Towers

I've been reading the RPG Dread. It's a horror game, where you must pull a block from a Jenga tower whenever you make a risky action. If the tower falls, you're removed from the game. It's such a neat little idea that I'm planning to make my own tower, based on Tartarus from Persona. 

Instead of removing blocks to make risky actions, you add them. The tower slowly rises in front of you. I prefer this metaphor of the dark tower rising - more ominous. Eventually, the tower naturally becomes too unstable to hold any more blocks. Here's a test I made out of houses and scraps from Mystery Teens. You choose blocks at random, so every tower will be different. In this test, the tower tumbles at around 11 blocks. I'm not sure what the sweet spot should be: 30? 20?

The big bonus of building the tower instead of tearing it down is that there's no setup time. Whenever someone dies in Dread, you have to rebuild the tower and pull some pieces, so the game has to screech to a halt for a setup break just as it was getting interesting. This tower is meant to start in pieces, so when it falls you can keep on playing without a pause.

I'm planning to use this for my game Mystery Teens. Whenever you take some time or risks to find a clue, you place a block on the tower in the center of town. None of the adults can see it. You can open up each tower block (if you can manage it without making it fall) to find strange and revelatory dream cards. When the tower falls, you've reached the climax. Hope you've figured out the solution to the mystery, because the villain's plan is currently boiling out of the moonlit suburbs like an exploding black octopus.

Here's another thought about Dread, though:

Motivation in Dread

Dread characters are made by giving you a questionnaire with loaded questions like "Why did you kill your wife?" After listening to this full play recording of Dread, I've decided every Dread questionnaire needs one extra question: 

What do you value more than your life or sanity?

The DM on that podcast explained that every block pull is optional. Even when a madman is swinging an axe at your head, you can still choose not to pull the block - it just means you've chosen to fail. Choosing not to pull a block means you can't be removed from the game, but the Host can do whatever they want to your character in exchange. 

Reading through the Dread rules now, I'm not sure they support that reading. I love it anyway. Whenever dark and terrible things happen to their characters, it is crucial it's their own fault. Like I've said before, they need to choose to go into Silent Hill or Death Frost Doom. If you force them to die, it's arbitrary. They're just frustrated at you, not blaming themselves.

Now, in any game with dice, this is hard to get right. It's easy for something horrible to happen to a character just because they were unlucky. You have to design against this possibility, working against the dice, making sure everything can be anticipated and foiled before the dice come out. Conversely, the tower in Dread makes sure that every death is the players fault- that's just how the system works. If you don't want a consequence (losing a limb, going nuts) you can always pull. If you don't want to die, you can always choose not to pull. Death always comes at your own hand.

So it's wonderful that Dread makes players to doom themselves, but by default the choice to risk death doesn't feel interesting to me. In the play recording above, their goal is just to Survive. As a horror game, I assume that's the goal of many Dread adventures. But when that's your only goal, most block-pulling choices boil down to two options:

A: You pull a brick, and risk being removed from the game.

or

B: You refuse to move the story forward, and suffer some consequence that makes it seem like you're more likely to be removed from the game in future.

This choice seems interesting in the moment: Do I want to risk death, or get a broken leg for certain? But it's fake. If you choose B forever, you'll never die. If the goal is simply to survive, you just need to always pick B. When the obvious best choice is to do nothing and refuse to move the story forward, something is wrong with your system.

To solve this problem, you need to give the players a goal other that survival: Something they value more than getting removed from the game. The wonderful thing about the Character Creation system is that you don't even need to decide what this is - you can ask the players themselves. Maybe they decide their character would sacrifice their life for their family, their honor, their country, whatever. You can then take those answers, and put them at the end of the adventure.

Now that value will be put to the test and strained to breaking point. At every step of the adventure, as the tower gets more and more unstable, they need to decide - do I really care about this thing? Am I really willing to sacrifice death for it? That's an interesting choice. If they decide no, and flee as their family is slaughtered, that's a fantastic character moment that'll make them great to play in future games.

This is so perfect for getting that Doomed Obsession that I'm crazy about. James Sunderland, looking for his dead wife. The journey to find Colonel Kurtz. Getting the players to give you the rope to hang them with. It's lovely.

Lovelyville

So much is happening with the next Megagame! It's transformed into its final form, very different to the original pitch. I'm so excited about it I'm tripping over the keys as I type here. Let's see if I can explain this.

It's still got the same hook as my first pitch: I'm making an entire paper town (which is more than half done now). It's called Lovelyville, a tiny seaside town in 1960's America. Nothing ever happens here. Everybody just minds their own business and gets on with their lovely little lives.

...Except of course the whole town is a web of corruption, and everybody has a secret. You can investigate the mysteries in town by opening up these little houses to find physical clues about those secrets inside, like picking up a rock to see what's squirming underneath. All that's unchanged. 

But! In the first pitch, the mystery was pre-written. You were interviewing NPC suspects to solve a premade mystery. Now, I'm going to run a full 50 person Megagame, where every suspect is another player. Everyone plays one of the people in the town. Maybe you're the local butcher, the mayor, a cop, the doctor. You'll all have a secret and a goal, and you'll all get your own little building.

This could be yours!

Instead of being pre-scripted, everything happens in-game. There are rules for Arson, Murder, Theft, and other crimes, and every player will need to do some dirty dealings to achieve their secret goals. Everything you do leaves behind evidence in these buildings, mostly in the form of cards. If you're stealing jewels, buying weapons to murder somebody, getting kerosene for arson, you'll be keeping all those items inside a building somewhere. When you sneak a peak inside someone's house, you're finding evidence of all the actual misdeeds they've been doing throughout the game. 

Trying to hide evidence and pull off the perfect crime will be just as satisfying as following a trail of clues to find out what your fellow player's been up to.

There will be a central mystery that ties everybody together. Last night, every single child in town went missing. As far as anyone can tell, they just snuck out of bed and into the night. The town is in crisis, and that's going to unearth all the old corruption that's been unfolding under it's sleepy exterior. 

I'm hoping to put tickets on sale next Sunday, and set the date for the event 5 weeks after that on the 6th of June. 

The next post will deal with how Murder is going to work - Alibi's, Killing, hiding the body, what happens to the Dead, and Death.

Interrogations & Graveyards

The first block of Mystery Teens is nearing completion. Everything you can see here can be lifted up to gaze at the underbelly beneath - Trees, river pieces, houses, graves.

Interrogations

On top of opening envelopes, and opening up bits of the scenery, everyone will have some slots during the day when they can drag in any character in the game for full interview in person. You can ask any question you want, it's full role-play. There'll be a special interview room set up, with a big light-bulb to shine in their face.

I will play every suspect, using a variety of wigs.

The 10 big questions

I'm hoping to put tickets on sale for Mystery Teens this week or the next. Here's how signing up for this thing will work. The Eventbrite page will have 10 mysteries. Pick one:

• The central Scooby-Doo mystery. You've just walked into school on a perfectly ordinary morning morning to find every student but you has disappeared. What happened to them?
• A cop drama, working the other side of the same case as the Lovelyville P.D.
• An Indiana Jones search for lost treasure in the ancient ruins below the town
• A Heist caper where you have to figure out where the Maltese Diamond is and how to steal it without getting caught
• A Phoenix Wright courtroom battle. One of you plays the Prosecution, one plays the Defense - you both have to uncover the facts of a murder and then twist them to get the verdict you want in a live court scene
• A Film Noir mystery where you play the main suspect in the courtroom mystery above - a travelling salesman who gets in over their head and uncovers a web of corruption
• An X-Files/Twin Peaks mystery about FBI Agents who fall into supernatural chaos - one believer, one skeptic
• A kinda lovecraftian Pans Labyrinth thing where you play a child who starts falling out of reality and has to solve strange riddles to get back
• A classic intriguing Sherlock Holmes case where you play a monkey detective who can only talk by holding up signs
• A Tintin mystery where you play a boy reporter thwarting a gang of crooks

Each of these will have a price and a recommended number of players. I'm thinking that you just buy the mystery straight-out instead of buying individual tickets, so you can bring more or less than the recommended number of players if you'd like. That price will include everything you want to solve a mystery: Food (massive amounts of coffee and donuts for the cops, of course) interviews (more on that later), whiteboards, maps, big corkboards with photographs of suspects and bits of string showing their relationships. I want to provide everything you need to replicate the Detective chic of Rust's Shed from True Detective.

Once you sign up you'll get a package in the mail with all your secret documents. Everyone gets a dash of background info, rumors and news articles to start them off, and their own personal mystery, distinct from the group one. Bring that stuff on the day, and you're set.

Mystery Teens

In about 7 weeks I'm going to run Mystery Teens, a Megagame about solving weird mysteries in a small town. If you sign up, I'll give you a mystery, and plonk you down in the middle of town to solve it. I'm going to make an entire paper town, with an amusement park, dark woods, a graveyard, an abandoned mansion, suburbs and cars, the whole lot. You'll solve mysteries by going out into town and investigating. It's totally self-directed, and you can investigate any place that takes your fancy.

Here's how it works. You're snooping around and you find one Old Man Herring was at the crime scene on the night of the murder. You can look up his address in the directory...

...and head over there.

From here, you have a few choices. Let's say you do the basic - knock on the door, see if anyone's home, and ask him what he's up to. You do that by opening the envelope in front of the house.

Seems like a prime suspect. From here you could check his alibi by looking up the local cemetery - but if you want to go further here, you can sneak into his house and look for clues. You do this by actually opening up the house itself.

Inside every one of these houses will be physical clues and evidence.

You will be able to search almost any object in the game like this. Say you want to search the boot of his car:

The room will be full of tables, each one a block of town filled with houses and props like this. Every one of these cute little paper props will pop open to reveal filthy, horrifying secrets hidden within. The paper houses, the cardboard graves - they all hide secrets.

You'll sign up to solve a certain mystery with 1-7 of your friends, and spend the time snooping around this town while everyone else is hot on the trail of their own case, At the end, all of these mysteries will explode together in a climactic Denouement where you reveal the answer - or answer wrong, and see the villain get away laughing. 

I'll keep updating this blog and the facebook group with more details and snapshots of more of the buildings. I'm planning to put tickets on sale this week or the next. 

The Megagame

Watch The Skies 2 just happened in the UK, and I realized I never posted about the aftermath of our own Megagame event in Brisbane. It was amazing! Click any of these images to make them bigger.

The Russian team, and the aliens shouting "Worms! Worms! Worms!"

Alien Documents

The News and the game map

The war room

The Aliens successfully steal the world's supply of coffee. Later, they gifted it to France.

Ace Reporter Gordy Higgins personally challenges the aliens to single combat, and is abducted.

You can see more on our facebook page. This game went so well that I'm going to run another megagame of my own design in about a month and a half. It's inspired by Scooby Doo, Twin Peaks, and the Megagame "At Right Angles to Reality". Here's a sneak preview of one of the locations:

 More details soon! 

Why play as kids?

Children are trapped in a set of rules they can't understand or control.

"Why do we have to move? All my friends are here." Well, because dad needs to switch jobs, because the company's downsizing, because profits are down, because the economy's fucked up, because the intricate invisible system that controls us all is shuddering and breaking.

Adults don't have much more knowledge or control, but we're tied into systems that we trust to understand things for us. We don't actually understand any of the crucial gadgets and systems that our lives depend on, but we can rely on the news, ads, other people to tell us that they're working fine. We can trust that everyone isn't lying to us.

Kids do not have this luxury.

Kids aren't smart enough to understand the Global Financial Crisis, but they are smart enough to know that you're lying to them about it. Inevitably, you'll lie to them. The truth is too complicated and terrible to explain, so you give them simple, clean lies until you think they've grown up. We teach them that 0 is the lowest number possible, then we reveal a hidden series of doppleganger numbers lurking underneath the system they thought was everything. A million small betrayals like this teach children that they are not being told the real rules.

So: Children don't understand the rules, can't control them, and they know everybody's lying to them about what the rules actually are. This creates a very specific and interesting mindset. Making a world that's a literal expression of an interesting mindset is a recipe for greatness. For instance, spy fiction has always presented a literal manifestation of a paranoid person's fantasies, a world where everyone really is out to get you.

In a million fairy tales, people are thrust into a world that works according to an intricate set of strange, often malevolent rules that are never clearly explained. This is the world kids live in every day, fishbowled around a child's perspective in the same way that spy fiction is fishbowled around paranoia. In the fairy tale, kids come to understand the rules, navigate them, and exploit them to their own ends. This is the heroic fantasy all children aspire to: attaining control and understanding over their lives.

Pan's labyrinth deliberately exploits the link to reality: The fairy-tale rules Ofelia has to follow directly symbolize the rigid laws of fascist Spain. In the real world her evil stepfather lectures on austerity measures. In the fairy tale world she is told not to take the food under any circumstances, for fear of the monster at the head of the table.

Here's a classic example, Vasilisa the Beautiful. Vasilisa finds something that works in a strange way: Skulls that glow with inner light. Like the badass she is, she rips off a skull and uses it to light her way through the forest. She has come into contact with a creepy rule, understood it, and used it to achieve her goals.

Of course, she still doesn't know what makes the skull glow. A kid may not be able to understand why their parents are fighting, but they can learn the patterns it runs by; what signs lead up to it, how to avoid it, and what usually happens afterward. In the mind of a kid, there's little difference between these rules and fairy-tale commandments like "Don't look behind you".

In comparison, Scooby-doo is the purest wish-fulfillment. Not only do you come to fully understand the hidden and terrible forces behind the world, you kick them into the light to be humiliated and destroyed. It's like punching the GFC in the face. Even here, though, there's some melancholy. There are no vampires, werewolves or ghosts. There's never any real magic or forces of evil. In the end, it's always just a bunch of assholes trying to make a quick buck.

The Burnout Bar

Everybody in the blog-o-sphere is going crazy for Monsterparts, and I can't blame them. It's about kids solving mysteries, which is my fetish. I was inspired by his treatment of HP to create my own system: an extended death save that slowly grinds you down into the dirt.

One of the reasons to play as kids is that kids are shit at everything. They get tired, they break down, they fall over and can't get up. This system is designed to capture that sense that every action is taking something out of you. After sprinting, leaping, stabbing, falling, getting blown up and shoved and punched through walls, you will not be as good as adventuring as you were when you skipped rosy-faced into the monster's lair.

The burnout bar combines insanity, wounds, HP, exhaustion, and damage over time into a single system. I designed it for kids, but it's good for any game where you want slow exhaustion and quick death. Here's how it works:

Everything that wears you down adds something to your burnout bar. That includes psychological trauma, running, acrobatics, stress, lack of sleep, carrying heavy loads, getting drunk, falling down pits, being beaten, shot, stabbed - it all adds a dice worth of exhaustion to this bar. Something only a little tiring, like climbing up a building, might be a d4. An exhausting act, like getting stabbed, might be d12 or more.

Here's a good rule of thumb for damage: Think "How many times could you do this before you'd fall unconscious?" If it's about twice, use a d20. Four times, d10. 

You can see by the stick figures along the side that exhaustion takes its toll. At 11, you can't run - only stagger wildly. At 14, you have to crawl. At 17 you're on the ground, using all your effort just to drag yourself an inch. At 20 you're unconscious. You might also need to roll over exhaustion to succeed at anything that would get harder as you grow tired. Say, thinking clearly, using your strength, stuff like that.

Here's the sting: Whenever you're attacked by something that could kill you, roll over your exhaustion on a d20. If you fail, you die. That's it. Every single dangerous attack could kill you. If you succeed your death roll the attack missed, or maybe hit you somewhere non-vital; you can keep going, but the effort of dodging it has worn you down that little bit more.

Attacking itself is just uses whatever system you're most comfortable with; just substitute exhaustion for HP damage and roll for death if the attack has a reasonable chance of killing you. Here's a D&D example: Sally punches Jake. She rolls over his AC, and does d6 exhaustion damage. The DM judges that Jake couldn't be killed by that punch, so he doesn't roll for death. If Sally had grappled Jake and held his head underwater, it might have been a different story. The golden rule is: If you think this attack has a reasonable chance of killing this character, roll for death.

Special armor would negate the need to roll for death against specific weapons. If you have a bulletproof vest, you don't have to roll for death against bullets. Gas, poison, knives, garrotes and anything that could get past the vest would still be deadly.

 The best bit:

 You can actually track the source of each piece of damage. Each piece of damage can then be healed in a specific way. How deliciously chunky is that?

For example, you can see here that detective John McClane suffered some psychological trauma from seeing people die. By talking it out with his friend Al, he was able to heal that damage specifically. He might be able to heal the jetlag by getting a good nights rest. Something like a broken leg, though, would obviously need a splint. There's no such thing as a heal spell in this system; everyone can heal everything using common sense and real-world knowledge.

Whenever you heal some damage, figure out how many points of Exhaustion you have in total and put an arrow there. John McClane was up to 18, but healing brought him back down to 14. He puts an arrow there to show that he can still walk.

That's not all; your wounds can keep damaging you. The line underneath the type of wound is there for status effects; anything that's going to keep damaging you in future. You write down what condition will trigger the exhaustion and how much damage you'll take at that point.

For instance, McClane jacked up his feet by walking through broken glass.The line underneath shows that he'll take d8 damage "While walking", until he can heal that wound. If McClane was stabbed, he might take d6 exhaustion every half-hour as he bled out. If he became claustrophobic, he might take damage every time he entered a small space.

For most systems

The arms along the side show that stronger characters get a bigger bar. Wizards & weaklings would start at 0. Thieves & average joes get the extra bar underneath, labeled with a white arm. That means they have four points to burn before they start being exhausted and have a chance to fail their death save. Fighters & strong characters would start at the bottom of the black arm bar, with 8 extra points total. No matter what system you use, you can hack this in by splitting all characters into weak, normal, or strong.

For Monsterparts

You can be 7 to 14 years old. Add one point to the under-bar for each year of age after 6. So, a 7 year old can go through one point before they have a chance of dying, while a 14 year old gets the entire bar as a grace period.

The older you are, the tougher you are. However! As you grow older, your mind becomes more and more clouded to the true nature of the world. That's where your age modifier comes in.

You add this number to any rolls concerned with seeing and understanding the dark truth at the center of everything. Mostly, it would be used as a perception check: You have to roll over a DC in order to actually see the monster (5, 10, or 15, depending on how unimaginably strange it is). Older characters may also have to roll in order to stop themselves forgetting crucial details and falling into the foggy delusion of adults: getting dressed for school, putting on their bag, and smiling as they wade into the black lake at the center of town.




This isn't finished yet: I'm still not sure if the numbers are right. The danger is that falling unconscious at 20 might be too soon; Ideally, I want the slow build of Call of Cthulhu. I've also drafted one for the d100, but that seems like too much.

I might get a chance to playtest it sometime and check my math. If I do, I'll clean it up and put it in a character sheet with stats, age, and the Anti-Hammerspace Item Tracker.

Mystery Teens Ride East

I'm making an RPG about mystery-solving teens. Just ran a playtest session using the Orient Express mystery-o-matic. They ended up taking a ride with

Rupert Coldsing. Twelve year old chain smoker, travelling alone, turned out to be an expert on defusing bombs. By finding this bible verse, deciphering a code, and hacking into the frequency of his secret radio, the gang discovering that he was a secret agent of communist-nazi spy agency Leviathan, working together with

Lokman Yilmaz, Turkish hypnotist and master of illusion. Both he and Rupert were working together to hunt down whoever stole the Key to Shangri-la from Leviathan. Lokman and Rupert were threatening

Count Frumpenshire Hamffleswain, famed Shakespearean actor, surrounded by silent servants with sewn-up waistcoats. The count had some bad debts, and was on his way to pick up his inheritance in Istanbul when Leviathan tracked him down. He was fine at first, but started to sweat after the murder of his personal friend,

Francis Depardue, suicidal French artist. From the occult symbolism of his paintings, the teen team deduced that both he and the count worshipped the same ancient, forgotten volcano god. Deeply depressed at the death of his religion, Depardue said this would be his last journey - so why was he found stabbed with his own ceremonial dagger? The culprit was taller than him - which means it was either Lokman, the Count, or

Beatrice von Trumpleshlize, obsessive german monkey collector. After stealing the Key of Shangri-la, she was fleeing on the train with her husband:

Marco Catione, mild-mannered Italian priest and secret ice robot from another dimension. On a hunch, the teens burst into his cabin and interrogated him. Believing they worked for Leviathan, he revealed his true form and froze one of the teens solid. With some home-made explosives the gang blew up the carriage and escaped off the train.

Now the teens are in the middle of the Austrian wilderness with Marco's severed robot head and the stolen Key to Shangri-la. If they can get to the Himalayas alive with that key, they could unlock the greatest mystery of our time - but all these crazed treasure-hunters and the forces of Leviathan are ahead of them.

We spilt indana jones all over our demented agatha christie, it's great.