Finding luck for Fortune Dark

In Fortune Dark, players are cultists for a capricious god which has granted them a collective pool of questionable luck. The nature of that pool changed a couple of times over the course of this game’s development, but it’s where I started with the whole thing.

Fortune Dark was inspired by discussions with my friends Marsh Davies and Jim Rossignol as we’ve been playtesting their proper and successfully Kickstarted TTRPG, Gold Teeth, a Forged in the Dark game in which players are corrupted pirates plying the 18th century Caribbean. We were discussing their plans to replace FitD’s stress system with a resource shared by all the players called the Ship’s Luck, and I started thinking about how it could be represented by a pool of dice they roll at the start of the voyage, so they’d get a very physical idea of how “lucky” they’d be over an adventure.

It was pretty clear that this would lack juice. You’d naturally spend high-value dice to add to rolls; low-value to avoid harm. Too little choice and chance. So, what if the roll is less known: the dice are individually covered after rolling, so players know roughly what’s left in the pool, but not what any given die is when they choose it?

I liked how the flavour of chance would change over an adventure. At first players would be uncertain if a die is good but since they’d have a big pool, they’d feel brave. At the end of an adventure they’d be more aware of their chances, but with a small pool, every roll would matter. Increasingly desperate feels good for an RPG.

But I knew it would be a real faff at the table. How do you individually cover, I don’t know, 15 or 20 dice? What happens to the dice if an adventure is split over several sessions? How would you do any of this online, over Discord and Google Sheets?

I tried to break down what I liked about the basic idea: it was about the players having an unspecific awareness of their general luck. And about that awareness changing over the course of an adventure. So I made a leap and ditched pre-rolling the dice, and finally started to find the core system for Fortune Dark. The pool would consist of normal dice and “cursed” dice, which give a bad effect if they’re rolled. Put all the good and cursed dice in a bag, giving a physical sense of how many dice are left, and have players draw them from the bag at random.

This was simpler and more practical than previous iterations, but I wanted a greater sense of changing desperation. So, what if the luck pool is pure to start with, with cursed dice added during play so that the pool is increasingly tainted over an adventure? This is where I landed. If a roll includes a 1, players add a cursed dice to the pool. If they draw a cursed die, they roll at disadvantage. Certain uncertainty at the start of an adventure (adding a die won’t make things worse); uncertain uncertainty at the end (adding a die might worsen things).

And I liked the idea that the more dice you roll, the greater the chance of success, but also the greater chances of being cursed. That’s Fortune Dark, a game of desperate chance, collecting tribute for a horrible god.