Archive for the ‘Dead of Night’ Category

Art Preview: Hide

Posted: April 27, 2010 in Dead of Night
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As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we’ve had some of Paul’s illustrations printed as postcards. The first of these,  Hide, arrived at the weekend so I thought I’d share with you the picture, which Paul coloured specially for the promo. On the back of each of the postcards I’ve had a bit of text printed too, giving you an overview of the (fake) movie and some advice on turning it into a scenario.

This text actually comes from the Genre chapter of the book, which dissects about a dozen different horror genres, giving you advice for using Dead of Night to emulate them. Each genre also comes packaged with a sample movie, describing the plot of the movie and an overview of how you’d run it as a scenario. Hide is the sample movie for the Slasher genre, so should give you a glimpse at how the chapter is shaping up.

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Monster Mash

Posted: April 22, 2010 in Dead of Night, design
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One of the chapters that has been expanded the most is the Monsters chapter, which tells you all that you need to know to make your own monster. I touched on this back in my first post where I talked about Monstrous Archetypes, and these form the core of this chapter.

Rather than just present a selection of fully formed monsters (although I do that as well, but we’ll talk about that another time), I strip it back a bit so that horror movie archetypes are all represented. Each archetype encompasses a  ‘template’ of sorts that helps guide you when making your own monster.

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Size Matters

Posted: April 20, 2010 in Dead of Night, publishing
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One of the key design considerations with Dead of Night II was the physical size of the finished book. What size and format should it be printed in? Is this something designers normally consider? I don’t know, but with  Dead of Night it’s a real biggie (no pun intended). For those of you who aren’t familiar with Dead of Night, the the first edition book was truly pocket-sized – about 4 inches x 5 inches, if I recall correctly.

This was a great gimmick – hell, I’m the first to admit to the fact that when I started writing it, that was all there was to the game – and worked wonders at grabbing people’s attention when it was sitting on the stall at a convention. The end result is achieved, the book is in the hands of the punter and half the battle is won. Great, surely?

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The More Things Change…

Posted: April 15, 2010 in Dead of Night, design
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So, ever since I previewed the cover earlier in the week, I’ve been asked the same question about Dead of Night: what’s changing in the new edition?

The game, at its heart, is still the same game. The mechanics all work in pretty much the same way with a couple of differences – you don’t just lose survival points to combat checks now, but to any check designated “risky”, be that escaping from the werewolf into the woods or chanting a powerful magical ritual. There are also Bad Habits, which I touch upon in more detail here.

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Art Preview: Dead of Night Cover

Posted: April 12, 2010 in artwork, Dead of Night
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With last week’s preview of Unhallowed, you should have a taster of the style and look of the interior art. This week I thought it time to unveil the front cover, again by Paul. The cover of the first edition, by Eric Lofgren, was a really distinctive image, depicting a pack of werewolves tearing apart a victim.

When approaching the cover for the second edition, I wanted to capture some of the imagery of the first edition, so I asked Paul to “put a werewolf on it”. No doubt this caused some howling and gnashing of teeth (no pun intended), as Paul explained to me, “Fur can be a pain to render.”

Well, as you’ll see from the finished results, it was worth the wait for me… and hopefully the pain for Paul!

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Con-Quest

Posted: April 9, 2010 in conventions, Dead of Night
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I’ll be at the first ever Con-Quest tomorrow, a new games convention in the East Midlands in the centre of Derby. A few of my friends are running it, and they have high ambitions, so it’ll be good to go and support them. I’ll be in the games hall in the afternoon running a game of Dead of Night second ed. I’m running Unhallowed, which will be featured in the book, so if you fancy seeing how the new edition is shaping up then pop along and join the game.

Art Preview: Unhallowed

Posted: April 5, 2010 in artwork, Dead of Night
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I made passing reference in my post about running Unhallowed that it was inspired by Paul Bourne’s illustration. Rather than leave the illustration to your imagination, I’ll post it up here. The game is about ready (it goes to Paul for layout) in a couple of weeks and the art is all in, so I thought it a good time to start showing it off in all its glory.

I had quite a strong concept for the art when I started chatting about it with Paul – I wanted each of the ten illustrations to be a fake movie poster, complete with credits and critical acclaim. Paul took this idea and ran with it, delivering a series of posters that absolutely blew me away. Each could be for a real movie, and I’d pay good money to see each of them at the cinema (or at the very least, on straight-to-video DVD).

Right, without further ado, the movie poster for Unhallowed is behind the cut. I’ll be posting up more illustrations, as well as the stunning cover, over the next few weeks.

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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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Bad Habits

Posted: April 1, 2010 in Dead of Night, design
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Not much has changed with the rules for Dead of Night second edition, but one area that I’ve tweaked are the characters themselves. Victims in Dead of Night still have attribute pairs, specialisations and survival points, same as ever, but players can also choose a bad habit or two.

Think of a bad habit as a horror movie cliche personal to that character. So a character might have the bad habit “sneaks out for a cigarette at every opportunity”, and when they sneak off for a fag when they should be guarding the camp, they earn a survival point. It’s a simple enough rule, and hardwires in certain behaviours to each character.

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Monstrous Archetypes

Posted: April 1, 2010 in Dead of Night, design
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I’m working on the second edition of Dead of Night at the moment, my game of b-movie horror. Amongst the many refinements, one of the things I want to do is to streamline the way monsters are handled. Rather than have a vague system of creating a monster and a grab-bag of samples, some more handy than others, I’ve worked up a list of monstrous archetypes that each encompass a different type of monster.

I”ve managed to narrow the list to nine archetypes, and I’m fairly sure that you can fit most monsters into one of the archetypes. So, with that in mind, can you think of any monsters that I haven’t accounted for? Any archetypes that seem redundant or superfluous?

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