DRYH: Don't Rest Your Head Review

A couple weeks ago I bought Don't Rest Your Head on a bit of a whim. I bought the PDF + book version. The PDF included a high-res version and a low-res, 2-pages-per-screen version for quick access. The book just came and I'm glad I bought it--something tangible and glossy-covered to flip through while I fall asleep at night.

The rules are a bit tricky at first glance, but they make sense by the second reading. In play, they go pretty smoothly. Basically, there are 4 dice pools: Discipline, Exhaustion, Madness, and Pain. Any time the player has a stressful encounter, the GM assigns a level of difficulty--the number of Pain dice he's going to roll. The player then rolls some combo of Discipline, Exhaustion, and Madness in response. First, you determine whether the GM or the player won--that is, whether the player succeeded or not. Then you determine which pool dominated, which may have certain game effects and always characterizes the resulting action. That's basically it for the game rules. This game definitely has a narrativist slant.

The setting is pretty cool too. The players are always insomniacs that begin to cross over to another world and gain odd abilities as they become more strained and exhausted. Think Dark City, Mirrormask, Neverwhere etc.

You can find out more about the game from Evil Hat's site (link above). Especially check out their Actual Play links--the world is really nicely fleshed out by other people's campaign notes.

It took me a while to come up with the couple dozen or so d6s required to play (but that is a story of its own), but last weekend, S. and I tried it out.