I’ve been tossing around ideas for a setting based on the 80s Marvel comic Strikeforce: Morituri . For those unfamiliar, here’s the “elevator pitch” of the premise: In the near future, to combat an alien invasion, a process (called the Morituri Process) has been invented to grant humans with super powers. The catch is that the process results in the subject’s remaining life span being no more than a year; at some random point, the energies will consume them (the Morituri Effect).

Most of the build can make use of various super power ideas tossed around, and flavor for the setting. What I’m stuck on is the Morituri Effect.

I’d like it to be randomized, because that’s the nature of it. (Or course, given the premise, there’d be player buy-in to the concept.) But, Despair meaning automatic Morituri Effect seems too harsh, while adding it as a Crit seems a little on the rare side (given its inevitability).

Any ideas on how to apply a mechanic to reflect such an effect?

2 hours ago, Nytwyng said:

Any ideas on how to  apply a mechanic to reflect such an effect?

start with +200XP and for every 50XP earned reduce WT or ST by one,
this gives each PC a max lifetime of 2x15x50 XP = 1500XP

Once per session a player must (not may) flip a story point from GM to PC, but when they do they roll a challenge die. Anything other than despair is ignored, despair kills them.

Because it is only once per session, you'll average 12 sessions before you die, but there are no guarantees. You might die first time out, you might live 20 sessions. If sessions are a couple days of intense action followed by a few weeks of downtime that works out to about a one year life span.

Maybe a houseruled saving throw. After either particularly intense power use (not before or during -the PCs should get their moment of glory) or taking X damage...roll y dice...if they roll one despair(or more if that's too low a threshold)....kablooom.

Variable and tied to the power in someway.

something more advanced:

• you have a "Mutation Threshold" (MT) equal to your WT or ST whichever is lower.
• Threads/Despairs rolled up from power use may be spent against your MT instead (Despair => 5).
• Advantages/Triumphs rolled up from power use may be spend to remove points spent against your MT (Triumph => 5).
• if your MT would overflow you suffer a trauma related to the power used instead and your MT is reduced permanently by one:
  • Physical Power: suffer a Critical Condition equal to the amount of Threads/Despairs.
    (see GCRB -- TABLE I.6–10, or Dark Heresy Genesys v1.5: Perils of the Warp -- pg 87-91 -- roll d10 per point)
  • Mental Power: suffer a Mental Condition equal to the amount of Threads/Despairs.
    (see GCRB -- TABLE III.4–2, or Dark Heresy Genesys v1.5: Chapter VII - Fear and Trauma)
  • (or use the Warhammer 3rd Ed Mutation Table)
• if your MT reaches 0 you are dead.

I don't have any suggestions as I barely know how to play Genesys, but Strikeforce Morituri has been stuck in my brain for decades and I was stunned to see it mentioned here. I wish you the best of luck with your endeavor.

15 hours ago, PandionKnight said:

I don't have any suggestions as I barely know how to play Genesys, but Strikeforce Morituri has been stuck in my brain for decades and I was stunned to see it mentioned here. I wish you the best of luck with your endeavor.

I've got a (now) decades-old Strikeforce Morituri promo sticker inside the lid of my RPG clipboard. At a Star Wars session a few weeks ago, seeing it just struck me as a fun idea for a Genesys setting. Now that the holidays are over, working on the setting is added to my gaming projects.

I see alot of people are suggestion mechanics to handle this, and i'm not saying those aren't good suggestions. But .... this really feels like a narrative thing more than a mechanical thing. One thing you need to realize off the bat, is that when you have a character with a limited life span the attachment of a player (on average, there are exceptions of course) will diminish. And if there are readily available replacement characters the attachment will further diminish with each progressive character. If you do not have readily available replacement characters the attachment to the game will diminish.

Anyone who has ever played through the original tomb of horrors will understand this effect. You come with 5+ characters, the first one might be your favorite with a name and somebackstory. the 5th is Fighter #3, a collection of stats to accomplish a goal, or it might even be fighter #1 with the "#1" crossed out/erased and replaced with #3.

Now that isn't always a problem, and if done well it could be a boon. But random, uncontrollable "Your character is dead" rarely makes players want to invest narrative in a character.

I would suggest that instead you try to find an individual "Arc" for each character (or a for all of the characters as whole), working with the player(s) to accomplish that arc. Then at the end of it, their time is up. It allows and encourages them to invest in the character narrative because they have some control over it. It also doesn't have the random "your character is dead" effect. Kind of like a long-shot, where it isn't a full long form campaign, but is a longer than a single session for a one shot.

I was going to say something similar to what Wisconsen outlined. A random "bang, you're dead" mechanic seems like a bad idea in an RPG.

I was actually curious how this plays out in the comic. Are the deaths just random and pointless (as a game mechanic might make them)? Or do they happen at dramatically elevated and important moments? I'm guessing the latter, but since the comic is no longer around, perhaps it was the former? And does the Morituri effect just hit someone, or is there some warning that it's coming on?

Depending on how the effect manifests, there may be a solution to marry the narrative and mechanical solutions together: Obligation. In case you're unfamiliar with Edge of the Empire, this is a mechanic whereby a character has some part of their background that haunts them, like a bounty on their head, a criminal record, an addiction, etc. There's a numerical rating attached to it (usually between 5 and 10), and the GM keeps a list of these on a chart. At the start of a session, the GM rolls a d100 and looks at the chart to see if anyone's Obligation triggers (by the roll being within the range of that character's Obligation on the full chart). A triggered Obligation reduces the character's strain threshold by 2 for the session, and the GM is encouraged to bring the Obligation into play during the session (like a bounty hunter shows up, or the character is denied services for being an ex-con, etc.). I'm guessing that Favors in the Android setting will work similarly to this.

So, you could give your PCs a "Morituri rating" that defaults to, say, 5. Give them the chance to bump it up to 10 if they want +5 starting XP, 15 for +10 XP. Make a chart listing all their values, and roll a d100 before your prep for a session to see if anyone's Morituri Effect has triggered. A triggered Morituri effect may mean the character is guaranteed to die in that session, but if so, you can make it a dramatically satisfying death scene, since you as GM will know their number is up. Alternatively, maybe it means that PC feels the effect coming on and has a chance to try to stop it. (Not sure if that's possible in the fiction you're emulating.) The point is that you can preserve some of the randomness you're trying to emulate while also making these deaths narratively satisfying to the players.

Good luck!

1 hour ago, SavageBob said:

I was actually curious how this plays out in the comic. Are the deaths just random and pointless (as a game mechanic might make them)? Or do they happen at dramatically elevated and important moments? I'm guessing the latter, but since the comic is no longer around, perhaps it was the former? And does the Morituri effect just hit someone, or is there some warning that it's coming on?

The answer to all of those questions is..."yes."

That is, of course, the series' writer chose moments that would make the most impact, but they were presented as both random at "unexpected" (to the reader) moments and at moments of narrative drama to allow "going out with a bang" (literally, in most cases). As I prep the setting work, I'm going to reread the series, but I seem to recall that some were literal violent explosions while some were akin to "regular" deaths. Some characters could feel the effect creeping up on them (I seem to recall one character constantly thinking that anything out of the ordinary was an indication that his death was imminent), some could tell mere moments before (there was even the possibility at one point that, due to one of the Morituri's powers, he'd accidentally "absorbed" another Morituri's death, triggering his own), and some just unexpectedly died. One even willed his Morituri Effect to trigger, taking out a group of enemies.

One character became pregnant during her time as a Morituri, with the unborn baby's metabolism supplementing her own (insert metabolism-related technobabble about the Morituri process here) and allowing her to survive to 13 months, her death coming only after the scientist who developed the Morituri process helped remove the baby and place it in an incubator. The parents were concerned that the mother would experience the Morituri effect while still pregnant, killing both mother and child.

Obviously, a writer controlling all aspects of the story has the luxury of the best of all worlds, choosing what makes for the best story that issue. I've been a bit remiss in that I apparently haven't made it clear that I don't mean to have a mechanic that will, out of the blue, mid-session, knock off a character (or characters) just because a game mechanic says they suddenly die. (That's why I don't want it to be something like Despair equating to automatic death...oversimplification in example, sure.)

One of the ideas I've knocked around has, indeed, been modifying the Obligation system, and what you describe is something like I had in mind. I also had a suggestion in another forum that's similar: With the maximum lifespan being set at a year, beginning each character with a set, identical "Morituri score," with each Despair a player rolls, subtracting from that score. Of all the suggestions I've seen so far, those two seem to best walk the line between randomizing the timing of each character's end while still allowing player input into that death (even if that input is saying, "I trust you as the GM to kill my character in a way that works best for the overall story").

Thanks!

That's not a bad idea. Another possibility is that the Despairs don't automatically raise the Morituri Rating, but rather increase the likelihood that it will go up. This could work like a combo of Obligation and Morality from Edge of the Empire and Force & Destiny . Each Despair grants a point of "Morituri Decay" (similar to Conflict). At the end of the session, each player rolls a d10 and hopes they roll higher than their Morituri Decay score. If they roll under, their Morituri Rating goes up by the amount they missed the roll by. The net effect would be to postpone their death a bit longer than a simple 1 Despair = 1 Morituri Rating raise system would, which would allow for a longer campaign if that's what you're going for. One other possible wrinkle might be to make Morituri Decay a permanent value that doesn't reset between sessions. The longer a PC is in play, the more likely they are to have a high amount of Morituri Decay, and thus the higher chance they'll have to bump up their Morituri Rating each session. (In other words, it'd be like Conflict that never resets but just keeps accruing.)

On 1/5/2019 at 2:14 AM, Nytwyng said:

I've got a (now) decades-old Strikeforce Morituri promo sticker inside the lid of my RPG clipboard. At a Star Wars session a few weeks ago, seeing it just struck me as a fun idea for a Genesys setting. Now that the holidays are over, working on the setting is added to my gaming projects.

I've made a start on doing a similar thing with Visionaries - Knights of the Magical Light , to help me learn the Genesys system.

I'm always stunned by the fact that Strikeforce: Morituri hasn't been picked up as a movie or cable series or something yet.

Mechanically, as soon as I saw the title of the thread, my thought was to manage it similar to Obligation from EotE. Depending on how brutal you want to be, if you roll, your number is definitely going to be up sometime that session, or perhaps it's a progressive thing where your chances succumbing increase more of each time your number comes up.

One of the things that I seem to remember from the series was that no one was safe, so even if one person died, another might die a page later. Also, if I recall correctly, the effect was no progressive, in that someone 1 day in had basically the same chances of someone 10 months in... except for that 12 month marker.

With all that in mind, how about something like this:

1) Every player is required to take on an "obligation" of Morituri Effect ranging from 5 to, say, 20 points. Each player decides, and you get than many bonus XP to start, so the more powerful you are, the riskier things are.

2) At the start of each session role some dice. This could be done one or two ways:

First, like Obligation in EotE, you make a single table and roll once. If a player's number comes up, they're on the chopping block. This means there will be one player on the chopping block, or perhaps none.

Second option would be to roll once for everyone. If you roll beneath their number, they are on the chopping block. This is more random. Everyone could be at risk one session, then nobody the next session.

3) Whenever a certain trigger comes up - possibly when the character rolls a Despair, they must roll a test of some kind. For conversation's sake, let's say Resilience (although I don't love that because that's not how the effect worked in the comic... but I need to write something down). If they fail the test, they succumb to the effect.

If they succeed, they are still on the chopping block. Each time they roll a Despair during that session, they roll again... with the difficulty increasing +1.

4) When the session is over, the counter "resets" (ie, cumulative increases in difficulty do not carry over from session to session. If you want some lasting effect, someone who was on the chopping block but survived may get +1 to Morituri Effect. If you're kind, you might even give then a bonus XP to go with it, since their changes of dying next session just went up.

5) Now, here's the fun part. At the start of the session, don't let anyone know who's number is up. EVERYBODY rolls when they get a Despair. Eventually, a player may realize they're safe if they fail a roll and don't die, but it should make things pretty tense until then.

Or something like that.

Good luck, have fun, and, we who are about to die salute you!

2 hours ago, gwek said:

I'm always stunned by the fact that Strikeforce: Morituri hasn't been picked up as a movie or cable series or something yet.

It’s been optioned a couple of times, but it turns out that ownership of the rights (series creator Peter B. Gillis or Marvel) is murky. The last time it was going to be made (as a TV mini-series, if I recall), Gillis was on board, then Marvel released trade paperbacks in response, reasserting their claim. The production company backed out, not wanting to get stuck in the middle.

Thanks for the suggestions. Ideas are percolating.