Apologia
This has been a busy week for me. Regular readers may have wondered where the heck I've been, and why the heck there aren't any new entries to read. This coming weekend is the annual MonCon games convention, and I'm slated to run two adventures. Since I later try to sell adventures which went well to publishers of role-playing games (RPGs), I put quite a bit of effort into adventure preparation. Character sheets describing the history, attitudes, and abilities of the player's alter-egos tend to run a page or two in length, and I have to take care to be explicit on motivational details. You never know how much improvisational skill you'll get from your players, so it pays to lead them by the nose in defining their characters' personalities.
So I've been spending the evenings when I normally write Never on Sunday preparing adventures. I'll let you take a sneak peek into what they involve. For those of you who don't know what an RPG is, it's sort of like improv theater. One person (the gamemaster, or GM) describes a situation while everybody else controls one important character in that situation, acting and reacting within his character definition. Normally, the players define their own characters, but at conventions, the GM usually provides those, too, since there is no time for character design in the slim four hours for an event.
The Lunatics are in the Hall is the serious adventure. The fictional Khomokashevo State Clinic for Mental Illness is a holdover from Soviet times, a combination asylum and prison for politically sensitive prisoners, deep, deep in the wastes of Siberia. For the past ten years or so, the clinic has been undergoing a phase-out. The staff has been allowed to retire without replacement, the dangerous ?Wing Two? patients were relocated two years ago, and funding, never great, has dribbled away to nothing at all. The players take the roles of the remaining handful of relatively normal ?Wing One? patients, waking unusually late one morning to discover that breakfast is not being delivered, and the facility is disturbingly still, even for eight total residents. Gradually, they emerge from their rooms to see what's going on? Well, the rest I'll have to keep secret, since Eileene puts these pages up for me, and she may want to play. Suffice to say, the players will have to face many stress checks ? see the next paragraph.
Not surprisingly for an adventure centered around the mentally ill, Lunatics places heavy emphasis on the psychological aspects of the situation. I wanted to pay so much attention to them that I am using an alternative rules system, Unknown Armies, rather than my favorite Over the Edge. UA has explicit rules for stress as it affects sanity. Every time a character faces certain universal stresses, like violence, social isolation, or helplessness, he either becomes increasingly hardened to that type of stress, or increasingly vulnerable. Neither is nice: too much hardening destroys one's humanity, but too much vulnerability leaves one unable to deal with life. The characters start dangerously close to one or both extremes. Heh, heh, heh.
The Monster in the Closet is a light-hearted romp, a sequel to my earlier Batteries Not Included. The players take the roles of a toddler's favorite toys, and must deal with the treat of the monster in the closet who has been ruining their little girl's dreams. Monster has much in common with the movie Toy Story and is a good adventure to play with Sunday morning burnout, where too much gaming and not enough sleep and a diet of caffeine and sugar have players a little punchy.
I hope to return Monday with interesting tales to tell of the convention. See you then.