Onyx Path has been around since 2012, taking over the publication of the New World of Darkness RPGs from White Wolf via a licensing agreement. They rechristened the New World of Darkness the Chronicles of Darkness and began producing updated anniversary versions of the original World of Darkness RPGs. All of this got a little more complicated in 2018, when White Wolf’s new owner Paradox Entertainment launched Vampire: the Masquerade 5e and has handed development of the new “fifth edition” versions of Hunter: The Reckoning and Werewolf: The Apocalypse over to Renegade Game Studios.

Onyx Path hasn’t been locked into only producing classic WoD and current CoD RPG supplements. Their RPG IP has been growing with games like Pugmire, the “They Came From . . . “ line of RPGs, and Scion 2e, which is powered by the Storypath System. This is a system that looks familiar to people accustomed to the Storyteller System that powered the classic WoD games, but added some currency spends that allowed for more flexible narrative elements as well as providing the basis for complications and conditions.

Curseborne is a modern-day horror RPG, set in a world of the supernatural known as The Accursed World. Player characters portray afflicted characters who acquire supernatural abilities that recall ghosts, vampires, demons, angels, and sorcerers. What we’re looking at today is the precursor to the full game.

Disclaimer

I picked up the Curseborne: Ashcan Edition when I saw it pop up on DriveThroughRPG and I am not working from a review copy. I have not had the opportunity to play or run Curseborne, but while it utilizes a newer iteration of the Storypath System than the one used for Scion, I do have experience playing Scion in the past.

 Curseborne: Ashcan Edition

Developed and Written by: The Curseborne Team
Editor: Reginald Pewty
Art Direction and Design: Mike Chaney
Layout: Dixie Cochran
Creative Director: Richard Thomas

What’s in an Ashcan?

This PDF is 60 pages long, with a color cover. The interior punctuates the two-column layout with what looks like the Rorschach version of a moth. This includes a Table of Contents, and four ready-made characters. These characters are presented as stat blocks in a chapter, rather than being formatted in character sheet form.

The listing on DriveThroughRPG mentions that a more finished version of the ashcan will be added to your library if you purchase it now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that didn’t include the Ready-Made Characters in character sheet format. If you read this in the future, some of this summary may not match what’s currently available, but I wanted to cover this sooner rather than later.

Concept

As mentioned above, the setting for this game is the Accursed World. It’s named such because all of the supernatural creatures you portray are the result of curses. The types that the ashcan details are:

• The Dead–a dead person who is animating their own body, but can jump to others
• The Hungry–a cursed person that needs to feed on others to empower themselves
• The Outcast–a person with something lurking inside, which could be angelic or demonic
• The Primal–a person with shapeshifting abilities and impulse control issues
• The Sorcerer–a character type that is in the final game, but only gets broadly described here

Each of these lineages can look a lot like the traditional version of, for example, a vampire or a werewolf, but the final rules will have additional options that introduce other wild forms beyond wolves, and other things that The Hungry feeds on that may be more esoteric than blood. If you’re familiar with The Dresden Files books, this is a similar concept to the White Court vampires.

There aren’t a lot of example opponent adversaries in the book, but the ones that appear all tie into the example scenario. This also brings up another aspect of the game, that you may not just be fighting invaders from other realities, other cursed individuals that are less than benevolent, or dangerous non-cursed individuals, but also malevolent conceptual locations.

Threats include Interstitial Zones, liminal spaces that may trap people within them if they cannot determine how to leave, as well as Shattered Spaces, spaces on the borders of reality that actively seek to feed off the people trapped within them and possessed of an antagonistic intelligence.

It’s not explicitly stated that characters are meant to be teenagers or young adults, but there are various passages that reference “adults” as clearly “not you,” and all of the Ready-Made Characters are high school-age people.

How Are We Doing This?

Your successes or failures are based on rolling d10s, with a success on an 8 or higher, or two successes on a 10. You roll a pool based on adding your attribute score to your skill rank. Most checks don’t require you to have multiple successes, however, you may have a number of complications that trigger even if you are successful. You can use extra success to pay off these complications. There are also tricks that you can purchase to enhance what you accomplish. One example of a trick is to do additional damage with an attack.

Some situations will grant the characters Enhancements. Enhancements are bonuses that you add to the successes on the dice, but you can only use them if you have at least one success. You may also have Advantage, which only comes up in contested situations. If your Advantage is significantly higher than your adversary, you may get what you want automatically, without rolling.

The game defines about twenty different conditions. The variety of conditions helps determine the kind of complications that might arise when the Story Guide is setting the stakes of a roll. While there are combat-related conditions like Agony (increased difficulty on tasks) or Bleeding (you take additional injuries if you don’t pay off the ongoing complication), there are also conditions like Guilt-Ridden (you feel so bad about something you need to address, everything that isn’t addressing that situation has an increased difficulty). I’ll just point out, I’m pretty sure I suffer from Confusion, Ennui, Exhausted, and Guilt-Ridden regularly.

One of the game currencies is Momentum, which can be spent to add Enhancements to your rolls, or to move your dice result one step up the ladder (turning a success with complications into a straight success, for example). You can also spend momentum to find evidence when you are in an investigation, or to add a story element to a scene. Every time you fail a check, you add a point of Momentum to your pool.

Characters also have Bonds, which can be positive or negative. These provide a pool of Enhancements that you can add to rolls whenever your action has something to do with the person with whom you have the bond. You have a limited number of bonds, and you can strengthen bonds by spending scenes with the subject of your Bond.

Throwing Down

When you get injured, you move through Injury Levels, which include the following:

• Bloodied
• Wounded
• Maimed
• Near Death

You get bonus dice in certain skills as you get beat up more, until you are Near Death, which gives you bonus dice and Enhancement, but you immediately gain the Taken Out condition after this. Armor, if you have any, adds boxes you can fill with damage before you start taking levels of injuries. I haven’t seen injury levels adding to your ability to succeed in many games outside of 7th Sea 2nd edition, and I like to see it here.

You roll initiative for at the start of an encounter, but that’s only to see who goes first. After that, the player that just acted hands off to the player or character they want to go next. This hybrid of traditional initiative rolls and hand-off initiative is used in Pugmire, and it is welcome to see it appear in these rules, as well. Weapons, like tools, grant Enhancement, and there are several modifying tags that weapons can have, usually no more than two. For example, the Brutal tag makes it cheaper to buy additional damage when you hit an opponent.

Combat uses range bands. Characters can move from Close to Short or Short to Medium as part of whatever else you’re doing. You can Rush as part of a combined action allowing you to charge further and make an attack at the end of your movement. Some areas can have effects applied to them, like Crowded, Darkness, or Overstimulating, which may add complications that you need to buy off when taking action.

Exploring the Curses

Characters have an Entanglement score, which starts at one, and sets the limits for some point spends and resources. Entanglement represents how intertwined you have become with the curse of your lineage. In addition to setting spending and pool limits, Entanglement also sets the number of Curse Dice you start with.

Curse Dice represent potential supernatural power. For each one you have, you replace a regular die with a Curse Die. In addition to the Curse Dice you get for your Entanglement rank, you can accumulate others by playing into your Torments (we’ll come to those below), whenever the crew comes together to start troubleshooting, when you enter certain locations, or when you hit certain roleplaying triggers.

If your Curse Die is one of the dice contributing to your successes, you may do what you intended to do, but too well. You may also attract the attention of various supernatural beings, from otherworldly creatures to the members of your Accursed family. If you fail a check, and none of your Curse Dice are hits . . . the same thing happens except it’s worded more ominously? I understand the narrative concept here is that you may get yourself into trouble because you’re too good, or you may look bad because your power draws attention to you, but it feels a little functionally clouded. If the Curse Dice are too hot or too cold, it may mean the Story Guide will be spending time trying to think of what kind of supernatural attention you have drawn to yourself or sourcing the table for ideas a lot, to the detriment of the current narrative.

When you roll hits on your Curse Dice, you have access to tricks that you can buy with extra successes, that are only available in that circumstance. You can only spend hits from the Curse Die successes for these tricks. Some examples include forming immediate bonds when interacting with others in a social test, hitting everyone in an area with an attack, or picking up on supernatural clues while looking for mundane ones.

You can also Bleed your Curse Dice. That means that you trigger some kind of special ability, roll your check with the Curse Die still in the pool, then remove it after the roll. Some of your special abilities are triggered by Bleeding a die, while others may depend on you having a set number of dice in your pool.

I’m going to slip in a discussion of Damnation here, because it interacts with your Curse Dice. When you no longer have any Curse Dice, you are subject to your Damnation. Most of these have a roleplaying component, as well as the more mechanical provision that the character can’t use spells or gain any new Curse Dice until they perform the action that resolves this instance of their Damnation.

The Dead take risks to make them feel more alive, The Hungry are driven to feed, The Outcast manifest outwardly visible signs of their angelic or demonic glory, and the Primal shifts into their alternate form and tries to establish their dominance in any given situation. The Dead can end this Damnation by performing a meaningful and thoughtful action, The Hungry must feed, The Outcast has to spend time establishing a bond with a normal person to ground them, and The Primal has to inflict one of a number of conditions on a victim for the primal form to be satisfied and recede. All of this reminds me of Monsterheart’s Darkest Self rules. That’s not a bad thing from my point of view.

I’m a little confused at the relationship between Entanglement and your Curse Die limit, because if your Curse Dice are limited by your Entanglement, and starting Entanglement for a game is usually 1, that means you can only have one at a time. If that’s the case, that means any time you trigger one of your special abilities that requires that you Bleed the Curse Die, you’re going to be thrown into your Damnation, some of which would subvert what you are trying to accomplish by triggering those abilities. I feel that what’s actually going on is that at Entanglement 1 you can have X number of Curse Dice, but I can’t find a reference to that in the PDF.

Torments

Different lineages have unique torments, although the final rules will have multiple Torments from which the character can select. Torments are the nagging weight of the reality of your situation, which can drive you to certain actions. Unlike Damnation, these aren’t triggered when you run out of Curse Dice, these exist as roleplaying hooks that you can use to add momentum to the Momentum pool, although in the section on Curse Dice, it also mentions gaining a Curse Die when you roleplay your torment. That’s not mentioned in the explanation of the torments, only in the Curse Die section.

The torments that we see associated with the lineages in the ashcan are as follows:

• Yearning for Life (The Dead)–you become obsessive in making sure the people you care about remember you
• Take What’s Mine (The Hungry)–you claim something that you want that isn’t currently yours, because you deserve whatever you can seize
• Show of Force (The Outcast)–you use disproportionate means to achieve your goals, showing off how much power you have, even if it causes collateral damage
• Elemental Fury (The Primal)–you pick the biggest target to attack, and can’t break off to help your friends or do anything other than take your target down

All these play into the archetype of the lineage well, and I like the ability to trigger your bad habits to build up your resources for later, as a means of rewarding roleplaying. It’s like a more focused version of invoking your own traits against yourself in Fate. The Outcast and The Primal feel a little less varied between their Damnation and their Torments, so I’m interested to see the additional Torments in the full game.

All of these Torments are listed in the section detailing the Accursed, and showing us Torments tied to those themes. The Ready-Made characters also have another Torment on the character sheet that has a title, but no definition in the ashcan. These are referred to as Personal Torments. The additional Torments we see on the characters are:

• Being Denied a Desire
• Elder Abuse
• Seeing the Innocent Harmed
• Being Left Alone or Singled Out

Two of those seem like perfectly normal roleplaying triggers, and two of those really concern me. I don’t know if these are meant to show that the character is tormented by seeing these things, or by performing these actions, but either way, that’s some very loaded content to add into your game. You may say, “different tables need to determine their own boundaries, as long as they are being safe,” and to that I would say, these are example characters meant to be played in a short scenario to show off the system. Maybe don’t hit the accelerator quite so hard.

Edges and Practices

These are straightforward, especially if you’ve seen other Onyx Path games. Edges are like edges, feats, or talents from a variety of games. They’re special abilities that thematically modify the game rules in your favor.

Practices are spells, supernatural rituals or actions that characters can take, some of which are native to a single lineage, and some of which can be broadly learned by students of the occult. Most of these require you to Bleed your Curse Die, but some can only be accessed if you are holding a set number of Curse Dice.

Qualities and Dread Powers

There aren’t a lot of adversaries in the ashcan, which is understandable. On the other hand, there are several Qualities and Dread Powers, rules modules that you can plug into an Adversary to help define what they can do in the game. You may get some extra mileage from the few stat blocks in the ashcan by mixing and matching these. Some examples include Clear Vision, which means the Adversary can see through magical and mundane disguises, or Invulnerability, which means the Adversary can only be harmed by a specific weakness.

The active side of traits, the Dread Powers, includes things like Bend Minds, which can allow the Adversary to take control of its opponents, Consume, which lets the Adversary chew on something substantial from a victim to remove injuries, or Devour, which allows large Adversaries to completely swallow their foes.

The Scenario

This one is short, and I won’t go into too many details, but it touches on some of the things explained about the setting in the rest of the ashcan. Some of the challenges are dealing with everyday frustrations, there is some investigation to find out what has happened to a missing friend who isn’t Accursed, and the characters may have to reckon with a malevolent location to find out what’s going on.

Style

I did want to touch on an aspect of the rules that may not be relevant for many people and is the most subjective part of what I’m writing in this First Impression. The chapter that introduces you to the lineages has introductory fiction where characters speak directly to you, the reader, as if you are a character in their world. This isn’t particularly strange for this style of RPG, and it’s been the custom in one way or another since the 90s.

I’m worn out by it. Having the in-world narrator talk to me, as I try to put myself in the place of someone in this world, and immediately begin to berate and belittle, while also talking about how tough they are leaves me cold. When I’m trying to acclimate to a new setting, I don’t need the default view to be someone that is hopelessly naive, probably doomed, and definitely pathetic, and I don’t need the person introducing me to that world to be cool and tough and edgy and to put me in my place. It feels like the pervasive adversarial tone says more about how to roleplay in the setting than anything in the Story Guide section. It also feels like a misplaced remnant in this book.

In a lot of the World of Darkness games, you have a reason to be associated with others. You’re part of a vampiric tradition or a pack. You can all hate each other and still be forced to work with one another. In this book, you’re people that are striking out away from their families, trying not to fall into the same negative patterns embraced by a lot of the Accursed. You’re forming bonds and working with friends. Even the example scenario is about trying to find out what happened to one of your mortal, non-Accursed friends. The adversarial in-world introductions seem at odds with the narratives introduced in the setting and reinforced in the example scenario, and feel like a misplaced remnant of World of Darkness games.

Final Thoughts

 I like that this feels a little scaled back and built to mix supernatural creatures from the start. 

As someone with a lot of affection for Scion 2e, and who appreciates the changes made to the core system compared to Scion 1e, I enjoy seeing the Storypath System being used for a wider number of games. As someone who enjoys the contemporary fantasy/horror genre, a game setting with monsters, magic, and supernatural complications is something I’m on board for.

I like how some concepts have been taken into this game and remixed to do something different. I like that this feels a little scaled back and built to mix supernatural creatures from the start. Even the means of introducing lineages that can look like the most traditional versions of the things you know but allowing them to swap in abilities that drift them from their expected archetypes is appreciated.

I like a lot of the components that make up this system. I think the bonds are a great way of mechanically reinforcing the connections your players will want to have with each other and NPCs. I am a fan of the general concept of what the Damnations and the Torments are doing, and I think they are moving in the right direction. I think I’ll like the ebb and flow of trying to decide if I want to Bleed Curse Dice or use them for stunts or other effects, once I understand what the actual economy of those dice looks like.

I’m hoping for some additional calibration to take place. Individual rules are easy to grasp, but a few connecting points are a little blurry to me. I need to know if this is a game about high schoolers trying to figure out who they are as they realize the world is worse than they thought, or if this is a game that is meant to be about people of different ages navigating supernatural politics while potentially becoming more monstrous, because some of the tone introduced in the book leans one way, and some of it leans the other. I also really hope that some of those Torments get reworked in their wording to make them less aggressive and that we get a clearer idea if this game wants you to be someone regularly doing not just bad things, but very uncomfortable things, to build up game currencies.

There is so much in this ashcan that is intriguing, I had to move it up to the top of my pile of first impressions and reviews. There is so much potential for this game to be exactly the kind of game I want. I just need to see the edges defined a little bit more before I know for sure.

Update: It slipped my mind that some of the Ready-Made characters have references which clearly place reference college. For some reason I took the coffee shop antagonists as older than the Ready-Made characters. Sorry for any confusion.