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Silent Legions

by Kevin Crawford

Nikola Avramovic

Luigi Castellani

Earl Geier

Illustrations By

David L. Johnson

Joyce Maureira

Miguel Santos

ISBN 978-1-936673-59-9

Table of Contents

Creating a Character ......................................... 3

Heroes for a Desperate Hour

The Rules of the Game ....................................... 21

Soldiers In a Lost Cause

Sorcery .................................................................... 33

Arcane Rituals and Eldritch Arts

Creating Your Mythos ..................................... 53

Summoning Up the Damnable Powers

Building Your World ....................................... 89

Creating Dark Circumstances

Cults ........................................................................ 135

Sicknesses That Never Sleep

The Bestiary ......................................................... 147

Creatures of Bleak Dreams

Game Master Resources ................................. 166

Red Rags and Shards of Bone

Index

....................................................................... 182

A Nightmare Beneath the Skin

The world is broken in hidden ways. The truth is concealed for the

sake of mortal minds. The unendurable reality that boils behind the

stars is veiled by the pleasant blindness that human sanity requires. Yet

every comforting shroud must fall in time, and for these investigators,

that time is now.

Human survival is lit by the flame of combusting minds. Someone must

go forth into the dark, to pry up the secrets and expunge the hidden

things, to sacrifice their own lives and sanity that humanity’s safety

might endure another hour. To deal with these horrors for long is to

embrace a fate worse than any common death, but there are always

a few, always so very few, that are willing to pay this price. Some act

out of love, others out of courage, some for the sake of unquenchable

curiosity, and a few cannot even name their own cause. But they act

and they suffer and they die, and by their blood is purchased a little

more time for those who remain.

Silent Legions

is a game of modern-day Lovecraftian horror, one

designed to allow courageous investigators and luckless would-be

victims to strike back against the horrors of an encroaching darkness.

Where the ineffable abominations of foreign realities bleed into our

world, these heroes are ready to do what they must to drive them back.

When terrible truths and forbidden sorcery boil up from hidden places,

they break the cults and stifle the black revelations that madmen would

force on an unwilling world. Most of these heroes die in the process;

some suffer worse fates. A very few live to be examples to those who

will come after.

Silent Legions

is different from many existing Lovecraftian games in

that it is designed as a sandbox toolkit for the Game Master. Entirely

new gods, aliens, entities, and other components of a new Mythos

can be created, plunging the perhaps-too-familiar denizens of the

conventional Cthulhu Mythos into a fresh and satisfying mystery.

Many of the tools within these pages are designed to be used with any

role-playing game of enigmatic horror, and you should feel free to pick

and pluck from them to serve your own purposes.

Creating a Character

you’ll learn how to make a suitable investigator

for the dark days to come. These brave men and women may have

come from ordinary circumstances and commonplace lives, but they

are soon to be plunged into the darkness of a new world. Choose their

skills and particular aptitudes and arm your hero as best you can against

the nightmares they are soon to encounter.

The Rules of the Game

relate the basic mechanics for playing

Silent

Legions.

While the framework of the system is drawn from certain

classic role-playing games of the seventies and early eighties, you’ll

find these systems compatible with

Stars Without Number, Other

Dust,

and

Spears of the Dawn,

all Sine Nomine games that provide

additional options for your evening’s gaming.

Sorcery

speaks of magic both black and gray, enchantments that can

be used without hopelessly damning the sorcerers soul and those for

wizards with fewer compunctions. Daring investigators might unearth

the secret grimoires and hidden teachers of these arts and enlist them

for their own ends. Game Masters might find equal use in this chapter

in building fresh sorcerous evils for the heroes to confront. Those who

favor other gaming systems can use the tools in this chapter to build

horrific spells for their evil high priests and malevolent liches.

Creating Your Mythos

is half of the heart of

Silent Legions,

the tools

you need to build an entirely new Lovecraftian Mythos for your own

campaign. Conjure fresh powers, new aliens, and unheard-of cults to

baffle and blight the heroes, presenting them with horrors that have

not been cataloged in countless other works.

Building Your World

is the second half of the game’s true focus. The

location tags and adventure templates here are designed to allow for

fast sandbox content creation, setting up a framework before play that

will allow a Game Master to quickly and easily creative investigative

adventures when the heroes decide to leave the beaten track of a

preexisting plot. By fabricating a campaign region with the guidelines

given here, a reader can smoothly slot a rough adventure outline into

the specifics of a particular place and create a night’s adventure with

no more than a few strokes of polish and detail.

Cults

are part of any Lovecraftian world, but all too often they lie

dormant and unmoving until the PCs impinge on their plans. The

guidelines here are adapted from the Faction rules of Stars

Without

Number

and help the GM to create background activity among the

nefarious powers of their setting. Malevolent cults do not play nicely

with each other, and the vigorous interplay of violence, sorcery,

betrayal, and grasping acquisition between them can leave many cracks

in their concealment. The outcomes of cult squabbling can make for

easy hooks for PC adventures, and the framework can also be used to

support PC-led organizations dedicated to better ends.

The Bestiary

is written to support GMs who want something fresh for

their nameless abominations. While a few classic monstrous examples

are provided, much of the text is devoted toward building new horrific

creatures and providing them with appropriately terrifying traits. Given

the classic gaming system used in

Silent Legions,

vast numbers of

old-school fantasy monsters can be smoothly imported into your own

game, with a few little tweaks to provide extra squamousity in play.

Finally, the Game Master Resources are provided to give a few

generally-useful tools, such as guidelines for converting material

from other systems, a Lovecraftian name generator, and the creative

organizations, frameworks, and tweaks offered by the ingenuity of ten

heroic Kickstart backers who nobly supported this game’s creation.

Silent Legions

is built to be a solid, smooth, fast-running game of

supernatural horror. You’ll find everything you need to unleash the

monstrous evils of the outer dark on an unwitting world within these

pages. For extra prospects of atrocity, you can import material from

other Sine Nomine games, with classes, foes, and adventure tags

compatible with everything given in this book.

The world is in darkness, but you will fashion what lies behind the veil.

The heroes fashioned here may not live long and their deeds may be

forgotten beneath a shroud of secrets, but the truth of their heroism

will remain. Turn the page, then, and see what awaits you…

Silent Legions.pdf

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