Purgatoria

Originally known as just "City of Angels" (and changed because people couldn't stop mixing it up with that shitty Nick Cage movie), 'Purgatoria: City of Angels' is a attempt by several fa/tg/uys to make a system that features elements not typically seen in a gaming medium over-saturated with high fantasy. The game is one of the few to feature a relatively modern-day level of technology and thematic elements without boggling it down with magic or elves, or some shit like that. Players control citizens of a massive walled-in city caught in an ever-present war between several themed gangs. The combat system is a lot crunchier than most homebrew games, featuring a massive spread of usable combos.

The system came around as part of a writing challenge in 2013 and eventually mutated into a full-blown game engine complete with a unique setting. The game seems to be not terrible, judging from the reactions of the 10 people that have actually read all the way through the 200+ page beta packet.

Mechanical Engine

The engine of Purgatoria is designed to be easy-to-learn, but has a ton of crazy applications when expanding into some of the game's crunchier applications.

Dice Pools

Purgatoria uses a dice-pool system for determining if player skill checks are successful. When players want to make checks, they roll a number of dice equal to (relevant attribute + skill modifier) and count 4s,5s, and 6s and successes. Even attack checks are done this way to minimize the amount of obnoxious superfluous rules that need to be learned. If a player's attribute is higher than the DC of the check, the check is automatically successful, regardless of the dice roll outcome. Certain techniques can briefly change the rules to count '3s' as successes, making these abilities super powerful.

Combat

Combat revolves around expending action points to build combos and unleashing them on opponents. When combat starts, players select three stats and 'Load' them, allowing these stats to generate AP every turn via skill checks.

Players can them spend AP on fueling techniques that become combo strings. Techniques fall into four categories:

• Base Techniques: The bread and butter of a character's arsenal. These can range from simple things, like a DDT takedown or head shot, to more insane things, like throwing handful bullets and shooting them to create hailstorms of projectiles or vanishing and exploding out from an opponent.
• Combo Techniques: Combo techniques add properties to base techniques. These can be relatively minor, such as adding a small bonus to hit, or completely change the technique, such as replacing a regular shot with a grenade and allowing the user to shoot the pin off, or causing an after-image of the character to deliver a follow-up attack.
• Movement Techniques: While all characters can spend Action Points to run around the battlefield, each class has a handful of unique ways of doing it. Examples include the Assassin's Ability to melt into shadows to cross the battlefield or a Gundancer's ability to ride the kick from firing guns full auto to briefly fly.
• Defensive Techniques: These techniques allow characters to stay alive. There's a diverse range of them that allow for increasing passive defensive or just avoiding attacks entirely.

Defenses

Purgatoria's system is pretty lethal, needing only three or four clean attacks to drop character HP low enough to acquire permanent wounds. To balance this out, a chunk of the combat system revolves around being able to mitigate attacks through one of three defensive styles.

• Damage Soak: Damage soak measures how much of an improbably badass person a character is. Generating soak in combat lets characters simply grimace and shrug off injuries that would kill lesser men. This is mechanically represented in a form of damage reduction that decreases whenever damage is applied to the user.
• Dodge Techniques: Instead of playing around with comparing stats, dodge techniques allow a character to simply dramatically avoid the attack without a scratch. As these techniques let players just completely dance their way out of trouble, they're the most expensive to use. Most classes feature some sort of mechanic that allows a player to uses dodges for much cheaper, provided certain conditions are met.
• Deflect Techniques: These techniques introduce new elements into the battlefield to make a character more stylish, and thus much harder to hit. In a sense, this mechanic functional similar to AC in other games, but these boosts are generally very short lived, meaning that players can't simply turtle behind them.

Character Creation

Character creation eschews a level system in favor of an EXP point buy. Players select an Origin (similar to a race) and class, before redeeming their Experience Points for class features. At certain milestones of spending EXP, characters receive slight buffs to their core stats to represent growing stronger.

Instead of the glaring skill point disparities of Dungeons and Dragons, every class has an equal amount of skills that it can purchase. Instead of leveling up these skills individually, these skills come in themed packs that represent a larger element of the character's abilities getting stronger when purchased. That's right: you can play a melee class and actually have things to do with it's skills, instead of having to relegate everything to the more rougish classes.

Playable Classes

This system features 9 base classes and an additional 10 advanced classes, which apparently work similar to D&D's prestige classes. Each class has three branching trees: a standard set of mechanics and two distinct separate mechanics, allowing for an autismally high amount of builds.

Assassin

Every tabletop game needs some sort of an Assassin. As opposed to their more sneaky cousins, the Assassins of Purgatoria are more focused around high-profile dramatic murders than hanging around and slapping tiny bits of poison onto people. This class also boasts tons of katanas. Katana everywhere.

The classes's two unique mechanics are High Profile and Low Profile. The former turns the Assassin into a super stylish murder machine, allowing them to perform feats such as shoot targets enough to turn them into projectiles or slashing opponents with such ferocity that they're reduced to a bloody mist that debuffs enemies. The Low Profile mechanic turns the Assassin into a more lethal Batman-esque character who plays off of the fears of opponents while darting about the battlefield and cutting throats.

Brawler

The Brawler is an inelegant, but beefy melee class. The class features a ton of options for psyching up to such manly extremes that explosions, bullets and knives are little more than pesky distractions. The class features some of the best melee damage in the game and the means to simply wade through deadly combat like a drunken redneck wades through a child's birthday party.

The Brawler's two skill trees are Debilitation and Improvised Weapons. The Debilitation tree turns the brawler into a super lethal WWE fighter, allowing them to save in enemy heads and break arms like it's going out of style. On the other hand, Improvised Weapons allow the Brawler to grab just about anything from a location and turn it into a weapon. As the Brawler acquires more EXP, these examples can get even more extreme, allowing the Brawler to even uproot telephone poles to use for pummeling.

Commando

Commandos are the Clint Eastwood class of the game. Imagine the flexibility of the D&D fighter smeared with a nice helping of South American Contra and smothered with a generous helping of Cowboy. While they aren't masters of any particular role, they have some of the most diverse ranges of means in which to shoot things, meaning they'll never find themselves in a situation where shooting isn't a valid solution somehow.

If a player is looking for a more cowboy interpretation of a Commando, they can grab the Showdown mechanic, which allows the character to declare a 'high noon'-esque showdown on an unfortunate opponent. From there, a Commando can unleash a barrage of devastating single-target attacks at this target until they've been reduced to little more than a smear on the wall. Conversely, a Commando may choose to invest in the Trick Shot tree, giving them a massive range of impractical bullet-related tricks they can do. This can range from doing things like ricocheting bullets to hit awkwardly positioned enemies to entirely changing the battlefield by shooting away at things like pipes and support beams.

Detective

Noir themed settings need Detectives like high school proms need bitter virgins. Detectives like solving crimes, and often create a ton more in the process of doing so. When pushed into combat, the Detective uses their forensic skillset to be one of the most support-y support classes in the history of tabletop gaming. This is great, because it means that your party's support can be a rugged man in a bullet-ridden raincoat instead of an obnoxious religious zealot or super-magical prepubescent animu girl.

For area control and frontline support, the detective can use the Crime Scene mechanic to establish crime scene investigations in combat. From there, the Detective has access to a set of tools that allow him to change the investigation focus to provide themed buffs, or start revealing caches of ammo, explosives, and plot coupons hidden within the crime scene. If a player wants to take more of a Sherlock-esque approach to the Detective, they can utulize the

Items and Armor

Purgatoria's Armor system doesn't track individual parts of the body, but rather reduces the entire premise to 5 slots that can contain just about any item. Instead of limiting a character to a single piece of headwear, a character can choose to grab five different peices of headgear and combine them. For instance, if a player wants a pair of rose-tinted glasses, a gas mask, a rave kandi mask and a cowboy hat, they can easily splice these items together into some sort of bizarre Death Corps party hybrid. This allows for palyers to focus more on finding the most fun items to supplement their build instead of just trying to slot out every single body part with some sort of static buff like some sort of neurotic dress-up game character hanging out in the world's most illegal pawnshop.

Guns and Weapons

Having the most improbably badass guns is a core requirement of anything gun-fu inspired. Naturally, doing badass reloads at the most improbable time is also a stylistic must. Of course, anybody who's tried to play a scummy scout build in Dungeons and Dragons should realize immediately that tracking individual bullets is the single least fun thing that can be done with weapons. Instead, every single weapon has a unique property that can be activated at the right time. Expending this property is considered a dramatic burst of all the weapon's remaining ammunition and grants crazy bonuses to the situation in which it is used.

The weapons system seems to contain Metal Gear Solid levels of gun porn, featuring all sorts of crazy pseudo-futuristic weaponry including crossbows that shoot pressurized syringes full of a mercury-laden substance and a sniper rifle that uses a microwave reaction to briefly ignite shots into super-heated shots of plasma, melting the fire mechanism and leaving the gun broken after a single high-powered shot.

Additionally, players can roll for procedural generation to randomly make guns. This can lead to instances where a series of rolls produces a revolving cylinder rifle with a 6-foot long barrel that shoots bullets with liquid mercury heads.

Setting Information

The core rules for the game feature a setting that takes place within a gloomy, walled-in city. Every day life within the city seems to be caught in an endless cycle of secret gangs wars, enabled by the secretive machinations of The Four Gods, an enigmatic set of forces that oversee life within the city. It's unknown if the gods are actually divine, insanely powerful individuals, or just idealistic fronts for some of the city's more influential businesses.

Given the noir-influences of the game, every scene is contractually required to include at least one brooding monologue, betrayal, and plot twist relying on an 'identical twins' explanation for a seemingly impossible crime.

Elves

There are none. Hopefully, there will never be any.