uskglass

Dread Postmortem

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 05:33:38 GMT

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.

( Dread )

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Drink Me and Debrief

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 22:19:54 GMT

In the past month or so, I played in two different one-hour Paracelsus Games LARPs. One of them was insane and hilarious. The other was brutal and intense (in a good way) and brought us both to tears by the end (in a good way, genuinely). These two games were Drink Me and Debrief.

Drink Me was played with my partner gogollescent and two friends in one friend's home, with the aid of a darkened room, several cups, some paper inscriptions, and a bunch of food coloring. And a lot of water. A bunch of water. We will talk about the quantity of water.

Debrief was played with just my partner, over a video call between two different rooms, as instructed.

You can check out her own writeup of our experience with Debrief too (along with her side of the game ECH0 from early 2022). Both games involve picking up pre-written character profiles--especially Debrief, where the backstories are lengthy and immersive. It's a fun challenge akin to learning a role for the theater: especially for Debrief, I found myself a tad nervous that I would remember it all, and ended up with a handwritten note on the desk in front of me while I played that contained the name of my character's kids. (He had three kids. I'm not all that confident in the names and birth order of my more distant extended family, never mind the offscreen children of an imaginary person I just became. But I managed.)

Drink Me involves 4 people and is kind of a Victoriana gothic monster mash like the TV Show Penny Dreadful or the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but less shooting, more squabbling. Debrief involves 2 and is an angsty Cold War interpersonal drama--think George Smiley or The Americans, but with a ghost.

If it sounds like I'm really into comp titles, I'm not, actually, but these games are: very much by design, I should think. They're games that expect the players to step into an unfamiliar milieu, historical or pseudohistorical, and learn a backstory and a set of motivations right off--it makes plenty of sense to draw on trope at least as a starting point, give players something to work with. They definitely encourage you to go beyond that, but when I was studying up on my Debrief role, I found myself going "oh I'm Bill Haydon, basically! Great, I can do a Bill Haydon" and then getting to examine how my character differed from John le Carré's actual Bill Haydon, or Kim Philby for that matter, and think about what I wanted to extemporize on. I'm pretty ambivalent on the popularity of trope as a widely known fandom thing, but I think this kind of activity is a great use of it.

Because they both rely on secrets and ask that the players read only their own role in full and not the others before playing, I'm going to put my descriptions behind two spoiler cuts. Just in case anyone's interested in setting up a game of either of these: they're both really fun, and I'm not sure they're replayable.

( DRINK ME )

( DEBRIEF )

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ECH0 Postmortem

Sun, 30 Jan 2022 02:38:06 GMT

ECH0 is a short storytelling TTRPG by Role Over Play Dead originally created for the 2019 Emotional Mecha Jam - and now I've played it! It's melancholy, bittersweet, encourages gesture- and detail-based worldbuilding on the fly, and is ultimately all about getting invested in the particulars of a story with an already-fated ending: all things I love in a story and in a game.

We ended up playing out a sad, lonely set of vignettes about a dead soldier who comes face to face with some harsh things about death, war, and fragile existence through her brief connection to a living child—and a living child who learns something about the past, and also about the value of his own one human life. The story spanned just a few nights in-game, and about six hours of play out of it: taking Carlo and the Gorgon/Alice between a construction site, a gorge and underground stream, and a city choked with barbed wire and civil unrest.

( ECH0 Postmortem )

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BitD Unbroken Sun: Session 4 (Sublunary House)

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 07:10:33 GMT

In this session - last Saturday I believe, as of the penning of this message - our daring smuggler crew finished up their very first score and started into their very first downtime! That's right! My babies are moving up in the world, or at least diagonally! Just to think, just a few days ago they had just been a specialized crew of three with a little submersible bound together by fate and a single harrowing, unexpected event that changed their lives forever: well, now they're more bound! More harrowed! More changed! And more crew, actually.

( Session 4: Sublunary House )

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BitD Unbroken Sun: Session 3 (Earworm)

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 23:54:34 GMT

Goodness gracious me! I am behind on logging these, shockingly: we've now had sessions 3 and 4. However, I'm determined to catch up before session 5.

My players take tremendously good, thorough notes, which is honestly a joy and preserves the flow and mood of narrative for rereading both as a GM doing preparation and planning for further sessions and just when trying to convey it later in recap form. One thing I'll say here is as might have come through in the last session's recap, this is a highly scope-limited score--they have to survive a few days holed up in a single location. This has led to a very conversation-heavy narrative with the tense feeling of a siege. It's honestly great, and also makes me glad I can verbatim blockquote the notes taken on that when I need to.

( Session 3: Earworm )

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BitD Unbroken Sun: Session 2 (Grim Grotto)

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 05:49:41 GMT

Our last session ended after the first part of a score; session 2 continues this same score with the Turtle motoring uneasily home with its new cargo.

This is a good time to mention that this crew is in possession of a grotto. Their lair, conveniently Hidden, is located in a cave in an unused subterranean canal in Six Towers, with space to tie up the Turtle and a dry area to store their things in - workspace, items, and enough furnishings to sit and probably even relax for a bit, but not intended for an overnight stay. It's at the bottom of a slimy staircase that leads up to a derelict facade house--a power substation and mailbox with a fake residence constructed around it to blend in. Aphra discovered this on a jaunt of recreational urban exploration a while back.

I'm mentioning all this because this grotto is going to be pretty important to this part of their lives.

( Session 2: Grim Grotto )

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BitD Unbroken Sun: Session 1 (The Dolores Job)

Mon, 08 Jun 2020 06:22:24 GMT

Our first Blades in the Dark session was... sometime at the end of May. Two weeks ago. I write this on the eve of our second, which is set for Monday June 8 - has this lit a fire under me to finish setting up this journal and do these writeups? You bet your ass it's lit a fire under me to finish setting up this journal and do these writeups. There are two modes in which I complete anything, singular obsessive zeal about a vision only I care about (niche fanfiction, bitchy reviews) or fires under me (anything else); I'm still working on synthesizing those.

I have to cut in here to say that as much as I really want to give GM DVD commentary on the following, I cannot do that, because this is not the end of this campaign and my players are going to be reading this. It would be "spoilers" or "whatever" and I have to show "restraint."

So our first session covers the first part of the Turtle crew's first score: free play, engagement, and ended at a pivotal point within the score itself.

( Session 1: The Dolores Job )

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BitD Unbroken Sun: Session 0

Mon, 08 Jun 2020 05:25:38 GMT

Welcome to the inaugural post in this journal! I made this account to serve as kind of like a Goodreads for non-books - minus the linkage to the GR community, the affiliation with Amazon, the dubious backup capabilities, the focus on star ratings and the topic of a specific thing... ... so, as a repository for writing thoughts on things, basically. This is also an experiment in a little corner of the internet that isn't governed by the terrifying forces of Web 2.0 quite yet: which seems like a much better place to be writing about interactive fiction, indie tabletop, and independent games in general. And other things that strike my personal fancy.

Today's post is an introduction and recap for the Blades in the Dark campaign I've just started running as of a few weeks ago for three exciting friends. I've wanted to play or run Blades from the time I first heard of it, and the more I learned about the system and the world the more determined I was to make a Blades game happen one way or another. It looked to combine several of my favorite things: a Fallen London-esque, Dishonored-esque dark steampunk setting, a post-cataclysmic Dickensian 'dystopia' of sorts, a system that supported and encouraged clever and daring characters in a not-strictly-violence-based stakes-and-resolution system - and I also vastly prefer 3-4-player parties over the 5-6 that end up being common in tabletop. And right now I've got the honor of trying all that out.

(Blades is currently part of a charity Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality on itch.io, by the way. $5 minimum for literally hundreds of tabletop and video games - go check it out if you haven't.)

( Session 0 - Creation )

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