Hey, welcome back. Quick reminder for anyone new: Porchirren: Crucible of Cards is a tactical, solo-first, card-driven tabletop RPG, no dice, no Game Master, resolved entirely with a standard pack of playing cards.
Quick recap for anyone who's actually played the Quick Start: you already know the drill, red checks your ceiling, black checks your floor. If you haven't played it yet, that's the whole rule, colour decides which number you're up against.
Here's the thing. That rule doesn't apply in a fight.
In Violence, colour does something completely different. Black sends trauma outward to whoever you're up against. Red lands it on you. No floor, no ceiling, just colour deciding, every single time, who actually takes the hit.
And here's something else Infiltration never had to deal with: Violence puts you up against actual foes, and not one but two at once. Each foe tracks their own trauma separately. Where do those foe numbers come from? The same colour that opens the scene decides it, splitting your own ceiling evenly between the two of them, 9 and 9 out of an 18 ceiling, for instance. The scene doesn't end on a simple pass or fail either, it ends once a foe's own trauma meets their own capacity, or once five checks have passed, whichever comes first.
Here's what that actually looks like. You declare Split. You draw the 3 of Hearts, no suit match, so the card stands as drawn. Check the colour: black. That's not a floor or ceiling check anymore, it's a hit landing outward. Whichever foe you declared against just took a real, permanent dent in their own trauma total, separate from their ally standing right next to them, who hasn't taken a scratch yet.
Flip that colour and the whole thing flips with it. Draw a red numeral card instead, and the trauma lands on you, not your foe, no floor or ceiling involved either way. And face cards, if you've played the Quick Start, you already know this part, still work exactly the same as everywhere else in the game, a condition instead of a number, black lands it on your foe, red lands it on you. That one's not new to Violence, it's the same rule doing the same job it always does.
Why change any of this? Here's the real reasoning. Infiltration is you against a locked door, bypassing (not fighting) a guard, a static problem. One question: did you get past it? A single check can carry that whole story. A fight isn't that. A fight is you against two foes who are both actually responding, and a yes, and/no but check can't hold a back-and-forth like that, let alone two of them at once. So the check itself had to become something else, colour doing new work, because the old work didn't fit anymore.
And I mean actually responding. These aren't just two numbers ticking down. Foes read your own cards like an actual foe would read your moves, and react to them. That's a bigger thing than fits here, I'll dive into it properly in a future issue.
One honest thing worth naming plainly: this Ashcan won’t cover what happens if your own trauma crosses into unconsciousness.
That's not a gap in the design, it's scoped to live elsewhere, in whichever Activity eventually covers it, part of the bigger picture this Ashcan was never meant to carry by itself.
One real, confirmed exception still applies here regardless. If you draw the Black Joker as an Action Check's own resolution card, the same ordinary draw that could produce any other card, it fully replaces the usual colour comparison. You get an immediate choice: zero out your accumulated trauma right now, or hold onto it to spend once, later, for that same effect. That's why it's the one card that actually stays in your hand rather than getting set aside like everything else, its own effect hasn't been used yet if you choose to hold it. So if you're holding one right when your trauma would cross into unconsciousness, you're always offered the chance to spend it first, never after the fact. Beyond that, treat crossing capacity as genuine narrative tension worth playing up rather than a resolved mechanical beat, because that's honestly what it is at this scope.
This is the first real piece of how the Ashcan ends up different from the Quick Start, by actually needing different mechanics underneath it.
A quick bit of housekeeping. The free plan I'm on with Beehiiv has its limits, so going forward you'll get a separate, short email whenever a new Devlogs episode goes live, with a direct link to it on Spotify. Not a full issue, just a heads-up so you don't miss one. While I have you, here's a link to the last episode of the Devlogs.
Next issue: why a fight needs real positioning at all, Zones, Facing, and Reach, the stuff Infiltration never once needed and Violence can't work without.
ICYMI: catch up with issue 002 right here. If you haven’t played the quick start, get it on RPGTrader.com or Itch.io PWYW.
If the cards you're dealt aren't kind, don't flip the table, have fun anyway.
See you next Monday.