After a week of camping in New Zealand's Northland, then rocking out at the Big Day Out and finally arriving almost straight from the airport, I found myself at Kapcon, Wellington's premier games convention. Part of my excitement at being there was due to the fact that i was scheduled to run a game I had been looking forward to for a long time.

The game was Dead of Night, using that wonderful little book to play out the terrifying story of...

...Dad's Army vs The Unspeakable Horror. Yes, a Dad's Army/Cthulhu/Hellboy mashup of soul-withering proportions. But would it work? Would people 'get it'? And, with the game running at 10am on a Sunday morning, would anyone turn up? This and other gripping questions will be answered! But first, the set-up.

DoN is an incredibly easy game to get started with, character creation is simple and effective. I had chosen to use the classic characters from the TV show for this game, for obvious reasons. My hope was that the people who signed up would be there because of what the game was and have at least a vague knowledge of conventions and forms of Dad's Army. DoN allows characters to have specialisations attached to attribute pairs that improve their chances of succeeding in certain narrow fields. For this game, I modified this a little to have the specialisations noted as character quotes from the series. The platoon worked out as follows:

Captain George Mainwaring

Identify/Obscure: 5/5
Persuade/Dissuade: 3/5 Specialisation: "I don't want to hear any of that sort of talk!" (8)
Pursue/Escape: 6/4
Assault/Protect: 5/3 Specialisation: "I do wish they'd have a go, I'm spoiling for a fight!" (8)

Sergeant Arthur Wilson

Identify/Obscure: 4/6
Persuade/Dissuade: 4/4 Specialisation: "Are you sure that's wise, sir?" (8)
Pursue/Escape: 5/3 Specialisation: "I say, do you mind!" (7)
Assault/Protect: 6/4

Lance Corporal Jack Jones

Identify/Obscure: 5/5
Persuade/Dissuade: 4/4 Specialisation: "Don't panic!" (7)
Pursue/Escape: 6/4
Assault/Protect: 5/3 Specialisation: "They do not like it up 'em!" (8)

Private James Frazer

Identify/Obscure: 5/3 Specialisation: "It was a wild and lonely night..." (8)
Persuade/Dissuade: 5/5
Pursue/Escape: 3/5 Specialisation: "We're doomed, I tell ye!" (7)
Assault/Protect: 6/4

Private Frank Pike

Identify/Obscure: 6/4
Persuade/Dissuade: 4/4 Specialisation: "I'm not sure Mum would like that!" (7)
Pursue/Escape: 4/6
Assault/Protect: 3/5 Specialisation: "Mum always said I should look after myself!" (8)

The character sheets were appended with a very brief description of the characters and their most notable features. The PDF available on the Steampower site was pretty handy, as it gave the character sheet, along with the quick rules of play and the uses of survival points. This was one thing that came in very handy: there was not diversions to work out what points were used for, people had the list to had and made excellent use of it.

To be honest, I didn't really have any detailed plan for the game. I knew that there were certain locations and scene that I'd like to see, but a lot of the meat would stem from the players and how they dealt with the characters. Of course, we'd need to have the Green in Walmington-on-Sea, the seafront and (of course) the Novelty Rock Emporium!

We kicked off with the platoon hiding in a ditch, at night, near a local manor house. They had been informed by a local lady that German parachutists were in the area, so they hotfooted it off to defend the realm! From here on in, the game was pretty much a breeze. The players totally got the character, grasped the simple and intuitive nature of the mechanics and understood how I could use tension and what it meant. Tension started at 3, not because of any horror, but because they platoon was keen to get to grips with the enemy and (more terrifying than the Germans), the General was due to conduct an inspection the next day.

An encounter with ARP Warden Hodges in typically antagonistic mode shoved the tension up even more, Jones and Frazer captured some 'fifth columnists' in the manor house and Wilson and Pike got into a fight with something like a shoggoth (or perhaps it was a German parachutist in disguise?). tension crept up, then dropped as it was used to foil the best laid plans of the bold men of the Home Guard! Survival points were used from the get-go by the players: one was spent to have the people in the house (the 'fifth columnists') actually be a Welsh male voice choir, Welsh being so easily mistaken for German!Points were also spent to flip attributes, have useful items to hand (Pike having his Swiss Army knife to try and cut himself free from the shoggoth. He, of course, used the corkscrew) and generally make use of survival points in exactly the way they should be used.

By this point people were really playing their characters to the hilt, hamming it up, using quotes and conventions from Dad's Army and Cthulhu-esque horror and generally making the game fire on all cylinders.

After the horror in the dark of the night before, the next scene was the Green, where the Home Guard, the ARP wardens and the local Women's Institute were to be paraded for an inspection by the General. The Home Guard had to parade with full kit and their transport. On a village green full of people, with the General about to arrive and Jones driving his van, what could possibly go wrong? The tension mounted!

One great thing about the game that I should mention here is that people were deliberately setting their characters up to fail in a manner appropriate to the source material. They knew how I could use tension and created situations where, if I used tension to make them fail, it would be totally and comedically appropriate. Which was great. Did Jones career across the Green in his van, tearing it up and driving into the duckpond in a ball of fire? Of course he did? Did Captain Mainwaring have to obfuscate in front of the General and blusteringly divert him to another location? Indeed he did. Quality stuff.

The inspection moved to the grounds of the manor house from the previous night. Jones, now drunk on whiskey given to him by Frazer is in a terrible state, Pike has brought a caked baked by his mum to try and butter up the General and things are well placed to go very badly. Sergeant Wilson has the genius idea of creating a diversion and swapping men from both ends of the parade line to avoid the General seeing the drunk Jones. Needless to say, I used all the remaining tension to make this grand plan fail. However, the players noticed I was out of tension and dashed fro the general, Pike proferring his cake and Mainwaring again engaging in obsequious obfuscation. Hilarity all round and quick thinking from the players.

The final scenes took place during a combined Deep One/Occult Nazi Stormtrooper invasion of Walmington-on-Sea. I can say without fear of contradiction that this produced some of the most hilarious scenes of the entire game. The battle with the Deep Ones saw tension mount, survival points got thrown around (Frazer produced a Bren gun, Wilson had some dynamite from a previously foiled bank robbery and so on). The hapless Jones (who had previously fallen into the sea) had to go to the local museum to get dry clothes and arrived back on the scene in a suite of armour carrying a pike. The entire table was reduced to tear for about five minutes due to the vision of Jones, in armour, with a pike, heading down the pier, charging a deep one, shouting "They don't like it up 'em! They do not like it up 'em!". The dice rolls caused success, eyes turned to me. Would I use tension to turn success into failure? Of course I would! The deep one ends up on the handlebars of the bike, the entire thing crashes thrown the seaside novelty and rock shop at the end of the pier, with Jones shouting "Don't panic!"

People continued to spend survival points to bring stuff into the game, both in terms of stuff their characters had and in terms of plot stuff. It turned out that the leader of the Germans (a chanting, spell casting type) turned out to be (due to a player spending survival points) a robot Herman Goering controlled by radio from Berlin. Hilarious consequences when Wilson found an abandoned Panzerschreck, which he fired at the stormtroopers near the bank. The bank? Where he works? Where Mainwaring is the manager? Could it be that tension could be used to demolish the place? Yep. Captain Mainwaring simply uttered one phrase: "Wilson! My office in the morning!"

There were too many great things happening in this game to list them all. Needless to say, it was great fun and really did exceed my expectations due to a great bunch of players who were all on the same page. The way DoN is set up also contributed hugely thanks to its simplicity, the economy of the survival points and the way tension can be used.

A few further notes and comments:

Tension was kept track of by the simple expedient of having a big red marker and a pad of paper in the middle of the table, so everyone could see what the current tension was at. Having a very visual, open guide to the tension level was really helpful for this type of game.

Deciding who got what awards at the end of scenes was really challenging, because everyone was contribution really great stuff all the time. However, on a lot of occasions, there was real consensus about who had given the best moments in a given scene. On a couple of occasions, I simply gave everyone a survival point because they had all done so well. Oh, and we used poker chips to give a visual representation of survival points, which worked really well.

What more can I say? I should thank the players for being brilliant and fully getting into the spirit of the game, hey really made it rock quite conspicuously. DoN also deserves props for being very able to accommodate farcical comedy and horror simply and effectively.

Great fun.

Cheers
Malcolm