Polyhedral Hepcat

The House is built on a point-buy system based on the number of players. I’m not sure how many points The House will get per player, but I’ll probably figure that out during playtesting.

Here’s a list of possible rooms and the types of dangers and occurrences that might belong in them:

The Garden

• Vines which wrap around ankles
• Snakes
• A swarm of insects
• A maze which seems to have no exit
• Glimpses of phantom children playing

The Woods

• A feeling of being followed
• Wolves
• Ravens perched on branches following the intruder
• An ancient cemetery with the crypts broken open and the bodies removed
• A translucent woman in white who darts in and out of view

The Chapel

• The candles light or extinguish upon entry
• The statues cry tears of blood
• The crucifix is upside down
• The font is filled with blood
• A deep disembodied voice chants in Latin, but it’s a black mass

The Conservatory

• Some needed item is found beneath a stone

The Grand Hall

• Music from the piano
• Footsteps
• Spectral dancing
• The floorboards are rotten and someone falls through (maybe into the basement)

The Grand Stairwell

• A young woman descends

The Dining Room

• The wine glasses are constantly and inexplicably empty or full
• Cow eyeball in the soup
• A finger in the soup, discovered after everyone has finished eating, of course
• Dishes fly across the room

The Library

• Books fly off the shelves
• Books open to auspicious pages

The Salon

The Kitchen

• Pots, pans, and knives fly around
• The sink fills with blood
• All the food is covered with maggots, though it was fresh a moment ago

The Wine Cellar

The Basement

• A shallow grave
• A walled up tomb
• The staircase falls in
• Rusty nails to stick into feet

The Lavatory

• A hand reaches up from the toilet
• Sink fills with blood
• Messages written on the mirror
• The reflection of the Intruder as old, young, or dead
• Bloody shower that turns out to be a normal shower

The Servants’ Quarters

• Phantom Singing

The Study

The Master Bedroom

The Child’s Bedroom

• Children’s voices
• A ball rolling from inside the bedroom into the hallway

Guest Bedroom

• Someone climbs into bed with the intruder

Hallway

• The classic painting with following eyes

…and the other things that usually happen:

• Faint voices
• EVP (electronic voice phenomena)
• Scratches or welts
• Lights popping or turning on or off

Eventually I’m going to give all of these things a point value, but for now I’m just brainstorming.

Again, if anyone has any additions or suggestions, feel free to let me know.

Start with a name and a concept…then…

Traits and Skills

Assign the following numbers to the six traits: 3, 2, 2, 1, 1, 0

• Athlete – Athletics, Fighting, Allure, Intuition
• Intellectual – Lore, Reason, Will, Perception
• Performer – Creativity, Allure, Athletics, Spirit
• Engineer – Creativity, Fixing, Reason, Will
• Freak – Stealth, Lore, Spirit, Intuition
• Delinquent – Fighting, Stealth, Fixing, Perception

Skill ratings are a combination of the total score for each trait the skill is listed under. For instance, if you had Athlete 3, and Delinquent 3, then you would roll 5 dice for Fighting.

• Allure – Sex appeal, charisma, influence
• Athletics – Running, jumping, climbing, swimming
• Creativity – Invention, improvisation, singing, drawing
• Fighting – Guns, Knives, Fists
• Fixing – Making stuff, breaking stuff (on purpose), fixing stuff, picking locks
• Intuition – Knowing when something isn’t right, or when someone is lying to you
• Lore – Myths, legends, folklore, rituals
• Perception – Looking for things,
• Reason – Problem solving, research
• Spirit – Faith, protection against evil, exorcism
• Stealth – Hiding, sneaking, going unnoticed
• Will – Courage, obstinance

Initial Physical Endurance is Athletics, Psychological Endurance is Will, and Spiritual Endurance is Spirit

Costumes and Props

Each Intruder gets to choose 3 points worth of costumes and props.

• Holy Symbol (+1 to Spirit)
• Holy Book (+2 to Spirit)
• Moleskine Notebook (+1 to Creativity)
• Large Tattoo (+2 to Creativity)
• Swiss Army Knife (+1 to Fixing)
• Multitool (+2 to Fixing)
• Glasses (+1 to Reason)
• Laptop (+2 to Reason)
• Pentagram Pendant (+1 to Lore)
• Forbidden Tome (+2 to Lore)
• Knife (+1 to Fighting)
• Gun (+2 to Fighting)
• Short (+1 to Stealth)
• Goes Barefoot (+2 to Stealth)
• Sneakers (+1 to Athletics)
• Big Muscles (+2 to Athletics)
• Dressed in Black (+1 to Intuition)
• Tarot Cards (+2 to Intuition)
• Shaved Head (+1 to Will)
• Goatee (men) or Hairy Legs (women) (+2 to Will)
• Very Quiet (+1 to Perception)
• Shifty Eyes (+2 to Perception)
• Silver Tongue (+1 to Allure)
• Sexy Clothing (+2 to Allure)

• If you want to make up your own costume, prop, or personality trait, you can. The above list is contains suggestions and inspiration. As long as you don’t go over 2 points for any one item and it fits the flavor you’re going for, you’re good.

If anyone has any suggestions for additions or changes, please speak up.

So The House is trying to either kill the Intruders, scare them away or possess them. The House can accomplish this at once, if the intruder is weak enough, or the intruder can be slowly worn down.

The Intruder resists these attacks with her Psychological Endurance (Composure or Courage), Physical Endurance (Stamina), or Spiritual Endurance (Faith or Skepticism). The intruder rolls the resistance against The House’s Attack. If the Intruder wins, then she gains an amount of  points in that pool equal to the margin of success. If she loses the roll, she loses an amount of points from that pool equal to the margin of Failure.

Once any pool reaches 0, the intruder is removed from the game.

The House has three possible objectives: scare away, kill, or possess the Intruders. It does this by attacking the Psychological Endurance (Courage), Physical Endurance (Stamina), or Spiritual Endurance (Faith or Skepticism) of the Intruder.

The House begins with a budget which is determined by the number of players and the desired length of the game. Each point from the budget can buy some sort of obstacle to challenge an intruder.

To scare an intruder, the player who controls The House (refered to from now on as The House for the sake of brevity) will buy hauntings. A haunting is an apparition which cannot actually physically harm the intruder, but can cause psychological harm.

To kill or harm an intruder, The House can buy traps, poltergeists or entities which can physically harm the Intruder.

To possess an intruder, The House can buy demons and evil spirits who attempt to take over control of the Intruder’s mind and body.

I’m going to have to do a bit of research to different types of hauntings to get my terminology right. If you’re an expert on such things, I’d love to have your help, and I’ll credit you as a consultant when I publish.

I think for there to be any kind of resolution mechanic, I first need to figure out the kinds of actions the characters might take:

• Run
• Hide
• Sneak
• Scream
• Break things
• Fix things
• Search
• Shoot
• Fight
• Dodge
• Climb
• Jump
• Make things
• Pick Locks
• Calm people down
• Search for hidden doors
• Search for clues
• Seduce
• Deceive
• Intimidate
• Remember
• Research
• Speak to spirits (Ouija Board, Tarot Cards, Automatic Writing)
• Use technology
• Exorcise

What I don’t want this to be is a skill list…not really. I was thinking that there will be a small number of stats, maybe based on horror movie stereotypes, and props/background might add dice or bonuses/whatever.

• Athlete
• Intellectual
• Performer
• Tinker Engineer
  
• Freak
• Delinquent
• Evangelist

I like the thing John Wick does in Houses of the Blooded where you choose 5 stats of the 6 (or 4 of the 5?) and assign a certain number to each one. You have to be good in something, and you have to be bad in something.

Maybe each class/stat is good at certain types of skills, and there is a bit of overlap. Say you have 2 in Athlete and 3 in Delinquent, both of those might be good in fighting, so you’d get 5 dice for fighting…or Freak 3 and Evangelist 5, both would know something about demons, so you might get 8 dice in lore.

“Tinker” is the guy who makes stuff in his garage, maybe can do basic handyman stuff or build computers. Can anyone think of a better name for this?

There is no GM, but one player is the antagonist and the others are the protagonist.

One player is “The House” and the others are the investigators/intruders/explorers/whathaveyou.

The goal of “The House” is to kill or scare away the player characters. That means characters must have some rating of “Resiliance” and “Courage,” and The House must contain items with various ratings of “Kill” and “Scare.”

The goal of the player characters is to survive until morning (and have the most points).

Why would anyone stay inside a haunted house?

• Shelter
• A dare
• To win a contest
• Film a documentary
• To discover its secret
• To find the treasure
• The rescue someone
• A tour
• They’ve got a connection with someone else who has a reason not to leave! (Tony Dowler)
• They want to solve the mystery of the House (TD)
• They’ve got a personal connection with the house (TD)

For some reason, they must stay until morning:

• They have been locked in
• They won’t win the prize if they leave
• There is a horrible thunderstorm
• They can leave the house, but not the island
• The house is bad, but what is outside is worse
• They haven’t found what they wanted to find

Types of haunted houses:

• Castle
• Mansion
• Monastery
• Asylum
• Carnival

Why is the house haunted?

• Built on burial ground
• Horrible murders
• Suicide
• Cult
• Unfinished business
• It isn’t really haunted (why bother with this one? It’s not as much fun)

Skills and tools. Two types of people enter haunted houses: those who want to, and those who don’t. The former will be prepared, to some degree, while the latter may have some sort of skills that will be useful. Is it more fun to play regular folks thrown into a bad situation? Leave it up to the players?

Wouldn’t it be cool if I included some public domain haunted house stories as flavor text?

What about making it a module rather than a toolkit? Or a module with a toolkit added on describing how to make your own module.

Pregen characters? See above.

Last night I recruited two playstorming partners, Sean and Alessa, from #playnow to help me with Impromptu. We played for about 2.5 hours and I think everyone had fun, but the mechanics had little to do with that. The initial brainstorming procedure may have had a little more to do with it. Sean and Alessa really brought it, and Sean was a very helpful thorn in my side throughout the session. The rotating GM bit worked out well, much better than I hoped. The mechanics didn’t really work at all, so we stole them from Sorcerer.

We had a good session, but that was really much, much more group than system. A bad group can ruin a good game. A good group can work with anything.

I think it felt too much like a bizarro-world PTA with structured premise creation. Not that that is a bad thing, but it’s not NEW enough.

I don’t know if this is allowed, but I’m thinking of submitting several games to Game Chef this year.

The first game I’m going to submit is called Impromptu: An Improvisational Story Game Toolkit. I’m desiging it because I want a no-prep, GM-less pickup game that is easy to play online, and I can teach in 5 minutes.

Game prep is a group brainstorming session during which setting, situation, and characters are created. It’s all about flags.

I like the ideas behind the Brevity Award, The A. G. Bell A/V Award, and The Albert Arnold Gore Jr. Award for Invention in Contemporary Game Design.

I have a friend who once said (he lied) that he’d never read an rpg book longer than 20 pages. A GM shouldn’t have to spend an afternoon, or longer, learning rules.

I’m pretty hip to the idea of releasing my game as an audio book, with a different chapter for each step of the game.

I (once) play(ed) a lot online, and once my friend John finishes EpicTable I’ll play online a lot more. Online play has its own issues, such as finding a play group that doesn’t flake out on you, and I’d like to see some text address these issuse.

Intrigued (see how I did that?) with the idea of a haunted house game. Almost any game could set an adventure in a haunted house, but I don’t think there are any story games specifically about that. Geiger Counter and InSpectres come to mind immediately, but I’m talking about something that is written with rules and stats for the haunted house. Maybe instead of a GM, the house has a player.

I’d really love to win The Dressed to Impress Award. As much as I hated working in the advertising industry, I miss keeping up my graphic design chops.

I’m not quite sure how I’m going to incorporate the ingredients yet.

Since I haven’t really updated here in over a year, I’ve repurposed this blog for my Game Chef 2009 entry. If you’re interested in the content which existed here previously, please visit my personal blog, brennenreece.com.

I’m in the middle of designing a game at the moment called The Flowers of Evil. I’m having a bit of a block with it, and I’m thinking that it’s a good idea to take a break and work on something else for awhile.