obviously much larger and more active than our little corner of the internet here.)