Posts Tagged ‘witch’

Dead of Night: Salford’s Lot part 2

Posted: October 31, 2011 in actual play, conventions, Dead of Night, games
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I posted part 1 of my actual play in the last post. I set the scene before character creation – two nights ago your teenage coven summoned something it could not put down; last night Salford was swept by a wave of rioting and looting; tonight two of the coven haven’t shown up – so we kicked into the game straight away. The coven scrabbled around Simon’s flat, determining that yes, the grimoire was indeed gone, before breaking into his bedroom where they found it crawling with cockroaches and a strange, sentient blood-like ooze that Ann-Marie insisted on taking a sample of.

They then fled the flat, where they ran into a group of rioters including the now-infamous Billy Hunt, who tried to bully Alan into holding the big tv he’d just nicked. This scene was great, as it set up Billy as a hard case, as well as putting Alan’s own bluster and bullish manner into perspective (Billy bullies Alan, so Alan bullies Ollie). Cops arrive, coven flees, only to find Simon’s body crucified in an alley, his phone filled with frantic voice mail messages from Julianne telling Simon she’s hiding out in the derelict flats.It’s about this time they first notice the car with blacked out windows and an Italian number plate following them.

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Dead of Night: Salford’s Lot part 1

Posted: October 30, 2011 in actual play, conventions, Dead of Night
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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. (more…)

Playing with Fire

Posted: October 26, 2011 in actual play, conventions, Dead of Night
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One of the things I’ve wanted to try for a while is a game of Dead of Night where the victims are all monsters – or at least have access to Monstrous Specialisations (aka cool powers). I know Scott has tried this a few times, so I hope he’ll pop up in the comments to talk about his experiences, but I’ve only ever tried it a couple of times in the past, and never with the whole group.

The idea I had was to run a game inspired by the Craft or the Covenant – you know the schtick, a group of teenagers mess around at playing witches, end up summoning something bad and getting into trouble. I wanted to run that game, with the players all as witches with supernatural powers, running from something worse.

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Which Witch is Which?

Posted: April 29, 2010 in Dead of Night, design
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One of the things I wanted to do with the Monstrous Archetypes was make it easier for the GM to go about creating his own monster, to take an idea and follow some easy steps to make it a potent foe in the game. But one of the things I wanted to keep from Dead of Night first edition was the ability for the GM to just go ahead and grab stuff ready-made out of the book, to really cut down on the prep time if that’s what the GM wanted. To that end, the book is packed with ready-made stuff, from pre-set Tension circumstances to complete scenarios and, of course, ready-to-eat-you monsters.

Each of the ten Monstrous Archetypes I talked about last week also comes with a sample monster, so you have ten fully statted monsters ready to go; everything from a vampire and werewolf, to a coven of witches and a haunted house (yes, as a monster, not a location). That’s not including the monsters included in the scenarios, which should be enough variety to keep even the most regular of Dead of Night GMs busy for months.

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