The Sitemap

The Frontpage

The Guide

Major Developments

The City

The World

The Esoteric

The System

The News

The Cast List

The Horizon 1 Site

HORIZON IS OVER!

The webpage remains up as a permanent archive of game material, mainly for the benefit of nostalgic players - although if you'd like to run a Horizon-inspired game for your friends, that's wonderful too. Horizon will be succeeded by Legacyin Trinity term of 2006.

If you like you can look at the (sketchy, incomplete) GM notes as well.

Quirks of Fate

Quirks of Fate involve your character's ultimate destiny.

You should buy Quirks of Fate if you want your character to:

  • enjoy sudden good fortune.
  • suffer from unexpected calamity.
  • be destroyed utterly during the course of the game.

or if it would ruin the game for you utterly for your character to die.
 Don't Kill Me Daddy (0)
This quirk is free because it doesn't represent an IC resource so much as an OOC agreement between player and GM team.

The GM promises, quite simply, not to allow your player character to die. In return, you promise:

  • To try and avoid situations of high risk to your character, so that we do not have to stretch suspension of disbelief too much to preserve them.

    This clause is obviously quite constraining, since all sorts of activities in this sort of game can involve fatal risks. If you find it constraining, you may simply renounce this quirk partway through the game. Once you have done this, however, you may not regain it.

  • Not to attempt to kill any other character, PC or NPC.

    This one is set in stone. It is absolutely unfair to have fights to the death between two characters when one of them has GM protection.

If someone turnsheets to kill your character, and we feel that they have a decent reason to do so (ie, you've meddled in their plans from the get-go and have shown no willingness to negotiate), they will fail; however, if under normal circumstances they would have succeeded, we will talk to you and the other player and see if between us we can't contrive some means by which the player's ends can be met - perhaps their character manages to put a curse on you, or forces you to swear to a dog not to meddle in their affairs, or perhaps your character just decides IC "whew! That was a close one - I'm going to back off, this isn't worth dying over." If, once such a situation has occurred, you decide to meddle again, then your character *will* die - there's only so much bending of the world we're willing to do for you.

Please note that if you are genuinely unaware of the risk when you undertake a course of action, the GMs will not allow your character to die whether or not you have this quirk. In turnsheeting we will, at the very least, allow you an opportunity to realise the risks before giving you the choice whether to commit to that course of action. No character in Horizon will be allowed to die without warning simply because their players were OOC unaware of the dangers of what they were doing. It may, however, take a while for the consequences of your actions to turn around and bite you. Also, if you come to us and say something along the lines of "But I didn't know that meeting my worst enemy in a dark alleyway would lead them killing me and burying me in quicklime, so you should let my character survive", we reserve the right to phone the mental health people and have you committed on grounds of superhuman stupidity.

No NPCs will ever have this quirk.

Roger Me Spinally (-1 to -3)
Bad things are coming your way. This quirk costs between -1 and -3 points; during the game (unless your character dies before we get around to it) we will shower three times the value of this quirk upon you in the form of crises, problems, afflictions, curses, dilemmas, and other bad things. There will be no way to avoid this, and the rogering will be in the form of our choosing (remember, the Doooooooooomed quirk is only 6 points...). We will do our best to ensure that these things have at least a tangential relation to what is happening in the gameworld.

Fortune (1 to 3)
A nicer version of Roger Me Spinally - "Cuddle Me Spinally", if you will. Happy times are coming your way; for each quirk point you invest in this, you will get three times its value back in the form of happy things. Whilst these will be analgous to positive quirks, they may not manifest in the way your character might like - after all, being favoured by the Gods is rarely welcome but is a positive quirk. In some instances it may be possible to reject your Fortune: if you do this, you won't get alternate Fortunate things happening. (For example, if you are in a situation where you could very easily become leader of a cult, but refuse, the relevant number of points of Fortune are lost.)

Yes, you can take both Roger Me Spinally and Fortune.

Doooooooooomed (-6)
Your character will definitely come to a bad end by the end of the game, their plans ruined, their schemes undone, their life laid ruin. You may or may not be aware IC of the nature of your doom at game start; that's entirely your choice.