Last night, our Monday night voip/rp group decided we would attempt to hack Don't Rest Your Head. The idea is to try to flip the mechanics towards a fairy tale type story with a push and pull between the fae and the real world.

We're going to try to "playstorm" this hack next Monday and see how it goes. Right now i'm just riffing on things and would love to hear some feedback on how to shoehorn DRYH mechanics. Right now what we're looking for in a game is: a sort of Gaiman 'Stardust', Delieria, Princess Bride, Zorcerrer of Zo, Alice in Wonderland, Labrynth, Brian Froud, Phantom Tollbooth, Winnie the Pooh, and a Changeling experience.

Initial notes towards a scenario:

Don't Lose Your Innocence

Just beyond the daffodils–further, to where the lilting breeze stops short and the blue sky can finally stand no more is a place where the clouds cough black and the trees bend and writhe, there sits a merciless kingdom. A timeless land of passionless fugue, filled with graying sun and a hoarse wind. At its heart, a city of rusty spires and spidery ramparts. It is a place all children recall from feverish dreams and whispered in hickory switches, a place called the Goblin Market.

Here, metal turbines gnash and burr with a most horrible shriek. These worn gears and cogs pound the pulse of the city. Since the dawn of time, These mills have served one purpose: to grind the hopes and dreams of children.

Within an airless, dank chamber glows the eyes of the Goblin King. Stolid and small, his mouth filled with teeth–and those teeth filled with teeth–the Goblin King takes a dram of a fine powder into his fist. This powder is the only product the Goblin Market produces. It smells of castor oil, burnt tar, old shoes and pepper. It is twice as fine as water and ten times hotter than live coals. It is said that it is made with tears and promises. Centuries have perfected the process of production. There is more of this stuff than there is oxygen to breath.

The Goblin King licks his cracked dry lips and snorts violently at the air. In this instance, his joy is as undeniable as it is horrible to witness.

The Goblin Market accepts no coin and yet it trades all day. The Goblin King licks his scaly paw and blows the dust into the air where it hisses and pops before it dissipates into the same sticky fog that pervades this land. Just a pinch of this stuff was enough to sunder glittering Camelot; they say a spoonful caused the stars to cry for forty days and nights; and the very mention of it is enough to render the inevitable to impossible. This is where they manufacture Doubt.

instead of insomnia / insanity. i'm trying to frame the discussion around wonder and innocence in against a land of doubt and disillusion.

i've only just recently looked at the DRYH mechanics. Jeff Coyler, John Lammers and Rustin Simons will also be on board. At least two of them have played the game before and will have a better idea of what's needed there.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear any advice about the hack or how to handle it.

thanks,

eric

Hey there D-K!

you know, yesterday i was puzzling over a similar situation, thinking of how to make a great fairy tale game which stays true to what i love about those stories... something i came up with was that the threat of violence is there, but if it ever occurs it turns out poorly for the protagonist, very one-sided. or at least, it's clear at the get-go whom the violence is targeting; the kids are putting the witch in the oven or the witch is putting the kids in, there's no struggle.
so, thinking about games where the protagonists start off as lower status than the world around them (ie, they're on the run or are generally in danger and outnumbered and so on) i immediately thought of DRYH.
and so i began joking with myself about "Don't Forget Your Manners".
The name i settled on for my project was "Don't Lose The Path", though mine is hacking another game as well, taking a chunk off of the new Changeling (which i'm pretty sure they got from Sorcerer). i don't think i'll stay with it though: especially now that you and your crew can do work that i can benefit from!

what i mean to say is, i'm excited about the direction you're taking this-
i'll follow the progress.

...i can see that annoyance with games that never lighten up. i'll add to that my annoyance with every game seeming to revolve around violence.
and i still don't get to slaughter orcs. pfff. what the hell.

Jeff pointed me to this thread at rpg.net

specifically:

Fatespinner:

Re: A DRYH challenge thread!
Another idea is that Exhaustion maps to imagination and Madness to magic. Your imagination allows you to do things and wonders by shaping the world around you. Magic on the other hand allows you to use the native powers of the land and draws you into it...slowly making you a citizen of the land.

The idea is roughly based on Grimm, where kids are trapped in a world made of fairy tales. Their imagination allows them to affect the world and magic can bind them to the land.

With DRYH it will feel different..but more like Horror and a wierd world experience.

and

buddha:

I guess I don't see it that way... The mechanics are built to actually feed off of one another, but it's purely color that that it leads to a dark doom-laden end for our heroes... But, I guess I should put my money where my mouth is and take Scattercat's challenge!

Okay; Don't Rest Your YA Fantasy it is! I'm thinking the kids transported to a magical fantasy land where they become heroes sort of thing...

Discipline becomes Responsibility.

Exhaustion becomes either Maturity (if you want the game to be about growing up and putting childish things behind you) or The Dark (if you want it to be about cool adventures and finding your inner strength). I'm more interested in the adventure side of things, so I'll run with the Dark... All of the kids have heroic Talents, or Virtues, tied into the Dark Track... as the Dark rises and things get more dangerous, the kids rise to meet the challenge!

When The Dark increases or Dominates (every time a point gets added) some aspect of the Enemy manifests. When the Dark has fully risen (i.e. one of the kids snaps and/or the adventure reaches its conclusion) the Enemy appears! Snapping can represent the kid being defeated, going temporarily over to the Dark side, or just being caught unprepared when the Enemy attacks... It doesn't take you out of play unless you're cool with that, but it does mean you suffer the effects of "Doubt" (?) Responsibility 1 and no Talents for at least a day, and he becomes a beacon to the Dark, open to its temptations and efforts to kidnap the child.

Madness becomes Wonder: representing all the magic and goodness that the kids discover... naturally they find they have hidden talents and destinies, or they get nifty magical gifts since they are the "Chosen Ones".

When Wonder dominates something magical happens to the kid. If three magical things happen, the kid gains a point of permanent Wonder, which replaces one of their Responsibility dice. If all the kid's Responsibility becomes Wonder, they become a creature of the other world, tied to it forever and unable to go back to the real world (perhaps they become a wise and benevolent ruler, or find themselves bonded to the primeval Forest). They will become an NPC after one last adventure, perhaps to later reappear to counsel new heroes.

Okay... how was that? Did I miss anything? Ah, yeah, the Questions.... let's see:

What's been troubling you? This should be real life issues that will end up being metaphorically represented in the Fantasy World
How did you and your friends come to be here? Something to tie you all together...
What side of you do adults see?
What would your friends say about you?
What is your greatest strength? This will tie into or be your Virtue.
What are your weaknesses? This is how the Dark will tempt/fool you.
What's happening right now?

ultimately that thread points back to SG, which i found amusing in its synergy.

thanks tomg. to be fair, the quote above was Jeff Coyler's (forlorn1) from his and my private exchanges about trying to stitch this damn thing together for next week. We are, however, very much on the same page.

i shouldn't be so amazed (and yet i am) that this meme is pervasive and that so many people have similar needs and are coming to similar conclusions with the material. I like the outline of Twisted Rhymes, Nursery Crimes.

Note to self:

bibliography, add: Willow and Time Bandits

Don't Rest Your Head online dice roller (in case i can't hack Vassal in time): http://www.redkingdreams.com/dice/dryh.cgi

That sounds very interesting, and I'll look forward to hearing how it turns out. Or there's always Back in Time for Tea: Bacchanal for children.

Over at camp Innocence we've had a few developments overnight:

Rustin has come up with an alternative scenario where the DRYH team youth wants to stay asleep in fae realm. hard to describe as anything other than Little Nemo-esque. That's on the table. It's not providing yet the solid reality that we're trying to pre-load into the scenario.

There's some discussion amongst us as to what the exact relationship between Exhaustion and Madness is thematically and mechanically. Both lead similar paths narratively. Is that necessary? Can they divorce? The reason this is important is that if we use (for example) whatever maps to Exhaustion as the pull for the magical npc (thing Tinkerbell again) then you have a scenario where Tink has to slowly enter the story and be reused in order to gain in dice pool power and become more and more effective. Since we are basically developing a one-shot hack. An advantage here is that when the Tink dice shoot the moon... you've either a: had her step in front of the goblin's axe and take a hit for the team, or in a varying scenario b: perhaps the children accrue some sort of "lack of wonder" where they can no longer See or Command the fae realm because of doubt or growing up or what have you.

Currently, I'm fighting for a mechanical change to Discipline. We are looking at fracturing Discipline into Major and Minor chords. This is a way to immediately add flavor to characters rather than start them all on a level field. Fred describes "normals" as having Discipline 1 or 2 dice and pcs starting with 3 dice. In the spirit of kid movies, where there are immediate archetypes: the smart one; the fat one; the pretty one; the fast one; the wealthy one, i thought it might be cool for the characters to have a standard value of 2 dice with a major value of 3. Meaning that dragging your character's leading attribute into the scene will yield an immediate mechanical benefit. The "fat kid" could still disarm the bomb, but he'd have to use an extra Madness die to have the same level of success as the "smart kid". Or, i suppose, he could just choose to eat it. The major chord would be an attribute entirely up to the player's creation. Both will fall under the category of Discipline (or what it maps to).

If this gets tight it would make a cool supplement for DRYH. I'd buy it since I love to run these kind of games at cons and DRYH scratchs me in all the right spots for pick up games.

Jeff Coyler has added Terry Pratchett's "Wee Free Men" to our bibliography. It has most of the qualities of our design goals.

here's a screen shot of the vassal layout i'm working towards for Monday night's trial. I'm no Brennen Reece but at least it's not totally a sham.




vassal requires an intro page... here's ours:

thanks tomg, similar to that one of the things that we were contemplating was a switch between our Curiosity level and the Doubt level dependent either on age of the character (as the char ages doubt increases) or mapping it some other how.
...

so the train officially started moving forward tonight with five of us reviewing everything and hacking things out further on Vassal.

Here are the three of the children characters generated tonight...

the questions have been remapped to not load the situation for campaign play but to develop sense of self and precarious formation. most of them are framed in a way where the answers can be either wildly metaphysical or very mundane. A push and pull is good. The chargen was done in the round and as such people loaded traits from one char into the next to help build synergy. our design goal again is for short form play so all the characters need to be tight knit from the get go.

curiosity works as a better frame than discipline for the age range. as such the third die is only rewarded for the child's "aspect". Doubt (nee Exhaustion) is mapped to Curiosity in that the Doubt Trait is that Curiosity major chord taken to its extreme but plausible conclusion. We worked up examples of these pairings and i'll list them later. The game physics of this is the interaction with the fae realm is augmenting the child's natural inclination. As mentioned above we may further map Curiosity and Doubt as a flex state but real play will dictate if this is necessary.

Beguile is a general pool for the children to call upon the fae npc/guardians that are helping them through the story. There will be no Beguile talent (an error on my part for the present char sheet). All the children for now will be able to access the npcs equally. Pulling them into the story deeper and deeper as they go. Any one player's crashing the Beguile pool results in death or permanent removal of the npc in use at that moment (I'm somewhat notorious and fond of using the axe in the head of Peter Pan analogy. ok, it was funny at the time.)

Gumption and Guile will be the two options instead of the pool of three for Fight/Flight. They are gentler resolutions and fit in the theme of the play we're after. And because it's a shorter format, initially i'm setting it up as one of each.

Wishes are a hack of the scar reroll mechanic. We are going to move wishes to boxes besides the questions. You will get 3 wishes amongst the, currently, 5 questions that you can exhaust for a reroll. Exhaustion will allow the GM to drag in your deepest fears/expose your secret... etc.








...

because we are sticking with the npc as the element of madness that the players have as their defense and offense in the fae realm and at home we're gong to have to create some mechanics for what i'm calling a Faerie Burner. Players are going to pre-create the help that will manifest in the story. This will put some burden on the GM to not be able to pre-progam the play as well but we'll also do some minor pre-burn of a minor villain that will help to get things started.

For example: in our run through tonight. We generated a long list of possible npcs to help us on our way. We settled on: Magical Origami, which springs to life from the pages of secret tome (crashing Beguiling will force the book to exhaust its pages or otherwise be destroyed) and we wanted some animal theme too so we have chosen an army of pixie-ish moths that will help us (I've described this as Queen Luna of the moths along her nightly visit across the sky). Our bad guy is going to be the Administrator of the orphanage that we're all from. She's really an employee of the Goblin King and the reason that children are being taken.

Jeff will go off and come up with GM ideas based on this pre-load. Some of us will make minor updates to our characters. I can discuss further later some of the notes taken and how we fleshed out more of the chargen and blocked the questions.

A hopefully more cogent follow-up to last night's ramble to get some stuff updated and out.

thanks for the posivtive fb, Jeff. I thought the jam session went pretty well. if for no other reason than to drag everyone onto the same page. i probably should reread the hacks at the top of the page in reference to how we've divvied things up and see how it sits today.

re Faerie Burning. At present we're mapping one npc to every two players. an npc can be an army of moths or it can be an animated rocking horse (family dog, Peter Pan, Puff the Magic Dragon, etc.) The reason for this is that none of the players get particularly precious about ownership of the interaction in the narrative. It also, hopefully creates a group-think about protecting each others Beguile (Madness) levels to not exhaust them. There's some talk that Faerie Burning will include some sort of Aspect tree that will also help define the npcs to the players and the gm. The Aspect tree will be a later concern.

trying to figure out the relationship between Curiosity and Doubt is still our most vexing. Mechanically, Curiosity has its major chord which is the narrative lead for the player to drag in the extra (3rd) die. the Doubt trait is then a nearly super-state of this major chord as justified by some taint of the Fae realm. Closer to the magic exaggerates the character's natural ability etc.

the Elizabeth character is the only one that is successfully mapped on the above character sheet. Her major Curiosity chord is Mannered. Her Doubt trait is Defining. The way this is envisioned for play is that she'll get an extra die for being prim and proper and correct. As game play ensues and she's being chased or confronted with problems the Defining trait will be brought in so that Elizabeth no longer reiterates etiquette but sort of dictates it. It's not been played yet but i imagine this manifesting as: Elizabeth wants to drag in a bunch of Doubt dice into play as the party is being pursued by the goblin horde. If she wins she's able to Define something in our favor... so, perhaps the Goblin horde always marches with their shoes untied and ranks of them end up tripping into each other as the children (or Elizabeth) make their escape.

The interrelationship of these two traits is key to character set up. Some examples so far:

intuitive to clairvoyant
smart to brainiac
observant to photographic memory (perhaps all-seeing)
pickpocket to master thief
loyal to self sacrificing
cruel to evil genius
charming to glamour/beloved
charming to inner glow
sneaky to invisible (unseen)
daring to swashbuckling
mannered to defining

generating more of these is going to help us significantly box in how play develops. would love to hear if anyone else has some thoughts on this.

forlorn1 and i had a good conversation about where next to go with all of this tonight. some further movement away from the mother game is in store...

our Beguile trait (nee Madness) will now become a group trait. Again, con play. With this volatile pool now a communal property there should be faster and more group oriented pull of the Fae into the narrative.

we're going to work out some pacing mechanics to create, as Jeff likes to call it, a Bell Curve for the story shape. Where in DRYH the GM uses despair coins vs the hope coins we are going to have a static pool of Beguile dice that the players can call on. As the GM spends his Trouble dice / despair coins the players will gain in their Beguile dice pool. As this is a limited resource, the questions that we are mapping to Wishes (nee Scars) will now also double for either burning them to reroll or to allow for more Beguile dice. The expense will force the character to narrate the question into the situation to some extent.

I'm playing with the idea of Chapters in the rounds. This will help control the Trouble dice for the GM. Introductory Narration will rotate to the character to the left who will block the initial scene. The Chapter will be loaded with an some narrative expectation set off by the GM. An example would be "Red must get to Grandma's house with wolf." And the player could start anywhere but all would have to work generally towards the Chapter goal.

there's been a little talk of making the Fae aspects one-shot usage. not sure if that'll hold.

Finally, We're wondering about endgame. Is it always win-win? if not then how? The dice loading between Trouble dice and the group Beguile pool should help us build the tension towards the player character but this clearly needs better development. Some talk of a Roanoke type multiple victory conditions if x is fulfilled or x+1, etc. is on the table. Also an option that your "final" wish might be some auto-lose burn situation like the last trait in 316 where in this case you need to narrate the loss of your character's goal. this is messy.

With the Beguile pool now in the group domain, I am addressing the pacing of the Fae npcs. Children's book stories usually introduce the fantastic systematically. We may decide to have a troupe of npcs in the middle of the table that can be called on from chapter to chapter pending on whether the Beguile pool dominates.

the hunt goes on.

It's good to see your progress. I appreciate you keeping me informed. I'm still working on my DRYH variant/scenario too. Not nearly as along as you though. It looks good. I wish I could drop in on Monday.