Purgatoria

ATTENTION: Puragtoria: City of Angels is now on Kickstarter! You can find it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1597847626/purgatoria-city-of-angels.

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 woefully unprepared guy(or gal) 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 utilize the Deduction mechanic to start building an investigation which they can utilize to alter the battle with well-timed dramatic reveals.

Gundancer

The Gundancer class is directly inspired by numerous Gun-Fu fighting styles and brings an anime-esque style to the usual grit of battle. Gundancers all practice a unique form of the Gundance, which is like a super aesthetically-minded martial art for automatic weapons. While other classes just spray-and-pray, Gundancers do things like arrange their shots to form flower designs. Additionally, by riding the kick of their weapons Gundancers can soar through the air and do all sorts of impossibly cool airborne stuff.

Using the Gun Fu style, Gundancers can evoke decades of improbably awesome action movie stunts in order to build some of the game's most high-damage and intricate combos. These combos can do things like carry a gundancer across the battlefield while shooting fireworks in every direction. To ensure their survival, Gundancers can use the Gun Sau skill tree to gain access to a bunch of stances that let them fundamentally change how their approach to battle works by doing things like shutting off movement to automatically supplement combos.

Inventor

The City has all sorts of dark recesses full of crazy pre-city technology, which creates a niche for Inventors. While an Inventor may not have the sheer degree of badassary that their peers possess, each one typically features some sort of mechanical suit cobbled together from powerful illegal technology, allowing them to do crazy stunts with the aid of machinery. Inventors are the classes for people that love the weapon system, as their class abilities allow them to do things like combine the effects of guns, tack explosive onto things, and give guns a temporary Steampunk or Cyberpunk makeover to add extra effects.

Inventors feature some of the beefiest abilities for a gun-using class, and have the best set of dodge techniques out of anyone in the game. Their Suppression skill tree reinforces the front-line role of the class, allowing the Inventor to use their machinery to wreck mayhem with things like improbably long bursts of fire or drone swarms. On the other hand, Inventors can use their Innovation skill tree to just focus on pimping out weapons as much as possible to absurdly powerful ends.

Martial Artist

Martial Artists fill the monk archtype within the game. As opposed to classes like Brawler, Martial Artists use a more stylish and refined style of punching things into oblivion. The class also features the strongest airborne game out of all the base classes, allowing them to fly around and act like a bird of prey while plucking people's eyes out and reciting witty mantras. Many of the Martial Artist's moves can be used as either base techniques or combos, giving them a really wide range of potential options for building a combo that delivers 100 punches in a row.

If a martial artist feels like building massive airborne combos and going 'Hokuto no Ken' on people's asses, they can invest in the Honorable skill tree to add tons and tons of punches to every single attack. Otherwise, a Martial Artist can simply employ the Dishonorable skill tree to hit opponent's pressure points and add wicked debuffs and Damage-over-time effects to all of their combos. Super awesome martial artists combine both of these to make super-powerful combos that collapse the opponent's lungs while flying through the air and shouting Atatatata.

Operative

The Operative class is designed for people that like their rogues sneaky and their sneak attacks to be extra-fatal. Operatives are a pure-stealth class, revolving around vanishing entirely, and reappearing only to black-bag several unfortunate souls. Their stealth mechanic makes them difficult to hit and many of their techniques gain added bonuses when used while concealed. If an Operative is played properly, they can often wrap up a battle without being directly engaged by an enemy once. This stresses the need to play properly, however, as an exposed Operative has few options for surviving direct firefights beyond hoping that the enemy is running low on bullets.

Operatives distill much of their murder abilities into the Mark-and-Execute mechanic, which allows them to quietly line up attacks on enemy weak points before evaporating the enemy in a barrage of silenced headshots and neckshaps. If an Operative's cover is blown, they can fall back on the Hit-and-Run mechanic to utilize their insane mobility to travel to effectively anywhere in the battlefield in one turn or less while leaving explosive surprises for anyone who tries to follow them.

Sniper

Snipers do exactly what their name indicates: snipe things. Instead of being reduced to a super boring long-distance single-target-damage class, Snipers function as more of a support, using incredibly well placed shot to do things like shoot down enemy bullets or create cover by shooting loose environmental features. This means that Sniper actually do something in battle besides lie in place and shoot the first people to wander into range, not that shooting people who wander into the wrong area isn't covered by their kit.

If a Sniper is more interesting in directly supporting his team, he can spend EXP in the Overwatch skill tree, which allows him to do things like guide movement with well-placed environmental shots or correct the velocity of melee attacks by shooting the backs of allied weapons. You read that right: Overwatch Snipers can shoot swords to make them hit things. Otherwise, a Sniper can shoot enemies with the Sharpshooting skill tree, which capitalizes on the fact that most enemies can't do much to hurt your team if they're running for cover.

Items and Armor

Purgatoria's Equipment 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. Along with a whole bunch of shitty guns which will break if you hold them wrong, because its only fun if the mooks on the other end of your bullet hose have the shittiest machine pistols in the entire city.

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. Praise be to Mr. Ghost.

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.

The City

To be finished eventually.
The city of Purgatoria was divided into hierarchical districts, ascending within the city, to keep the plebs from getting to the nice parts of the city where the gods live.

• District 1: The most well maintained, cleanest, and fanciest district of the entire city. Which means as a character, you will get kicked out of the district immediately, for looking like a scruffy nerf-herder or some other excuse made up on the spot by your GM. If you do get the chance to visit, you should check out the Wicker Gardens, the premiere den of hedonism disguised as a theme park.
• District 2: Located directly below the seats of the four gods, the commute to dist. 1 is the real reason why any one lives here. Supposedly, people who live in this district don't even have to share buildings with other residents, which is a complete lie. If you get a chance to visit go to Santier Street, the Wall Street of Purgatoria, because there isn't any where else to go in the district, and to pretend to be Bane when you ruin the economy of the entire city.
• District 3: A complete conundrum to all; the home of the city's biggest and most renowned club, the most prestigious gun running shanties, and the Fortress-Monastery of the city's local chapter of Spess Mehreens, the 12th Street Knights. No one knows how all of these establishments were green lit for construction on the same square, or how a single square became an entirely separate district. If your GM doesn't let you purchase explosives of questionable legality Guns, Guns, Guns, before a wild night at Club Hivemind, and followed by a riot on the steps of The Royal Hall; make sure to drill for answers about the zoning logic that is behind this district.
• District 4: Do not let the rather high numerical number of this district fool you, district 4 exists as the slums of the entire city. This is probably where your GM will force you to spend most of your campaign, because they just watched the most recent Judge Dredd film, and think that cribbing the entire plot of the film for a campaign will work. If this is so, begin searching for all the Streetside Verses, basically Beowulf combined with the Toynbee Tiles, and wait until you have filled a page of letters before burning the page while maintaining eye contact with the GM.
• District 5: The academic/obligatory shitty weather district. Just when you thought that it was your lucky day when you got accepted into Chappleton University, and sent out your first year's tuition, you realized that this district is basically the city's England, with near constant rain and fog due to some graduate civil engineer deciding that sending the city's runoff water to a single district would be a great social experiment. If you want to meet one of the city's numerous detectives, academics, or just consult the only libraries in the city, you had better bring an umbrella and some rubber boots.
• District 6: Weebs, everywhere. Welcome to consumer central, which looks just like Akihabara, and the home of the Yakuza, Wasure. Where if you aren't interested in buying anything, you'd better get out while you can, because the consumer spirit in this district must be infectious, due to how many weeabo zombies there are un-living in this district.
• District 7: This is the district that you go to if you want to actually want to buy anything, because every week vendors have to vacate due to the selling floor of the district shifts randomly, which for some reason keeps most of the weebs out. However, the weeabo influence can not be escaped entirely, as this district is home to the Forbidden City, oops Forbidden Castle, the home of the San Guo, a gang so mysterious, that not even they know when they are leaving their fortress sanctuary.
• District 8: Remember Christmas Town from The Nightmare Before Christmas, yeah, neither did I, but this district is like that. Except if perhaps the inhabitants of Christmas Town were replaced with violent isolationist separatists who have control of the climate control for the entire city. Whomever was in charge of deciding the location for the climate control towers was fired promptly. However, if you do get a chance to visit this district without being shot by angry Eskimos, one of the few working theme parks within the city lies within the district, and people say that the log floe is really fun.
• District 9: The "jail" of the city, which was promptly taken over by the gangs, and used as a training/recruiting ground for picking the best of the best crooks who were caught by the CPF, begging the question of why the CPF keeps sending more criminals into the district. If you get sent here, make friends fast, show that you aren't a candy ass on your first day, and don't drop the soap. Fitting with the clock tower motif of the city, there is an imposing one located within the district, used for housing the best and brightest murder hobos that the PC's can create.
• District 10: Docks, just asking for criminal activity. Just don't question why some one wants to control the docks if they are only used for boarding ships that are affixed, let alone why gangs would fight over this area, but they do nightly. So, a perfect berth place for a murder hobos campaign, 'nuff said.
• District 11: This district is in a tie for the shittiest district of the entire city. Mines, filled with poison gas, with workers paid just enough to afford equipment for the next day, of course in currency which is not valued anywhere by this district, and rumors of bug that can eat through stone. If you need a better picture, combine an american railroad labor camp, with a world war one battlefield, and you should have a pretty adequate understanding of this district. Also, home to the largest weapons manufacturer of the entire city, so if you're stuck in this district it could behoove you to borrow some high grade munitions.
• District 12: No one goes here, just forget I mentioned it.
• District 13: The other contender for most grim-dark district of the city. A sun beaten desert, with chemical waste that will turn anyone unfortunate enough to come in contact with it into what amounts to a rage zombie, and outhouses. If that isn't enough fun for you, there are roaming nomadic bands, who think that these new fellas are stealing their land, and a legendary sniper who just doesn't seem to meet his End when some one gives him a lead nap. All in all, the place that you want to be for any campaigns where the GM decided that the Cohen Brothers works were a good place to start for inspiration.
• District 14: The home of inventors, and the diametric opposite to the stuffy halls of District 6. If you want to see the boring old shit that just brings up more questions about the city's history than answers, this is your one stop shop.

The Gods

No one person knows if the gods in Purgatoria are actual singular living people, organizations that hold a great deal of power, or true deities. But, that doesn't really matter, all you need to know is that there are four of them, and they most certainly aren't based off of the four temperaments.

• Big Money: Motivated entirely by the city's greed, big money is represented by one of those fat Chinese Buddhas sitting on mountains of Krag. The most popular form of worshiping Big Money is making it rain, because if you don't have enough Gold Krag to do so, you really should be worshiping him. As a player, you should be friends with Big Money, because doing so gives you the power to see money that has fallen on the ground.
• Mr. Ghost: Either the product, or the cause of the city's insatiable need for guns, and known by his symbol of a skull missing its lower jaw. Mr. Ghost's agenda is unclear, although if you look hard enough he seems to just want to be the most profitable businessman in Purgatoria, or perhaps the greatest influence on the variety of guns within the city. As a player, you should be a servant of Mr. Ghost, because doing so gives you the power of finding guns that have fallen on the ground.
• Madame Heart: Um, heard of Slannesh? Ms. Heart is pretty similar, minus the whole fop act. The proprietor of many of Purgatoria's vice establishments, most notably those which harbor prostitution. Madame Heart plays a game, spanning the entire city, with each piece representing a person of influence, and she wants to have the strings to pull on all of them. As a player, you should love Madame Heart, because doing so gives you the power of finding out the dirt on people that has fallen on the ground.
• The Singer: Think of your least favorite televised talent competition with an unhealthy dose of suicidal ideation, and that is probably the most apt explanation for what The Singer represents to the city, essentially controlling fame the way Indrick Boreale controls his Battle Brothers! She controls a variety of lounges throughout Purgatoria, as well as running a city wide contest to find the next new thing in entertainment, however this is heavily contrasted by the Singer's seeming lack of interest in anything other than being sad about things which aren't explained. As a player, you should emulate The Singer, because doing so gives you the power to perform your way through two thirds of the social skills, which have fallen on the ground.

Elves

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