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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barendd Nobeard" data-source="post: 374916" data-attributes="member: 960">Little Fears came out last year (2001) at GenCon.  The subtitle is "The role-playing game of childhood terror."The basic premise is that the "monster in the closet" is real--but only to children. As children age, they lose their belief in magic and other "un-natural" phenomena.Beliefs have power in Little Fears.  A child may order X-ray specs from the back of a comic book...and they'll work, simply because the child believes they will.  But if the character ever fails a Belief Roll the item will no longer work.  Little Fears is not a d20 game, but you could make a d20 game mechanic version of this:  The child has to make a belief roll (maybe a Will Save), with a modifier of their Innocence level.  In LF, Innocence is based on age; with a child having 8 points at age 6.As children age, they lose their innocence--one point at each birthday.   Plus, any time "belief magic" fails for the child, they lose some of their innocence (basically, after 10 failures, they lose 1 point of innocence, so they lose 1/10 of a point for each belief failure).  D20 doesn't allow such a fine level, but you could run Belief as a % stat, like Sanity in Call of Cthulhu, if you want that much precision.  You only need this statistic in the "childhood" portion of your game (if you decide to use it); you can just drop it once they're adults.  As adults, Belief magic won't work--they'll have to fight the monster with "real" weapons.  With regard to fighting monsters with Belief magic in LF, the Belief is what gives the child protection.  The carving knife becomes magical.  Or the teddy bear rises to defend the child.  Or the bedtime ritual bars the monster from leaving the Closetland.  So failing a belief roll could be really bad during a big battle. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />And I really like ShadowWolf's reminder above.  Maybe Pennywise is just IT's avatar.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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