Review: Don't Rest Your Head

Don't Rest Your Head, by Fred Hicks, published by Evil Hat Productions. 84 6x9" pages, B&W interior.

Synopsis: Dark City smashes into Mirrormask, except Mirrormask was all goodness and light compared to this.

Now, I follow Fred's blog, and I saw his early posts on his ideas for this game, and they just didn't grab me. When he announced that he'd published it, I bought it "just to see what Fred's doing."

So... keeping that in mind, I was surprised to be hooked on the setting before I even finished reading the rules section. I'm looking forward to trying this game out. As another vote of confidence, one of the guys in my game group, who doesn't follow Fred or Evil Hat at all, saw [[http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=272635|the thread about it on RPGNet]] and ordered it promptly. So I'm pretty sure I can get my group into this game.

Maybe it helps that I watched Gaiman's Mirrormask in the middle of reading the game, and I thought Dark City was pretty cool. (Note to self: drop Dark City into my Netflix queue again.)

The setting

So take that Dark City / Mirrormask mashup and add one more element: Insomnia leads to supernatural abilities, the first of which is the ability to see gateways into the Mad City... the city "beneath" the City Slumbering (where the normal people, the Sleepers, continue their daily lives without a clue about what you've discovered), filled with Nightmares and weirdness. The Tacks Man cometh. You can read all about that in the intro on the Evil Hat website.

What makes your character special is that he is one of the Awake, which gives him two supernatural talents, an Exhaustion talent (an extension of something he did in the normal world... except he's unnaturally good at it, and the more Exhausted the better) and a Madness talent (an all-out superpower that only works when he taps into his own madness, though with some risk). An Exhaustion talent might be something like, "Good with guns," and when your character is good and exhausted, that means unnatural feats of marksmanship. A Madness talent could be things like teleportation, invulnerability, mind-reading, or hurting things by singing badly. Like I said, Madness.

Now don't read that wrong... this isn't really a game of superheroes. The Awake aren't saving the real world from the bad guys, they're usually saving their own butts, or risking them to retrieve a loved one from the Mad City. While the characters may have to venture back to the City Slumbering from time to time, the story is squarely centered on the Mad City.

The rules

This is an indie game, though I won't classify it as a "new style" or "new wave" game. The GM is still very solidly the GM, and though the players can suggest scenes and be given more narrative control, this isn't built into the mechanics.

(UPDATE: After looking at the rules again, I have to classify this as partially "new style"... the rules deal with conflict resolution and not task resolution. There are no "skills" or other attributes... you have somewhat vague abilities (i.e. you and the GM make stuff up) and the only real numbers are your die pools, which are applied pretty much equally no matter what you're trying to do.)

But the mechanics aren't hackneyed retreads of that you already know... Fred smashes together some really interesting mechanics here. First, you're going to need handfuls of dice in four different colors. The GM gets only one kind of die... Pain, but the player gets to roll up to three... Discipline, Exhaustion, and Madness. Just the names of the dice really evoke what this is all about.

So you always roll your Discipline dice... you get three, most of the time. You start out with zero Exhaustion dice... you can take on one Exhaustion for free in a conflict, and you can get Exhaustion assigned to you. Get too much Exhaustion and you Crash... you have to sleep, but sleep is bad. Not only does it reset your Exhaustion to zero (sap you of your power), but you can't defend yourself when you're asleep... fall asleep without trusted guardians to watch over you, and you're as good as dead. Finally come the Madness dice. You start out with zero of those, but you can roll as many as you like, up to six at a time, on any roll. But you risk Snapping, and taking on permanent Madness, which erodes your Discipline and moves you closer to becoming a Nightmare yourself.

So you roll your mixture of dice, and the GM rolls his Pain dice. Count successes... 3 or less is a success, and you compare your total successes against the GM's. Nothing new here, but now comes the fun part... the pool with the highest die "dominates" the scene. When Exhaustion dominates, you gain another die of Exhaustion. When Madness dominates, you Snap... fight or flee in uncontrollable rage or terror. (Flavor with your creative roleplaying.) Snap too often and you go permanently Mad! When Pain dominates... well, that's not pretty. Bad things happen, even if you won the conflict. And you pay a Coin of Despair into the GM's coffer.

Oh, yeah... that sounds bad, doesn't it? The GM gets to spend these coins to force any particular die in a roll to be a 6... that is, gets to "cast a shadow" over the outcome and influence which pool dominates. But don't despair too much... when the GM spends a coin, that coin goes into the players' coffer as a Coin of Hope. The players get to spend these for recoveries... to buy off Exhaustion, Madness, and so on. In the end, it's Pain that keeps the PC's going... keeps them from Crashing or going permanently Mad.

DRYH doesn't have an experience mechanic, per se, but it has something better for long-running games. As your character accumulates bad experiences, you record them on your character sheet. Later in the game, when you can tie a past scar to a present situation, you can use it to reroll of a pool of dice. ("Recalling your failure to rescue your wife, you press on with a renewed fury to win back your daughter.") You can do this every game session, provided the right circumstances turn up. Or, you can "use up" a scar by cashing it in for transformation... a temporary or permanent change in a talent. Thus, your character's "experience" has a direct effect on the future events of the game based on the nature of the experience. Very cool.

Conclusion

The writing is clear and evocative of the setting. There are plenty of examples (bordering on too many... there are some concepts that just didn't need an example), and between clear writing and examples, one shouldn't have any difficulty in getting the hang of the rules.

The description of the Mad City is centered in its denizens, and there are all kinds of juicy ideas for story elements embedded there. But since this is the player characters' story, the rules are careful to warn us that adventure design should be centered on the PC's and the answers they gave to five important questions concerning who they are, how they became Awake, their path and their secrets. Hence, there is no introductory adventure... but the game gives the GM and the players the tools to construct their own.

All in all, it's a very cool looking little game, and I'm getting antsy to try it out. It's dark, but it could be played toward hope or despair... this is all weird stuff, but we'll get out of it alive; or this is all really bad weird stuff and if we're lucky we'll get to live a little while longer before the Nightmares get us or the Madness takes us.

Don't Rest Your Head is available from Lulu.com in both print ($14.95) and PDF ($7.95).

This is probably my third or fourth book from Lulu, and the quality is very high... outside of one small flaw, I wouldn't guess that this was a Print-on-Demand book. The flaw is one that Fred has already noted... the full-bleed pages have "fade outs" in some of the corners, where the solid black becomes spotty. It's not too bad for this particular game, because the layout has a rough, scratchy feel to it already. The splotches almost look intentional. But this is a problem Lulu needs to fix.

(UPDATE: Revised comments on "new style" above.)