The Impossible Dream

[Indy Pete]

Hi

Recently I ran a hack of Dread that was glory-themed rather than horror-themed.

The game was set in the world of chivalric knights and courtly romance that will be familiar to anyone that has read the Arthurian legands, played Chaosium's Pendragon RPG, or seen John Boorman's film Excalibur. Gameplay featured lots of courtly romance, a scene of poetry (!), jousting, gore-spouting combat in seas of mud, and all that kind of good stuff.

I'm quite taken with John Harper's AGON at the mo, so in this hack of Dread, the tower modelled a pool of potential Glory. Knights could pull to succeed - as per normal Dread - and they could also make an additional pull to succeed gloriously.

The spur of friendly rivalry between players and much cajoling from me saw lots of pulling for Glory early on, which made the tower quite rickety rather quickly. At that point, players began to be torn between the desire to earn Glory - via additional pulls - and the desire to not cause something dreadful to happen to their Knights - and by extension, the things the Knights loved such as family, reputation, and suchlike.

It was fun, and I'll be running it again soon.

Here is a link to download a quick-and-dirty PDF that contains all of the questionnaires we used.

Cheers
Pete

[Eppy]

That is absolutely gorgeous!