My Tuesday night roleplaying group has been playing one-off TV based games.
A couple of weeks ago we tried out a game called "It's Complicated", set it in a small 'Stars Hollow'* like town, but populated with old Gods and Goddesses in human form, some retired, some there for other reasons.
The characters were:
Dr Thoth, the town doctor, hiding from the town the fact that his wife was dead and resurrected.
Serena, the token sane person and Athena working hard to be an ordinary diner owner.
Bacchus, owns a vineyard and inn just outside of town...constantly drunk.
Kelly/Kali, the exceptionally grumpy meter maid, obsessed with consuming blood.
Zeke, the mighty Zeus, trapped in the body of a teenager with no power at all. Hyperactive and entrepreneurial.
Lyle/Loki, in town under witness protection from the Norse Gods. Highly paranoid and loopy.
We based the game on quirky gentle comedies like Gilmore Girls and Pushing Daisies, and had a great deal of fun choosing scenes with each other and playing off the strange quirks we'd all developed. I was Serena, and I felt something like the mother to them all as I tried to understand the actions they took and keep the town from descending into chaos.
Dr Thoth doing a bit of a psych test on Lyle: You find a turtle upside down. What do you do?
Lyle: Is it looking at me?
Thoth: Let's say.....yes.
Lyle: I hide. Until it goes away. It could be some days but at least I know where it will go.
We're going to play another session of it I think. I hope so anyway.
The game we played last week, and one player short was a game of Primetime Adventures, which I have had a love hate relationship with in the past. This time the game came through for me and I got why everyone raves about it so.
I wanted to play some sort of documentary and then someone else pitched monster hunters and magic being commonplace in the world and from there we invented the show with no name as of yet.
It's a TV show about the people who make a documentary about hunting monsters, kind of like Most Haunted but a bit more dangerous with actual results.
The characters were mostly crew.
Alistair Dowd, a big game hunter type with Daddy issues, expert for the TV show.
Johnny Thunder, the pop idol elf who wishes people would look beyond his shallow exterior to find....the shallow interior. Co-presenter.
Amy Orwin, director/producer/costar of the show. Control freak, stress bunny who cares more about ratings than possibly anything else.
Daff, the dwarf equipment guy who is fantastic at his job and completely undermined and overlooked and is very very bitter about it.
We played the pilot episode.
Lord Dowd, Alistair's father came into the show and loudly took over. He was incredibly good at making Alistair feel terrible. It was incredibly chaotic, but I think we got all the characters established and set up some dramatic loads of bricks.
Daff had fun pranking Johnny and losing out in coolness stakes and his psychic girlfriend will be a firm fan favourite I think. I did some good shrieking as Amy and impressed everyone with the levels of panic I can get to when I want.
Also introduced were a rival monster hunting TV show group, Los Gringos, who drove me insane with anger.
Lord Dowd: Good help is hard to find.
Johnny: Yes, and hard help is good to find.
Los Gringos to Amy: Little American Girl, you are in Mexico now!
Amy: No I'm not! This is east LA!
Amy to Johnny: don't worry about fighting the monster, we've all got that under control. You just do your thing with the camera.
Lord Dowd: Look son, the weakness of the Hydra is in the brain carapace! (goes to stab it)
Alistair: I KNEW that!!! It's my monster!
*setting of Gilmore Girls
Posted by jenni at February 19, 2008 09:10 PM