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Lis and I saw SLEEP NO MORE last night. I loved it; Lis, not so much, but she had an okay time.
I hate writing reviews of things that nobody's going to get a chance to see, and they're sold out for the entire rest of their run.
But they just added an extra performance on February 3rd, for $100+fees+town of brookline's cut, instead of the usual $25+fees+town of brookline's cut. The extra $75 goes to Partners In Health's Hatian relief fund.
By the time I hit "POST", though, it will be sold out. The 7 pm entry time already is.
What is SLEEP NO MORE? Um, that's hard to explain. Imagine, maybe, a three-hour LARP with no PCs. You've got NPCs, and GMs, and spectators. But no PCs.
Or maybe imagine a Halloween haunted house. Except all the people in it are characters from either Macbeth or Hitchcock movies involved in the plot of Macbeth. And many of them are excellent ballet dancers.
Or maybe it's like a first-person atmospheric horror game, like SILENT HILL. Except you're actually walking through there, and nothing in the place can interact with you. Except when it does. But it can't actually HURT you.
What you've got is the Old Lincoln School, which is a former school in Brookline, which Punchdrunk, a British theater group, took, and turned into . . . um. Thingy.
( Read more... )
Also, tangentially-related in the sense that it's for Haiti relief, but actually giving you something that you might want even if it WASN'T a donation:
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=78023&
Drive-Thru RPG is a pay-and-download RPG site. And a bunch of folks who publish through them got together a VERY tempting fundraiser.
Purchase their $20 donation to Doctors Without Borders. In return, you get . . . a bunch of stuff. Retail value about $1400. Now, naturally, in terms of ACTUAL worth, it's not anywhere near that -- basically, a lot of their publishers pretty much threw a bunch of stuff from their back catalogs, stuff that wasn't really selling, into the bundle. But there is definitely WELL more than $20 worth of stuff that's worth it. What you get is probably worth well over $100, even if $1400 is a bit of a stretch.
It's especially interesting for people who design their own RPG systems. Even the flawed systems -- even the flawed-to-unusability systems -- are useful to read and get ideas from. And there are a LOT of systems. Some of them are even good. Even the bad ones have good ideas.
But, for me, I was at well over $20 worth of material with the SERENITY RPG sourcebook (flawed system, but lots of good background info on the Firefly universe), and the SAVAGE WORLDS "TALES OF TERROR", I think it's called, pulp sourcebook -- which includes a chapter on a Random Pulp Adventure Generator System, based on Lester Dent's formula for writing a saleable pulp novel. It takes Lester Dent's system, translates it into random tables, et voila! Now you, too, can create a pulp adventure scenario that may not make a WHOLE lot of sense, but ought to move fast enough and be exciting enough that your players won't have enough time to NOTICE that it doesn't really make sense. (Which is pretty much how all of Lester Dent's stories worked.)
Oh, and also the Quick-Ass Game System's Book Of Random Tables, which is a book of random tables. Basically a humor book ("Random Dave Table" featuring 20 famous people named Dave?) but one or two potentially useful imagination-kick-starters. ("Okay, let's see. So I just rolled on the campaign generation table. I can run a campaign where the players are MONSTERS who work as SOLDIERS and are opposed by SUPERHEROES. Um. That actually sounds like it could be fun . . . ")
Well worth $20, and, hey, it's a donation to Doctors Without Borders.
I hate writing reviews of things that nobody's going to get a chance to see, and they're sold out for the entire rest of their run.
But they just added an extra performance on February 3rd, for $100+fees+town of brookline's cut, instead of the usual $25+fees+town of brookline's cut. The extra $75 goes to Partners In Health's Hatian relief fund.
By the time I hit "POST", though, it will be sold out. The 7 pm entry time already is.
What is SLEEP NO MORE? Um, that's hard to explain. Imagine, maybe, a three-hour LARP with no PCs. You've got NPCs, and GMs, and spectators. But no PCs.
Or maybe imagine a Halloween haunted house. Except all the people in it are characters from either Macbeth or Hitchcock movies involved in the plot of Macbeth. And many of them are excellent ballet dancers.
Or maybe it's like a first-person atmospheric horror game, like SILENT HILL. Except you're actually walking through there, and nothing in the place can interact with you. Except when it does. But it can't actually HURT you.
What you've got is the Old Lincoln School, which is a former school in Brookline, which Punchdrunk, a British theater group, took, and turned into . . . um. Thingy.
( Read more... )
Also, tangentially-related in the sense that it's for Haiti relief, but actually giving you something that you might want even if it WASN'T a donation:
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=78023&
Drive-Thru RPG is a pay-and-download RPG site. And a bunch of folks who publish through them got together a VERY tempting fundraiser.
Purchase their $20 donation to Doctors Without Borders. In return, you get . . . a bunch of stuff. Retail value about $1400. Now, naturally, in terms of ACTUAL worth, it's not anywhere near that -- basically, a lot of their publishers pretty much threw a bunch of stuff from their back catalogs, stuff that wasn't really selling, into the bundle. But there is definitely WELL more than $20 worth of stuff that's worth it. What you get is probably worth well over $100, even if $1400 is a bit of a stretch.
It's especially interesting for people who design their own RPG systems. Even the flawed systems -- even the flawed-to-unusability systems -- are useful to read and get ideas from. And there are a LOT of systems. Some of them are even good. Even the bad ones have good ideas.
But, for me, I was at well over $20 worth of material with the SERENITY RPG sourcebook (flawed system, but lots of good background info on the Firefly universe), and the SAVAGE WORLDS "TALES OF TERROR", I think it's called, pulp sourcebook -- which includes a chapter on a Random Pulp Adventure Generator System, based on Lester Dent's formula for writing a saleable pulp novel. It takes Lester Dent's system, translates it into random tables, et voila! Now you, too, can create a pulp adventure scenario that may not make a WHOLE lot of sense, but ought to move fast enough and be exciting enough that your players won't have enough time to NOTICE that it doesn't really make sense. (Which is pretty much how all of Lester Dent's stories worked.)
Oh, and also the Quick-Ass Game System's Book Of Random Tables, which is a book of random tables. Basically a humor book ("Random Dave Table" featuring 20 famous people named Dave?) but one or two potentially useful imagination-kick-starters. ("Okay, let's see. So I just rolled on the campaign generation table. I can run a campaign where the players are MONSTERS who work as SOLDIERS and are opposed by SUPERHEROES. Um. That actually sounds like it could be fun . . . ")
Well worth $20, and, hey, it's a donation to Doctors Without Borders.