In July 2010, three of us played a little Don't Rest Your Head on a long car ride. Mechanically, this worked very well, as there's not much overhead. I used a cup to hold and roll the mini-dice I created previously. I GMed from the back seat. I didn't have a preset story and just planned to improvise.
My two players created some very interesting characters.
Brett: John Hannigan
Surface: Homeless war vet: scraggly, scars, limpy, quiet. 15 years since the war. Has a shopping cart. Carries a book from/by sister Laura (about 28 years old) which he also uses as a sort of journal. It has old letters stuck in among the pages.
Beneath: Memory is slipping away. Feels vague guilt over the death of his brother Tom (fled?). Laura's letters stopped coming recently.
Insomnia: Nightmares about Tom's face. Sees bright/flashing lights while awake. Recently saw a "nice lady" too.
Path/Goal: Find Laura and explain (to her?) about Tom.
Just Happened: A bright light while crossing the street, now shopping cart is gone. Only book remains.
Exhaustion talent: Heightened Senses
Madness talent: Draw something in his book and it becomes real
Respones: 1 fight, 2 flight.
Becky: Eli Fox
Surface: Upper-middle class white architect. Attractive in his business suit. Early 40s. Drives into city for the week. Works long hours. Married for 8 years. (Wife?) married young.
Beneath: Distrusts wife. Has been drinking a lot and has a coke habit. Wants to kill wife and lover. Bought a gun recently.
Insomnia: Walked in on wife and another man (a stranger).
Path/Goal: Revenge and closure on infidelity
Just happened: Hit someone with his car, and ran, taking his gun with him.
Exhaustion talent: Persuasive/smooth-talking
Madness talent: Endurance/resistance/strength
Responses: 2 fight, 1 flight
I was impressed by these characters, but I found it hard to bring them together. They started separately, after Eli crashed through John's shopping cart. John followed a wandering PaperBoy into an old gas-lit subway entrance. Eli got picked up one of Tock's clockwork patrolmen.
Improvising as I went, I had a very hard time bringing these two characters back together. Even after a long roadside break and some pondering, the story never really picked up again. I had some ideas that Eli would get involved with the Ladies-in-Hating--probably through one that looked like his wife--and possibly dealing with Mother When. Mother When would also work for John's story of loss--possibly reached through lost Mad City children and the Finishing School. I also had some interesting custom nightmare thoughts for John: a War Monger and a number of Leaf Tenants (play on the word Lieutenants, in light of the British pronunciation, "leaving", and tenements.) that burn in horrible conflagrations. This would somehow tie into John's war experience.
But these ideas never really picked up steam. I eventually got Eli and John together using a previously conceived nightmare/local of my own design: Benjamin "Button" Bridges, who runs a small warehouse of buttons, each imbued with a different memory or dream experience. As I recall [it's been over a year now], Tock's men came knocking on the warehouse door and John and Eli fled. I think things ended there, because I hadn't yet managed to give them a solid hook to tie them together and drive them into a story.
The main reason I'm blogging all of this now is as a reminder to myself of the agony of improvised GMing. I still think I had some rich characters, willing players, and some decent general ideas here. But I just couldn't pull it all together in time on the fly. Any GM-improvising system/tool should help with this sort of problem: not just generating ideas, but pulling them together too.
Another lesson is a variation on that old chestnut: "Never split the party." In this case, I think starting with the party together and firm goal would have helped a lot. Bouncing narration back and forth between two storylines sucks.
Showing posts with label dryh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dryh. Show all posts
Monday, August 15, 2011
Thursday, April 10, 2008
DRYH: Piper Fergesson
Date: 06 Apr 08
Player: S.
S's character was Piper Fergesson, a cop on leave after an "incident". She and her partner, Herb Banocheck, had a run-in with some nut with long grey hair. The nut ran at Piper and said, as if in recognition, "It's you!" He pushed her down and she bonked her head, losing consciousness. Witnesses report that the nut then shot Herb with a ball-and-blackpowder pistol, killing him. The nut apparently escaped in the ensuing commotion.
Piper is on leave now, but she can't seem to sleep. Recently, she seems to be noticing doors where she doesn't remember seeing any before. The action opens when she passes a woman in the lobby of her apartment building--a woman she recognizes as a former tenant that died!
[Character details: Exhaustion talent = Good reflexes/reaction time. Madness talent = Can summon/communicate with ghosts. Madness responses: All fight.]
Locked in her apartment, wondering if she's losing her mind, Piper hears a knock on the door. It's a Bobby policeman, asking her to accompany him down to "District 13" for questioning regarding the death of her partner, Banocheck. Curious, Piper follows him, even after she spots the large clockwork key protruding from his back. He takes her down the hallway a ways and through a janitor closet door to a busy city street. Looking back, they just came out the glass door of a candy store.
As they head down a busy and anachronistic street towards a metal archway bearing a large "13", someone in the crowd slips a bit of paper into Piper's hand. Reading it while the Bobby stops to talk to a Paper Boy, Piper sees "Don't go into District 13!". Taking this as her cue, she slips away from the Bobby and disappears into the crowd. She wanders through half-familiar streets and finds the Bizarre Bazaar.
[Here we paused for a nap and a break to get some storyline plotted, as I'd been just adlibbing this far--and most of that based on a vague memory of the example session in the first few pages of DRYH.]
A little someone catches up with her in the Bazaar. He looks like a blue stuffed dog in a trenchcoat with sort of tassel buttoned to the end of his snout. Introducing himself as Stitch the Snitch, he leads Piper to see "La Resistance!" Down into the sewers, through the borders of the Wax King's domain, and down to the upper edge of the Under-Where [hee hee]. La Resistance proves to be three individuals who bear a suspicious resemblance to some of Piper's childhood toys: a little "rag doll" girl, a "stuffed pig" named Anderleaf in a flowery waistcoat, and Barbie's friend Midge. They're currently having tea on a packing crate under a single naked lightbulb.
La Resistance explains to Piper that she can summon ghosts, as they themselves are not really here, but the ghosts of toys remembered. Something strange is going on regarding the death of Herb Banocheck, something that has Officer Tock and even the Tacksman interested. The description of the nut sounds like a Tweener they know named Mad Max. (Tweeners are neither Awake nor Sleeper, but trapped between the two worlds. You usually find Tweeners raving to themselves at bus stops in the City Slumbering.) With no further clues, they recommend Piper seek prophesy.
Stitch takes her to the surface again. He buys a paper from a Paper Boy and points out a small article regarding Piper's escape from the Bobby and that she is still wanted for questioning. He chuckles over how he "snitched" Piper away from the Bobby.
Stitch then leads her to Mama Fortuna. Piper's own mother made a living as a false medium and psychic, and so Piper recognizes a number of tricks of the trade. Mama gets nothing from the crystal ball, so she tries a Tarot reading. It's a strange deck, but she reveals the following: the King of Cups (the Wax King) is in opposition with the King of Blades (the Tacksman) over the City (Mad City and the City Slumbering, two sides of a coin). Beneath the City is the Page of Wands (Piper, newly Awake). Mirroring the Tacksman and Wax King's opposition, Piper is torn between the Horizon Walker (a major arcana card of a man with long grey hair and out-stretched arms; "He represents new awareness and knowledge," Mama says) on the one hand. On the other... Mama Fortuna draws the last card, but casts it and the deck aside, refusing to continue the reading.
Leaving Mama's, Piper finds that Stitch has disappeared. At a loss, she decides to try to find a way home. She heads to her neighborhood in this mirror city, looking for a door. Instead, she finds a couple Pin Head G-men waiting in her building lobby. She gives them the slip. In the fight, she finds her gun is gone... snitched by Stitch?
She tries to buy another paper, but the Paper Boys want Wax King coins, or else $20. One of the Boys, Johnny, recognizes her from the newsies, and so sells her a paper for an autographed $1. According to the paper, Piper is still wanted for questioning, though now they've called out the Needle Nose hounds.
Piper summons Anderleaf the pig, who daintily sniffs around her and announces that, yes, she's being tracked based on the scent of her gun, snitched by Stitch. So he recommends she buy a new one to replace it... then her old one won't be hers anymore.
Back at the Bizarre Bazaar she trades, in the shadows, a memory of freedom and rain in exchange for a gun... that proves to be a ball-and-blackpowder model. Johnny the Paper Boy runs up to her in the crowd, waving his autographed $1, gloating that it'll be worth even more now, look... a new article in the paper says that there is now a warrant out for Piper due to "possession of evidence".
A Needle Nose trots by then, on the trail of something... but passes her by.
Then a mob of Paper Boys hurry past, cursing the Horizon Walker for "taking a bum again." Dashing after the Boys, she sees that they are following some bum with long grey hair. His clothes are stuffed with old newspapers... slips of which are falling out behind him, leaving a trail of headlines from the future. Dashing in, pulling off the Boys before they can dismember him, Piper draws her new gun. As the bum turns, she grabs him and recognizes him as the nut that killed Herb. She cries out, "It's you!" and there is a sudden connection between them. She can see something reflected in his eyes... a Tarot card... the opposition that wouldn't be shown by Mama Fortuna... but as she struggles to dive further in, to make sense of the vision, she passes out.
She awakes in the Bazaar, surrounded by a crowd muttering "Horizon Walker". The bum and the Paper Boys are gone, but, in their place, is a crowd of Bobbies, Pin Heads, and Needle Noses, who quickly surround Piper and haul her into a paddywagon bound for District 13!
There, she is hustled to a courtroom for trial. The Tacksman and his Pin Heads are there as audience. So is Stitch the Snitch, who continues to sob, "I'm sorry! I couldn't help it--I'm a Snitch!" so loudly that he is eventually evicted from the room. The prosecution argues that Herb was killed by the Horizon Walker with a blackpowder gun. Piper is the Horizon Walker (huh?) and possessor of said gun. Chronology seems to hold no weight here. In her defense, Piper summons the spirit of Herb himself, who exonerates her by agreeing that it was the bum Mad Max who shot him.
The prosecution tries to shift tacks--while Piper may not have been directly responsible, she was indirectly to blame. In the moment when she faced her assailant, she was slow (when we know she can be so fast), she passively let her partner come to her rescue (when we know her to be so capable), she failed to see the supernatural at work (when she is (now?) so comfortable existence). With this speech, realization comes. It's true, there is/was opposition to the awareness that is the Horizon Walker... an image comes to mind of a little girl in the shadow of a woman in a shawl holding a crystal ball... the same woman that was on the card she saw in the eyes of the Horizon Walker... the Charlatan... her mother.
The tiny judge in the huge wig bangs his gavel and dismisses the case. Somewhere outside, the clocks are chiming Thirteen.
Conclusion. We played for about 2.5 hours, I'd guess, which is our longest gaming session to date in any system. It is also the first story we've every finished. (Yay!) There was certainly a strong story focus--we only rolled for "combat" and "summoning", and that only occurred about 6 or 7 times.
Some of the elements I was proud of: Tweeners, Stitch, the Under-Where, Anderleaf, the folding over of time with the HW encounter. Others were a little weak--particularly the whole Charlatan thing at the end. I was attempting to build on what S. had already established--Piper's mother--as a psychological topic for further investigation. In the City Slumbering, her mother's shadow still affects her--as the prosecution pointed out--leading to a level of cynicism and a tough cop exterior. Yet, in Mad City, she has in many ways achieved what her mother always pretended--she can actually channel the spirits of the dead. And the first unconscious use of that power was to summon the spirits of her childhood--symbols of girlhood and innocence. But all this probably makes way more sense here than it did during the session, where we were both getting tired and just trying to finish things up.
I wouldn't mind returning to this storyworld. I think of this session as the pilot episode for a TV show that may or may not get canceled...
Player: S.
S's character was Piper Fergesson, a cop on leave after an "incident". She and her partner, Herb Banocheck, had a run-in with some nut with long grey hair. The nut ran at Piper and said, as if in recognition, "It's you!" He pushed her down and she bonked her head, losing consciousness. Witnesses report that the nut then shot Herb with a ball-and-blackpowder pistol, killing him. The nut apparently escaped in the ensuing commotion.
Piper is on leave now, but she can't seem to sleep. Recently, she seems to be noticing doors where she doesn't remember seeing any before. The action opens when she passes a woman in the lobby of her apartment building--a woman she recognizes as a former tenant that died!
[Character details: Exhaustion talent = Good reflexes/reaction time. Madness talent = Can summon/communicate with ghosts. Madness responses: All fight.]
Locked in her apartment, wondering if she's losing her mind, Piper hears a knock on the door. It's a Bobby policeman, asking her to accompany him down to "District 13" for questioning regarding the death of her partner, Banocheck. Curious, Piper follows him, even after she spots the large clockwork key protruding from his back. He takes her down the hallway a ways and through a janitor closet door to a busy city street. Looking back, they just came out the glass door of a candy store.
As they head down a busy and anachronistic street towards a metal archway bearing a large "13", someone in the crowd slips a bit of paper into Piper's hand. Reading it while the Bobby stops to talk to a Paper Boy, Piper sees "Don't go into District 13!". Taking this as her cue, she slips away from the Bobby and disappears into the crowd. She wanders through half-familiar streets and finds the Bizarre Bazaar.
[Here we paused for a nap and a break to get some storyline plotted, as I'd been just adlibbing this far--and most of that based on a vague memory of the example session in the first few pages of DRYH.]
A little someone catches up with her in the Bazaar. He looks like a blue stuffed dog in a trenchcoat with sort of tassel buttoned to the end of his snout. Introducing himself as Stitch the Snitch, he leads Piper to see "La Resistance!" Down into the sewers, through the borders of the Wax King's domain, and down to the upper edge of the Under-Where [hee hee]. La Resistance proves to be three individuals who bear a suspicious resemblance to some of Piper's childhood toys: a little "rag doll" girl, a "stuffed pig" named Anderleaf in a flowery waistcoat, and Barbie's friend Midge. They're currently having tea on a packing crate under a single naked lightbulb.
La Resistance explains to Piper that she can summon ghosts, as they themselves are not really here, but the ghosts of toys remembered. Something strange is going on regarding the death of Herb Banocheck, something that has Officer Tock and even the Tacksman interested. The description of the nut sounds like a Tweener they know named Mad Max. (Tweeners are neither Awake nor Sleeper, but trapped between the two worlds. You usually find Tweeners raving to themselves at bus stops in the City Slumbering.) With no further clues, they recommend Piper seek prophesy.
Stitch takes her to the surface again. He buys a paper from a Paper Boy and points out a small article regarding Piper's escape from the Bobby and that she is still wanted for questioning. He chuckles over how he "snitched" Piper away from the Bobby.
Stitch then leads her to Mama Fortuna. Piper's own mother made a living as a false medium and psychic, and so Piper recognizes a number of tricks of the trade. Mama gets nothing from the crystal ball, so she tries a Tarot reading. It's a strange deck, but she reveals the following: the King of Cups (the Wax King) is in opposition with the King of Blades (the Tacksman) over the City (Mad City and the City Slumbering, two sides of a coin). Beneath the City is the Page of Wands (Piper, newly Awake). Mirroring the Tacksman and Wax King's opposition, Piper is torn between the Horizon Walker (a major arcana card of a man with long grey hair and out-stretched arms; "He represents new awareness and knowledge," Mama says) on the one hand. On the other... Mama Fortuna draws the last card, but casts it and the deck aside, refusing to continue the reading.
Leaving Mama's, Piper finds that Stitch has disappeared. At a loss, she decides to try to find a way home. She heads to her neighborhood in this mirror city, looking for a door. Instead, she finds a couple Pin Head G-men waiting in her building lobby. She gives them the slip. In the fight, she finds her gun is gone... snitched by Stitch?
She tries to buy another paper, but the Paper Boys want Wax King coins, or else $20. One of the Boys, Johnny, recognizes her from the newsies, and so sells her a paper for an autographed $1. According to the paper, Piper is still wanted for questioning, though now they've called out the Needle Nose hounds.
Piper summons Anderleaf the pig, who daintily sniffs around her and announces that, yes, she's being tracked based on the scent of her gun, snitched by Stitch. So he recommends she buy a new one to replace it... then her old one won't be hers anymore.
Back at the Bizarre Bazaar she trades, in the shadows, a memory of freedom and rain in exchange for a gun... that proves to be a ball-and-blackpowder model. Johnny the Paper Boy runs up to her in the crowd, waving his autographed $1, gloating that it'll be worth even more now, look... a new article in the paper says that there is now a warrant out for Piper due to "possession of evidence".
A Needle Nose trots by then, on the trail of something... but passes her by.
Then a mob of Paper Boys hurry past, cursing the Horizon Walker for "taking a bum again." Dashing after the Boys, she sees that they are following some bum with long grey hair. His clothes are stuffed with old newspapers... slips of which are falling out behind him, leaving a trail of headlines from the future. Dashing in, pulling off the Boys before they can dismember him, Piper draws her new gun. As the bum turns, she grabs him and recognizes him as the nut that killed Herb. She cries out, "It's you!" and there is a sudden connection between them. She can see something reflected in his eyes... a Tarot card... the opposition that wouldn't be shown by Mama Fortuna... but as she struggles to dive further in, to make sense of the vision, she passes out.
She awakes in the Bazaar, surrounded by a crowd muttering "Horizon Walker". The bum and the Paper Boys are gone, but, in their place, is a crowd of Bobbies, Pin Heads, and Needle Noses, who quickly surround Piper and haul her into a paddywagon bound for District 13!
There, she is hustled to a courtroom for trial. The Tacksman and his Pin Heads are there as audience. So is Stitch the Snitch, who continues to sob, "I'm sorry! I couldn't help it--I'm a Snitch!" so loudly that he is eventually evicted from the room. The prosecution argues that Herb was killed by the Horizon Walker with a blackpowder gun. Piper is the Horizon Walker (huh?) and possessor of said gun. Chronology seems to hold no weight here. In her defense, Piper summons the spirit of Herb himself, who exonerates her by agreeing that it was the bum Mad Max who shot him.
The prosecution tries to shift tacks--while Piper may not have been directly responsible, she was indirectly to blame. In the moment when she faced her assailant, she was slow (when we know she can be so fast), she passively let her partner come to her rescue (when we know her to be so capable), she failed to see the supernatural at work (when she is (now?) so comfortable existence). With this speech, realization comes. It's true, there is/was opposition to the awareness that is the Horizon Walker... an image comes to mind of a little girl in the shadow of a woman in a shawl holding a crystal ball... the same woman that was on the card she saw in the eyes of the Horizon Walker... the Charlatan... her mother.
The tiny judge in the huge wig bangs his gavel and dismisses the case. Somewhere outside, the clocks are chiming Thirteen.
Conclusion. We played for about 2.5 hours, I'd guess, which is our longest gaming session to date in any system. It is also the first story we've every finished. (Yay!) There was certainly a strong story focus--we only rolled for "combat" and "summoning", and that only occurred about 6 or 7 times.
Some of the elements I was proud of: Tweeners, Stitch, the Under-Where, Anderleaf, the folding over of time with the HW encounter. Others were a little weak--particularly the whole Charlatan thing at the end. I was attempting to build on what S. had already established--Piper's mother--as a psychological topic for further investigation. In the City Slumbering, her mother's shadow still affects her--as the prosecution pointed out--leading to a level of cynicism and a tough cop exterior. Yet, in Mad City, she has in many ways achieved what her mother always pretended--she can actually channel the spirits of the dead. And the first unconscious use of that power was to summon the spirits of her childhood--symbols of girlhood and innocence. But all this probably makes way more sense here than it did during the session, where we were both getting tired and just trying to finish things up.
I wouldn't mind returning to this storyworld. I think of this session as the pilot episode for a TV show that may or may not get canceled...
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.
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.
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