New/Old Hack-Dread

Hey guys,

It's been a couple of years since I was on the site. I was working on a horror/mystery hack called World of Dread. Now, at the time, it was essentially a reskin of AW, like most people's first hack. Since then we've had Dungeon World, Murderous Ghosts, and Monsterhearts come out, which showed just how far you can push the moves. It's made me rethink my hack from the ground up.  The moves define the genre. Monsterhearts, f'er example, forces things to go from bad to worse because making a move is basically fucking up (until you Grown Up).

So what is the genre about? In Dread, I'm emulating the horror-noir of Se7en or Chinatown, where evil intrudes on people's lives and secrets become the most important resource. I'm also taking a lot if inspiration from the horror writing of Thomas Ligotti, who finds horror in the absurdities of middle class life, and the films of David Cronenberg. What you have when you put those into a blender is a game about secrets; hiding them and uncovering them. It's also a game about the intrusion of the Weird into people's lives, and how the disruption can force people to reveal things they'd rather not.

So with that in mind, a couple obvious moves come to mind: Digging up Dirt and Understand the Madness.

Digging up Dirt is proactive: you're going through people's phone records, hunting down their last known address and the like. It's also very reductive. Instead of playing out each individual piece of information, like you would in a Gumshoe game, you're more interested in getting leverage over another character or NPC. It might work as an option between taking 1 Forward on future investigations, or increasing a connection with another player, or alerting the subject of your investigation.

Understanding the Madness is either proactive or reactive, depending on the situation and the MC's moves. This might be constructed differently than most other moves I've seen. On a hard success, perhaps the player can ask a series of questions to the MC. On a soft success, they may ask a question but take some mental stress or lash out. On a failure, they lash out, retreat from the scene, or some other inappropriate behavior. From a fictional perspective, it makes Understanding the Madness into a narrative keystone, and presumes that some dirt digging as occurred before then.

You'll notice a couple things about these moves. The first is that they predicate some kind of investigation mechanic. I think a lesson can be learned from Monsterhearts here, where Strings are the social currency.  If Clues are the investigative currency, it lets the players determine the course of the investigation.

This also mean that Fronts are replaced by Mysteries, or more accurately, augmented with Mysteries. Similarly to the portents of doom in Dungeon World, you have an Escalating Horrors. But parallel to that you have a Chain of Evidence, ways for the players to essentially jump ahead of the Mystery, and prevent it's Terrible Conclusion. 

I'll go into these in more detail, but for now, I designed a collection of playbooks for the earlier version. You can take a look at them here https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0B0QGoyHBMghLdUx3N043LWhNaVE/edit.

Some of the playbooks work well, others wear their reskinning on their sleeve. Particularly I like the Gumshoe (all about getting into trouble), the Lunatic, and the Sherlock (the ultimate mystery solver, but vulnerable). 

The Stats

So the stats I came up with way back when were Deadly, Slick, Smart, Cool, and Dark. Again, they're pretty obvious reskins of AW stats. Let's start from square one.

Violence is a big part of the genre. But its more important to state the mental capacity for violence than the physical capacity. Violence tends to be sudden and decisive, with the more willing participant setting the fiction. Deadle might still be a good name for it.
Deadly meaning dangerous, bloodthirsty, capable of violence, remorseless.

Solving mysteries is always about the triumph of rationality over barbarism. We'll keep Smart as a stat for that reason.

The characters in the horror-noir genre are more often charismatic because of their smooth talking than their raw sexual presence. It looks like Slick rounds out the trio of pure character defining traits.

We need some kind of trait that defines the mental hardiness of the character, the resiliency to horror, while letting a character that is magnanimous in spirit be playable. I'd like to draw a parallel with Deadly, some stat that says : I can take what the world dishes out and not lose my mind. This will play directly into the Understand the Madness move.

I started with Cool, but now that I think of it, Cool and Slick overlap too much. That means I might fold them together and rename it to Smooth. My old build of this game gave me Dark, which was thematically weak and just a reskin of Weird. Understanding the Madness requires more than Smarts, it requires a holistic understanding of the strange and depraved. For now, I'll keep it as Dark. The more I think about it, the better that name works.

So now we have four characteristics that define the character: Deadly, Smart, Smooth, and Dark.

What about some kind of stat that lets the characters be noble? Brave? No, that not thematically right. Something that's the opposite of Dark. If Dark is about embracing the horror, this is about creating a bulwark against it. Stoic? Steady?
Deadly, Smart, Smooth, Steady and Dark? 

Does that work?

(You'll notice I'm using this as a scratch pad.)

Here's an idea: the Angel skin in Monsterhearts has a dual stat that shifts from light to dark as play proceeds. This might be a good compromise with the Dark/Steady stat.

Nah, and I'm not wedded to the Steady trait at all.

Creating Mysteries

In Dread, unknown forces intrude on the status quo of the character's fucked up lives. These intrusions are called Mysteries, and are the narrative thrust of the game. The characters are confronted by a Body of Evidence that points towards a Grim Conclusion. The Characters must outpace the bad guys, seize the initiative, and prevent the Threats from coming to pass.

This means that Mysteries are active antagonists. Even if it's something that seems to be passive, like a location, the effects of that location must be moving towards some Grim Conclusion. 

Surrounding the Mystery are Layers of Protection that the players must penetrate to effect the Mystery. For example, a depraved serial killer stalking the streets might have a Cult that covers for him, or a corrupt police force that bungles investigations. Each Layer of Protection reveals something about the mystery, and is connected in some intimate way.

Imagine the Mystery as a race to the finish, and the party that gets there first will have the advantage.