After Sundown 1e

"Whoever dies with the most will presumably have the most left when they are resurrected."

Characters in the realm of horror spend more time than you might think running around naked. That's fine and all, and meshes well with a certain kind of story. But much of the time, characters really do have physical objects and social connections at their disposal in addition to their personal abilities and the contents of their mind. In After Sundown, these resources are itemized and written down in order to formalize reserves that a character can draw upon during their adventures. Individual advantages that a character has are assigned a value based on their presumptive potential utility and categorized by what kind of story advantage they grant. Resources can be physical things, but they can also be more ephemeral things of value such as friendships or society's recognition of ownership. Characters may also have fetters that tie their hands, demands placed upon them by society either out of need or hostility. These are called Obligations.

That's what I got, what you got?

Resources are not necessarily fungible nor are they necessarily transferable. While a character's Finance Resources can usually be traded away (that being most of the point), even in those cases they may instead be stocks or property rights that may be difficult to transfer quickly and/or draw attention when title is given away at all. Friendships can almost never be sold away, and minions are not generally happy to have the subject brought up in anything but the crudest of jests.

Depending on the parameters of the campaign, a starting character in After Sundown is normally expected to have a 1-point Resource, a 2-point Resource, and a 3-point Resource (and no, you can't trade those all in for a 6-point Resource, but thanks for asking). With the MC's permission, a character can begin play with additional Resources, so long as they "pay" for these resources by taking Obligations of equal size. That is, a character might have an extra 3-point Science Resource (access to the FBI finger print database perhaps) but also be saddled with a 3-point Stalkers Obligation (presumably the Bureau keeping tabs on their movements). Players may not take two 1-point obligations to pay for a 2-point resource, nor may they take a 2-point Obligation to pay for two different 1-point Resources.

Assets are people, or beasts, or supernatural monsters who will act as backup for you in dangerous situations should need arise. Assets become more useful (and thus higher rated) if they are harder core, and also if you can tell them more about your situation without breaking the Vow of Silence.

Contacts are people who you can rely upon for information or as sources of goods. Generally speaking, any character actually knows many people, not just one. And some of them will be more "useful" and others less. For the purposes of the chronicle, the character's main contact is not necessarily their best friend, but likely the shadiest or best connected person they know.

Destiny is access to special magical methods of problem solving. Enchanted lands and objects are all over the place in the realm of horror, and many of the dark and hidden events of the past and future have been written down. Finding these places, objects, and writings of power is a serious goal for many supernatural creatures - and with good reason. Information is power, and well, power is power too. And when this power affects a supernatural world, it becomes useful and relevant to the interests of creatures that live in that world. Sometimes a source of magic will have enough gold or obvious age in it that it might be sold in a pawn shop for Euros. However, in almost all cases the market price of such items is so small in human terms compared to its utility that Witches who find out that someone sold something of Destiny will laugh at them.

Finances need not literally be bank accounts in dollars or euros, piles of gold or drugs works pretty well for that. A resource is financial in nature if its primary utility is that it can be traded in the human world for goods and services. Indeed, the characters probably have several different things that are tradable. Rather than itemize the value of their watch and each piece of jewelry, each level of Finances gives an example of something that might be the biggest ticket item they have for trade. So a character whose largest item is their car can still probably scrape together the cash to buy some kit kats or whatever without having to sell it.

Speaking (or in the case of ancient languages, sometimes merely reading) another language is very much unlike other forms of resources, in that it is something which is almost entirely internal. Yes, if the world passes you by long enough, you won't be able to understand what kids these days are saying - but it's still substantially slower to desert you than other social connections.

It is of great importance that characters can and do get the Languages resource multiple times, learning different languages each time. In the real world, language is an enormously complicated subject and people's facility with any particular language is a highly variable sliding scale running from Shakespeare to "Fire Bad!" But for purposes of the game, characters who can speak a language are able to summon all of the eloquence imparted by their Persuasion and Backgrounds in every language that they "speak". The ability to conjure up simple phrases such as "¿Donde está el baño?" or "Lehněte a svlekněte se prosím." is free.

A character does not specifically need to know a language in order to get something translated. Some time with an automated translation can get you a humorously inaccurate translation of many pieces of text (especially short text). And given some time, many Contacts or Science Resources can translate specific languages on your behalf. The Language Resource allows the character to know that language personally. And yes, characters just get full knowledge of a language with a single Resource - which is somewhat unrealistic, but people in this genre speak an awful lot of languages sometimes, and the rules need to reflect that.

Some character concepts will require more than 3 foreign languages. In this case, you could take Languages more than once. Obligations of higher than 3 should not be taken to purchase additional languages.

Science is access to special mundane methods of gaining information and solving problems. The panopticon operates blind in many areas, and the Syndicates of the world work to ensure that it stays that way. Nevertheless, the amount of information available at the hands of humans is shocking in its complexity and completeness. Someone with the right clearance could crack a lot of the world's conspiracies right open if they knew what to look for. This rightfully frightens many supernatural creatures, but having access to even small parts of the panopticon can make a character's research and investigations be much more productive.

Secrets are a lot like finances, but for the supernatural world. Secrets are things that have market value within the World Crime League or the Makhzen but which for whatever reason would be difficult to sell for acceptable value in mortal markets. Like with finances, it is entirely possible that the character has multiple items including enough kittens to make small purchases. The examples are for the most valuable item a character with that level of Secrets might own.

Some characters have obligations: things that restrict their ability to act freely. Some obligations are things that the character's ethos demands of them, and others are imposed on the character from without. But the effect is really very similar. If the character's little sister is in trouble with the Glow Skulls, forcing the character to come in conflict with the voodoo gangsters; this is very similar in overall effect to a situation in which the Glow Skulls have it in for the character. While the impetus is very different, in either case the character is drawn into conflict with the Glow Skulls "against their will". And if they are captured by the Glow Skulls, it is surmisable that they will not be interrogated by Rudenko.

MCs should give potential obligations that players are considering for their characters the fish eye. After all, while an obligation limits the character's choices, in a very real way it limits the choices of every character in the coterie. The other characters are presumably not going to leave one of their own to take on the Glow Skulls on their own. And once they are drawn into that conflict you're basically looking at the rest of the players getting saddled with obligations that they didn't agree to or get any compensatory resources for.

Everyone has things they want to do. These are goals, and they are not Obligations. However, some people have things they have to do, even at a cost to themselves. These addictive behaviors can be detrimental to successful completion of other goals. From the simple reality of giving one's self away with cigarette smoke or the glow of the ash all the way to losing one's life savings and whole days of life to the jab of a needle. An Addiction is valued by how much it impacts the character's ability to accomplish other things, rather than on specifically what (if anything) will happen to them if they fail to perform their addictive rituals. Note also that the value of the Addiction in game terms is not meaningfully tied to its long-term affects on the character's health, but merely to their ability to be goal oriented in the context of the story.

Debts are an Obligation in the strictest accounting term: they are resources that the character does not have that they nonetheless owe to someone else. Debts as an obligation are not valued based on their monetary value, and indeed it is entirely possible that at no time during the chronicle will the character actually pay off these debts or even necessarily make a good faith effort to start doing that. A Debt is valued based on how intrusive the collection attempts are to the character's life and actions.

Duty is a social requirement to do certain things in certain circumstances. It acts as a very effective constraint upon the character's actions, because it is generally speaking something they agreed to do. It isn't just that the player wanted their character to operate with a social limitation in order to afford nifty resources that could be used in other ways - the character for whatever reason has taken on a commitment that they intend to keep. A Duty is worth more the more it interferes with a character's other goals.

Enemies are people (or at least creatures) that actively wish ill upon the character and are willing to act on this by actively interfering with the character's life. Some enemies want to send thugs to the character's residence and beat the crap out of them. Others simply want to ruin the character's career, expose them to the media, steal their number one dime, or in some way do something bad to the character. An enemy doesn't deserve a higher rating just because they want to do something more awful to the character - they deserve a higher rating because through dedication or reach they impose a greater limit on the character's choices. So long as the enemy wishes to do something of sufficient harm that the character will not passively allow it to happen, the rating of the Enemy Obligation is a function entirely of how intrusive they are to the character's story.

The character has one or more people who keep track of their movements. Being stalked is creepy at the best of times, but in an abstract sense someone who collects information on the character and then doesn't do anything with it is not a real problem (well, a smaller problem, in that someone else could subsequently come into possession of the data and then do something with it). The value then of Stalkers as an obligation is determined by how many resources they will use in collecting information on the character coupled with how much the character wishes that information to not be kept. In short: how much the character finds their life actually inconvenienced by trying to keep their secrets and having their secrets escape anyway.