Luck

Luck is the only currency on your side of the table, and you don’t decide when you get it.

Every roll whose difference ends in an odd digit hands you Luck — about half of all rolls, whatever else happened on the die. Succeed brilliantly, fail catastrophically; if the last digit is odd, you gain. The other half go to the GM as Toll.

It’s the same number you roll against

Luck is a Resource, which means it sits on the 0–100 scale like everything else and you roll under it the same way. When something is down to chance — a fall, a coincidence, whether the guard happens to look left — you roll against Luck.

So it does two jobs at once, and that’s deliberate: spending Luck makes you less lucky. It isn’t a pool of tokens sitting beside your character, it’s a quality your character has, and drawing on it draws it down.

⟨How the pool works in detail is undecided — whether the score itself depletes, what a single spend costs, and whether valence can push Luck above where advancement put it. Three candidate models are recorded in the design notes, and this page can’t be finished until one is chosen.⟩

What a point buys

⟨Prices are not set. The list of things Luck can do is:⟩

• Nudge a die — shift a roll you just made
• Buy an initiative slot — override a tiebreak you lost, and go first anyway
• Contribute to a pooled Favor check — help someone else afford something

Where it starts

Luck is the one score you never roll. Every other score on your sheet is 4d10. Luck is worked out at the end of creation, from the total of the other ten.

Total your ten Attributes once all three creation packages are applied. Luck is 70, minus every point that total runs over 220. It never starts below 5.

That makes starting Luck run inverse to everything else you have. A character who rolled badly starts fortunate; a character who rolled well starts with little to fall back on. The dice are unfair and this is what makes the unfairness stop mattering — the player who did worst at the table is the one holding the currency.

See Resources for the worked example and for how the inverse closes as you play.