I wrote about my pwn rpg last autumn. It was about the Cottage and you can read first part from here.
What happened in the Cottage?
Basic idea was that characters lives through a tramatic weekend and they begin to fall. The truth about characters will be revealled when the layers are peeled from their minds. Fist they think that they're workers of the hospital. Slowly their own personalities will come out and there you will have persons with mental issues. So eventually players realise that they were not workers in the hospital, they were the patients.
One of the characters was paranoid being suspicious about everything. Other character was imaginating that she lived in the fantasy world and third one was overly violent and aggressive. From these three first two offered best options to play. Playing aggressive is hard and it is only going into rage if things won't go the way character wants. If I would keep the rpg again I would change these mental disorders into different ones. I didn't use real diagnoses either since I thought I didn't have enough knowledge to do so.. So even the game was happening 1990´s, it was still some kind of fantasy world.
What triggered characters then?
The cottage wasn't empty. Actually characters had a bad luck that there were two robbers in the cottage at the same time. And these robbers had used drugs what made them aggressive so they even fight with each other. Characters didn't see the fight but they found corpse of the other robber from the lake. And at the same time they were facing sabotage so they couldn't escape from the place. Eventually polices arrived into to place but before that players were trying to survive alive what they did more or less.
This kind of surprisemoment can work only in the game what is meant to play during one evening. Playing campaign with characters like these could be very tiring especially when the characters were written by DM not by players. But this was worth of trying and it was fun evening.
