Fright Night Art & Rules Update

It's been several months since I talked about Fright Night. Ever since Melissa pushed me to start doing art myself for A Sundered World, we've decided against trying to Kickstart it again and just have me draw all of the five-ish pieces we were initially aiming for. Here's the cover for the Creature Factory section:

Since the entire game relies on film terminology, I'm going for a rough, "storyboard" kind of look.

In addition over the past few months we've done more playtest sessions with some other players, and even a few other groups (sometimes with them running the game to see how it worked out). I haven't blogged any play reports because I've been insanely busy with a variety of projects (including, well, Fright Night), but some of the highlights include a prisoner shipment getting picked off by aliens in Australia, a whaling crew fighting off zombies (which culminated in a fight against a zombie whale), and a clan of hillbillies getting pulverized by a particularly violent ghost.

Though only one of the sessions was kind of meh (which, unfortunately, was run by yours truly), we still ended up tweaking the game some more.

The way the game works is that each Character takes turns having a block of playtime focused on their character (a Scene). The Director (ie, the GM) builds Scenes by rolling on a pair of tables and using the results as guidelines: the character might learn, find, lose, or see something, suffer damage (either from the Monster, an Extra, or the environment), or have nothing really happen at all.

It used to be that both tables had six results, which meant that you had an equal chance of anything happening. After one session in which the Director rolled a bunch of Extra Deaths, he proposed a change: have the tables vary as the game progresses. Again, the game already uses a lot of cinema terminology (Director, Movie, Set, Scenes, Extras, Actor, etc), so why not have the game better follow a kind of three-act structure?

So there are now three sets of tables, one for each Act. As you accrue Climax successes the game transitions from Act I to Act II, then from Act II to Act III. Each successive set of tables changes the odds of each result, so you're more likely to get a Nothing, Jump Scare, or Asset in Act I, while in Act III you can expect more Extras to die and Characters to suffer damage.

Something else we clarified was forcing Cool rolls to avoid having the Character do something stupid or disastrous, fighting the Monster at the end (including an option for an Instant-Death ending), and suggestions on handling Character recovery (in case you have a lot of downtime, or your Movie has access to futuristic medicine or magical healing).

It's been about a year since we started doing this, and we're excited that it's almost done (and all "in-house" to boot). The next game we plan on making using this game system (which we're calling Treatment) is probably going to be something superhero oriented.

GM's Day Sale

DriveThru RPG is running a week-long sale, in which they are marking down hundreds of titles by 30% or more, including our entire product catalog!

Seeing as I forgot about this when I put The Pirate on sale, I set it back to it's original price, and then marked it down 30%, which is 9% more than it was before. When Drivethru's sale ends, I'll put it back and keep the March sale rolling.

I'm not going through the motions of updating the bundles, since right now if you get them individually you'll still save a good deal more than if you got the bundle.

So, here's your chance to snag a bunch of high-quality, high-content classes and magic items at a considerable discount!