13 thoughts on “So, the doomed…”

  1. I don’t have it in front of me, but you could go a number of ways with it. Maybe you die. Maybe you’re “reborn” as a different character, having been changed by the experience. Maybe your “hero side” dies and you become a bad guy. Also, it says “confront it”. Maybe you run away or deny it or hide or somebody else saves your bacon for another day.

  2. As intended, yes, you lose the character if you let the doom track fill that many times. Your fate is pretty much inevitable; that’s the Doomed’s whole thing.

    If you want to go another direction, stay alive until you can take the below the line advance: confront your doom on your terms and change playbooks if you survive. Bearing in mind that advances are descriptive as well as prescriptive, so if that situation arises naturally in the fiction maybe you change playbooks early.

  4. If you want to give them more time create a one-time use artifact that clears a doom sign. I’ve had the conversation with our Doomed to let her know that should her doom signs fill before she can change playbooks it will be bad for everyone, but especially her.

    Her doom is an apocalypse and I have two tables going in a shared universe.

  8. The Doom has to feel serious, and perishing all but inevitable. Now, of course, there’s some play in the joints of “all but inevitable.” But picking the Doomed is a signal that someone is interested in things being high-stakes, dramatic, and portentous. So whatever you do, don’t softball the Doom. Perhaps there’s a way for the Doomed (or something of them) to stay around on the far side of the Doom, but make the road there costly and dangerous. Think about (Spoiler Warning!) the glimpse we get of Terra in the last episode of Teen Titans, or the later appearances of Alex Wilder in the Runaways comics. Few characters stay dead in superhero stories, but death/doom can still have major stakes if you invest enough in them.

  9. In our game (where one of the PCs was a time-traveling Outsider come from the future to prevent a villain from conquering the universe in her timeline), when the Doomed’s track was filled, we had a big reveal where we found out HE was the future villain all along, as the events caused him to fulfill his destiny (becoming a NPC in the process).

    The player started a new character, and the team had a new nemesis to deal with.

  13. What exactly happens is going to be dependent on the Doom. But what will always happen is that the Doomed will ‘perish’, in some way.

    This could mean death, yes, but it could also mean that something changes them in such a way that they’re no longer who they were. Such as losing their powers, having their personality altered by the trauma, and so on. But whatever happens, the old Doomed is gone, and now they’re something new and different.

    A good example might be Batgirl becoming Oracle, or on the Marvel side, Jean Grey becoming Phoenix.

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