Mud, Blood & Rats – Complete Edition

Core Rulebook by G.A. Mitchell

MUD, BLOOD & RATS for Journeyman, Expert, Master is a complete game which allows you to craft and experience grim campaigns of grubby, grimy fantasy. MUD, BLOOD & RATS offers that classic experience of career-based comedic catastrophe as you and your party negotiate, outwit, and flee an apathetic world of inimical horrors, crazy cultists and an uncaring upper class.

Who is MUD, BLOOD & RATS For?

• Game masters who want comprehensive rules for running exploration, sandboxes and adventures in a grubby, low fantasy setting.
• Players who want a high degree of character customisation in level-based play.

Key Features

• Character advancement from 1st level to 30th level built around careers: you might start out as a ratcatcher, but work hard and keep your head down and you may advance to something worthy of note – perhaps an officer in the army, perhaps a grumbly old wizard or even an over-zealous witch hunter. With 132 careers, you’ve got plenty to choose from.
• The game includes options for 5 heritages (dwarfs, elves, halflings, humans, and ogres), each of which has a different style of play.
• The familiar and easy-to-understand resolution mechanic of Journeyman, Expert, Master that encourages players to always roll high and compare the outcome against 6 proficiency levels  (Untrained, Trained, Journeyman, Expert, Master, Grandmaster) has been reworked to facilitate campaigns focused on low fantasy, grim and grubby themes.
• Each character has a simple, comprehensible pool of Fatigue Points that can be spent on dodging attacks, performing martial feats, invoking the miracles of the gods, and far more – no more having to track dozens of different types of resources like spell points, sorcery dice, superiority tokens – FP is one resource for all abilities. 
• A clear system for running encounters in the deep-woods, mountains, mires and other locales typical to a grubby fantasy game. More than that, you’ll find a whole host of encounters for the dingy settlements and ale-stained taverns of the game.
• Characters must balance their ever-growing Grime Points against their quickly diminishing Grit Points: comprehensive rules for mental and physical mutation and corruption evoke the best kind of comedic catastrophe.
• A new virtue and vice system pushes the campaign in the direction of moral ambiguity and promotes a slick roguishness to campaigns of MUD, BLOOD & RATS.
• Three sub-systems for running Mass Battles allow armies to crash together in your campaigns. The Skirmish-Engine allows you to zoom-out by a step, running fights with dozens of combatants in a way that puts our characters in the foreground. The Battle-Engine allows game masters to reduce lists of troops into units that can be commanded around on a battlefield while the War-Engine rules allow a game master to reduce the outcome of a whole battle, or even series of battles, to a single dice roll – for when you just need an outcome quickly!
• The magic system has been completely overhauled for this new, grimier genre. Using a simple d6 dice-pool mechanic, those characters who wish to delve into the sorcerous (and morally dubious arts) must balance their need for power with the mercurial and damning nature of sorcery in this world.
• Vehicular combat (including naval combat) is made possible through systems for vehicle damage and hit locations allowing you to extend your campaign even further. This allows you to run campaigns set on river barges or even take command of steam-powered clockpunk warmachines.
• Rules for loyalty facilitate the recruitment and control of hirelings within the adventuring party.
• A detailed bestiary stocked with terrifying foes supports the adjudication of any sort of encounter.

Mud, Blood & Rats – Complete Edition is available through DriveThruRPG in Print and PDF.

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