ORACLE

5/26/2010

NEMESIS in a Nutshell

I was looking back through some documents from a few years ago, and stumbled upon something I thought would be interesting and handy to share with everyone. First, just a bit of background...

Back in 2006-2007 I was working on and ran a very short lived Sword & Sanity game powered by a customized version of the NEMESIS: Roleplaying in Worlds of Horror system, which is a game that utilizes the One-Role Engine (ORE). ORE is a rules-lite roleplaying system that allows the player to roll a dice pool of 10 sided dice, and this one roll tells you everything you need to know to resolve a situation, both in and out of combat. It is a very clever, and well designed resolution system. The NEMESIS rules are free to download and play, and I highly recommend the game, but be warned it is a bare-boned system that leaves a lot of breathing room, and some may feel needs further fleshing out. Personally, I find this to be a positive thing about the game, because I enjoy tweaking and "messing" with game systems.

During this time I began working on a conversion for the game to help me realize my Sword & Sanity concept, and I called the project NEMESIS by Torchlight, which basically took the modern NEMESIS rules and changed them up for dark fantasy roleplay. I cannot for the life of me put my finger on the rules I had written up for that game, but if I receive enough feedback from this post I would consider taking another look at the project and doing a rewrite.

Anyway, the document I ran across today is titled "NEMESIS in a Nutshell", and basically is all the vital rules from the NEMESIS system compiled together so they can be printed on one sheet of paper (front and back). I have had "Nutshell" available for download over at Project NEMESIS for a few years now, but I have cleaned up a few things and corrected some minor mistakes I was able to find, and I am now offering it here to be downloaded and enjoyed:
NEMESIS in a Nutshell (v1.1)

4 comments:

Sean Robson said...

Looks interesting. I've never heard of NEMESIS before, but I'm always keen to look at another horror rule system.

I'm not sure I have enough ten-sided dice to play the game, though. At least the West End Games Star Wars rpg used d6 pools - everybody has tons of those.

Shane Mangus said...

Sean,

One nice thing is that you never roll more than 10 dice in NEMESIS. Statistically, if you did you would always succeed with your roll. I also played d6 Star Wars quite a bit back in the day. Thinking about it now, I have only enjoyed three dice pool systems - the One-Roll Engine, d6 and the Ubiquity System (Hollow Earth).

Talk to you soon,

Shane

Lee B said...

I'd like to enjoy the download offer, but I'd rather not have Scribd walking away from the deal with my personal info.

Shane Mangus said...

I have this up on MediaFire as well as Scribd. Here is the link:

http://www.mediafire.com/?3egetmmniyz