A roleplaying game by Jonas Ferry
You’ve seen the movie. You know the one where a bunch of people go to some remote location and get killed one by one. It’s thrilling to know that people will die, but not how and when. This game will give you and your friends the tools for telling a horror, thriller or splatter story of your own.
Preparation
First of all the group will have to write down numbers on pieces of paper and randomly assign one to each player. If you’re four people for example, the numbers would be 1, 2, 3 and 4. The numbers state the order in which the characters will die, and the players should keep their number secret.
First you decide what kind of people you’re going to play and where they’ll be. You don’t have to decide what will happen or how things will end, just some stuff to get you started. Perhaps you’re going to play teenagers hiking next to a lake when a killer attacks, Vietnam soldiers whose helicopter have crashed and who have to fight their way back through the jungle or people who, without knowing each other, get invited to the same house for some mysterious reason. If you like you can play a zombie story, as long as the characters are the only living people they meet. What’s important is that the characters should be isolated from the rest of the world for some reason, and should not be able to flee to safety or call for help.
After you have an idea of who you’ll all be, everyone creates a character each. The characters should be described with an appearance, if they have any psychological or physical peculiarities and if they conform to some kind of stereotype. Stereotypes are people who usually take part in the kind of story you’re going to tell and could be the pretty girl, the sports jock, the science nerd or the yuppie, or someone else completely. The characters should also have at least one other character that they like and at least one that they dislike. The sports jock character could like his cheerleader girlfriend but dislike all the other guys because he thinks they’re out to steal her. The cheerleader could dislike her overprotective boyfriend, but like the new guy in the group since he’s cute and shy.
The last thing to do before starting is to decide who’ll be the first storyteller. The difference between storytelling and playing is that the players only control their own character while the storyteller, besides their character, controls the world and everything in it. The storyteller controls the murderer, the crazy birds that attack people or the fog that turns people inside out. The thing is that the duty of storytelling is passed around, so no single person has the full picture of what’s going on. Some kind of object, like a ball to hold or a hat to wear, should be used to clearly mark the current storyteller. I’ll call it the “ball” for the rest of the game.
Playing the game
The first storyteller is free to start the story in any way they like. Perhaps the characters have just arrived to their destination, or perhaps they’ve been there for a while, it doesn’t matter. The storyteller will do the work of a regular storyteller or game master, frame scenes and describe locations and things that happen. The players roleplay their characters the same way as regular roleplaying games, by describing what they are doing and acting out what they’re saying.
The first storyteller continues as long as they like, while still playing their own character, until they pass the ball. They can pass it to whomever they like, and that person is the new storyteller. The game continues like this, with people storytelling for a while until they pass the ball.
So, what about the deaths? Every character, except perhaps the last one, will either disappear or die. The players know this, but the characters obviously don’t. The thing is that the storyteller is only allowed to kill their own characters, not anyone else’s. This means that the person who has the character with the next number has to get the ball before they can describe what happens. Even if they get the ball, they don’t have to kill their characters, they can calmly pass the ball to someone to stay alive a while longer. This can only go on for so long, though, since nothing will really happen until the person dies and someone else becomes the next victim.
The storyteller should try to set up a cool scene for the next storyteller before they pass the ball to them. They can perhaps separate the character from the rest of the group, describe how they see something in the corner of their eye and then pass the ball. If the new storyteller’s character is the next to die, they will have an easier time describing it, and if they’re not the character can always survive somehow.
When a player’s character is dead they stay in the game and can still become storyteller, they just don’t use their own character anymore. There is a way to get a comeback though. If another storyteller wants to, the character could be summoned from the dead to join a scene. Whether it’s a heroic comeback or a comeback as zombie or ghoul is up to the storyteller, but the player should seize the chance to play the character one last time. Before the scene is over the character must die in a more gruesome way than before to make up for the opportunity to redeem themselves. Only one character can have a comeback during the game, and that character can only have it once.
Ok, so the players take turns as storytellers, killing off their characters or toying with the others’ expectations. This continues until there’s one person left, the last character. That player gets to decide the ending and epilogue of the story all on his own, as the final storyteller. The character can either make it, turn out to be the killer or could get killed like everyone else. This is all up to the player. The player could either choose to explain what has happened, or leave it as a mystery.
You could of course try another version of the game, if you like the idea of a character being responsible for the killings. In that case you cut out extra pieces of paper after you have assigned the numbers in the beginning of the game and leave all but one blank. The player with a marked piece of paper will be the killer. Of course they will have to “kill” the character when it’s their turn to die, but after everyone has died they will have to explain what really happened. It’s fun if they reveal both the motive and how they killed the others, perhaps in the form of a letter to the police. You can also use more blank notes than there are players, if you want to be uncertain if one of the characters is the killer or not.
One important thing is to keep the story kind of consistent. If the first person dies by being attacked by killer bees, the second one shouldn’t die from a serial killer and the third from getting hit by lightning. Every death has to have a purpose, and the driving force behind the killings or disappearances should stay the same. Of course, you can’t synchronize your story with the other players that much while playing, so when storytelling try to stay true to what has already happened and introduce things that give the next storyteller something to chew on. Make them sweat, but don’t make any mistakes yourself.
Of course these kinds of stories are rarely wholly plausible or sensible. See it as an intellectual exercise to build on what the others have created and add your own stuff before passing the ball.
Make sure to use and abuse the expectations formed from the genre of your choice; either the annoying guy gets killed first or last. It’s all up to the player with the lowest or highest number to decide if they’re going to play an annoying character. Try not revealing your number, as the game is much more fun if you trick the others into believing it’s your character’s turn to die when it’s not.