You are the Bookkeeper.
- Incunabuli is yours. Alter it to suit your table. Make rulings that fit your style and your players. Your game need not 100% resemble the rules or lore as written, and that is good.
- Teach it to your players. The game is best when shared by you. You are the filter between player intention and what happens in the game world. The rules exist to help you produce believable outcomes to their actions. You teach how to use them.
- Ask them questions. Describe the world, make things happen in it, and ask your players how their cutters interact with it. Tell what their senses reveal. Ask what they think, feel, and do.
You make the game. Incunabuli is the toolset.
What should you run for your first game? Select a module. Internal Growth is recommended.
Visit the Incunabuli Discord for Bookkeeping support.
Below are recommended methods of style for running the game:
record keeping
As Bookkeeper, the it falls on you to note a few critical items. Detailed session note-taking should be left to the players. Offer an incentive of +5 XP session notes taken and recounted at the start of the next session.
Track the passage of time. Use the timescales—peacetime, danger, peril—and track them accurately. The game’s resource management aspect requires this to fully work. Use this spreadsheet, if desired.
Record the cutters’ core skill levels and traits. This will prevent you forgetting who is most subtle, who has Unfortunate, etc. You will want this for determining initiative every fight.
Skills
Skills stand alone. Cutters should not add them together when making skill rolls.
There are no social skills. Only reaction rolls. Never create a “diplomacy,” “persuasion,” “intimidate,” or “insight” skill.
Rolling dice
You decide when rolls are made. Players should not roll without prompting. After all, why should they? Rolls carry a chance of failure, and failure is bad. It’s good not to roll, as a player. Additionally, they should not roll until you’ve elucidated the modifiers. You can tell them the modifier and let them decide whether to roll based on it, this is not cheating. Conversely, if rolls are volunteered when appropriate—when swinging an axe at a ragwretch—you need not be strict.
Roll dice in the open. Especially when stakes are high. This increases player trust and removed your temptation to ignore die results. If you already deemed a roll was necessary, why ignore it? Finally, it is permissible that players witness your rolls and deduce probabilities and enemy skill levels. Their cutters can weigh the odds, so why not they?
Abide by the Rule of 2. If you’re looking for a modifier, penalty, or bonus, use 2. Two actions per turn. Two units water in a canteen. +2 to to hit per edge (a ~17% weight on a d12 roll.) The exception is damage: Bonuses to damage always come in increments of +1.
running scenes
Keep up the pace. In peril, emphasize the urgency of the life-or-death situation. In danger or peacetime, if the gang are consumed in arguing over a course of action, remind them that conversation wastes in-game rounds. Insist that choices be made. Don’t allow the gang to get bogged down shopping. Though, do set the scene and allow characters to be introduced. The first time the gang enter the local cutter bar, make a scene out of it. Introduce NPCs. But if they are dipping in for a hot oatmeal and glass of Farthinesse cream for the 15th time that month, skip over it.
Describe combat effects. When your cutters stun a foe or cause it malus, tell it. They need to know when attacks have an effect. They also need to know when stuns occur in order to exploit them.
If things start to drag, move on. Suggest doing something else. Make something happen. Roll a random encounter.
cities & Towns
Create custom shops. Stock them yourself. Disallow shopping from the entire rulebook. Even if a shop’s stock is “the entire foodstuffs list plus three items,” that’s better than unmitigated access to everything. That said, make sure there are merchants with gear relevant to the scenario, even if cutters have to look for them. Armor, especially, should not be unlimited in availability.
Downtime is gameplay. Avoid glossing over the search for food, drink, comfort, and bedrest. Finding these things is gameplay, especially in unexplored areas. Cheap or reliable access to them should be earned. Once it’s easy to get, or once it’s been described in detail before, you can skip over it. Eschew random “carousing,” too. Characters met at a bar, dance hall, or coquelicot den may become allies, friends, lovers, contacts, or quest givers.
Cities are neither safe nor cheap. Prepare a random encounter table per city. In one, trouble will find cutters eventually, and the gang should not want to spend too much time there rather than on a venture. The only way to be safe in a city is to pay for it, and pricing for food, transportation, rest, and security should come at a premium.
Towns are not convenient. The smaller the settlement, the poorer the supplies. Prices may be fine, and local delicacies plentiful, but cutter gear and amenities lacking.
npc companions
Restrict henchmen. Few people are crazy, desperate, or motivated enough to be a cutter, let alone work for them. Normal people simply will not go where cutters dare. The player cutters represent most of those willing to venture in normal populations. In gold rush towns, fellow cutters work for the bank. They will demand a full share of yield, per bank rules, if they are hired.
Make specialists available, but expensive. Translators, demolitionists, cooks, camp-minders, teamsters, and the like. Strictly noncombat. Hired under a fixed rate and an agreement that they be protected. Actual violence-workers, such as assassins, work along similar lines: Fixed fee, fixed goal.