Go Play Brisbane was held over the weekend. You can see the remnants of it at the site. Overall I'm pleased with how it worked out.
As a GM, I stretched myself in two areas. First, I ran Space Rat for the first time. This is a simple and clever system (as I've written about before) and was fun to run. Everyone laughed - a lot. In fact, it didn't take much to keep the laughs flowing for 3 solid hours of gaming. In fact, I laughed more at this game of Space Rat than I've ever laughed at a sitcom. It's official: you get more laughs-per-dollar with Space Rat than with sitcoms.
The second stretch area was the Don't Rest Your Head game. I don't watch horror movies or read horror novels, as a general rule, so I'm not completely familiar with the tropes of horror. Typically, I run DRYH as an exhaustion game with very little horror content. This time I changed my tactic and brought the horror to the foreground. When things were getting a little light-hearted, dismemberment entered the conversation. When the players began to forget the sorrow and drive of their characters (beneath the surface... keeping you awake...) I put their related NPCs (the missing child or wife) in a torturous situation. It was my attempt at visceral horror, and I think it worked. The players stopped smiling and reconnected with their characters. Don't get me wrong; I wanted them to enjoy the game, but it's a horror game and from time to time I pushed the horror up to eleven.
And then, after the high of running games, I rediscovered the post-game crash. Those adrenaline cycles can be a real bummer.
Monday, 27 April 2009
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When running a horror game, consider the words of wisdom imparted by one of the great horror writers of the late 20th century, Stephen King (in terms of book sales this is pretty much undisputed even if you aren't a particular fan of his literary skill).
In his work on the horror genre "Danse Macabre" he wrote that he strives to bring the emotional and subliminal terror of great authors such as Poe and Lovecraft, when he can't bring that he aims to bring the horror through more visceral means, and when he can't get that to work he just resorts to the gross out factor.
I'm paraphrasing here, but you get this idea.If you can work all three levels of disturbance into your games then you're on the right track. If players don;t get the deeper horror just move to the more blatant form until you hit something that gets a reaction.
It works for me...and who am I to argue with one of the highest selling authors of all time.
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