Steampower Publishing

I mentioned the game of Dead of Night I ran at Furnace the other week, Salford’s Lot, in my last post, so thought I’d post a quick actual play about what happened as it was a great  fun game. The premise of the scenario was a simple one – the victims were all teenage members of a coven, dabbling in things that they do not understand. Last night they summoned something they could not put down. Tonight two of the coven have not turned up and riots are sweeping the town. Go!

Partly because I hadn’t had time to prep characters, and partly because the last time I had the players make up a relationship map to tie their characters into the story – Grendel, Alaska, from Indiecon a few years back – it created an awesomely compelling game, I had the players create characters to fit the premise. As they created characters, I made them tie themselves to each other on a relationship map in the middle of the table, to the two members who had not turned up, as well as add additional NPCs to the map too.

You can see the relationship map above (click for a closer look).

As I’d hoped for, we ended up with a great cast of characters:

Raven (real name Rachel) Harris, who was Julianne’s best friend and heavily into the magic.

Josh Fellowes, Raven’s boyfriend, who is the only one with a job and a reluctant participant.

Alan “Carver” Harris, Raven’s cousin and Josh’s best friend, who is jealous of all the time he spends with the coven.

Ollie Freeman, a troubled teenager who has problems distinguishing reality from fiction.

Ann-Marie de Pouvre, Raven’s exchange student, who is convinced it’s all scientific, but can use magic anyway.

As I mentioned last time, I gave them the option of taking a supernatural specialisation to represent their magical knowledge but, interestingly, only two of them took me up on it. The others were happy to be non-magic using members of the coven.

They also created quite a few NPCs:

Julianne, the founder of the coven, now missing with their magic grimoire.

Simon, Julianne’s boyfriend, whose basement flat they meet in, also missing.

Louise, Raven’s little sister, who she often has to babysit for.

Billy Hunt, a hooligan who Alan looks up to and is beaten up by.

And a few others, who never came into it. I do like creating NPCs for a scenario like this, as the players all know who you’re talking about when you introduce one of them – no blank looks and people struggling to remember names – and I end up with a ready-made stack of victims to kill off that the players actually care about. Call me heartless…

We kicked off with the coven assembling in Simon’s flat, the door slightly ajar and neither Simon, Julianne nor the grimoire anywhere to be seen. And I’ll tell you what happened next in part 2!