The cottage part 2, towards insanity

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.

The cottage part 1, the basics

Today I was dungeonmaster in a game called the Cottage. I had made characters beforehand and gave them to players. There were four characters who were working in the mental asylum where they kept prisoners. Employees who were friends with each other needed a break and they had rent a cottage for a weekend. The story started when they left from the city towards countryside.

I wanted to keep system a simple one. There was three skills.. physical (like strength, dexterity), mental (wisdom, intelligence etc.) and effectiveness (like charisma) and I had shared ten points between these to every character.. Like one of the characters was porter and I had given him these stats:

Physical 5

Mental 2

Effectiveness 3

When I asked players to roll the dice they always rolled one six sided dice and added their skill to the result. If it was 8, it was success. If it was 1 it was always fail and something bad happened. Simple system since this game was supposed to last only couple hours. And to be honest we finished it in three hours.

The other characters were nurse, psychologist and psychiatric nurse. Unfortunately there was only three players so one of the written ones was dropped away. This time no one wanted to play psychologist, so she was out of the adventure.

In the beginning all the friends had had a rough week at work and they needed a break desperately. They had morning shift on Friday so they could leave together from work and could travel towards the cottage after buying some food for the weekend. 

I will analyze the plot on the next part then.