I recently acquired Desperation which is two games in one by Jason Morningstar. Both games work the same way; they just differ in subject matter. Both games are about groups of people desperately trying to survive a horrible situation.
The two different situations are represented by a unique deck of cards. There’s a setup phase where location and people cards are laid out to introduce everything. Then the game progresses through a series of acts where things get progressively worse. Everybody takes turns drawing the next card in the deck. On the card is a quote and the player who drew it assigns that card to one of the currently surviving people. The player can choose to elaborate or play out a scene around that person speaking that quote as much or as little as they like. You keep doing that until an end game card is drawn and that’s pretty much the whole thing.
The game suggests that you can do this solo if you like. So, I decided to play The Dead House scenario. Dead House is about a group of people in a small isolated town trying to survive an overly long and awful winter in the late 1880s. I took a before and after photo and embedded them in a document I made to notate my play. The document can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aQEobGYgJu1MGzuWkf_6re1S1t0MwDXMEf6ZfRU69t8/edit?usp=sharing
The acts, as noted, are Autumn, Winter and Hell. I recorded the title of the card drawn, its number, and who I assigned it to. I also copied PART of the quote on the card to give you a sense of the material. I noted any other imaginative details I thought of. Finally, I mention if I moved any of the cards around either of my own free will to help me remember what I last did with those characters or because a card instructed me to (this happens when characters die).
In practice I found myself building little through lines around the characters. This mostly manifests as later card assignments feeling like they’re an escalation or elaboration on prior card assignments. In my play you can see this most strongly in Ralph Townes’s attempt to be a town protector to tragic ends, Telly Mitchell’s growing madness over keeping herself and her unborn baby warm, Look Mitchell trying to be steadfast husband and father, and Bobley Townes’s resentment over being dragged to this town and her eventual suicide.
You do occasionally draw a card and find it doesn’t fit particularly well. This happens when the card doesn’t feel like a natural build on something prior AND it feels like too drastic of a shift to assign to someone new. There were two standout examples of this in my play.
“A Poisoned Heart” is about two people having a falling out. But I never really established anyone really having that strong a relationship and it felt arbitrary. I eventually assigned it to Junior and assumed a prior friendship with Velma based on a mutual interest in wanting to leave. But that was a lot of content that came out of thin air on one card.
Another example is “A Fine Meal” which is about someone eating increasingly weird things including a dead rat that the cat kills. Noone felt alone enough at that time to get that desperate. I gave it to Henry Hertzel who I had literally ignored for 2/3rds of the game. Weirdly this resulted in a rapidly escalating situation involving ritual sacrifice, cannibalism and eventually the death of both Henry Hertzel and Ralph Townes.
In any case, prior choices definitely felt like they informed later choices in a significant way. I am very curious to see how this plays with other people.
One response to “Alone In The Dead House”
I have been pondering how to comment without being unpleasant. I appreciate the posting very much, and I’m sure there’s something to talk about productively, but I also can’t stay silent about something I think should be criticized.
It is: this and many other titles. by Jason Morningstar are simply not in the zone of activity. The last really strong role-playing work he did was almost twenty years ago, with Grey Ranks. Many of his works since are programmed entertainments, which he does well. You described a lot of modern role-playing events (as the hobby/industry term is used) as escape rooms, and that’s exactly what the last activity that I played with him was, a few years ago. Others I consider to be deceptive garbage, fake-play, often with a curious contemptuous, mean-spirited spin
What you’re describing here is “build a story,” from card prompts. It creates a plot, with the human providing easy connectors, sort of like the interns in a screenwriting mill, hooking together the money shots provided by the “real” writers. I think playing with more than one person merely provides more hands for the same thing.
“But what’s wrong with that, Ron?” I am so tired of this question. Who cares whether I think it’s “wrong!” The issue is whether it’s anything to do with the expressive medium this site is dedicated to celebrating. I don’t think it does.