So, wanna play Time Travelers, SuperHeroes/Villains, Lost Gods, Greek (& other) Heroes. Mostly for convention one shots. Any suggestions? Pitfalls or techniques to 'bring the awesome'. Also any suggestions on modifying the facts document and the questionaire?

I don't have the Facts & Reassurances sheet worked up yet. But here's the questionnaire I designed to do a hard-boiled detective story.

Recall how you became involved in the case
When I think of... I remember:..
What were your initial impressions of the case?

Recall when you knew you were in too deep.
When I think of… I remember:…
Why couldn’t you just walk away?

Recall how the case concluded.
When I think of… I remember:...
Who was the most guilty person?

Was justice served? Yes/No.

Jesse

here is a facts and reassurances document I've been working on, not done the questionaire yet

Facts & Reassurances
While Mnemosyne helps to break down the barriers between your mind
and the minds of your fellow patients, it also weakens the barriers between the
compartments of your mind. Memories, dreams, books, paintings—all of these
may mix together. To help you distinguish fact from fiction, we have prepared
this guide to the world you live in. You may treat the following statements
about the world as true:
-You are a supernatural being currently bound in Human Form. Somehow a group, individual or event has hidden your true nature not only from others but from yourself, you don't remember it but you are some manner of angel, spirit, demon or otherworldly entity currently restricted to a human body.
-It is the Twenty-First Century. That is not to say that you haven't possibly live for a significant amount of time compared to most humans, you may indeed have existed for many millenia, however if you have memories of super advanced technology or strange and sinister alien devices they are likely not of human origin.
- To Most people the world is a mundane place. People see wonders and terrors from simple and personal things, like the birth of a child or the death of a loved one. But to a lucky few there are wonders and terrors in this world that are beyond mortal imagination, gods, angels, demons, spirit, faeries and all many of other supernatural creatures roamthe world and the spaces between worlds. If you have memories of magic, supernatural beings or otherworldly landscapes, do not immediately dismiss them as fantasy.

Renato, thanks for passing that along! That is a really helpful idea. I think I'll be hosting a game of Penny again next week, and was considering how we'd build on the success of our last game (which used the Shadow Out Of Memory playset). I feel like getting channeled a bit by genre convention really helps deal with the deer-in-headlights effect that playing very open-ended story games tends to create. That's a cool trick for making lower-key constraints.

Posted By: Ryan Macklin

Posted By: ccreitz(which used the Shadow Out Of Memory playset)

Is there any AP of that? You're the first person I'm aware of who has used the alternate ones from the book.

sigh. For small children-related reasons, I'm several sessions behind on AP posts. We've played a great game of Fiasco, had a decent playtest of my own new game, and had a revelatory session of Penny, all since my last AP writeup, and all of them had good lessons learned. Oh, and there was also the great game of "My Uncle the Baron" with two guys who had never played any sort of story game or RPG in general.

I'll get on that, maybe later today.

So, six days later than I expected... AP. John, Kathy and I played The Shadow Out Of Memory. Relevant facts:

• Both of them have played CoC with me before, and I knew buy-in for a horror game would be high


• We've played a few satisfying sessions of Fiasco, so we were confident about GMlessness


• We had, just minutes before, completed a playtest of my new GM-less game, without issues


• We prefer tight narrative constraints, which help to avoid deer-in-the-headlights situations


• All of us enjoy (sorry, need to say it) Story Now play when appropriate

The learn-as-you-go, zero-prep rules structure where the Reader teaches the rules in play was completely awesome. Everyone understood what was going on right away, as soon as we had finished the first question and answer. Paul totally hit that out of the park!

Although it didn't come up in our game, we did note with approval the ingenious mechanism to bail out players who are having trouble contributing: if you get lapped because you're not getting coins, then when the other players "I will help you remember" you, they give you additional narrative constraint, helping you get started on more solid footing. Brilliant! Speaking of which, we loved the ritual phrases, which clearly call attention to the places where you need to interact while simultaneously reinforcing the framing device. In particular, we used "Are you sure?" a few times at the beginning to reach agreement on the pacing of the stories and the bounds we'd use for what decisions required input; that was also cool, like using an accented downbeat in music jamming to get everyone back onto the same page if they start wandering. As a final technique note, I'd like to point out that if three people play, then everyone is involved in every game-mechanical action, which might be ideal. We thrived on the constant collaboration.

As to ephemera: to save space at the table, we put the memory trigger slips into the same bowl as the pennies. We cut up pages from a pocket notebook into thirds, which was the perfect size for triggers.

Drift: As it turned out, we had a couple of pairs of nearly identical memory triggers. We laughed, said "The drug works!" most emphatically, and decided to draw a new slip. I suppose it would have been cool to see what our different stories did with similar triggers, too! But seeing more triggers was fun. Also, I diked out the part in the F&R document about it being the 1920s. We went present day instead, as we always do when playing CoC. This did not present any problems in play.

The part no one cares about but us: Our stories were of radically different tones, which was really awesome. Kathy's story involved her encounters with a sort of animate meat that infects flesh and liberates it from bodies. It was pretty nasty splatterpunk! The funny thing is that at the beginning of the game, she had asked, "How do they know to give us this F&R, that mentions that we were in some Lovecraftian jam?" Answer, in her case: the suspicious amateur arm amputation! John's was a more reflective story about a man who lost his love, and was haunted by creatures of embodied loss, who had tried to initiate him into their number by effecting his girlfriend's death. Mine was more traditionally Lovecraftian — tainted blood, hereditary priesthood of a Thing That Should Not Be, pursued by a cult that wanted me to lead them (and it was a struggle for me not to give in, due to the tainted blood aforementioned).

An idea that should have crossed my mind much, much earlier: Insomniacs from the Don't Rest Your Head setting, all with erased memories after flipping out bad.

It could easily be used to generate starting characters for a DRYH campaign, maybe starting them at Permanent Madness 1.

Maybe I'll elaborate more later :)

Posted By: ccreitzThe funny thing is that at the beginning of the game, she had asked, "How do they know to give us this F&R, that mentions that we were in some Lovecraftian jam?

I love it when people pick up on the subtle questions the game doesn't answer. :D

Fantastic AP, Colin. Thank you very much.

Posted By: renatoramMaybe I'll elaborate more later :)

And I'll be here clicking on Reload every five seconds until you do.

Hope y'all don't mind me resurrecting an old thread... I'm a new guy!

I'm also cross-posting from the BGG forums, where I'm active, but I figured I could get a better response over with y'all.

Anyway, enough with the intro: I'd like to solicit ideas for a horror-oriented session to play at this week's game night, in honor of Halloween.

I'm thinking that the Facts & Reassurances can stand as it is, adding an additional "fact": You are currently incarcerated in an Asylum for the Criminally Insane". The rest can be set up the same, with folks who are amnesiac 'cos of the trauma they endured: did they really perpetrate vile acts, or were they the sole survivor of a hellish incident, too psychically damaged to protest when they were arrested?

Then, I was thinking the Questionnaire could follow roughly the same arc, with a good memory, a bad memory, and the incident which occurred.

What're the thoughts of folks who've played the game? (Or have only, like me, read the rules and can't wait to try 'em...) Any other Facts & Reassurances to add? Or other interesting Questionnaire questions?

Please, my friends call me "Holmes!" :)

Yeah, Cthulhu-esque could be hip, for sure, but I'm thinking more in line with a slasher movie vibe, staying away from paranormal stuff. That's why I like the basic F&R that says the world is normal and so are you... I'd like to take it to a Silence of the Lambs kind of thing, where we're getting into the heads of people who have either perpetrated or been involved in evil deeds...