How To Play Lost Roads Of Lociam

Firebreathing Kittens

How to play Lost Roads of Lociam

Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for Lost Roads of Lociam. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play Lost Roads of Lociam yourselves.

I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections.

• Every roll is a d100

• In opposed contests the greatest difference wins

• Ten traits

• Gain 1 experience per trait if succeed with that trait during the session

• Professions

• Weapon and armor proficiencies increase your martial trait

• Items

• Exertion reduces trait by 10 to roll a guaranteed 2

• Status effects reduce traits

• Ranged combat

Lost Roads of Lociam is a d100 based tabletop roleplaying game system. Roll dice to randomly generate a number between 1 and 100. A 100 is a botch resulting in personal injury. A natural 1 is a success the rule book calls almost divine in its flawless execution. For any other number between 1 and 100, subtract the roll from the trait. You succeed if the difference is equal to or greater than the task difficulty secretly set by the Game Master before you rolled. Tell your result to your Game Master so they can consult a difficulty table and tell you if you succeed or fail.

For example, your trait is 80. You roll a 20. You tell your Game Master that your trait minus your roll equals 60. The Game Master looks at the table and sees that a 60 succeeds at a "hard" task, which needed a 50 or more. But a 60 fails at an "impossible" task, which needed a 75 or more. The Game Master tells you if you succeed or fail, depending on how difficult the task was set before you rolled.

When you are opposing someone else, for example in combat or arm wrestling or horse racing or sneaking, you both roll dice and compare to see who has the greater difference between their trait and roll. Both people roll a number between 1 and 100, and subtract it from their trait. The person with the greatest difference wins. If both people have a negative difference, neither person was skilled enough to do anything.

For example, person A and person B are in a sword fight. Person A has a martial trait of 60 and rolled 10. Person A's difference is 50. Person B has a martial trait of 70 and rolled higher than their trait, rolling an 80. Person B's difference is -10. Because 50 is larger than -10, person A wins the contest and deals a sword wound of an effect size based on the two peoples' martial trait number to person B, consult the table on page 47. If person A and person B had tied, then the one with the highest trait number would have won. If both person A and person B had gotten a negative difference, neither would have been skilled enough to injure anyone.

There is a table on page 47 showing how much damage people are left with after a combat. A combat might leave your character pained (-20 to rolls), hurt(-30 to rolls), injured(-40 to rolls), or maimed(-50 to rolls). How quickly you can recover from injuries depends on your martial trait number. For example, a character with 40 martial would recover from being pained in a half hour. A character with 90 martial would recover from being pained in five minutes. The recovery table is on page 52.

There are ten traits that every character in Lost Roads of Lociam will have a number in that ranges from 0 to 100. These traits are: Academic, Athletic, Communication, Faith, Forester, Knowledge, Magic, Martial, Perception, Street-smarts. You can use your character's traits to do things. Each trait chapter contains tables of modifiers you can apply to various activities you might attempt using that trait. These include:

• Academic: literacy, mathematics, access to reference books, access to geographical maps, ability to recognize heraldry flags, book learning of history, law, customs, and etiquette.

• Athletics: climbing, falling, guard duty, long distance travel, poison resistance, disease, weather exposure, starvation, dehydration, riding a horse, running long distance, and athletics can also be used for sneaking.

• Communication: communicating in a foreign language, charming, bluffing, and intimidating.

• Faith: praying for advice, praying for creation, praying for destruction, praying for influence, asking for divine favor, or asking for a blessing which adds between 5 and 20 to the next roll. A person can only be the recipient of a single blessing at a time.

• Forester: familiarity with a place, camouflage, stealth, trapping animals and enemies, wilderness survival, tracking and concealing tracks.

• Knowledge: common sense, regional knowledge, historical knowledge, and becoming insane.

• Magic: your odds of success when casting spells, and your ability to sense magic which is called Fathom. To see if you cast a spell successfully, subtract your roll from your magic trait and consult that school of magic's table to see what number is needed to succeed with that spell. If your attempt to use magic fails, you can try again but subtract five from your result for each time you've failed at that spell this session. If you get a natural 100 or 1, consult the botch and critical success table on pages 59 and 60.

• Martial: weapon skills, melee combat, ranged combat, and healing time after a battle. Weapons and armor you equip will modify your martial trait. The cap on positive modifications gained from gear is half your martial trait. There is also a second cap on positive modifications gained from weapon proficiencies, again maxing out at half your martial trait.

• Perception: searching, alertness, becoming afraid, and overcoming fear.

• Street-smarts: familiarity with the local area, disguise, impersonation, escaping from ropes or shackles, selling stolen items, forgery, lock picking, pick pocketing, stalking a mark, and stealth.

You gain one experience point for a trait by succeeding with that trait on a roll during a moment of important consequence or danger. Only one point can be gained per trait per adventure. At the end of the session, pool all these experience points together. You can spend experience points to level up your traits. Consult the tables in the rulebook to see how many experience points you need to spend. It depends on which trait, the trait's current level, and the level the trait would become.

For example, the athletics and perception traits cost less experience points to improve than the faith and magic traits do. They have different tables in the rule book for leveling them up.
Leveling up low number traits costs less experience than leveling up high level traits. Improving a trait from a lower level like 20 to a middling level like 50 costs fewer experience points than improving the trait from a middling number to approach a trait of 100.

Here is an example of how to read the experience table on page 21. Let's say you currently have a 0 in your forester trait. It would cost 2 experience points to increase your forester from 0 to 5, and 4 experience points to increase your forester from 0 to 10.

Here is an example of how to read the experience table on page 20. Let's say you currently have a 50 in your athletics trait. It would cost 4 experience points to increase your athletics from 50 to 55, and 8 experience points to increase your athletics from 50 to 60.

Here is an example of how to read the experience table on page 22. Let's say you currently have an 80 in your magic trait. It would cost 32 experience points to increase your magic trait from 80 to 85, and 128 experience points to increase your magic from 80 to 100.

Please note that page 87 has a table meant to be used when leveling up faith. Those who follow commandments faithfully during the session will find it easier to level up their faith trait. You can appeal for your roleplaying during the session when you did something to adhere to the tenets of your faith to be applied as a modifier to decrease or increase the experience points needed to level up your faith.

When building a character, see if your specific character would fit with a profession listed on pages 60 to 62. If any of those professions match your backstory, you can choose to spend 20 experience points if your magic trait is below 55, or 15 experience points if your magic trait is 55 to 75, or 10 experience points if your magic trait is above 75, to learn all lower magic abilities listed for your profession.

Weapon and armor proficiencies cost 10 experience points for a first level proficiency, 15 additional experience points for a second level proficiency, and 20 additional points for a maximum third level proficiency.

One level of weapon proficiency increases your weapon modifier by 1.5x. Two levels of weapon proficiency increases your weapon modifier by 2x. The maximum three levels of weapon proficiency increases your weapon modifier by 2.5x.

For example, your character with a martial trait of 40 has two points of proficiency in military weapons. They have a sword which gives a +5 bonus to their martial trait. Because of their two levels of proficiency in military weapons, this bonus is doubled from 5 to 10. Neither modification nor proficiency bonuses exceed half of their martial trait of 40 which would be 20, so you're all good. You can roll as if your martial trait was 50 instead of 40. Forty from your base martial trait, five from your sword, and five from your proficiency, for fifty total in your martial trait after weapons and proficiencies.

When you buy an item in Lost Roads of Lociam, the cheaper price on the left of the slash is to buy it used, which has a minus five modifier to its roll when you use the item. The expensive price on the right of the slash is to buy the item brand new, which gives a plus five roll modifier and lets you use the item.

Exertion reduces your trait number by 10 to count your d100 roll as being a 2. Lower rolls are better, so the two is like a guaranteed success.

Status effects such as over burdened, maimed, and terrified decrease your trait by an amount ranging from 5 to 50.

During ranged combat, only combatants with a ranged weapon can apply their weapon's bonus to their martial trait. Armor benefits are half against ranged weapons. A melee combatant winning a contest against a ranged combatant just means they didn't take ranged damage, they can't deal damage to a ranged combatant unless in melee distance.

For players in my upcoming game, you all will be at 70% of maximum power. For Lost Roads Of Lociam, I estimate that you can achieve that if you build a character using eight hundred experience points. I also estimate that owning ten items, which includes all equipment, weapons, armor, knickknacks, consumables, etc, should be appropriate for this level.

Hopefully this little rules chat helps my players build their characters and understand how to play. For everyone listening, if you’d like to hear an example adventure, the episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast right after this is a demonstration of us playing Lost Roads of Lociam in oneshot game session. We invite you to listen to it to see an example of Lost Roads of Lociam actually being played. We encourage you to find the Lost Roads of Lociam rule book yourself, and play a game with friends.