Necronautilus
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 Cover art by Shel Kahn | |
| Designers | Adam Vass |
|---|---|
| Illustrators | Shel Kahn, Adam Vass |
| Publishers | World Champ Game Co. |
| Publication | 2020 |
Necronautilus is a role-playing game created and illustrated by Adam Vass and released by the indie publisher World Champ Game Co. in 2020 in which characters are sentient clouds who go on quests to enforce the will of the god of Death.
Setting
Necronautilus is a game of the Old School Renaissance movement, which seeks to emulate the minimal rules and imaginative play style of the earliest role-playing games of the 1970s.[1]
The game is set in a dimension ruled by the blind god Death, where all creatures who have died now reside. Players take the roles of Death Agents, formerly living beings who now are embodied as sentient clouds of gas under the command of Death itself. They roam the Death dimension in a nautilus ship as they perform missions for Death. A character cannot remember its former life or how it died, only how it became a Death Agent. Being clouds of gas, characters cannot wield tools or equipment, but must manifest action through Words of Power. Each character starts with three Words, and can collect up to nine more—called the Collection—as the storyline progresses.
Action resolution
Each time a character wishes to take an action, it uses one of its Words of Power. Each word starts with a value of 6, and to use it successfully, the player must roll two 6-sided dice and get a total less than the current value of the Word.
If the action is successful, the power materializes in the way the player wishes. As GM historian Stu Horvath noted, "Thus 'Fire' can start one, burn the flesh, inflame the heart, discharge a gun, or manifest four building-sized letters; so long as there is some connection between the Word and the effect, no matter how tenuous, it happens."[1] The definition of the Word, and even its spelling and symbology, are up to the player. As Michael Barnes pointed out, "Words of Power take on different meanings, interpretations, spellings, or signification based on what a player does with them—it is all about subjectivity and generating a bespoke semiology at the gaming table."[2] Successive uses of the Word exhausts its power. When this happens, the character can turn the Word into a Memory, revealing something of the character's former life. The player can also activate a Word from the character's Collection to replace the lost Word.
If the action is unsuccessful—the player rolled more than the Word's value—no manifestation of Power appears, and the Word itself is changed by the addition of affixes, letters or complete words, making the Word more specific and thus less useful. However, the Word's value increases by one, increasing the chances of successfully using it.
If the player rolls the Word's value, the gamemaster relates the effect that happens, and the Word fractures in two, making a new Word of Power, and a new Word for the character's Collection.
Returning to Life
When a character accumulates 30 points of Life from Memories, the character remembers its former existence and is restored to Life and removed from the dimension of Death (and from the game).[1]