10 Minutes and a Knife
Were you a professional in a shop with kit and space enough and time, you could extract every coin of value from this carcass. But instead, you’re an amateur in the wilderness with 10 minutes and a knife.
Homo Victor by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Your butchery score starts at 0 and goes up to 3. To butcher a fresh beast, roll 1d6 for each point of butchery you have and one more if you have appropriate tools. Then assign each die to one of the following options:
| Roll | Result |
|---|---|
| Any | 1 ration of meat. |
| Any | Notable external feature. Horn, claw, wing, tail, etc. |
| 1 | Education. |
| 1-3 | This many rations of meat. |
| 3-4 | Take 10 more minutes, then re-roll this die. |
| 4-5 | Hide, skin, feathers, fleece. |
| 6 | Wild card. Eyeball, stomach contents, venom sac, blood, ration, whatever. Your choice. |
| Any | Haruspicy. |
Assign no more than one die to each option. When you finish, nothing useful remains.
Butchery is not a team effort. However, a more skilled (higher butchery) pair of eyes and hands than your own may substitute for proper tools.
Education
Use this opportunity to answer a question about the beast, either as an individual (“What sex?” “How old?”) or as a species (“Where are they weak?” “What do they eat?”).
Or, if you have less than 3 butchery, you can take +1 butchery.
Haruspicy
Ask one yes-or-no question and read a true answer in the entrails. The subject of the question is determined by the die assigned to it:
| Roll | Area of Inquiry |
|---|---|
| 1 | Violence |
| 2 | Politics |
| 3 | Travel |
| 4 | Religion |
| 5 | Agriculture |
| 6 | Health |
Notes
The options could be tailored to other kinds of creature. What can you salvage from an automaton? How many rations is a behemoth?
The mechanic is loosely adapted from Thunder Road: Vendetta, which is pretty fun.
Attestation
Hey, look! These rules are MOSAIC Strict! I think. But they don’t have to be. If you want tighter integration, I’d start by tweaking the “Education” result.
UPDATE!
When I wrote these rules, I thought to myself, “If only I had mindstorm Ty’s ability to casually throw out pretty diagrams, I bet these rules could make a neat little one-pager.” After Ty mentioned that “it has [his] brain whirring,” I let him know this, and he had already started drawing a pretty diagram. The man is a beast, and with his permission, I am sharing it here.
