Dread: The Recap

Playing Dread not once, but twice in one weekend was a pretty daunting (and amazing) task. I'd never run the game before, my Disney game wasn't that well-prepared, and most of the Ghosty Teens had no idea what an RPG even was, so I wasn't sure how things would turn out.

First, the Ghosty Teens. We had eight characters: a Leader, a Brain, a Beauty, a Bully, a Talking Beagle, an Idiot, and the Bully's Kid Sister. A good bunch, although I'd say eight is probably too many people for me to handle.

Even though they were unfamiliar with RPGs, most of the group was made up of experienced improvisers, and everyone took to it very quickly. The game, in fact, was pretty darn funny.

I love the use of questionnaires in Dread, it's a lot like an opening in an improv show where you get details that you can later use. For example, I asked the Brain, "You're related to a famous celebrity. Who is it, and why don't the two of you get along?" and he answered, "My stepdad is famed basketball player Shaquille O'Neal. He never listens to me and his inventions often work better than mine."

So that helped me right there - Shaq became an important NPC in the mystery (he is the owner of the Natural History Museum, in fact) - and it's little things like this that helped me realize I don't have to prepare a Dread game that much: I can just write an outline with a lot of blanks, and have those blanks filled in by the players' questionnaires.

The only thing worse than describing a convention is describing an RPG in detail, so I won't tell all about The Mystery in the Museum, but it was fun and came to a satisfying conclusion: The Beauty (long-haunted by the fact that she had to eat her little brother to survive) redeemed herself by shooting a gun out of the villain's hand.

I kept expecting the Jenga Tower to fall (since that's the thing about Dread - when someone knocks down the Tower, their character dies), but they made it through without any fatalities... except for the villain. The Bully tackled him and put a sack (containing a poisonous snake) over his head.

I am amazed and pleased that this game was kind of similar to our old Ghosty Teen shows.

As for Disney Zombies... this would be different. I'd be with experienced gamers, including someone who writes games for Call of Cthulhu. And I didn't want the game to be a run-of-the-mill zombie survival story with just Disney characters. And I wasn't as prepared as I'd like.

But it still turned out fine. We had seven players: Scar (from The Lion King), Clayton (from Tarzan), Sally (from The Nightmare Before Christmas), Gonzo (from The Muppets - technically he's not a Disney animated character, but he was too much fun to deny), Huey (from DuckTales), and Mulan and Mushu (both of Mulan). Seven also might be too many players for me: 4-6 is probably my ideal number.

I'd expected (and hoped for) some personality clashes between Scar and Clayton, the two villains, and characters that would never get along, since one is a villainous lion and the other is a villainous hunter. They both were prepared to backstab the other, but sadly, it never came to a pass (though there were several times Clayton showed me the note, "I'm going to shoot Scar.").

I'd like to keep this game's plot under wraps, since I hope to run it again as a short campaign instead of a one-shot, but it went really well.

Despite having zombie-fighting "tanks" Clayton (armed with a rifle and six bullets) Mulan (armed with a sword and 10 arrows), the heroes of the game were Gonzo and Mushu.

Gonzo, with his rocket-powered roller skates and a portable cannon he could use to launch himself, showed an insane amount of bravery (maybe you could call it recklessness), and showed even more heart. He'd often do things that seemed suicidal (I even asked, in a very unbiased way, "Wait... are you sure you want to fire yourself into that dark and scary courtyard?"), but true to character, always came out unscathed. And I was touched that he did his best to take care of a dying bird.

Mushu was the same, he'd often pull from the Tower with the intent to fail and die, but he successfully crawled up the pants of the Mad Hatter, detonated his stash of fireworks to blow up an entire zombie horde, knocked a chandelier on an approaching zombie, and used his shinju-kyo (spirit mirror) to save Huey's life.

Sadly, though, in the final moments of the game, someone knocked over the Tower. Sally was pulled under the many coins of the Money Bin (presumably by Scrooge McDuck), and her body could not be recovered.


Though the game ended with a victory for the players, it also ended with a big "The End?" and already, I'm thinking about getting another game together.