Assign a 3,2,1, and 0 to the following stats.

Fierce OOOOO
Dark OOOOO
Primal OOOOO
Presence OOOOO
(New PCs: assign 3,2,1,0)

Speed (Primal +4):
Health (Fierce +4):
Willpower (Dark + Presence):
Defense 10-(Fierce + Primal):

Fierce, Dark, Primal, and Presence are your four core stats. Fierce is mostly used for fighting and physical acts of strength and dexterity. Gonna bash a dinosaur with a club, or try to hurl the wizard off a cliff? Fierce is your huckleberry.

Dark is mostly going to be for magical endeavors. This game is going to be very power-focused, in that you get to purchase powers for your character. Dark will fuel a lot of the magical ones, but I’m not sure what it’ll be used for consistently outside of that. It might not need anything else. I think I’m comfortable with falling into the “Wizards start weak, and it takes a long time to get powerful” trope.

Primal has to do with nature. Are you trying to find food, or taming a wild beast? Primal is what you’ll use. I want people to use Primal to take control of dinosaurs and send them rampaging through their foes. It’d govern stealth as well.

Presence is basically personality. Lying, convincing, and deceiving would all fall under Presence. The combat system of the game is going to be very wargame-ish. I want it to be able to transfer seamlessly from one-on-one PC combat to mobs of tribal warriors attacking a wooly mammoth. Presence will dictate both how many warriors you can command and their morale.

System

The system is a d10 dice pool system. When you attempt an action, the GM will tell you what stat to roll and the difficulty of the action. For each dot you have filled in, you roll that many d10s. Any result of 7+ is a success. For particularly hard tasks, you may need multiple successes.

If you do not have any dots in an attribute, roll two d10s but only count the lower number.

Combat

Combat will usually be a Fierce roll, unless a power says otherwise. Make a Fierce roll. For every success, the defender rolls a d10. For every die that exceeds the defender’s Defense number, subtract one success from the attacker. If the attacker has any successes left over, they translate into damage at a 1 to 1 ratio (1 success means 1 point of damage to the defender).

Mass combat will work largely the same. Creatures, represented by figures on the tabletop, are divided into mobs. Add the Fierce scores together for each figure in a mob that is in range to attack. Roll that many dice. The defender then repeats the process listed above. If the mob is attacking another mob, any excess damage carries over to multiple figures (i.e. if tribal warriors are attacking gnolls and would deal 9 damage, and the gnolls only have 3 health each, 3 gnolls would die).

Next week, we’ll tackle powers.