@ladylakira@dice.camp Hats hats hats.
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J. Walton
@ludopolitics@dice.camp
mastodon 4.7.3Asst Teaching Prof, CMU. Indie game designer, teacher, scholar, parent. ENG/中文.
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Joined October 30, 2022
Cult-favorite SoCal indie horror RPG designer Jesse Burneko has a new game on Kickstarter:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jburneko/haunted-4/
Highly recommended! Jesse is a master of making boutique creepiness that you don't want to miss, particular with spooky season coming up. Run, don't walk.
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Anyway, those were the games I dreamed last night. I definitely think Cyborg Swingers has some potential, at least!
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While one player plays a previously unknown kaiju, the others play humans reacting to the first kaiju attack. They panic, run around, flee, blame each other, etc. It may be helpful to play Blue Oyster Kult to time this phase.
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Skip a few days of in-game time.
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Scenes of humans recovering & making plans to strike back.
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Humans strike back! The human players move tiny military vehicles around the feet of the kaiju player and say "bam! pow! zap!" but this only enrages the beast.
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The beast slowly approaches the remaining tiny buildings & vehicles, arranged to represent a city. The human players run around, panic, hatch schemes, reveal their true natures, etc.
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Right as the kaiju starts to destroy the city... another kaiju awakens / appears / arrives, drawn by the destruction. Humans react.
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There's a kaiju standoff as they assess each other like boxers. Humans look on in awe/dread.
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Kaiju battle that destroys the city! Humans scream/cheer.
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Aftermath.
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@roleplayinggrenade @johnharper It's pre-AW, right? So you kind of have to distill the methods of how to run it from the evocative text, instead of it necessarily making everything completely explicit through GM moves & principles. But the combat & flashbacks basically run themselves. So if you're immersed in space marine vibes (whether 40K or Starship Troopers or Aliens), I think the rest should go pretty smoothly?
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@johnharper I've been thinking about 3:16 too, especially as a bunch of folks seem to have gotten back into painting 40K
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I can post more about these games later, if I try to make them real, but here's a brief summary:
EVIL CYBORG SWINGERS was about meeting a swinger couple that were basically the Borg, except they were entirely robotic, more like the villains in Matt Snyder's often-overlooked indie RPG classic 44: A Game of Automatic Fear, plus maybe some vibes from PK Lee 's classic dance larp about vampire-hunting dance robots from the future (called something like VAMPTRON 3000? can't quite remember).
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There were four main characters (1) evil masculine dominant robot swinger, who was assigned a stereotypical "bad boy" persona and actively seduces people into being assimilated, even if he doesn't always find that limited one-note role completely fulfilling, (2) evil feminine supportive robot swinger, with a stereotypical "good girl" persona, who feels bad about seducing people and assimilating them, but does it in a gentle, caring way that makes everyone feel pretty okay about it...
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...(3) a bored human wife, who misses the excitement of her youth and feels emotionally dissatisfied with her "nice guy" husband, but has a lot of guilt about her self-destructive attraction to dangerous or forbidden thrills, (4) the gentle "nice guy" husband, who was raised to resist the aggression and misogyny of traditional masculinity and never sowed wild oats, but also feels constantly disappointed that he can't be everything that his wife needs and also feels a bit too domesticated.
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So, basically the four characters are set up to be perfect foils for each other, and also to have an indirect conversation about gender norms & roles in modern society.
I don't know if it should be tabletop or larp thing, but I would want to inject some additional characters into it if I was going to finish it. Like, throw in two more couples -- a good "autobot" robot pair secretly trying to find and destroy the evil cyborgs, and a pair of human secret agents trying to destroy all robots...
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...and then let them all loose at each other in a "couples retreat" environment -- where they are constantly having affairs, being assimilated, being freed, being destroyed, etc., with either hidden information about true identities or complete transparency, depending on the vibes the players prefer. The game also needs a better name, like: "Mork Me Harder, Evil CyBorg Swingers!"
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WEIRD HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA was still about Dracula running a castle. But Dracula was actually a weird Lovecraftian cosmic demigod, who waged endless war with other weird cosmic demigods under an unnamed artificial code of conduct that made things more competitive and entertaining. The cosmic demigods consequently referred to themselves as "knights," for following this code, and had thrilling battles and intrigues for millions of years.
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However, Dracula grew tired of this and his army of lesser horrors needed some R&R, so he brings them all to a castle in the Carpathian Mountains, where they hang out and pretend to be very abnormal humans. That was the premise.
The gameplay, in turn, felt a bit like Yazeba's, in that it was an ensemble game with various horrors (including Drac himself) having interactions with each other and with the random groups of humans who regularly seemed to find their way into the mix of things.
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And other alien cosmic demigods and their servants would sometimes show up and not be sure if this was part of some cosmic war strategy by Dracula or if he was really on break or quitting.
The first part of the dream treated the premise seriously -- like it was prestige television -- but then the interactions because increasingly silly and comedic, more like the Hotel Transylvania movies. So in the end it felt like an anime series that had both serious and comedic elements.
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If I was going to carry this one forward, I think I would definitely ditch the overused Dracula parts and just have some cosmic horror settle down and then have to deal with humans (and visiting horrors) way more than they were anticipating.
I think you could do this with elements of PTA's and In a Wicked Age's episodic structures. But honestly it also sounds like it would require a lot more work to structure the game, unless I just left everything up to the players.
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@ladylakira Maybe the hats distinguish the humans from the monsters, since monsters don't wear hats?