Don’t Rest Your Head

First off, if you’re not familiar with Don’t Rest Your Head, fix that. Really. Picture Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere mixed with Dark City and some really interesting mechanics. The characters in DRYH are insomniacs who have powers rooted in exhaustion and madness.

I’ll confess to being a little hazy on where, exactly, the line between the two lies. I read it as: If the action pushes the limits of credibility but is close enough to mundane that someone could explain it away as very improbable or not really what it looked like–even if they have to avoid thinking about it too much–it’s an exhaustion power. If it crosses the line into “can’t lie to yourself well enough to make what you saw possible” territory, it’s a madness power. (I’d love to hear how others have delineated these two.)

I find that gray area between the improbable and the impossible, and people’s twisting of their memory of what they saw to try to explain it, really compelling. Wanted has lots of examples to draw upon. The setting and premise of the movie are totally different from Don’t Rest Your Head, but the characters do things that I think are like DRYH exhaustion powers–implausible but which an observer might be able to rationalize away.

Demonstrations of Exhaustion Powers

There are plenty of trailers for Wanted, but here’s one that has a fair number of demonstrations of Don’t Rest Your Head “exhaustion powers”.

Points of Interest

0:10 The Pickup

Picking up a passenger in mid-spin. Followed by other driving feats. Beyond belief, but so rooted in the mundane—driving—that an observer would accept it as rational.

0:45 The Curve

Curving bullets around one target to hit another: The key to making this an exhaustion power rather than a madness power is that the character makes a show of trying to put spin on the bullet, like a pitcher throwing a curve ball. Between that and the fact that the bullet doesn’t go very far off course, an observer could talk himself into saying, “Well, maybe the spin really does help….” or “His arm was way out to the side when he pulled the trigger—that’s why the bullet seemed to go around the obstacle.”

1:20 The Block

Blocking bullets with bullets—unbelievable…but just very good and very lucky, right? Nothing unexplainable here….

1:32 The Jump

An impossibly long jump from one building to another. It’s not just the standard jump from rooftop to rooftop across an alley. This is across a wide street. Clearly impossible…but someone observing it could tell himself, “It must be closer than it looks” or “He did drop a couple floors by the time he reached the other building.”

1:52 The Flip

Flipping a car sideways over a police barricade. This drive power stays an exhaustion power, rather than a madness power, by virtue of its mundane, rational context. A lucky stunt, the perfect conditions….

Taken on its own merits, Wanted might be brilliant or might be ridiculous, I don’t know. But as inspiration and illustration of exhaustion powers for Don’t Rest Your Head, it’s a goldmine.

For more info, check out my earlier post on Don’t Rest Your Head.

Recently, I caught a couple episodes of Supernatural, and it’s totally different from my first impression. It’s no longer (if it ever was) a disconnected string of encounters between monsters and overly-pretty heroes. It has a compelling and dark story arc, likeable, believable characters, and plenty of good imagery for horror or dark fantasy RPGs:

• shotgun shells loaded with rock salt for shooting ghosts
• doors and windows lined with salt to keep out demons or evil spirits
• artifacts able to kill demons
• plenty of warding symbols and spells
• shifting and ambiguous alliances
• plots within plots within plots

I guess I’d call it dark fantasy—the protagonists aren’t as hopelessly doomed as a Lovecraftian story, but neither are the demons and other adversaries just simple monsters to be killed and looted.

I can imagine using ideas from this show in a lot of games, but it seems particularly good source material for a Sorcerer game. There’s not much in the way of demon-binding in this show, but the relationship between Sam and Ruby is a great example of the a complications that can arise when you have a demon ally.

If, like me, you’d written off Supernatural, you may want to give it a second look.

Premise

In Don’t Rest Your Head, you play one of the Awake, insomniacs who have stopped sleeping entirely (they hope) and who have become able to traverse the portals from our world to the Mad City. Your character tries to achieve his goals (tied to what’s keeping him awake) before he falls asleep and becomes meat for the Nightmares of the Mad City.

I have to admit that I haven’t actually gotten a chance to play Don’t Rest Your Head yet, but it’s a bit of a perfect storm for me due to my love of…

• Dark City (think The Matrix with less philosophy and more Clive Barker)
• Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (The series is good; the book phenomenal.)
• the notion that exhaustion can make you supernaturally better at something (I’m rolling black dice most nights working on EpicTable. That might make more sense in a bit….)

Dice Mechanic

The dice mechanic used for conflict resolution in Don’t Rest Your Head fits the theme perfectly. The player rolls a combination of white, black, and red dice.

• White discipline dice reflect the character’s skill and are safe to roll.
• Black exhaustion dice let the player tap into his exhaustion to call upon extraordinary abilities; but it comes at a cost.
• Red madness dice allow the character to exercise overtly supernatural powers, but carry significant risk of the situation spiraling out of control.

The GM rolls pain dice, and when these dice dominate, win or lose, there’s no sunny outcome for the character.

Conflict Resolution

Conflict resolution is along two axes:

1. The person with the highest number of successes (1s, 2s, and 3s) wins the conflict.
2. The pool (discipline, exhaustion, madness, or pain) with the high die value is dominant and shapes the outcome, regardless of whether the character won or lost.

The player has some choice in how many of each color dice are brought to bear in the conflict. More dice means more chances to win the conflict, but more chance of the exhaustion or madness pool dominating the outcome. This creates a really interesting range of outcomes.

Character Creation, Hope, and Despair

The character creation process is also really engaging. Its questionnaire seems inspired by Spirit of the Century, but the result is wholly appropriate to the theme. There’s also an economy of Hope and Despair coins, which seems interesting and somewhat akin to fanmail or action points, but again, done in very thematically appropriate way.

Impact on EpicTable

From an EpicTable perspective, supporting Don’t Rest Your Head means support for mixed-color dice rolls and yet another reason to implement success counting. You can read more about this in my post on EpicTable’s Dice Cup Designer. It also means support for token pools (though my recent foray into Primetime Adventures had already planted that seed).

Closing Thoughts

The first nine pages of Don’t Rest Your Head are available on Evil Hat’s site, and they’re quite possibly the best nine pages of game material I’ve ever read. I can’t wait to play this game, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say once I get the chance. In the meantime, I’m going to grab some black dice and get back to implementing that success counting mechanic for EpicTable….

I recently saw the third of the Brendan Fraser mummy movies, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which had a scene involving yetis, and well…at least it got me thinking about yetis….

I can’t say that I’d recommend The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. I won’t argue that the first two were great, but the combination of mummies, Egypt, and Rachel Weisz destroys my objectivity in a way that China and Maria Bello cannot.

The best thing about this movie, for me, was the yetis. Here we see one making his intimidate check against a villainous goon. The yetis do a nice job of leaping about and throwing bad guys this way and that. (I’m steadfastly refusing to acknowledge that the yetis play American rules football—don’t ruin them for me, they’re all I’ve taken away from that 112 minutes.) Also, the concept of a Tibetan girl who can call the yetis in times of need is an awesome one. Very much a summon nature’s ally kind of trick and one that I’d love to use in a game.

So, fresh from the movie and full of enthusiasm for all things yetian, I collected some yeti lore for you, the kind readers of the EpicTable blog.

• The Yeti entry in occultopedia has an interesting timeline of yeti reports and searches that may be of use to people crafting a yeti-focused adventure
• There’s a recent (August 12, 2008) ABC article about the yeti, if you can believe that: “Losing the Yeti in Forgotten Nation of Bhutan“
• Also from August 2008, it seems that Japanese Explorers are searching the Himalayas for yeti
• The Cryptid Zoo article on the yeti has some info about yeti subtypes and lots of links to other material on them.
• I dug up some D20 yeti stats. These are available in print in the D20 Menace Manual.
• As of the time of this writing, you can learn all about one man’s search for the yeti for approximately 28 cents plus shipping (which is kind of sad, really…)
• Late breaking update: 23-Jan-2009, I found this page with tons of yeti links.

Yeti Artwork

At considerable risk to my own sense of self-worth, I have slogged through thousands of yeti pics to bring you the very best yeti art the web has to offer. (No warranty express or implied is made by Realityforge LLC regarding the extent to which these are, indeed, the best yeti pictures available, nor as to the number of yeti pics actually perused in pursuit of those shown here.)

Hover for a quick blurb about each.

I stumbled into Adam’s gallery on a site called deviantArt (about which I’ve blogged before). There’s a lot of variability between artists on these online communities, but the moment I saw Cyclops Scene (a small crop of which is at the start of this article), I knew I’d found the guy to create my mascot.

Orcs…

I was thrilled to have Adam create the EpicTable dragon—and lucky that the timing worked out. He’s since been heavily involved in a card game from TableStar Games, called “Orc Wars“. I love the work he’s done there. He does a great job with monsters and monstrous humanoids. His orcs are clearly inspired by Warcraft orcs, and he’s got some great taurens as well. But while Adam’s orcs and taurens are similar to Warcraft art, they’re different as well. Sadly, I don’t have the artistic wherewithal to tell you why, so you’ll have to go to his gallery at deviantArt and look for yourself.

…And More Than Orcs

If orcs and taurens aren’t your thing, there’s plenty more to look at. My favorites are:

• “Cyclops Scene”, the image that originally pulled me in
• Untitled – grey haired orc
• Back to the Noose, a skeletal pirate done for a band called Swashbuckle.
• Bio-Mech Merman, which reminds me of my friend Jeremy.
• Attack of the Kraken, a great pulp work
• Leap of Faith, which seems to be his signature piece

Avatars!

If you like what you see out there, you’ll be glad to know that I’ve not left you EpicTable readers out in the cold. Adam has agreed to let me use some of his work as avatars in the EpicTable forum. So, if you don’t have an avatar for the EpicTable forum yet, head over there and pick one out!

One more thing…

Ah—one more thing: If you find that you have a need to say Adam’s last name someday, you can take advantage of the fact I finally got around to asking. Straight from Adam himself: “My last name is pronounced (Vay-gee) with the “gee” like McGee”.

]]> http://www.epictable.com/blog/artist-spotlight-adam-vehige/feed/ 0 http://www.epictable.com/blog/welcome-to-the-sideshow-the-dark-art-of-david-hartman/ http://www.epictable.com/blog/welcome-to-the-sideshow-the-dark-art-of-david-hartman/#comments Mon, 16 Jun 2008 03:24:31 +0000 John Lammers http://www.epictable.com/?p=83 I don’t recall how I stumbled upon David Hartman’s site: http://www.sideshowmonkey.com/. Maybe I don’t remember how I got there because I spent the next couple hours lost in this dark little world he’s created.

Did I mention it’s dark? Yeah, a lot of David’s work is pretty dark, and it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea (which is an oddly inappropriate expression to use when talking about monsters, zombies, and the like), but there’s a comic/pulp feel his work that I really like.

More than just the style, though, there’s a sense of anticipation in a lot of Hartman’s work that I think gamers will find inspiring. There’s almost always something just about to happen. It’s often something not very nice. But the people in these scenes aren’t passively awaiting their fate. As often as not, they’ve got a gun or a knife or an axe, and they’re poised to confront the awful thing that’s closing on them.

My favorites are:

• Revere – Paul Revere (one imagines) fighting off werewolves.
• Space Man – a classic sci-fi work with humans and hostile aliens (or, I don’t know, aliens and hostile humans)
• Sea Killer – Vikings having a rough day

David’s done quite a bit of commercial work for folks like Rob Zombie, MTV, and Warner Brothers. His work includes the Bruce Campbell movie, Bubba Ho-tep, several animated TV series, comic books, and even some work for game industry folks like Green Ronin Press. The biggest surprise to me though, after spending some time on his site, was learning that he directed “My Friends Tigger & Pooh”. I can only hope that the creatures from SideshowMonkey.com live far from The Hundred Acre Wood (or that Pooh is a lot more fierce than he lets on).

The fact that I stumbled upon David’s site only by accident, even though he’s obviously well-known in some circles, led me to point other gamers in his direction. I’ll go one better though–I got David’s permission to use some of his work as avatars for the EpicTable site. By the time you’ve read this, there will likely be a nice, shiny, new batch of avatars in the EpicTable forum, courtesy of David Hartman. So, if you don’t have an avatar of your own for the EpicTable forum yet, make your way over there and pick one out!

]]> http://www.epictable.com/blog/welcome-to-the-sideshow-the-dark-art-of-david-hartman/feed/ 0 http://www.epictable.com/blog/pulp-gaming-inspiration-indiana-jones-and-the-kingdom-of-the-crystal-skull/ http://www.epictable.com/blog/pulp-gaming-inspiration-indiana-jones-and-the-kingdom-of-the-crystal-skull/#comments Mon, 16 Jun 2008 01:31:36 +0000 John Lammers http://www.epictable.com/?p=82 I just saw the latest Indiana Jones movie: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Now, I can’t give you a very objective critique of the movie, because it has crumbly jungle ruins, crystal skulls and monkeys. And if there’s anything that blows my objectivity, it’s crumbly jungle ruins, crystal skulls and monkeys.

So, without any trace of academic or intellectual criticism, I’ll just say, “I liked it.” It has a lot to offer the gamer or GM. The visuals are stunning, and there are enough ingenious mechanical doors and puzzles to make Grimtooth (the devious trapmaker of 80s gaming) proud. There’s even a bit of Lovecraftian “spaces in-between” talk and otherworldly forces that are like magnetism…but not.

Several times, the movie had the opportunity to go the route of the cliché or not, and it chose not. I could imagine the GM sitting there thinking, “Well, I could have it just fly off and call it a day, but that’s kind of lame…. Let’s instead have it….”

To sum up: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was entertaining, it had a good pulp gamer kind of feel to it, and I definitely could steal some ideas from it. What more does a GM need?

]]> http://www.epictable.com/blog/pulp-gaming-inspiration-indiana-jones-and-the-kingdom-of-the-crystal-skull/feed/ 0 http://www.epictable.com/blog/fear-itself-the-sacrifice/ http://www.epictable.com/blog/fear-itself-the-sacrifice/#comments Fri, 13 Jun 2008 04:12:02 +0000 John Lammers http://www.epictable.com/?p=80 Did anyone happen to see the recent episode (“The Sacrifice”) of NBC’s new horror anthology, “Fear Itself”? I just got around to watching it, and I was surprisingly impressed. There was kind of Colonial Gothic horror feel to it, with the bestial vampire, the old-fashioned dresses, bloody axes, an old fort…. Even the premise–a community protecting the outside world by keeping a creature contained within their midst–was pretty cool.

One has to assume that the place is warded to keep the creature in, and I’m sure there are other logical flaws (like why did it take so long to think of burning the creature in the pit used for sacrifices?), but the atmosphere and visuals were very nice. I can definitely imagine this as a chapter of a Gothikus game (a story game in development, chronicled over at Polyhedral Hepcat).

]]> http://www.epictable.com/blog/fear-itself-the-sacrifice/feed/ 0 http://www.epictable.com/blog/76-sound-of-a-desert-nightmarehtml/ http://www.epictable.com/blog/76-sound-of-a-desert-nightmarehtml/#comments Mon, 18 Feb 2008 02:18:41 +0000 John Lammers http://staging.epictable.com/?p=52 Awhile back, I talked about artwork that inspires me as a GM. My game is currently in a three week hiatus while I plot the campaign’s next chapter, which includes a trip to a not-very-nice desert location.

My plotting was thrown into high gear this weekend when I just stumbled upon the album, “Necronomicon”, from a band called Nox Arcana.

This album is the perfect complement to horror in the desert. It has lots of references to the Cthulhu Mythos, but it’s mostly instrumental, so it’ll work with lots of different settings. Several tracks have a distinct Eastern flair that works nicely if your next adventure involves deserts and mummies and other creepiness. Whether your game is fantasy or pulp horror or sci-fi, there’s always room for something ancient and sandy and horrifying. (Seems like there should be a joke there….) So pour yourself a cup of coffee, put on the headphones, and let Nox Arcana help you write the characters’ demise next heroic exploit.

]]> http://www.epictable.com/blog/76-sound-of-a-desert-nightmarehtml/feed/ 0 http://www.epictable.com/blog/56-inspirational-deviantshtml/ http://www.epictable.com/blog/56-inspirational-deviantshtml/#comments Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:15:05 +0000 John Lammers http://staging.epictable.com/?p=45 Awhile back, I was searching for someone to create a mascot for EpicTable. I wanted a mascot–an iconic figure, not just a logo. Some creature that would be to EpicTable what Eddie is to Iron Maiden. My search led me to Adam Vehige and his gallery on deviantART.

Along the way, I spent (way too many) hours paging through some really great artwork. I’ve found myself returning to these sites when I need inspiration for an important villian or location.

Looking at work of this quality can often give me the boost I need to come up with a site or encounter that’s more memorable. I thought I’d share some of my favorites here.

I’m not going to load you down with a ton of links. There’s a lot worth exploring on deviantART and CG Channel. These are just my favorites.

Author’s Note: Sadly, the CGGallery links have become unavailable since this post was written. I managed to find Lacoste’s and Jieanu’s work on deviantART, but I’ve not been so lucky in other cases. I’ve removed the links but left the text in case anyone cares to track some of these artists down.

• Cyclops Scene by Adam Vehige (deviantART)
• Grave of Souls by Kuang Hong (deviantART)
• Malik shah’s Sanctuary by Raphael Lacoste (deviantART)
• Once upon a time…. by Andreas K. (CG Channel)
• Dark Riders by J. P. Targete (CG Channel)
• Brom’s Goathead by Julio C. Espada (CG Channel)
• Castle by Dragos Jieanu (deviantART)
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