Editing Castle Falkenstein

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''Castle Falkenstein'' is a magic/steampunk [[RPG]] published by [[R. Talsorian]] Games. Throw away your dice and grab your deck o' cards as if you were dumb enough to play poker. Also grab your "player as contributory GM" hat, because you will make up almost as much shit as the dude hypothetically in charge. This is mainly due to the odd nature of the system where, in order to achieve anything, you need to test your skill rating of 2-12 plus card draws against a target number. The cards add their face value (11 for a jack, 12 for a queen, 13 for a king and 14 for a Ace) if the suit was aligned to the action. Clubs physical, Hearts Charisma, Diamonds perception, Spades social graces. As this means that card draws are way more important than your characters skill, they often determine what your course of action would be. In other words, mild mannered librarians holding clubs would be able to outshoot a veteran gunfighter holding hearts. 

As you can hold up to 4 cards if you got them, you can store a hand to pull off a particular action [[Just as planned|(to the annoyance of everyone else as those cards wouldn't be in circulation)]]. It also leads to a near-pathological desire in all players to look for any reason to jettison any Spades they held as they were nearly always useless.

The system theoretically lets you play as magicians, fey (many different varieties) and even dragons, although the rules that accompanied them varied from stupid to entirely broken.

System quirks aside, there's some astonishing fluff, almost [[Space: 1889]]-like in its period genre madness.

Set in a Victorian era where Bismark and his Prussians were out to conquer Europe with their land tanks and Unseelie Fey allies, held back by the airships and plucky heroes of the German principality of Bayern, while the rest of the great powers mainly bickered and intrigued amongst themselves. RTG produced half a dozen supplements including an ok one on America to expand the setting (all done from the point of view of a time travelling American from the 80s).

For all the many quirks of the system, it was nonetheless a pioneering steampunk setting. The very fluid nature of the rules mean that it is very easy to integrate almost anything into the story, so GMs could plunder any literary source they felt like. Games including Sherlock Holmes, HG Wells' ''The Time Machine'', the Martians from ''War of the Worlds'', Frankenstein, Fu Manchu, Phantomas and the like weren't uncommon, kind of like playing a game based on ''Anno Dracula'' by [[Jack Yeovil|Kim Newman]].

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