Chariots of Rubbish Part 2: Frames

ON BUILDING YOUR RIDE

In Chariots Of Rubbish, the Vehicles are C2ARS!*

They have five stats each.

CREW is how many dudes you can fit in the car.

CONTROL is how well you can avoid stuff.

ACCELERATION is how fast you can push it.

RAMMING  is how much it hurts if you hit someone.

STABILITY is how unlikely it is to explode.

When making a stat check, you roll 1d10 and add your stat. If there's no target number or opposed roll to beat, you have to get 6 or higher.

If you're looking to run a one shot race, have everyone roll once on Frames, Drives, Extras, and Weapons; roll on Racers and Mooks as needed. Add up your stats, write down your special abilities, and you're done!

If you're running a campaign where players keep their cars and improve them between races, invent a Racer and roll a Frame and a Drive. All that other stuff is what you get from looting, scavenging, and winning.

A final note on creating cars: I don't give the player any options. I prefer the game to be about stupid fun instead of min maxing. That said, if a player HATES what she got, I'll give her a reroll. Again, stupid fun.

*Would you believe me if I told you that the stats just HAPPENED to spell out CARS? I shit you not.

ON THE FACT THAT I INCLUDED MODEL NUMBERS WITH EVERYTHING

That's mostly so you can google this stuff. For fluff purposes, feel free to ignore them utterly.

#	Name	Special	CR	CO	AC	RA	ST
1	Surf Board		0	4	2	0	-2
2	Roman Chariot		1	3	2	0	-2
3	Ceremonial Golden Howdah	Animals fear you. They remember their oppression.	2	1	2	0	-2
4	Steam Punk Motorcycle	Losing ST makes a -2 A steam cloud. Affects you too.	0	3	2	0	-1
5	Corvus Pattern Power Armor	You're immune to SHOOT and MELEE. Possessed by demon with omnicidal urges.	0	2	2	2	2
6	Innovative 225 Dragster	How odd! The thing you need is under the seat.	0	1	2	1	-1
#	Name	Special	CR	CO	AC	RA	ST
7	Sand Rail		1	2	1	1	-1
8	Sopwith Camel Fuselage		0	3	1	1	-1
9	X-34 Land Speeder		1	1	1	2	-1
10	Enormous Haunted Skull		2	0	1	3	0
11	Doc Brown's DeLorean	Once, go into future. Skip this round. Leave flame tracks: R: AC + d10 P, A: 5, D: 2.	2	1	1	2	0
12	HEAT-1X One Man Rocket	Activate the engine and it's AC 20 this round. You'll also auto fail any CO checks.	0	0	1	1	1
#	Name	Special	CR	CO	AC	RA	ST
13	Pink Rolls Royce Phantom II	The crowd LOVES you! Use them as one free Trick.	2	1	0	2	0
14	Eurocopter HH-65 Dolphin	No rotor, so it can't fly.	2	2	0	1	0
15	Lockheed P-38 Lightning, sans wings	It has working radar. You ignore camouflage, invisibility, and darkness.	0	2	0	1	0
16	T-47 Snowspeeder		1	1	0	2	1
17	Sherpina CW 25.35 Crane	Upgrade your Grapple to R: 0 S, A: 4.	0	0	0	2	1
18	Colonial Viper Space Fighter		0	1	0	2	1
#	Name	Special	CR	CO	AC	RA	ST
19	Robo-Vishnu, controlled by cables against it's will	When you GET REKT, roll ST. Fail and it regains control of a limb. It's very angry.	1	2	-1	6	1
20	Seehund Midget Submarine	While inside, you cannot SHOOT, and no one can SHOOT you.	1	1	-1	2	1
21	Peterbilt 379x  Big Rig	Roll a new vehicle with a d20 frame. You're carrying it! Add CR together.	2	0	-1	3	2
22	Aztec Calendar Stone In Metal Frame	Sacrifice a heart to cast a spell! Cycles: jaguar, hurricane, fire, water, earthquake.	2	-1	-1	2	2
23	Sherman Tank, sans cannon	Swivel mount! Your weapon can shoot backwards too!	2	1	-1	3	2
24	Mad Cat Battlemech, sans legs	Comes with a second weapon. Roll two of 'em!	0	1	-1	2	2
#	Name	Special	CR	CO	AC	RA	ST
25	Sidewheeler Paddleboat		3	0	-2	2	1
26	The Iron Throne	Enemy boarders take a 2/6 MELEE hit.	1	-1	-2	4	3
27	HMAS Advance Patrol Boat		4	0	-2	3	2
28	The Devil's FEF-3 Train		3	-1	-2	4	2
29	Death Star Super Laser Tube	It's charged! You get ONE shot at R: Zone A: 8 D: 12. Hits an entire Sector.	2	-1	-2	3	1
30	Small Castle Tower		3	-1	-2	3	3

ON PAINT JOBS

Your ride was made in a junkyard, so the assumption is that everything looks like it's made of scratched, beaten and rusted steel. But maybe your crew had the time to pimp your ride? Sure, why the hell not. Describe your paintjob to your heart's content! Here's a few examples.

1. Hot Rod Flames
2. Tasteful Racing Stripes
3. Demonic Runes and Math Formulas
4. Canadian Flag
5. Orthodox Saints Everywhere
6. Hello Kitty

7. Starry Night
8. Mural of a Psychedelic Wizard Fight
9. Skulls On Everything
10. Dragons All Over

11. Gradually Shifts Through The Rainbow Like A Shitty Gif
12. Made Out Of Wood
13. Nega-Paint Job: You're a black whole in reality.

14. Jingle Truck
15. Dekatora Lightshow

16. All The Joints Bleed Continuously

17. Covered In Fresh Picked Flowers
18. Covered In White Fur
19. Shaped Like A Terrible Monster
20. Enormous Top Hat Welded On

Chariots of Rubbish Part 1: Introduction

Welcome to Chariots of Rubbish!

ON WHAT'S GOING ON HERE

Chariots of Fire is a fast and simple system to race oddly constructed cars. With five rolls of a d30, you can have yourself a weird and wacky vehicle. Racing is as simple as rolling a d10 and adding a stat. There's rules for dirty tricks, mooks, weapons, horrible crashes and Dracula. Packed with random tables and plays pretty fast to boot.

If any of that sounds interesting, read on!

ON SETTING

These rules presumes three things.

One: You want to race a whole mess of cars.

Two: You're gonna build them in a junkyard.

Three: Some of them will blow up.

All you need to add is a setting and a reason to race. For me, that's the TRASHLINE.

The REDLINE is the biggest and most dangerous race in the galaxy. To even qualify for it, you need to win one of the eight YELLOWLINE races. And to qualify for one of those, you need to win a BLUELINE race.

But below that, for the people who can't even scrounge up a half decent racing rig, there's what's called a TRASHLINE. You and a bunch of your idiot friends head down to the local junkyard, hiss, spit and fight over the scraps, and then build something terrible from 'em. Maybe if you win the TRASHLINE in your bucket of bolts, the prize money will be enough to buy a real racer.

But that's just me! Feel free to use whatever setting and reason you want. Here's a couple others I scrounged up.

SETTINGS

1. You live in a HOL: a human occupied landfill. No one knows where the trash is coming from, but the local tribes survive by turning it into useful shit.
2. It's Mad Max baby! The bombs fell, the whole world looks like Australia, and everyone wears a lot of leather.
3. Warhammer 40k Hivecity: it's a bit like five cities all stacked on top of each other. In between the Hives is the ash wastes, full of firestorms, toxic waste, and raiders. It's a toss up as to which is more dangerous.
4. Carcosa. Mind the dinosaurs, and don’t run out of wizard blood for your engines. Summoning Cthulhu isn't advised, but all too likely.
5. Cyberpunk metropolis. The junkyards is the only place the corps don't watch!
6. Qelong. A haunted, blasted jungle being torn apart by titanic magics. Mind the monks, ghosts, and carnivorous ants as you go tearing through the temples.

REASONS

1. Win a race!
2. You stole something! Run for your life!
3. That son of a bitch stole something! Go get him!
4. The first one to tell the supreme overlord that we've won the war is going to get knighted!
5. Something fell from the sky! First one to get there keeps it.
6. You need to protect the tanker full of oil from the raiders!
7. You need to get that tanker! Smash the guards!
8. OH GODS IT’S A MONSTER EVERYONE RUN FOR IT.

A Sorting Of Mutations

So Patrick of False Machine posted this. It's a list of mutations for player characters who stay in the underdark for too long. And for reasons inscrutable, even to me, I decided to organize it.

SENSES: The expanding of your perception. Because you can’t see. Not without light.

1. You can identify blood by taste. The species and, if you have tasted it before, the individual. Roll twice and you must identify any blood by taste.
2. Subconscious sonar. You compulsively click your tongue to discover the distance of nearby surfaces. You can scan for solid objects within 50ft. It is hard for you to stop doing this.
3. Your vision spectrum drops into a deeper shade of red. You gain infravision but blue is now simply black to you. If you had infravision, you can now see vague x-ray glows.
4. Flayer Smell. You can and must smell psionic influence. The smell is as slight as a cup of coffee but you will sense it if you get close enough.
5. Magic Sense. Tip your head back, spread arms, close eyes, roll jaw and moan to detect magic. You will feel it in your teeth if it is there.
6. You gain a sense for the silent tongue. If you see dwellers using it you can get a good feel for the general tone and can spot simple words.
7. Magnetic sense. Iron in the rock will stop you reliably sensing North, but it can aid you in navigation nonetheless. Especially if blinded. Worked metal is like a burning torch to you. It can blind you if close enough. You don’t like carrying metal weapons.
8. Water Sense. You can taste emissions from upstream in moving water. Anything pissing or bleeding within half a mile upstream.

ALERTNESS: The ceaseless vigil. Because you can’t rest. It leaves you open.

1. If you wake up in darkness, you remember exactly where you went to sleep, the precise dimensions of the enclosing space, and the exact location of every nearby object. You will not need to fumble for your sword or search to locate an exit you have seen.
2. Your pupils are permanently dilated to their maximum extent. Add 10ft to the distance you can see. You are easily blinded.
3. Hyper-sensitive skin. You no longer like to wear clothes. With naked skin you can sense the movement of air around you. 50% naked you can sense the size of cave around you. 90% the size of the local system. 100% and you can sense local movement, the rough size and speed of things moving in the cave.
4. Your time sense erodes without any realization; your wake-sleep cycle extends from 24 hours to 48 if rolled twice, then to 72. You do not notice this.
5. Your eyelids become translucent, you are hard to surprise if sleeping but easy to blind.
6. Always hungry -1 CHA unless just eaten. Can smell food on people if it is hidden.

ADAPTION: The perfection of form. Because you can’t waste. The calories are too precious.

1. Weight obsession. You must find a way to reduce your load. Throw something away or drastically alter its form to reduce its weight.
2. Any sense of claustrophobia is gone. You do not fear any enclosed space, no matter how long you are there, in fact you prefer it. Your memory of the sun is gone. You may not refer to it or describe it.
3. Each time you roll this, go down to the next lightest skin pigmentation. The last three are Caucasian, Albino, and Translucent. (Elves respond differently to deep earth radiations, their skin gets darker not lighter.)
4. Your immune system has collapsed. You have no save vs. disease. You must trade with the Myconids for a symbiotic fungal replacement.
5. Lose the hair from your body, or head. (Elves do not lose hair, instead it turns white.)
6. Osteocytes. You begin to develop frills and ridges of bone upon your skull. These extend through the skin. They may be horns, ridges, spikes or something else. The more you roll this result the more elaborate they become. (+1 STR? +1 CON? +1 AC?)
7. Your finger bones lengthen and crook permanently. This provides a tireless hold while climbing and increases your ascent speed. You have difficulty doing fine work.
8. Respiration and digestion slow when still. If doing nothing you can go 30 seconds between breaths. You barely need food if all you do is wait.
9. You compulsively sharpen your teeth.
10. Your limbs and torso grow subtly longer yet retain the same mass. At first gangly (10%), if rolled twice, freakish (20%), if thrice, trollish (30%) and you go up a size category.
11. You must make a WIS test to avoid compulsive consumption of your fallen foes if they are of animal intelligence, if rolled twice, named beings, if thrice, even your own species.
12. When you are not exerting yourself your body temperature drops to the ambient temperature of the environment. You cannot die from hypothermia. Neither can you warm others who are suffering. You may seem dead when you sleep.
13. Rapid protein conversion. You can gorge on meat to add 1 STR for HD consumed. So all of a 1hd creature, half a 2hd creature one 10th of a 10hd creature, etc. The bonus lasts till sleep.
14. Your nails thicken, and extend, they become d3 weapons. If rolled twice, d4 weapons. If thrice d6 weapons and are now claws, you will have difficulty with fine work.
15. Face blind. You can’t remember faces till you stroke them.
16. Blood change. Your blood becomes an odorless, tasteless clear gel. It is hard to track you. If your skin is already translucent then your bones are almost visible through the cloudy flesh.
17. Poison Absorber. Poison still affects you as normal, but if you survive it, your body will hang on to the dose. You can transmit it via biting.
18. You lose all desire to return to the surface. You belong here now.

PARANOIA: The intolerance of others. Because you can’t trust. There are too many dangers.

1. Paranoia. You know that a fellow PC is hiding something from you.  XP freeze until you force them to reveal it.
2. Rage. You can no longer control your resentment and suspicion. XP freeze till you physically and directly harm a team mate. Until you commit this action the DM may force it upon on the failure of any roll.
3. You hunger for silence. The rhythm of your conversations slows imperceptibly. You breathe out single words. Shouting becomes intolerable, even in times of danger. You must pass a WIS test to raise your voice.
4. Your breathing becomes silent. If you were next to someone, they would feel your breath on their face before hearing it.
5. You no-longer trust paper as it decays too fast. You start to tattoo your knowledge and maps onto your skin. Your self-developed code is shorter than writing and means your flayed skin would be useless as a map for others. A clever trick, you think. You start with your forearms and thighs then spiral out.
6. You can taste lies on someone’s breath as they speak. You must be within kissing distance.
7. Scent identity is now more real to you than visual identity. If separated from your friends, you will not fully recognize them till you smell them all over.
8. Mask-hunger. You become obsessed with protecting your image. Make a mask and wear it continually.
9. Shadows are portals from which you can be watched. You cannot sleep or relax in shadow. You need complete darkness. You can often spot illusions by watching their shadows.
10. Reflections are enemy selves. You will avoid them if you can and never discuss important business in front of them.
11. Secrets. You horde them. Must pass WIS test to willingly communicate any secret thing. For instance, the location of a secret door you just found, a letter you picked up, the last words of a foe.
12. Ghost warden. You fear the spirits of those you have killed. Build, or obtain, an amulet to imprison them. Record them all. If it breaks or is lost, they may get free. (5% chance true per Ghost)

INTIMACY: The fabrication of emotion. Because you can't forget. The feeling of not-loneliness.

1. You now lie half awake and hallucinate instead of dreaming.  Name your most common vision. If rolled twice you can create this vision in darkness, casting it as an illusion spell by having a brief conversion with the target. If thrice the vision will appear in your ‘waking’ hours and call you. If four times, you must obey.
2. You must name any flame that you light. You must speak to them as if they were people. They take up a retainer spot. They have a morale. They may keep watch for you. They may also betray you.
3. You no longer recognize own racial nature. You regard yourself as “other”. You gain no bonuses when communicating with your own race.
4. In absolute silence, just on the edge of hearing, you can hear the darkness speaking with itself. You do not like this. Learning its language is harder than any human tongue. Its discussions may be beyond you.
5. You must name any rope you own and speak to them as if they were people. They take up a retainer spot. They have a morale. You can command them to unknot, they may inform you if they are damaged or not well secured, the may also betray you.
6. You can and must use Speak with Air as daily power.
7. Bone collector. Every enemy you kill has one bone waiting for you, take it and wrap it carefully.
8. Riddle Master. You cannot refuse a riddle challenge. In appropriate circumstances you may riddle and gain bonuses to social situations.
9. Cloaker Totem. Build one and wear it continually. You believe this will protect you. It will. Once per level, in life threatening circumstances, it will act with the powers of a normal cloaker under your control
10. Tectonic dreams. Just before you fall asleep you can hear the murmuring of Earth Elementals, you can gradually learn that language.

The only one I left out is this one:

There is a darkness in your belly. When you scream, deliberately or not, a minor darkness spell is cast, from your mouth for the duration of the scream.
It's much more magical then any of the others, and I don't know where to put it.