The New Fourm

A while back I GMed a little RP for my two housemates, called The End Times, about being journalists in a small weird town called Way's End, and because of life one of the players needed to take a break from their character, and that doesn't seem like it's going to stop being true any time soon so we're thinking about restarting it with a new player character.

I'm using the reboot as an opportunity to try and pack more shit in here.

The basics of the setting is Way's End, Wyoming, a small weird town with non-authoritarian nightvale vibes - a weird and slightly silly little town. There's a number of magical and non-human residents of the town - this isn't normal for the world, but everyone in town who's been there for any length of time knows about it because every equinox the town merges into a spirit realm / faerie deelio. That's where the supernatural residence of the town originate from - everyone knows that a decent number of people here aren't human, but there's a communication based vale that means they can't talk about it when they aren't in the other world. It just doesn't work. (and if you're fully in the other world - which you can do through a few methods - you cannot talk about this one). So magic is a secret from the player at the start, but it will not remain so after the fall equinox in two weeks.

The realm merging is a recent phenomenon, there's no records or known stories of it happening before the town was founded in the 1920s - although the town is kinda in the middle of nowhere so it's hard to say if it started a bit before the town was founded and no one noticed or what. There's all sorts of stories about why the merging happens, but no one knows for sure.

Right now I'm trying to give everyone secrets. And "is supernatural" doesn't really count, because that's not really a secret in this town, so I've just been brainstorming shit.

A List of Secret Ideas:

• Committed a crime
  • Stole some shit
    • Money / Valuables
      • Because they needed it
      • For the thrill
      • Because they didn't want the original owner to have it
    • Secrets
      • Of the state
      • Of an individual
      • Of an organization
  • Murdered the president
    • Of the country
    • Of a Homeowners association
  • Murdered someone else
    • For Revenge
    • For self defense
    • Because they were incredibly intoxicated
• Framed for something
• Hiding from someone
  • An abuser
  • A crime syndicate
  • Someone they betrayed
• Invents gossip
  • Numerous harmless rumors
  • Has ruined someone's life
    • On accident
    • Very Intentionally
• Developing something they don't want people to know about
  • Because they're paranoid people would harm them for it
  • Because they're paranoid people would try to stop them from finishing
  • Because it's illegal
  • Because they're trying to surprise someone

If anyone else has ideas about secrets people could have, either building off what I brainstormed here or completely unrelated feel free to reply!

Secrets:

• Is pregnant
• Is gay
• Used to read Homestuck

I think this is cool! There's a fun twilight-y (the time of day, not the book series) vibe to a story with infrequent but regular merging of the realms. I'm trying to think of what it reminds me of but it's not coming to me right now. You'll have to let us know how it goes

Oh right interpersonal secrets! The town is pretty damn queer because it's my world and I can make it gay if I want to (and hoh boy do I want to (and also a decent percent of the town is from another world, where culturally that's less of a big deal, and also isn't fucking human. "my neighbor is kissing a guy who's his same gender" can feel like less of a big deal when your other neighbors are vampires.)), so I'm Gay isn't likely going to be a major secret, but things like had a kid in an affair, being sick of someone's shit, provided an alibi for someone, etc are all pretty good more grounded secrets.

The town is so gay. The library is run by a lesbian polycule. The chief editor of the paper is an old bear (who's also a wearbear because I cannot fucking resist a pun). A solid half of the paper's staff is some flavor of queer, and he remaining half might be I just haven't thought about it that hard.

Also it's so funny that you included "used to read homestuck" because I am including several characters who're loosely based on homestuck characters. Also it's 2006 in the RP so if I wanted to make a character having read HS they would need to be a time traveler, which, admittedly, isn't out of the picture.

Of COURSE you're including characters loosely based on Homestuck characters. I should have expected no different. XD

Hey I need a lot of NPCs and I have a decent grasp on them as people. I also included anthropomorphization of my old cats. And a guy based off of a local autoshop I've never been to. I'm taking inspo from whatever the fuck I can, a small town still has a lot of people.

That said, the Terezi and Aradia expies are pretty major characters, and the Kanaya one was a very major character in the previous attempt, although probably will be less so in this one, so like. It's not just me filling out the roster.

The first time we tried this game, I decided to hack the gumshoe system, which is designed around solving mysteries, because I figured that was a similar concept to small town paper. However, it wasn't really working well, and one of my players didn't like the core mechanics much, so I decided to try something different with it this time.

I considered kids with bikes, a game about dicking around on an adventure in a small town, but after talking to Book about her experiences playing the game I wasn't excited about it. It would work I think, but it's a very unobtrusive system, there's nothing about it that really seems to encourage the player to do anything, and it doesn't really have distinct social mechanics, just role for stat, and as this game is going to be mostly running around snooping about this town I want something that intensives snooping. I'm also a fan of Powered by the Apocalypse style "yes but" successes.

So after talking with my partner (one of the players), I decided to make my own system.

I'm still ironing out the details, but the basics are this:

• Each player's character sheet defines a small number of notable skills, that have numeric values as skills in RPGs often do
• Each player has a deck of cards
• When a player Unravels something new about the town and it's inhabitants, they draw a card into their hand
• When a character wants to do something particularly challenging, outside their skill set, or with a high risk factor, they must play cards who's value is equal to a difficulty rating the GM sets. If they have a relevant skill they my add that value.
• Every card has a side effect. Each suit has a realm of effect, and each number has prompt. Lower value cards have more mild prompts. Aces succeed with no side effects. Face cards succeed with very notable side effects.

The suits domains are as follows:

• Spades: Effects what the social network knows
• Hearts: Effects what the social networks feels
• Diamonds: Effects the Greater World
• Clubs: Effects the players personally

Edit: and the value effects:

1. Ace in the Hole: You succeed with no side effects
2. A rumor spreads
3. Something is mended
4. Something is found
5. Alarms go off
6. A secret is revealed
7. A debt is forged / called
8. Something is broken, lost, or hidden
9. An accident occurs
10. A major blow
11. (Jack) The winds shift
12. (Queen) The tide rises
13. (King) Calamity strikes

I still need to make most of the number prompts, but I'm pretty excited about this.

Characters hiding relationships could be interesting secrets such as:
○Two characters are divorced
○One character used to bully another character and they are both embarrassed about it
○A group of characters are in a small cult together

And stuff like that! Twin Peaks uses these kinds of hidden relationships to build mystery and suspense.

Those are good thoughts! Gotta make a relationship diagrams. Gotta plot out how it's all changed

Update: I accidentally gave the vampire family the last name "Night". I absolutely wasn't thinking about the fact that the first one I named was a vampire when I named her that. but I'm excited for my players to discover this.

I decided to add a mysterious treasure hunt thing to the game, because I was solving nonograms and was like. You could hide a map in one of these.

So part of the game is that there's parallel dimension thingies, the main ones being this world and a place that I'm mostly calling "somewhere else", but there's also some smaller ones, namely the library's stacks, the depths of the abandoned walmart. There's also a place called SpDonalds that is uhhhh sort of a weird hell/faerie McDonalds that's a bit of an inside joke with my partner and I.

Now, a divide between a magical world and a mundane one is a trope that I get frustrated with easily, not because I have a problem with that sort of story, but because it's often justified in ways that do not make sense in a global and historical context. Like, not to bring up HP but the HP thing with the wizard government covering the whole thing up... you mean to tell me that in every culture in the whole world all magic casters decided fuck their people, they were gonna form their own little insular magic club? Hell fucking no. But I wanted a story that was our world with a little pocket of weirdness, so I thought pretty hard about how I wanted that to work and decided that the fact that it's possible to pass between worlds here is just a here thing, and a pretty recent here thing, as in, within the last hundred years. No one fucking knows why it can happen, and no one from the other world has heard about dimension hopping being possible before they ended up here. I also decided that there is a communication barrier, you cannot be understood if you talk about ideas that are intrinsically tied to a dimension you're not in, and you cannot understand anything you read about it. You can tell someone's talking, or there's writing, you just can't understand it. Again, it is unclear why it's like this, it just is.

To be clear, this doesn't effect what you know. You can know that the equinox bridges the two worlds, and that one world has werewolves and the other has lizards that can spit blood out of their eyes to deter predictors, but you cannot communicate that to anyone else unless you are in the right world, even other people who also know those things.

So for the scavenger hunt, I'm going to give each player a note, with some cipher encrypted riddle clues about where to go to get the keys needed to get the treasure, not that the notes are going to say what the fuck there getting, they're just going to give each player a clue about the first cipher key and some encrypted text, and, four other sections that the players cannot read.

The idea is that each dimension has a set of clues that lead to a puzzle that lead to one or two letters that together form the combination for a lockbox - or, in SpDonalds case, instructions on how to get the lockbox itself.

So far I've written three out of five of the sections, this world's clues lead to a nonogram that's a map to a cave, the library's clues lead to a knight and knave puzzle that I wrote, and the SpDonalds clues get you the lockbox itself, and, currently, doesn't actually have a puzzle, just a cipher. Might change that, I'm not sure.

I actually came up with a few riddles for this, and I'm surprisingly pleased with them? They're all inspired from things I read when trying to find riddles online to steal, but a lot of online riddle sites suck ass so...

- go to the bed of no sleep where the mouth does not eat.
- what occurs twice everyday, but only once today, and not at all tomorrow?
- what's middle is after its end and before its start?

And then my knight and knave puzzle, which isn't super hard (I don't think) but is still a fun little thing to have made

On the islands of knights and knaves there are two inhabitants that say the following:
- Alice: The answer you're looking for is not in my type
- Bob: The answer you're looking for is in my type
- Alice: Bob would tell you that the answer you're looking for is at the very start of one of the types
- Bob: Alice would tell you that the answer you're looking for is unique to one of the types
- Alice: The answer you're looking for is two letters long

This has gotten really long but can anyone else think of a kind of puzzle that would be good to hide either some sort of directions (like a map) in, or more directly give 1 to 2 letters as an answer? I considered a crossword, but I'm not excited by the prospect of making a crossword and having my players fill it out