Best Friends
An interview with Gregor Hutton
Things have been a tad quiet around here with me moving into the house I’ve just bought and Nick running around sorting out his next big step, but I thought I’d kick things off again with an interview with Gregor Hutton.
I was very pleased to meet Gregor earlier this year at KapCon when he was in town for a friend’s wedding. A little while later I asked if he’d mind answering a few questions and here are his answers. › Continue reading
Derby of the Damned – a kind of game
So a couple of years ago I bought a t-shirt from Threadless called “Derby of the Damned”. A few months later I went to my first KapCon and came away flush with ideas and concepts for new adventures using many and varied different game systems. One of those ideas was based on the t-shirt, partly because I thought it would be cool to play a Roller Derby girl and partly because I thought Derby of the Damned would be a great name for a scenario.
This idea bounced around in my head for months, every now and then I would try to make it work with an existing system. I tired All Flesh Must Be Eaten (the Unisystem zombie game from Eden Studios), Savage Worlds, True 20 and even Best Friends. But none of them quite seemed to fit with my idea with how this should play out.
It was around about this time that I was introduced to shared narrative games, most specifically 3: 16 Carnage Amongst the Stars. Something about the extremely quick character creation, low-fi stat/ability system and free for all nature of the game totally clicked with my idea of what I wanted Derby of the Damned to be. This minor epiphany also made me think that Derby didn’t need to just be a one off scenario, but possibly a shared narrative game in it’s own right.
I worked pretty hard on it after this change in direction, getting a set of rules I thought I could work with together with the intention of Derby making its debut at Kapcon 18. However I totally chickened out at the play test stage and decided against it in the end. Since then I’ve pretty much shelved the project, and I think it might be time to pull it back off the shelf.
So I’ve decided to write a series of blog posts on the different elements that I’ve thought about during this design process to try and kick start it again. They will be around:
- Character creation
- How the dice roll
- Creating stories
Hopefully by the end I’ll be back in the head space to finish this off and actually get a game going.
The first post will show up sometime next week, so check back soon if you’re interested to see my somewhat bunny hopping creative process unfold.
Best Friends or “How I got a bigger piece of the pie through quick wit and bitchiness”
Today at WARGS I, along with 4 others, played a game of Best Friends. This crazy game of girls and their petty hatreds and jealousies is awesome fun for a one off play.
We sat down and started to talk through what type of game we wanted to play. A few ideas were put on the table from Vestal Virgins to students at a Sith Academy to a group of women haggling over a fortune. In the end it was decided that they were:
Heather (Paul) – the first ex-wife
Chastity (Nasis) – the ex-trophy wife
Kitten (Nick) – the bimbo mistress
Katrina (Curtis) – illegitimate daughter
of Nigel, a millionaire who made his money from inventing the post-it-note clue. He’s dying and they have to prove to the lawyer that Katrina is part of the family or she gets the full $50 million.
The highlight of the game for me was Paul’s increadable bitchiness as Heather. With out a doubt he took the whole idea of the catty and mildly bitter ex-wife to a new level.
The lines of the afternoon go to Paul and Curtis:
Heather replying to Chastity about the length of their respective marriages: “Yes, well, give or take 10 years”.
Katrina commenting on Nigel’s 24 hour nursing care: “The happy ending nursing team”.
After Heather “got rid” off Kitten’s handbag dog in a up market New York club, Kitten seduced Heather’s new husband (for which Heather vowed to kill her), Chastity got the seduction on camera and provided the evidence to the lawyer, Katrina tried to get more money by suggesting that daddy liked her more than he should and Kitten ran off to Mexico with all the spare cash and jewlery she could find, the end result had the full $50 mill being split evenly between Katrina, Heather and Chastity.
I had a blast, thanks to the quick wit and utter bitchiness of the players!