The Evil

The Evil represents the only mechanical threat in the game. Unless it is present and acting, players can at most be trapped, separated, scuffed up, spooked, or inconvenienced by failed rolls. Mechanically, The Evil works as follows:

• The GM begins with eight Evil Points per player.
• When a player rolls for conflict resolution, the GM may spend one to four points of Evil to roll that many dice against the player. This represents The Evil choosing this moment to clash with the character, threatening to do them harm.
• Sometimes the player will be totally aware this is going to happen—for example, if the player’s attacking the masked murderer with a coathanger, they can expect the GM to drop quite a few dice to represent the murderer fighting back. Sometimes, this is a nasty surprise for the players—for example, a player rolls to charge down a door and is unpleasantly surprised when the GM also rolls, announcing that a machete plunged through the mail slot.
• If the GM rolled successes, those are bad news. Players can spend their own successes to cancel these out. (Obviously, if the player’s left with no successes, the check fails.)
• GM successes that aren’t canceled cause the unfortunate character to lose that many points of whatever stat they were rolling due to injury, stress, madness, or some other appropriate consequence.