- Brian Poe(Golux)United States
Tucson
Arizona
Something that would have been purple if there was light to see it by scuttled across the floor.
Time is for Dragonflies and Angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.
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I had a real positive experience running this game at a Con this weekend. I have to admit that it must have been some kind of insanity that led me to try to run this game for a group at a con but I did. A couple things need to be noted.
I had previously thought this game was a bit unwieldy for large groups. The personal nature of the game and the players relationship to the reason they were awake seems hard to encapsulate with 4-5 players at the same time. I'm not sure why I decided to fly in the face of the previous decision... but I did.
SETUP:
The intense nature of the character in this game is what makes the horror and personal journey important. Requireing players to come up with something deep and heavy like that in a short time period (I only had a four hour slot) seemed unfair. So I pre-gennerated a background scenario for each charater. I created 5 short stories of traumatic events that made each character unable to sleep. The players were given rules explination and the backgrounds. Players were encouraged to keep their stories to themselves at this time. The players chose their own exhaustion and madness talents and off we went.
STORY:
I wanted each player to be involved with his story and with a storyline that each player could interact with. The overarching storyline is a set of murders happening in the Mad City which all coincided with murders in the real world. The players enter after the first one and are asked to investigate by someone to whom they owe a favor. (The nature of this obligation is to be setup as a question each player should answer in an open session before gameplay begins.) The players will subsequently investigate other murders as they happen. I paced the murders as I needed to manage the time in the con. Each player was told via note that one of the murders is someone significant from their back story. Either someone who caused them pain or who they caused pain. The bodies are prostrated upon a metal tree at the scenes of the murders in the Mad City. Doors to the real world are littered nearby and the players have the option of looking at the real world to see the scene. The players will either discover some significant event involving the link with their backstories in the real world. The mad city is the only place to find the next murder wich will lead to another PC's link to their back story being placed on the metal tree. (This is completely ripped off from Hyperion, a classic Sci-Fi novel.)
The players are hounded and also helped by paper boys who will point them toward new murder scenes and also threaten to place them as the murderers in the next issue of the paper.
The game ends with a final conflict with the creature causing these murders. The players all see the thing as having their own face (notes passed to each player.) After the beast falls the game fades to black and allow the players to hypothesize on the metaphor of the game.
The players all enjoyed the game a lot and I had a fantastic time running it.
So... things I've learned.
This game is playable with more than 1 or 2 players. The story has to be very carefully crafted to deal with all players backstory so they can revisit that particular trauma often and still feel as though it's being adressed.
If anyone is still interested I can post the backstories up here. I'm going to run another don't rest your head in a week or two.
Wish me luck!
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