FKR-Beuk! Part 2 - Violence & Material Concerns

Well yes, this IS the Dragon Magazine Critical Hits & Fumbles table! The thing is, Naheulbeuk used d20 versions of exactly that, though a little less fine-grained. I prefer these, and they have all of the funny stuff in the Naheulbeuk versions. So what you'd do to handle violence in Naheulbeuk is have characters roll d20 versus d20. A 1 is a fumble, a 20 is a critical hit. Otherwise, whoever scores higher inflicts a Hit. Most normal people can take about four Hits before they die. Weaker PCs like Wizards, Priests or Elves can take three. Stronger PCs like Barbarians, Warriors & Dwarves can take five. Heavy Armour grants an extra Hit, as do Shields.

As usual, I would advocate for using Classic Traveller's method for establishing surprise/ambushes/avoiding encounters (d6 per side, win by 3+ to spring an ambush or avoid the encounter), and use simultaneous resolution otherwise, with the Chainmail logical string of events - intent > ranged > melee > movement > spells/special actions.

In a nutshell: as usual, but throw d20s instead of 2d6 cause Naheulbeuk is a chaotic game.

MATERIAL CONCERNS
As a ref, you are responsible for gearing up starting PCs. Naheulbeuk gives you a mostly bland list of typical medfan gear that I'm not going to bother listing out, you can figure out the price of a beer. There are gold, silver and copper coins. Use adjectives like crude, decent, fancy, heavy, light, shoddy, crumbling, rusty, wet, antique. Give stupid backstories to stuff, like a grandfather's pocket knife. Don't give out "rations", give out shrimp & mayonnaise sandwiches or moldy rolls of cheese. Of course there's going to be cheese, it's a french tRPG. Make starting PCs feel like broke losers. Give them a reason to strip dead bandits of their boots. And be stingy with treasure - don't give them the gamey "treasure everywhere dangerous" thing. This way they're always poor and looking for monies to fix their terrible gear. Dungeons are rare and really freaking dangerous, like made for Warhammer Heroes from WFB, even though PCs are more like starting WFRP 1E characters. There's treasures there, but fighting should usually be a terrible idea that leads to a lot of quick death. Running away while being in over one's head is a staple of Naheulbeuk. It's kind of like the low-level OSR stuff before OSR. Pathetic Fantasy. But keep it tongue-in-cheek, right? It's a beer & pretzel kind of experience, not artpunk.

Oh, also there's taxes. Let's say your PCs do manage to haul off with big loot from a dungeon. Well now they gotta pay 1/3 of their loot to the CDD, Caisse des Donjons - the Dungeoneers' Guild, essentially, which is a mix of french social security services and administration, an Adventurer's Guild, and a Dungeon Masters' Guild (as in, the people who fund and build and staff dungeons). And 1/3 to the local Beggars & Thieves' Guild if they hear about it. And if they got help from some stronger and cooler NPC somewhen during a terrifying adventure where they almost died, have them come around and also extort the PCs for gold. Misery is the name of the game. Don't be adversarial in how you talk to the players, just depict a really dickish and obnoxious world where adventure seems like a great idea but really isn't practical unless you already have massive wealth, power and privilege. The zero to hero story is a lie. That'll turn newbies into cunning OSR murderhobos and entrepreneurs. Out of spite and jadedness, they will work their way up and maybe get to become the cool guys themselves, but it'll take a lot of effort.

Character Generation, Wizard Schools
Priest & Paladin Spells