Agents of Syn are not easily frightened. There’s a whole training course in Composure Retention, during which all sorts of supernatural things are shown to, or inflicted upon, the Agents. The thing is, feral Crystals can do some unexpected, frightening things, doubly so if they’re in the hands of people. Pfffft, people, they have no idea how to properly use Crystals. They should give US all of the Crystals, to take care of them– oh, but that’s the Subtle Indoctrination course.

Essentially, things that would frighten regular people, like seeing a giant beast in the middle of a dark forest, don’t necessarily frighten Syn Agents. Overtly super-natural or gruesome things, though, might.

Fear checks (page 85 in Savage Worlds Deluxe) are a pretty straight-forward way to handle such situations. You simply roll your Spirit attribute, and if you make it, all’s well. If you failed, though, something happens, depending on whether the source of the fear was blaghhh or “No, no, NOOO!!”. Here we have an obvious case of blaghhh, but our brave agents all rolled well, so they keep their bearings.

There’s a whole cool table you roll on if you fail a “No, no, NOOO!!” type of Fear check, and I bet we’ll get to it in a story arc or two. For now, our heroes remain heroic; perhaps too heroic, see next week’s page.

On this page…

Muna rolls Persuasion and gets a success. Persuasion is not actual mind control (her Crystal is, though) but she had a simple, reasonable request, that amounts to “hey, wait a moment before we do something stupid, and talk a bit”. Which is enough to at least get some explanation from the Holy Father, before the inevitable nnnngggGGGAAA Everyone rolls their Spirit: d8 for Muna, d6 for Raf and a d4 for Mac, and they all make it (even Mac, but only thanks to his Wild Die). Nadav rolls for Margaret. He already decided she’s low to average, her attributes being either d4 or d6. Her Spirit’s a d4, and she rolls and gets a 3 (she doesn’t have a Wild Die), which means she fails – but Nadav uses a GM Benny to make her re-roll! He only has a few of those, but he really wants her to stay, to make things more complicated. On her second roll she gets a 4, which explodes, but it doesn’t really matter since a simple success is enough here. Actually, Nadav considered having this gruesome transformation scene impose a -2 modifier on the Fear check (getting the idea from the stats for werewolves, page 142), but because it’s the first Fear check in the campaign, he decided to forgo it.

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