Dread: Part Five
Contest Time!
The authors of Dread, Epidah Ravachol and Nat Barmore generously offered up 3 autographed copies of Dread for me to give away to readers and those folks interested in taking the game for a spin. I have to say, this is pretty damn cool and I am excited to pass these along to 3 of you. With that, let’s dive into the deets of the contest.
140 Characters of Dread:Â Every session of Dread revolves around a group of characters and a story. In my opinion, it is the heart of the game. So in the comments below, in 140 characters or less give me your best Dread scenarios. This will run until Sunday evening and then the winners will snag a shiny, autographed copy of Dread!
Update: Enter as often as you like. I’m easy.
Update #2: A few folks asked how Brett’s character is still in the game after knocking over the tower. Â By the letter of the law, Brett is now considered to be a ‘Dead Man Walking”. He is going to die at a moment determined by Charlie. However, being a DMW he is allowed to role-play and interact with the other players, though he cannot make tower pulls. It’s a great mechanic for keeping players who accidentally knock over the tower (like he did) in the game for a while and build tension.
The small prop plane you were taking has to make a stop due to a freak storm. Once you land, you discover the town is empty of people.
Players in a library, they find a mysterious book. Whatever they read actually happens, even if read in their head. Can they stop the madness?
Players wake up in separate white tile rooms with no memory. Dressed in blue jumpsuits. Each given a knife. Voice says “to leave, you have to play.”
You wake from cyro into zero-g and frozen drops of crimson tumbling through a dead ship. Outside the glass you don’t see Sol. You don’t see anything.
There are no stars.
I don’t know why, but this one is seriously terrifying.
I may have wet myeself reading that.
You and some friends are on a hunting expedition through the woods. Suddenly you spot some strange-looking lights in a field up ahead.
The players are high schoolers walking to a local playground. They reach the place it used to be and it’s…gone. A little girls rides up on her bicycle and walks into the middle of where the playstuff used to be. She slowly turns around with firey, glowing eyes. “I’m sorry. I forgot my daddy doesn’t like me to play with strangers.”
The PCs are teachers at an elementary school. A thunder storm is going on, and the lights go out. Kids scream, no big deal. Then they hear a loud crash from the hallway. They go to explore and see a little girl with no mouth standing the dark hallway. Thunder crashes. She raises her hands to them. She has gnashing mouths on the palms of her hands. “Want to play pattycake?”
After losing a major battle, can the crew escape their wrecked spaceship without alerting their attackers or running out of oxygen?
Oops. 140 character limit. >.<
Teachers at an elementary school. Lights go out. Explore & see a girl with no mouth; gnashing mouths on her palms. “Want to play pattycake?â€
Walk to a local playground, but it’s…gone. Girl stands where it used to be.“I’m sorry, Daddy doesn’t like me to play with strangers.â€
Everyone’s kidnapped, drugged, and forced to play a game of Jenga. Topple the tower, and the person to your left has to kill you.
It’s the end of the world, and you have the only working car! Get to safety!
They were only telling campfire stories, just stories. Then the trees start to come alive.
Students from the modern day are suddenly swept back to the year 1845 by Darwin’s studies of the Cthulhu cult!
A mysterious door is found in an abandoned mansion that leads to a seemingly endless, dark room. Dark vibes radiate out. What’s inside?
In the year 1860, Charles Darwin kidnaps the PCs for experiments on human reproduction and artificially accelerated evolution.
Late studying, you hear your roommate call you in the hallway. Then you hear him call you from the bathroom, “I heard it too, don’t go!”
You wake up in a medical room. It turns out that only America exists and everytime you “leave,” they feed you memories! Escape the facility!
Friends hanging out, talking. One guy goes to the kitchen for a snack and finds his own dead body in the fridge.
It’s the Second Coming and Jesus is pissed at you guys for that time you TP’d that Baptist church. Whatcha gonna do?
You’ve woken up to find you are now part of a human centipede. Oh snap!
After being sucked up by a U.F.O, a group of cheerleaders find themselves suspended in the sky on an invisible floor on indeterminable width.
Your group is locked in a maze of doors each requiring blood to open. The timer is running down. How much blood are you willing to use to escape?
The city’s perimeter of banefire has held the hungry darkness at bay for as long as you remember, but now the flames have begun to flicker and dim…
Damn, 148 characters! Fixed version below.
Banefire has held the hungry darkness at bay for as long as you remember, but now the flames have begun to flicker and dim…
Characters receive envelopes containing a pair of 3d glasses with the words “Put me on,” scrawled on them. Soon they wish they never had.
Tonight’s ritual must go off without a hitch, but are you willing to sacrifice your friends?
It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now there’s a body in the trunk and a car full of loose ends…
You were doing just fine ignoring the sounds coming from the basement until your friends came over…
Your childhood imaginary friend just showed up on your doorstep.
Your fortune cookie reads “The next person you talk to will be murdered in 36 hours.” When you ask to see your friends, theirs are all the same.
A group has been sentenced to death in the dark labyrinth. Is there really a Minotaur down here? Or is it the others you have to be wary of.
The floor is Lava @_@ sorry I had to 😀
An ancient Race of aliens is recolonizing the earth. Humanity struggles to survive, but the aliens wear the skins of men, and walk among you
There’s a competition to create an interesting scenario (preferably British) with only 140 characters, you know any second you’ll run out of
’44, in the Gestapo’s cellar. Spy work seemed a big game, until now. Did one of you betray the others? Can you pretend it was you, to live?
When you took a dare to walk through the ‘Combat zone’ you were drunk; now you’re sober, it got weird, and muggers aren’t what scares you.
You’ve hiked these trails for ages, but never saw this cool side path your friend found; now why can’t you get back to the path you were on?
Manchuria, Unit 731; very very bad. The Japs will kill you just because you’re Chinese; they don’t know you’re a spy. Is that your way out?
People round here can only push me so far. I been buying guns and I’m gonna show ’em all. But why’s he dead on my couch? I didn’t do that!
Road closed. Google Maps says take the side road; after 15 miles of logging road, it’s blocked with boulders. Shotgun shells everywhere.
[Note: This one happened to me. We were in the middle of deep woods, getting pretty creeped out. and trying not to show it. I didn’t tell my wife until we’d driven out of there how much that felt like we were in the setup for a horror movie.]
You huddle close to your slave cargo as the sounds continue beyond the galley door, realizing the color of your skin doesn’t matter anymore.
3 days ago the moldy bread ran out; the cages of the dead are out of reach. Your shriveled left arm could sustain your family for 1-2 days.
“You or her; no third answer,†the human trafficker spits in broken English. You’ve family back home, but she’s sobbing and is just a child.
You wake up gasping for breath, clawing at the sealed plastic that envelops your body. Just as you’re about to expire, the bag decompresses and air fills your lungs once again. You unzip your plastic tomb and sit up, the room you are in is filled with humanoid figures suspended within glass cylinders filled with a thick fluid.
As you pull the catheters and wires from your body you vomit up a silvery liquid substance that smells almost like formaldehyde. You notice that you’re not alone, a few others in this chamber seem to be awaking as well. From the corner of your eye you catch sight of a slick skinned creature with huge black eyes peering out at you from a darkened corner, though it slips back into the shadows before you can truly get a good look at it. Amidst the overwhelming silence, you can hear the stamping of rhythmic footfalls marching over the metal floor from a distance, and the sound seems to be drawing closer.
You’re not sure who these other people are, where you are, or how you got there. Your instincts tell you that it’s time to move though, especially if you want to live long enough to find out answers to any of those questions…
“Ladies and gentlemen,†the intercom announced, “please pull out your ticket stubs, the starboard nacelle lifeboat lottery begins now.â€
You glance at the princess, and she waves with her right hand. Obediently, you chose the right door, so is it to be the Lady, or the Tiger?
A beautiful day for you to be out riding Comanche, even though there were indians about. “Take cover,†you hear in Custer’s Yankee accent.
Sandstorm. Your squad huddles in the cave where noises echo from the dark. Is something there or is your guilty conscience playing tricks?
Havana Harbor, 1898. You and your crewmen awake for your shifts to find yourselves locked in the lower berths of your ship: the USS Maine.
You found the gun in the dumpster where you hide your porn mags. While showing it off to some other 12-year olds, a stretch limo pulls up.
You come to tied to a chair, connected to a polygraph. Gas hisses into the room as a voice from behind mirrored glass asks, “True or False?”
After dozing on your intercontinental flight, you awake to find the entire crew gone. The autopilot is holding but the fuel is getting low.
You wake up at a banquet table in a lavish dining room. In the kitchen, a limbless torso sits on a butcher’s block. Why do you feel so full?
A meteor storm has perforated your deep-space mining ship, crippling it and leaving it slipping into the gravity well of a black-hole. Not only is it falling apart at the seams, it’s also falling into oblivion, and maybe – just maybe – the escape pod is light and powerful enough to get you out of there.
You wake infront of an alter with a body on it. Three of your friends around it, covered in blood and a knife in your hand…
Thank you so much!
Yeah, I know, the contest is over. But I just came up with this one: “You’re filming a “ghost huntâ€, hoping to make it big on TV like those guys from TAPS. But there’s more than ghosts in this old asylum…”