Entries tagged with postmortem

Entry tags:

dread,
postmortem

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.

( Dread )

Entry tags:

postmortem

Drink Me and Debrief

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 )

Entry tags:

ech0,
postmortem

ECH0 Postmortem

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 )