Hi all! Today I have an interview with Chris Falco on Eldritch Care Unit, which is currently on DriveThruRPG and itchio from Falconian Productions and supported by the San Janero Co-Op! It sounds really cool! Check out Chris’s responses below.
—
Tell me a little about Eldritch Care Unit. What excites you about it?
The basic idea of Eldritch Care Unit is that you’re playing a doctor, nurse, or something more occult like a ritualist or alchemist, who’s working in the “Eldritch Care Unit” of a hospital. The ECU is a hidden wing in most modern hospitals, where mostly mundane folks like the player characters do their best to treat supernatural illnesses and ailments, whether the disease itself is magical or it’s just infecting a magical creature; maybe Fae react strangely to a certain strain of the flu, for instance. But, these hidden sections still rely on typical hospital funding and bureaucracy, so you need to try and maneuver the already insufficient and bureaucratic American medical system to try and account for creatures that most of the world won’t acknowledge even exist.
Eldritch Care Unit is my first “full” independently published game, which is itself exciting, and it’s an idea I came up with kind of at a weird whim while listening to other people talking about something entirely different (if I recall, they were talking about clerics healing people on a battlefield after a fight). What excites me most is the unique concept combined with the unique but fairly simple system I came up with for it, called the Adversarial System, which relies more on rolling to withstand external pressures than to see if you’re skilled enough.
This sounds fascinating! How do players mechanically interact with the game? What is gameplay like?
It’s a fairly simple system. Essentially, characters have “training” in various fields, which has a simple numerical rating, and said numerical rating is almost always higher than the difficulty of the task that’s being done; for example, your highest rating starts at 25 and the highest difficulty usually used is 15. You then roll dice not to see how well you use that rating, but to see how well you withstand any external pressures; instead of flat penalties, they provide dice to an “Adversarial Dice Pool,” which is rolled to see how much your rating gets penalized. For example, if you’re pitting your rating of 25 against a difficulty of 15, but are on a tight schedule and your patient’s noncooperative, that might provide 2-3 (d6) dice to roll, so you need to roll a 10 or less on them to succeed. There’s ways to negate or lower those penalties too, though, and other little permutations and optional rules, but for the most part it comes down to that core mechanic.
As for the core gameplay, it revolves around difficult patients. While your day to day might involve some checks to continue long term care or check up on normal patients, the interesting part that the game’s meant to focus on are those that have some difficulty; either the ailment is unique and difficult to deal with, the patient’s insurance is bad and you need to work around that, there’s a time crunch before the disease really sets in, the hospital lacks the right ingredients for a curative, or anything similar. It’s left largely to player creativity at that point, to come up with ways to get around the problems, and usually involves a series of different things they’ll need to get done, whether working together or in parallel, depending on their time vs difficulty needs.
To note, there’s no combat in the game. The system doesn’t even work particularly well for it, as we don’t track health as anything more than maybe lingering dice penalties (3d6 on manual tasks while your hand’s injured, etc). You COULD make it work, but I don’t see many doctors and ritualists being thrown into fights in a hospital.
What are the bounds of the fiction here? How weird does it get?
The fiction is pretty open. There’s some basic guidance on how magic works, and how the supernatural exists within the world, but the basic idea is that if there’s some folk tale, movie, or other story about a given type of creature, it probably exists in some forms. Most of the time, they integrate well into the modern world; think of how it happens in Men in Black, but with supernatural creatures instead of aliens. They’re everywhere, and most people don’t realize it. It’s less your typical “they stalk you in the shadows” and more “they’re trying to figure out how to do their thing in a modern world.”
The ECU itself isn’t the only “human” organization that knows about magic and the paranormal, of course; the book mentions that there’s government agencies, supernatural lawyers (never sign a demonic pact without one), and similar groups out there, but the ECU is the main focus of the game. Though, the nature of the Adversarial System would make it pretty easy to play some of those other sorts of groups too, with a bit of tweaking, if someone wanted.
How do you handle being respectful to potential human, real life people who might identify with the supernatural entities – allowing for safety tools, special guidance, or otherwise?
The book makes it clear to avoid getting into too much detail unless you’re sure your players will appreciate it, and despite the general motif of “Life isn’t fair,” the general goal is that when the Player Characters are involved, things will usually get fixed up. It inherently gives a bit of hope for even a broken medical system, and focuses on the good people in that system. It’s something I’ve found cathartic, as someone who’s been given the runaround by insurance companies and hospitals
With it being a small book, I didn’t include a lot of full writeups for tools beyond that vague advice to make it a cooperative, positive experience, but I’m personally a strong supporter of systems like X cards and other safety tools, and definitely recommend them.
It’s awesome to have a game with no combat! What are a few exciting or compelling examples of experiences players have had with ECU?
In the one shot I’m running right now, the characters were going about their day to day when a Dragon more or less barged its way into the hospital, demanding treatment. Dragons are rare beings even in the open ended sort of world involved in this game, so there’s a bit of excitement and stress involved in making such a large, none-too-cooperative creature comfortable so they can diagnose its diseased wing, especially since experts on dragon anatomy aren’t really available.
And pity whomever ultimately has to ask them to pay the bill…
—
Thanks so much to Chris for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Eldritch Care Unit on DriveThruRPG or itchio today!