All quiet on the eastern front

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.