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Dread Postmortem
A couple weeks ago, I ran the horror RPG Dread for the same group I played Drink Me with. Dread is a horror and suspense game from the 2000s with a core mechanic: Jenga. You (the group) build a Jenga tower. You (the host) create a horror storygame narrative. Every time the players would roll in a different RPG, they play Jenga. Try to do something uncertain? Pull a block. Contend with a challenge? Pull a block. The tower starts looking rickety after a while, and the question becomes, is this block really worth it? --Because you really don't want the tower to fall.
It's pretty great.
Here's what the game's blurb has to say about it: Explore hostile worlds of your own creation with Dread, a game carved from the intense emotions buried in your favorite horror stories. Through individually crafted questionnaires, players are coaxed into revealing their characters' abilities, shortcomings, personalities, and fears. These characters are plunged into macabre tales devised by the host. When moments of conflict and peril arise in the story, it is the players' nerves, rather than the whims of dice, that determine the fates of their characters.
This PDF, a few friends, your own sick imagination, and one set of Jenga® blocks is all you need.
The scenario I ended up running took place on a British Royal Navy ship circa 1805 in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars--a tightly knit claustrophobic world, dependent on constant and well-coordinated teamwork and surrounded on all sides by an unsurvivable alien environment. In the end the creepy tale of HMS Centurion took us 2 (long) sessions--we photographed and rebuilt the tower the second time--and we spun a great tale of superstition, conformity, bad French, and hostile work environments.
THE SYSTEM: Dread is a 100-page PDF from DriveThruRPG--and a Jenga set, not included. About 20-30% of the PDF is dedicated to the ruleset, which is pretty simple--create a premise for a self-contained interactive horror story, write questionnaires (in lieu of a formal character sheet) designed to elicit character brainstorming and plot hooks from the players, and then make a Jenga tower. The remainder is divided between tips and observations about horror storytelling--maintaining suspense, psychological elements of horror, ideas--and three sample modules provided, which are "Beneath the Full Moon" (werewolf-based, frankly a bit hilarious), "Beneath a Metal Sky" (space horror, think Alien or Dead Space), and "Beneath the Mask" (slasher movie, meant to have one of the players turn out to be the killer a la a murder mystery dinner party--I admit I did not follow this one very well).
For a loose narrative storygame, it's pretty comprehensive, full of structural and genre guidance. I was impressed with that--I've been frustrated with other low-mechanics storygames before and the way their sourcebooks are kind of... uh, vibes-based, generating an aesthetic and not a lot of storytelling structure. I think this is pretty unhelpful for players (whether the game is GMed, like Dread, or GMless, like many others) and can lead to people feeling embarrassed and ashamed that they don't "simply" know how to tell a good story without any guidance. There's nothing simple about freeform storytelling or sustained improv, not even for seasoned players or writers, and Dread certainly knows it: not only does it go into a lot of detail on what elements it advises to keep a scary game scary, but it actually advises a certain screenwriting-style scene structure, which is something (used flexibly! and with an eye to improv!) I think a lot of newbie GMs could benefit from in other sourcebooks.
I took and left Dread's advice in turns, but I still had a good time reading all the meta on the horror genre. I particularly liked the identification of two elements of a good horror experience--isolation and deception, with deception here defined rather broadly. The book points out that a bridge that seems like it's going to be a sturdy escape but collapses when everyone's weight is on it counts as deception in this case: I think that's really true and that rug-pull moments are vital to a really visceral cinematic horror experience. Isolation, too, can be literal or social and psychological; they ended up being two fun elements to consider on a whole-story level as well as scene-by-scene to check with myself to see if I had enough horror in store for the players.
If there's anything I'd want more of, it's probably more pacing guidance: the hardest thing by far for me as a GM was figuring out how long it was going to take them to pull blocks reasonably/topple the damn tower. More experienced Jenga players might have intuition about this. I didn't. This contributed to the two-session runtime, I think, though wasn't the only reason (we were also just having a grand time playing a reasonably eerie, building-tension narrative).
In a lot of ways, GMing Blades in the Dark every week for two years was the best intuitive preparation for hosting Dread because--essentially--anything that warrants a roll in Blades is a pull in Dread, including the player's risk/reward valuation, so I've gotten more of a sense of the rhythm of play and player choice from that. (It certainly helped that 2/3 of my Dread players were also 2/3 of my Blades players.)
The most exhausting effort in the game was writing the questionnaires ahead of time, which took longer than I thought. Questionnaires always do. I have the same problem when I make joke Uquizzes. The biggest modification I made to the rules was to a big one--changing the consequence of a tower fall from a character death/removal to endangering the ship and the order of the ship. This was partly for tonal reasons but mainly because I wanted to emphasize the stakes of conformity/rebellion in this particular story--it's not something with an engine or an autopilot or a life support system, it's a ship that requires everyone to be doing their job all the time. Or the situation will not be survivable! Every single damn person with a job, or just about. What better place to deal with possessed and sinister authority figures?
THE STORY: I listened to a horror vignette story a while ago with imagery that struck me, so I ended up adapting a loose version of the premise: a ship runs afoul of a storm, takes on a strange sea creature which bewitches the captain and divides the crew, and the order of the ship breaks down as it sails to an unknown horizon. In the podcast story, that was a whaler and a mermaid- or sirenlike sea creature like an embodied hand of the malevolent ocean. In our Dread game, it was a Napoleonic battleship and a completely wild and alien selkie-ish beast with no conscious intent of bewitching the crew who carried the curse of the deep with her. So I knew that was going to change the nature of the narrative a bit from the outset--a more orderly, militant microsociety and a case where the ship's captain was not just going to be bewitched, but delusional, affected by powerful enchantment and driving his ship to destruction based on the way he mapped his own dreams and desires onto the unspeakable lure of the sea. --So Moby Dick always comes along one way or another. Don't ask me what my Blades game is about.
In reality, though, it turned out both very different from and much more complex than the story and also extremely different from other tabletop storygames I've played in, because the scope WAS so confined--it WAS a story of a claustrophobic floating world where hour to hour, watch to watch was the scale of things, where there were essentially three livable floors, where any attempt to keep a secret was at least observed by the other people with you. On a naval ship of this time, there would always be other people with you! So it turned out a really fun, limited-info, claustrophobic, superstitious atmosphere for a Body Snatchers-type possession story--your coworkers getting bewitched and possessed one by one is a big problem when there's nobody else and nowhere for any of you to go. The social isolation of standing out, as the Dread book suggested, was extremely real.
It helped that I had three fantastic players who shaped a story specifically about their three characters: Frederick Nott, an awkward and serious and stifled nineteen-year-old officer; Eugene Collet, a former French prisoner now in a strange liminal position as a paroled tutor for the boy midshipmen; and Bill Donnelly, a competent, popular, seemingly easygoing getalong type of guy working as an able seaman with a long history at sea. For a horror premise that functioned essentially as a social contagion, it was great to work with three vivid, well-fleshed characters who each had their own reasons for not fitting in--whether by position (like Collet) or socially (like Nott) or deep in his own heart (like Bill).
It was also really, really fun to work with these players and their readiness to play characters bound by a rigid social order: the fact that Nott was always at the top of the chain of command and Collet was unusually outside it, that Bill had social access to the other sailors and fluid semi-unobserved motion that the other two could never share, that Collet spoke the native language of their prisoners-of-war and Nott was in charge of the ship when the only other superior officers were asleep, but instantly relieved of it when they were awake--these were always material and real and natural, and my fantastic players learned and harmonized with the order of things very quickly. It was a natural sea-story and it was also a natural soldiering story of a certain time. It was great.
Each of them also had their own personal demons and constrictive social positions challenged by the danger they were in, an opportunity enabled quite well by the questionnaire system; this came together really well as improv and I didn't know exactly how it would turn out at the start of things, except in loose outline form, but I was delighted to watch Collet have to force another disillusioned former Jacobin to accept the reality of what had happened to their revolution since Napoleon's coup without trying to rewrite history cynically and distance himself from the horror of it, also as a supernatural game mechanic--and to take Bill's good humor and nonconfrontational personality and desire to escape conflict and consequences alongside his sense of friendship and loyalty and put those at odds, and force him to choose between them, ALSO as a supernatural game mechanic--... and, also, to force nineteen-year-old Nott to finally break the chain of command to save his own life and deck his douchey, manipulative Cool Guy of a superior officer, which was just amazing. And cathartic.
Yes, they saved the day (after a tower fall); yes, it was hard and well-earned and satisfying. I'm incredibly proud of the character-driven story we all told together and I had a great deal of fun with the scary atmosphere and eerie, escalating events: in a way I think some of the scariest parts of a horror game like this (or Lovecraftesque, or Call of Cthulhu) are the very earliest wrong notes, the things before the horror really shows its face, the 'huh :\', the swinging door in the wind, the strange pipe leak. In this case it was a barrel of valuable drinking water inexplicably full up with the ocean. Gotta love act 1 of a horror story.
I'd definitely recommend Dread to anyone who wants to play suspenseful, in-the-moment, life-and-death-stakes horror of any genre: it's not a high-level abstract storytelling game, it's more of a cross between a movie and a fleshed-out campfire yarn. And I think it really benefits from it! We had a wonderful time. Ademon walrus selkie bride ripped out a man's throat. A toxic workplace environment was... uh, not rehabilitated, but at least prevented from sinking with all hands. And what more could a man o' war ask for in 1805?
It's pretty great.
Here's what the game's blurb has to say about it: Explore hostile worlds of your own creation with Dread, a game carved from the intense emotions buried in your favorite horror stories. Through individually crafted questionnaires, players are coaxed into revealing their characters' abilities, shortcomings, personalities, and fears. These characters are plunged into macabre tales devised by the host. When moments of conflict and peril arise in the story, it is the players' nerves, rather than the whims of dice, that determine the fates of their characters.
This PDF, a few friends, your own sick imagination, and one set of Jenga® blocks is all you need.
The scenario I ended up running took place on a British Royal Navy ship circa 1805 in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars--a tightly knit claustrophobic world, dependent on constant and well-coordinated teamwork and surrounded on all sides by an unsurvivable alien environment. In the end the creepy tale of HMS Centurion took us 2 (long) sessions--we photographed and rebuilt the tower the second time--and we spun a great tale of superstition, conformity, bad French, and hostile work environments.
THE SYSTEM: Dread is a 100-page PDF from DriveThruRPG--and a Jenga set, not included. About 20-30% of the PDF is dedicated to the ruleset, which is pretty simple--create a premise for a self-contained interactive horror story, write questionnaires (in lieu of a formal character sheet) designed to elicit character brainstorming and plot hooks from the players, and then make a Jenga tower. The remainder is divided between tips and observations about horror storytelling--maintaining suspense, psychological elements of horror, ideas--and three sample modules provided, which are "Beneath the Full Moon" (werewolf-based, frankly a bit hilarious), "Beneath a Metal Sky" (space horror, think Alien or Dead Space), and "Beneath the Mask" (slasher movie, meant to have one of the players turn out to be the killer a la a murder mystery dinner party--I admit I did not follow this one very well).
For a loose narrative storygame, it's pretty comprehensive, full of structural and genre guidance. I was impressed with that--I've been frustrated with other low-mechanics storygames before and the way their sourcebooks are kind of... uh, vibes-based, generating an aesthetic and not a lot of storytelling structure. I think this is pretty unhelpful for players (whether the game is GMed, like Dread, or GMless, like many others) and can lead to people feeling embarrassed and ashamed that they don't "simply" know how to tell a good story without any guidance. There's nothing simple about freeform storytelling or sustained improv, not even for seasoned players or writers, and Dread certainly knows it: not only does it go into a lot of detail on what elements it advises to keep a scary game scary, but it actually advises a certain screenwriting-style scene structure, which is something (used flexibly! and with an eye to improv!) I think a lot of newbie GMs could benefit from in other sourcebooks.
I took and left Dread's advice in turns, but I still had a good time reading all the meta on the horror genre. I particularly liked the identification of two elements of a good horror experience--isolation and deception, with deception here defined rather broadly. The book points out that a bridge that seems like it's going to be a sturdy escape but collapses when everyone's weight is on it counts as deception in this case: I think that's really true and that rug-pull moments are vital to a really visceral cinematic horror experience. Isolation, too, can be literal or social and psychological; they ended up being two fun elements to consider on a whole-story level as well as scene-by-scene to check with myself to see if I had enough horror in store for the players.
If there's anything I'd want more of, it's probably more pacing guidance: the hardest thing by far for me as a GM was figuring out how long it was going to take them to pull blocks reasonably/topple the damn tower. More experienced Jenga players might have intuition about this. I didn't. This contributed to the two-session runtime, I think, though wasn't the only reason (we were also just having a grand time playing a reasonably eerie, building-tension narrative).
In a lot of ways, GMing Blades in the Dark every week for two years was the best intuitive preparation for hosting Dread because--essentially--anything that warrants a roll in Blades is a pull in Dread, including the player's risk/reward valuation, so I've gotten more of a sense of the rhythm of play and player choice from that. (It certainly helped that 2/3 of my Dread players were also 2/3 of my Blades players.)
The most exhausting effort in the game was writing the questionnaires ahead of time, which took longer than I thought. Questionnaires always do. I have the same problem when I make joke Uquizzes. The biggest modification I made to the rules was to a big one--changing the consequence of a tower fall from a character death/removal to endangering the ship and the order of the ship. This was partly for tonal reasons but mainly because I wanted to emphasize the stakes of conformity/rebellion in this particular story--it's not something with an engine or an autopilot or a life support system, it's a ship that requires everyone to be doing their job all the time. Or the situation will not be survivable! Every single damn person with a job, or just about. What better place to deal with possessed and sinister authority figures?
THE STORY: I listened to a horror vignette story a while ago with imagery that struck me, so I ended up adapting a loose version of the premise: a ship runs afoul of a storm, takes on a strange sea creature which bewitches the captain and divides the crew, and the order of the ship breaks down as it sails to an unknown horizon. In the podcast story, that was a whaler and a mermaid- or sirenlike sea creature like an embodied hand of the malevolent ocean. In our Dread game, it was a Napoleonic battleship and a completely wild and alien selkie-ish beast with no conscious intent of bewitching the crew who carried the curse of the deep with her. So I knew that was going to change the nature of the narrative a bit from the outset--a more orderly, militant microsociety and a case where the ship's captain was not just going to be bewitched, but delusional, affected by powerful enchantment and driving his ship to destruction based on the way he mapped his own dreams and desires onto the unspeakable lure of the sea. --So Moby Dick always comes along one way or another. Don't ask me what my Blades game is about.
In reality, though, it turned out both very different from and much more complex than the story and also extremely different from other tabletop storygames I've played in, because the scope WAS so confined--it WAS a story of a claustrophobic floating world where hour to hour, watch to watch was the scale of things, where there were essentially three livable floors, where any attempt to keep a secret was at least observed by the other people with you. On a naval ship of this time, there would always be other people with you! So it turned out a really fun, limited-info, claustrophobic, superstitious atmosphere for a Body Snatchers-type possession story--your coworkers getting bewitched and possessed one by one is a big problem when there's nobody else and nowhere for any of you to go. The social isolation of standing out, as the Dread book suggested, was extremely real.
It helped that I had three fantastic players who shaped a story specifically about their three characters: Frederick Nott, an awkward and serious and stifled nineteen-year-old officer; Eugene Collet, a former French prisoner now in a strange liminal position as a paroled tutor for the boy midshipmen; and Bill Donnelly, a competent, popular, seemingly easygoing getalong type of guy working as an able seaman with a long history at sea. For a horror premise that functioned essentially as a social contagion, it was great to work with three vivid, well-fleshed characters who each had their own reasons for not fitting in--whether by position (like Collet) or socially (like Nott) or deep in his own heart (like Bill).
It was also really, really fun to work with these players and their readiness to play characters bound by a rigid social order: the fact that Nott was always at the top of the chain of command and Collet was unusually outside it, that Bill had social access to the other sailors and fluid semi-unobserved motion that the other two could never share, that Collet spoke the native language of their prisoners-of-war and Nott was in charge of the ship when the only other superior officers were asleep, but instantly relieved of it when they were awake--these were always material and real and natural, and my fantastic players learned and harmonized with the order of things very quickly. It was a natural sea-story and it was also a natural soldiering story of a certain time. It was great.
Each of them also had their own personal demons and constrictive social positions challenged by the danger they were in, an opportunity enabled quite well by the questionnaire system; this came together really well as improv and I didn't know exactly how it would turn out at the start of things, except in loose outline form, but I was delighted to watch Collet have to force another disillusioned former Jacobin to accept the reality of what had happened to their revolution since Napoleon's coup without trying to rewrite history cynically and distance himself from the horror of it, also as a supernatural game mechanic--and to take Bill's good humor and nonconfrontational personality and desire to escape conflict and consequences alongside his sense of friendship and loyalty and put those at odds, and force him to choose between them, ALSO as a supernatural game mechanic--... and, also, to force nineteen-year-old Nott to finally break the chain of command to save his own life and deck his douchey, manipulative Cool Guy of a superior officer, which was just amazing. And cathartic.
Yes, they saved the day (after a tower fall); yes, it was hard and well-earned and satisfying. I'm incredibly proud of the character-driven story we all told together and I had a great deal of fun with the scary atmosphere and eerie, escalating events: in a way I think some of the scariest parts of a horror game like this (or Lovecraftesque, or Call of Cthulhu) are the very earliest wrong notes, the things before the horror really shows its face, the 'huh :\', the swinging door in the wind, the strange pipe leak. In this case it was a barrel of valuable drinking water inexplicably full up with the ocean. Gotta love act 1 of a horror story.
I'd definitely recommend Dread to anyone who wants to play suspenseful, in-the-moment, life-and-death-stakes horror of any genre: it's not a high-level abstract storytelling game, it's more of a cross between a movie and a fleshed-out campfire yarn. And I think it really benefits from it! We had a wonderful time. A