This game was intended as a single session pilot for a series of "one shot" games which stretch the boundaries of role playing games and provide mind bending twists and reveals.
The pilot episode focused on a group of graduate students and their professor who are on vacation together after finishing their cutting edge, ground breaking research project. After a seemingly idyllic awakening in a top notch ski chalet, things began to seem 'wrong'. Dinner was met with disaster when the chef set himself on fire, and an explosion in the kitchen triggered an avalanche which buried the characters and another hotel guest in their cabin, which proceded to collapse upon them. The characters then awoke, and found themselves at a beach resort, believing the events of the ski chalet to be a nightmare. Again, at the resort, things appear to be perfect, but have an underlying wrongness to them, such as the scuba instructor that drowns in five feet of water, and the surfer dudes who drown in a similar depth, and the beach babes that react orgasmically to everything, even being punched in the face. Again, dinner is met with disaster, and the resort floods. With their life boat sinking, the players again awake, now highly suspicious of their surroundings and believing nothing to be real. They then progress through further iterations of the same general concept, which gradually grow more absurd, such as race car driving track resort with open bar, and a live fire wargame range. All the while, the characters are gradually starving to death, and no matter how much they eat they remain hungry. They eventually pry from the professor the nature of the device they built; it it generates a field which captures neurological impulses and stimulates the mind to perceive a fantasy world, and the five of them are trapped in it, and something is wrong in the software in which things keep going wrong. Eventually they reason, based on their knowledge of the device, that some representation of it must exist in the simulation, and they might be able to deactivate it to shut down the simulation. They eventually find a closed room with the label "do not enter" on it, and within find the device, and disable it.
They come to in the lab, apparently a few days after their original test of the device, quite starved. They take some food and begin to recover, but the professor does not, and he seems much more starved than the rest of them. The characters stumble upon a door in the lab with the same 'do not enter' sign on it, and eventually force their way inside. Within the room, they find a representation of the professors prototype, and destroy it.
The professor himself then wakes up, back in his garage, and his fantasy of having a team of brilliant and dedicated graduate students, and fame and renown, was just a fantasy.
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People responded well to this game, particularly while using premade characters. Enough enthusiasm towards this concept was demonstrated, and interest in further games in this vein was demonstrated to justify further episodes. I have a few ideas, but I have to say that it's very difficult to concept a mind fuck and make sure that it will only last one game session. Once play began, this game lasted about 3 or 4 hours, and concluded while everyone was mostly awake. A good time was had by all.
I forsee being able to probably run one more of these while I'm here. I have a few generalized pointers I could offer to another GM interested in running one. I found that developing this game was actually more difficult than most other game's I've worked on, as a greater amount of planning and concepting was necessary. I learned a lot from running it, as far as pacing the game and making things interactive goes. I felt like more skill related things happening would have been good, but by and large people didn't seem to mind their decisions and interactions having a relatively unfettered interaction with the world, however this is partly because they were interacting with a world that existed to please them, and the expression of intent was more relevant to the simulation than a die roll was.
These games are highly roleplay intensive, and playing a randomly selected premade character is a fairly tough challenge. When you write your own character from scratch, and develop who that person is and what their skills and so on are, you have a perhaps easier time of making sure that you can successfully play the character. I'd like to give real life xp to Cheyne, Haley, Steven, and Paul G for their universally excellent character portrayals. I found the various ways these characters handled the revelation that what they thought was real was fake quite entertaining. Particularly Paul, who murdered beach babes to prove that reality wasn't real. 3xp each, everyone, good job.
I have at least two more concepts that could be used for further Outer Limits sessions, with a third rumbling along. I will, however, leave them as mere concepts until a very firm date and time for another game is determined, probably until that day actually. It is, as I mentioned above, tough and demanding, and I have two other games I'm running right now which also require development and attention.
I would ask people to express any interest in roleplay centric, somewhat linear games like this, and also for the people who played in the pilot to share their feelings.
I forsee being able to probably run one more of these while I'm here. I have a few generalized pointers I could offer to another GM interested in running one. I found that developing this game was actually more difficult than most other game's I've worked on, as a greater amount of planning and concepting was necessary. I learned a lot from running it, as far as pacing the game and making things interactive goes. I felt like more skill related things happening would have been good, but by and large people didn't seem to mind their decisions and interactions having a relatively unfettered interaction with the world, however this is partly because they were interacting with a world that existed to please them, and the expression of intent was more relevant to the simulation than a die roll was.
These games are highly roleplay intensive, and playing a randomly selected premade character is a fairly tough challenge. When you write your own character from scratch, and develop who that person is and what their skills and so on are, you have a perhaps easier time of making sure that you can successfully play the character. I'd like to give real life xp to Cheyne, Haley, Steven, and Paul G for their universally excellent character portrayals. I found the various ways these characters handled the revelation that what they thought was real was fake quite entertaining. Particularly Paul, who murdered beach babes to prove that reality wasn't real. 3xp each, everyone, good job.
I have at least two more concepts that could be used for further Outer Limits sessions, with a third rumbling along. I will, however, leave them as mere concepts until a very firm date and time for another game is determined, probably until that day actually. It is, as I mentioned above, tough and demanding, and I have two other games I'm running right now which also require development and attention.
I would ask people to express any interest in roleplay centric, somewhat linear games like this, and also for the people who played in the pilot to share their feelings.
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Paul Gilmore
- Lost Knight
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