Don't Rest Your Head

Don Corcoran guest-GM'd a session of Don't Rest Your Head for my local RPG group on Friday night. I'd bought a copy at GenCon and read it through, but this was my first experience actually playing it.

I'd been a little concerned that we'd spend a lot of time in character creation and not enough time actually playing the game, but that turned out not to be a problem. Don did a great job taking character ideas presented by each of us and tweaking them to make them more setting-appropriate and help us interact in more interesting ways. I have to admit that my own character worked well enough in terms of the setting, but it might have helped if I'd had a more specific goal. It might've been a better character for a long term game than for a single session. Mike H's character was similar in that respect. I don't think we got more than a glimpse of where he could've gone with that character over time.

We started with bits introducing each individual character, occasionally drifting into each other's stories. It reminded me of some Sorcerer sessions I've played. It works well enough as long as all of the individual stories hold the interest of the players who aren't doing anything during that time. Don used the device of having players play the occasional NPC, which keeps everybody involved and brings a bit more color to the NPCs than if the GM played all of them.

The true highlight of the session was actually because of colorful NPCs. Dana and the other Scott played a couple of street corner drug dealers who had us all on the floor laughing. I think I'll have to find an excuse to throw a couple of similar dealers into the Firefly campaign somewhere. :-)

In terms of the actual PCs, Jason gets the award for best start to his story by teleporting into a children's birthday party while on fire. That's hard to match, never mind top.

Don ultimately brought all of the PCs together at an all night diner, where we were collectively attacked by surreal beasties after building up to it by our finding a couple of corpses apparently left behind by said beasties. This ending reminded me of how Call of Cthulhu has lost a lot of power for me because I can recognize most of the commonly used opposition from the smallest hints. In this session, I had no idea what our enemies might be capable of, and in a horror game that makes all the difference.

The game mechanics were clear and simple, yet flavorful, and everyone understood how things were supposed to work very quickly. I plan to run Don't Rest Your Head at a convention sometime if I can come up with enough interesting characters to do a good job of it. It might actually be easier for me to come up with a group with interesting interactions than a single character.

So thanks again to Don for GMing a quality session for us. I look forward to seeing the horror game of his own design that he was telling us about after this session.