Actual Fucking Monsters is explicitly NOT one of those games that uses Humanity as a gauge for anything, you can lift the system directly out of Nightlife if you do, actually, want to use it. I’ll offer an option for a different style of Humanity gauging system in a companion pamphlet for AFM.
Actual Fucking Monsters is explicitly NOT one of those games that uses Humanity as a gauge for anything, you can lift the system directly out of Nightlife if you do, actually, want to use it. I’ll offer an option for a different style of Humanity gauging system in a companion pamphlet for AFM.
If you choose to include ‘Humanity’ in AFM, against all reason and every warning and insistence I give, then fair enough.
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Your Humanity has no meaningful impact on the game, most of the time. Humans can, themselves, be monsters of the non-supernatural kind and find ways to excuse, rationalise or ignore the most horrific things that they do. Nonetheless it has a die-rating, as with Health and Satiation and if your Games Master chooses to be a bastard, they can limit your social die rolls to a maximum of that die type.
Rather than having a rating, or a Judeo-Christian morality structure, this is about how your character manages to live with themselves. You set a ‘red line’, something that you will not do, starting with the least objectionable thing you might be able to think of.
If you ever cross that line, you get a chance to rationalise your actions to the Games Master and then roll your Mind die plus Nature die against your Spirit plus current Humanity die. If you succeed, you modify your red line to be looser, but keep your Humanity at the same level. If you fail, you modify your red line to be looser, but drop your Humanity one die-type.
Monsters that lose all their Humanity become ‘Maniacs’ and their monstrous nature fully erupts. Their Mind drops to d4 and their Body is stepped up by a number of dice equal to what was lost (even going into die multiples). They become an NPC and go on a rampage.
Example: Croen is recently made and despite being a blood-drinking horror, he has set the red line that he will ‘Never kill’. The circumstances being what they are in AFM, he’s soon put in a position where if he doesn’t shoot this shotgun wielding loon, one of his friends will die. He pulls the trigger and the man dies. Croen tries to rationalise this as being ‘Self defence’ and to modify his red line to ‘I will never kill except in self defence’. He rolls his Mind d8 + Nature d6 for a total of 6. While his ‘Humanity’ rolls d12+d8 for a total of 11. He fails to fully rationalise this, but shifts his red line to the d10 level and has lost a bit of his Humanity.
You could also kitbash this system for a Sanity system, with gradual stages of madness.
Postmortem Studios 