Archive for the ‘actual play’ Category

Dead of Night: Bad Signal

Posted: September 18, 2010 in actual play, conventions, Dead of Night
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One of the games I ran last weekend at Concrete Cow was one of the scenarios I’m writing for a Dead of Night scenario supplement, Bad Signal.

The set-up was simple: it’s 1975 and Arizona is experiencing a record heatwave along with accompanying weird shit like electronics malfunctioning, tempers fraying and a weird signal in the static. Malc described it as Convoy meets the Crazies, although I like to think it had a fair bit in common with Duel too.

All of the players played truckers, all with complex personal lives of some sort or another:

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Endangered Species

Posted: July 20, 2010 in actual play, Dead of Night, design
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A guest blog by James Mullen.

I’ve wanted to run a zombie apocalypse game for a long time and the release of Dead of Night, 2nd edition seemed like the ideal opportunity to do so. The game I had in mind would riff off Max Brooks’ World War Z and Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, so it would be a long-running soap opera with Zombies, spanning weeks, months or even years of the characters’ lives in a post-apocalyptic world.

It was readily apparent that no one had ever run any sort of campaign using Dead of Night before, so the question was: would it work? My experience of running and playing in one shots suggested a high mortality rate and the rules only suggest refreshing 2 Survival Points for each character who survives to appear in a sequel session. If I was going to keep the characters alive for more than a session or two, I was going to need something extra to assist their survival.

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Games Expo preparation

Posted: May 25, 2010 in actual play, conventions, Dead of Night
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In a fortnight’s time it’s Games Expo, one of the UK’s best conventions. I’ll be there as part of the Collective Endeavour for the fourth year, debuting Dead of Night second edition. I’m also running a game of it but the automated booking system shows that games are filling up fast. There are still slots available in the following Collective Endeavour games (including mine), all run by the designers themselves:

Ends & Means (Covenant), run by Matt Machell at 10am on the Saturday

Unhallowed (Dead of Night), run by me at 3pm on the Saturday

Hell 4 Leather, run by Joe J Prince at 3pm on the Saturday

The Fir Tofa (Carnage Amongst the Tribes), run by Gregor Hutton at 10am on the Sunday

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Sinful Behaviour

Posted: April 2, 2010 in actual play, Dead of Night
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Last weekend I was at Concrete Cow, a great little games convention down in Milton Keynes. I ran a game of Dead of Night inspired by one of Paul Bourne’s illustrations, called Unhallowed. It was ostensibly a zombie survival movie, very much in the vein of 28 Days Later, albeit set in London after the war between heaven and hell has been fought. The tagline, “In the battle between good and evil, good lost”, should tell you all you need to know about it.

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