**Cross-posted to Story Games**

Yesterday evening at Conpulsion I ran a short playtest of my game-in-development, “The Hammer Falls: A Game of Dystopia.” It was very much at the tail-end of the convention, and I managed to snag an excellent group of players – Joe M., Stuart, Debbie, and Calum. I knew Joe and Calum from playing with them at Nerdinburgh ’08, and had played The Shab-Al-Hiri Roach with Debbie, Joe, and Calum the previous night. I had never played with Stuart before, but had met him briefly at Nerdinburgh, and was happy to have him along. Rather than playing in this game I sat to the side, facilitated, and nudged when necessary.

We sat down at the table, and I handed out the character sheets. The Dystopia Sheet is placed at the centre of the table. I briefly reviewed that everyone was relatively comfortable with the definition of dystopia provided by the game, and I started to read off the list of dystopia “Types” so we could establish our setting. After quite a bit of discussion I interjected, and asked if they would rather randomly determine the setting. We rolled a one for the primary Type, which was good old Totalitarian Dystopia. The group decided that was a little vanilla, and so we rolled for a secondary Type and got a four, which indicates an Alien Dystopia. So we wrote, on the Dystopia Sheet “Totalitarian / Alien.” This stimulated a massive chat about possible settings, which eventually resulted in a Human Theme Park on an alien planet. The park is a bad vision of earth in the year 2008, with constant humorous and sometimes unsettling historical inaccuracies. The aliens are in actuality only around 3 inches tall, and they fly through pneumatic tubes to go through the park and observe the specimens. Despite their size, the aliens are capable of killing a human with only a thought.

We launched into character creation, and while there were areas of difficulty it ended with some very interesting characters. Calum ended up playing an enforcer of the alien overlord’s dictates – a human oppressing humans. Debbie created a woman bred to play the part of Princess Diana, First Woman On The Moon. Joe ended up a lowly fry cook, just going through the paces. Stuart was playing one of the Aliens, a Manager of the park and a pretty ruthless, sadistic bastard. Some choices in chargen I found really interesting included the Emphasis choices. Emphasis determines whether the story will concentrate more on your character’s struggle with the dystopia itself (Spotlight Emphasis) or an internal struggle somehow mirrored and thrown into relief by the dystopia (Backdrop Emphasis). Only one character ended up choosing Backdrop, and that was Calum. It was made more interesting when he won the Hope “A Person Who Comforts Me and Makes Me Confident” – which was in direct contrast to the way he had acted thus far, merely an ultraviolent thug. (I have great thoughts for what his next scene, which is known as The Turning Point, would have been.)

This is already pretty long, so I won’t give a blow-by-blow as I often can. Suffice to say that everyone brought excellent ideas and play to the table. I loved many moments in the narrative – adored the opening scenes from each player in particular, which were establishing shots that give us a feeling for the character’s lives. The system revealed flaws, as you might expect from a first-time design and first-time playtest, but also strengths – the system seemed to push things towards dystopia even better than I had hoped. The new addition to the system incorporating real-life player Hopes worked well, I thought. Likewise the dice system worked at least as well as I had hoped.

I’m really looking forward to working further on this game. I’m possibly more excited than I’ve ever been about writing it.

It kinda worked. Wow.

I can’t thank Joe, Calum, Stuart, and Debbie enough. You guys kick ass, you rocked my game and gave me more assistance and food for thought than you can conceive of.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I hope I can return the favour someday.