Tuesday Dead of Night Tryout
As mentioned in my previous post, I ended up running a game of Dead of Night yesterday, by Merwin Shanmugasundaram and Andrew Kenrick, and published by Andrew's company Steampower Publishing.
So the situation was that at the last minute, the GM of our GURPS supervillains game cancelled. So I invited the other two players, Jesse and Peter, over for some random sort of gaming. I had previously GMed a WWII soldiers game using Greg Stolze's NEMESIS, but I was not interested in that. I suggested Dead of Night as an alternative. I briefly explained the rules, and they were clearly set on playing the monsters. So I suggested two of the five pre-written scenarios with multiple monsters -- and the picked the first.
To summarize non-spoiler-y first, we had a bunch of fun, and it absolutely lived up to its claim as a pick-up-and-play pocket roleplaying game. I used a scenario and monster stats from the book, printed out character sheets, and we wrapped up the adventure in around two hours. I had previously reported on two quick games I played of DoN in my End Game April 2006 Mini-Con Report.
An important difference here was that the players were playing the monsters. Thus, I read them both the complete background and overview of the book scenario -- whereas playing humans in the con, a big part was figuring out what was going on. They copied in the monster stats from the book. So there was virtually no hidden GM-only information here. I also thought it went better than the con games, though I did have a controlled set of players whom I knew.
So, of the two choices, they agreed to the first, which was "The Shadow of the Pharoah" -- about a new Egyptian exhibit in the history museum in the generic town of Chaddlestone. The scenario by default is for the players to play human characters involved with the exhibit. But for this, I read the background notes directly to the players explaining the full situation. The scenario is that there is an evil pharoah who was killed by his guards. He was buried in an unmarked tomb, while his chief bodyguard was buried in his royal tomb. The modern discovery of the tomb awakened the pharoah's mummy, who killed the archaeologist in charge (Winslow Batty) and took his place using supernatural disguise. Meanwhile, though, the bodyguard would awaken as well.
They interpreted this as the traitorous bodyguard being the "good mummy" and the pharoah being the "evil mummy". Jesse took the bodyguard Tutankmosis, and Peter took the pharoah Ramhotep IV. I printed out character sheets, and they copied down the stats for the two creatures: a mummy and a regal mummy.
What I did was quickly jot down names and stats for some human characters to appear. My two starting characters were Dr. Jerome Wolf, museum curator and rival to Dr. Batty, and Nina Batty, his ward and a high school senior. From there, we mostly just went off and switched scenes.
Following general role-playing advice, when Peter asked if there were any suspicious characters in the audience for his speech, I came up with some and soon introduced Will Markham -- Nina's college boyfriend, a football jock. Soon, Nina and Will were sneaking into the museum to investigate since she felt that her guardian Winslow was behaving very oddly. In the big picture, this was mostly a fight between the two mummies which the humans did little about, but they each picked up on things to do besides just battle with each other.
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jhkimrpg) wrote,
