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I mentioned a while ago that I read Don’t Rest Your Head, and indie RPG very reminiscent of things like Dark City and Neverwhere (both of which are listed in the book as sources of inspiration). I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
To sum it up, it’s a game about people who haven’t slept for a while. After a certain point, the theory goes, sleep becomes a choice, and when you choose not to sleep, you awaken to the Mad City around you. The Mad City is a city that exists alongside our own world, and it’s populated by “Hollow Men”, who are basically people who have become automatons, extras in the Mad City, and the Nightmares who rule it. As one of the Awakened, the Nightmares target you, but you have power–drawn from your exhaustion and madness–to fight back.
After reading it, I really wanted to play it, so when my friend Matt agreed to play with me, I jumped on the opportunity. Matt created a character who was already a paranoid schizophrenic–that was, in fact, why he wasn’t sleeping; he was afraid that “they” would come and get him. This become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as his Awakening made him a target for a very sinister Them, indeed. He journeyed into the Mad City and tried to figure out what was going on.
Eventually he learned that the one who was after him was a being known as the Tacks Man. He planned to lure the Tacks Man into a trap, using the villain’s well-known greed against him. One of my favorite scenes involved Matt running from Officer Tock and his clockwork cops, carrying a fake hand of King Midas inside a fake stasis machine. He escaped his pursuers, only to run into the Paper Boys. The Paper Boys write about things–murder and mayhem, mostly–and those things have a habit of coming true. They were interested in Matt, but Matt did some fast-talking and convinced them that the hand of Midas was a much bigger story. They took the bait and wrote about the discover of Midas’s hand, at which point the fake became the real thing.
It was a great session, and I’d like to run the game again. The nice thing about DRYH is that it’s really easy to make a game that is almost entirely player-driven. It’s good to go in with a few ideas as the GM, but mostly you’re going to want to look at your players’ characters–their motivations and goals–and use those to generate story hooks that your players will want to run with. The system is simple enough that it facilitates this style of play, making improvisation extremely easy.
I had a great time, and I’d recommend the game to anyone who’s a fan of works like Dark City and Neverwhere.
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