[Dread] Jenga beat up my dice! My results from the indie horror RPG.

[Random221B]

I'd play in this game in a heartbeat. You win "most ambitious game of the year" award. It's a brilliant and (possibly overly?) complex story that's going to be tricky to pull off.

I've seen a few vaguely similar adventures, including one CoC game where all the PCs turned out to be fragments of a person's shattered mind. I'll suggest starting at the end and working backwards. Ideally, what's the big climax? Create 3-4 scenes working towards that, then layer in the Grinning Man's development. You're shooting for disquieting and unbalancing, with aspects that make the world feel more and more surreal in a way that is only explainable when you realize the world isn't real. That way you'll have all the clues ready for foreshadowing when you get to the first scene.

Boy, character questionnaires are going to be a huge part of this game.

Thanks so much. I hope it goes at least reasonably well.

I admit, I am still very torn on the whole "they're already dead" thing. On the one hand, I really think it could add an unexpected twist and a really unique atmosphere and angle to things. On the other hand, I worry that it will complicate things too much, and/or feel like a cheat to the players in the end. Luckily I still have a little time to hammer things out. Once I get the questionnaires back, that may help me figure out how I ultimately want to go.

You're right, I think the questionnaires are really key. I agonized over them quite a bit. Initially, I had one question the same in all the questionnaires, "How did you almost die during the war, and how does it still haunt you today?" The point was to determine how they *actually* died, and then have them re-experience it within the game. But I decide I didn't like that. It felt clunky, and I wanted to change things up between the characters. So instead, I tried to ask leading and/or suggestive questions about each character's experiences during the war, like "How did you manage to escape execution when the Abwehr was disbanded and most of the German Resistance groups were rounded up in late '44 and early '45?" or, "Tell me about that night in Berlin, when it all went to hell." The hope being that the players will provide answers from which I can extrapolate their deaths. The upside is that if I decide *not* to go with the whole "They're already dead" thing, then I haven't wasted a question slot on something fairly generic whose only purpose was to provide information I'm not even going to use. Fingers crossed that it works out.

I also focused a lot of the questions on regrets, losses, and things they are holding onto...the kind of things they'll have to let go of, if they want to move on and rest at the end, after they destroy the Big Bad. Again...we'll see how things play out.

Your comment about the CoC scenario has inspired a new scenario idea in me, based on that premise;

"Reconstructing Harry"

Harry Blackwood is missing...or maybe he's been murdered (or possibly even dismembered...nice and gruesome.) There's evidence to suggest that his death or disappearance is because of something he knows; something terrible that he learned somehow. A group of people who all have some sort of unusual connection to Harry, and a vested interested in seeing him found or avenged, come together in a desperate effort to piece together exactly what Harry knew that got him killed (or taken.)

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that he learned of some terrible threat to humanity/the world/etc. We're talking Lovecraftian-Apocalytpic here, real "Things Man Was Not Meant to Know" territory. And something about the nature of what he learned means that Harry is the only one who can stop it. Now the race to either get him back or--if he's dead--learn *everything* he knew becomes even more desperate. And of course as the climax approaches, it slowly dawns on the characters that what Harry learned shattered his mind...and they are the fragments, each with a little piece of the knowledge Harry needs to save the world. They have to figure out how to reintigrate themselves in order to rebuild Harry's mind, so he can do what he needs to do.

I'm thinking that in the end the players will have to decide which of them will ultimately "become" the integrated Harry. The others will cease to exist at that point, and the last remaining player--the "true" Harry--has to make the final pulls to save the world.

I envision things like weird telephone calls or radio broadcasts representing conversations and comments bleeding in from the "real" world outside of Harry's mind, to add elements of weirdness.

What do folks think?

Of course, if I do put this one together, and I plan to run it for some of the same players as the game I'm running in a couple of weeks, I'll have to run 3 or 4 other scenarios first, before I follow the "you're all actually dead" scenario with the "you're all actually fragments of somebody's mind" one. LOL

Thanks for thoughts and comments.

Best,

~~~~Random

 

[Seonaid]

Both of your ideas are neat! I'm not sure I'm thrilled with the "remaining player makes the pulls to save the world" idea though. It seems like it would become too meta if the players know ahead of time that will happen ("Okay, who has the best hands?") and too tricky/bad-GM if they don't ("Man, if you had told us, we'd get Mike to do it instead of Sally because he's better at this kind of thing."). Maybe letting them each make pulls in succession? I dunno.

Thanks for your ideas! They were fun to read.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

Unveiled a new Dread game at NC Gameday last weekend. As usual, it was a ton of fun. Great players make this game such a pleasure to run.

The Soulriders

If you want to get to the Other Side, someone has to die. If you want to come back, you have to live.

The first time it happened it scared the crap out of you. You'd fallen asleep beside the hospital bed where your mother lay gasping to breath with cancer-riddled lungs. Your dreams were chaotic, until out of the formless shadows your mother appeared. She smiled and reached towards you. A chill ran through you at her embrace, and in an instant you saw your mother's entire life. Childhood, marriage, the affair you never knew about. The petty crimes that we all commit, the pain and elation of childbirth, everything. You knew her as well as you knew yourself. Better, maybe, absent the self-delusions that get us through the day.

Your mother turned and moved off into the shadows, beckoning you to follow. Fragmentary images of the city swirled around you, finally settling down to the familiar view of your parents' bedroom. Your mother went to the Japanese jewelry box your grandfather brought back from the war. She opened it and removed an ivory cameo, an heirloom that had been in your family for generations. She smiled as she looped the gold chain around your neck, the pain that had dimmed her eyes gone now.

Something stabbed you in the chest. You awoke, sobbing, the sound almost drowning out the drone of your mother's heart monitor flat-lining. A nurse towered over you, fluorescent light glinting off the needle of empty syringe. You don't notice the pendant around your neck until the grief counselor compliments it.

You and the others don't work together enough to be called a gang, but if there was no honor among thieves, there was at least a certain camaraderie. You shared new techniques for soul riding, provided alibis when needed, and every once in a while joined together to pull off a job too big for one person alone. There aren't a lot of you, but now there's one fewer. Malloy wasn't your leader, but he was the person you all looked up to, respected Now he's dead, for-real dead, because someone put a bullet in his brain. The police don't know how the killer entered a room locked from the inside, but you've got a pretty good idea.

This was the culmination of some ideas that had been kicking around for a long time without coming together. Finally one day it all just sort of clicked, and I'm very pleased with the results. It had a somewhat codified skill/talent tree, in that there were things the characters knew they could do, and certain characters were better at specific 'soul rider' skills. And it had a nice way to integrate 'dead man walking', which was fortunate since we had one unlucky player knock the tower over around pull #6.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

Hey all,
I'm trying to put together a Dread game for my reunion with the college roommates this weekend and I need some help. I'm never a GM and I've never played or run Dread so I have a bit of an uphill climb but I'm going to give it a whirl anyway. (And fall back on one of the scenarios in the book or an old CoC scenario, if need be.)

The session would be between 2-4 hours long and its general premise would follow the movie Munich. The players would be covert assassins from the near-past taking out leaders of a revolutionary/terrorist organization.

This is what I have so far:

Plot Outline
1. Two starter assassinations. (Easy ones to display the characters and get a bunch of pulls).
2. Dual assassination. (A harder set of assassinations that need a little more planning because they need to be done simultaneously in separate parts of the city).
3. Retribution. (The terrorists learn about the group and take the fight to them.)
4. Leader goes into hiding. (The leader of the terrorists goes into hiding and the players need to investigate to find him.)
5. Final showdown. (Kill the leader.)

Questionaires
What made you sign up for the mission?
What do you bring to the mission? (Should I assign a role so I don't have three explosive experts?)
Why are you no longer in a service?
What was your biggest blunder on an assignment?

SNAFUs
Mistaken identity. The PCs misidentify the target's brother as the target and kill the brother by accident.
Innocent bystanders getting in the way.
Police try to bring in the PCs.
===============================

Like I mentioned, I hardly ever run games so I don't know how much detail to go into for each plot point. I don't want to dictate how they should plan the assassinations but I want to have enough to keep things interesting and moving forward.

Any comments or suggestions would be much appreciated! Thanks!

 

[Asmor]

This thread is going to outlast ENWorld.

 

[Piratecat]

Plot Outline
1. Two starter assassinations. (Easy ones to display the characters and get a bunch of pulls).
2. Dual assassination. (A harder set of assassinations that need a little more planning because they need to be done simultaneously in separate parts of the city).
3. Retribution. (The terrorists learn about the group and take the fight to them.)
4. Leader goes into hiding. (The leader of the terrorists goes into hiding and the players need to investigate to find him.)
5. Final showdown. (Kill the leader.)

In my experience this sort of setup leads to horrible analysis paralysis. The group sits around and talk, talks, talks about the plan instead of going and carrying it out. That's true for one assassination; try to get 4 in there and you're dooomed. You also need some emotional or personal tie to the person they have to kill.

I would probably set this up in 3 acts, and start them in media res during the first assassination. Something goes wrong and they have to carry it out anyways. In act two, they learn that they've accidentally hosed themselves somehow and their world is falling apart. They have to take out the leader to help themselves, but people are trying to kill them in the mean time. This leads to investigation while dodging assassins. Finally they find and go after the leader, but is it a trap?

Dread does spooky much better than combat / action movie. Plan accordingly.

 

[John Crichton]

Dread does spooky much better than combat / action movie. Plan accordingly.

Just quoting this cuz it's mega-true. A Dread game I just ran had a minimal amount of action and that particular sequence wasn't nearly as fun as the rest of the game which was much more psychological and investigation based.

 

[Seonaid]

Just quoting this cuz it's mega-true. A Dread game I just ran had a minimal amount of action and that particular sequence wasn't nearly as fun as the rest of the game which was much more psychological and investigation based.

I was in John Crichton's game and what he says is definitely true. The investigation parts were definitely better than the combat part.

 

[Rel]

I was in John Crichton's game and what he says is definitely true. The investigation parts were definitely better than the combat part.

You are such a suckup!

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

You are such a suckup!

Srsly. It's like she's trying to get into his pants.