I fail at Dread :)

So I ran my Halloween game at Mom's last night. I had 5 players - Tommy, Jessie, Mark, Amanda, and Cameron. I sprung the questionnaires on them right before the game, and that had some people flustered. But then we slowly got into the adventure. Some people had to go, but the almost everyone was pretty engrossed in the story until the very end. I say I fail at Dread not because I ran a bad game, but because I basically ran a sci-fi one-shot with jenga instead of dice :)

I was running "Beneath a Metal Sky," one of the examples from the back of the book. I was warned on RPG.net that this was the hardest of the scenarios, but I trudged ahead with it, spending the past few weeks going over the scant information published in the book and building on it in my head. One of the most useful building blocks I created was a deckplan of the ISS Auerbach. Because I had committed this to memory, I was able to visualize and explain where the locations were in relation to each other.

Another thing I worked hard at was picking the right music. I had originally wanted to use the Alien soundtrack, which was creepy enough, but it had ups and downs, crescendos that may be awkward if they played at a dull moment in the game. I decided to use the background music from Quake 1, written by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. That worked beautifully. Creepy and droning, it was able to fade in the background and make everythign jsut a little more creepy.

Best moment of the game was when the characters found out what the creatures were. Mark's character, the Captain, took one down with a few excellently placed pistol shots. They examine it to find that it's merely a slightly-altered human with absolutely no skin. Exposed muscles are covered in dried blood. When the doctor starts to investigate, the corpse explodes into a swarm of tiny, four-legged beetles. Thankfully no one was hurt. (Drat!) The bugs had hollowed out the former crew member and were driving him around. Both Cameron and Mark said that this was legitimately creepy. Go Team Chris!

There were some other creepy parts towards the beginning, but the game turned into one big run & gun after the first creature fell. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Next Halloween, I'm planning to run something more game-y.