RPGaDAY2025 – Day 19 – Destiny – Shuffling off the Mortal Coil
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Day 19 – Destiny
One of my white whale RPGs that I’ve always wanted to run is a campaign of Luke Crane’s Miseries & Misfortunes. Miseries & Misfortunes is a OSR-style game set in 1648 France. It’s one of those games that’s clearly born from a designer’s obsession with a particular historical moment, rather than a commercial intent. I don’t think there was a huge public demand for a RPG set during the Fronde.
Since this is a game steeped in history, it has lots of fiddly little mechanics for things like Wealth, Duels of Wits, Reputation, etc.
One of the most interesting mechanics, and the one I want to discuss, is the concept of Mortal Coil. It’s about a player character’s inevitable, destined death. It’s worth stealing for other games.
Mortal Coil
During character creation, the GM rolls the character’s life expectancy, based on their social class. This number is not shared with the player.
The player also determines the staring age of their character. The difference between their life expectancy and their current age is a number called their Mortal Coil. Only the GM is privy to this number. This is the number of years the character has until they’re likely to die.
At any time, the player can choose to spend one year of Mortal Coil to re-roll skill tests, though they’re unsure how many years they have left. Every time they do this, they have to roll on a Mortal Coil Table to determine what pains they suffer (illness, injury, madness, etc.)
When Mortal Coil reaches zero, the character doesn’t immediately die, they just roll on the Mortal Coil Table each year (M&M campaigns take place over many in-game years) with increasing penalty until they die.
It’s a delightful little memento mori for the players, reminding them the characters are not immortal. I could easily see bringing this mechanic into almost any dark fantasy game – Mörk Borg, Band of Blades, Symbaroum, etc.