Dead of Night: A Cabin in the Woods

About the adventure

In Dead of Night: a Cabin in the Woods, your characters will be representatives of the tropes of all those cabin-in-the-woods movies you've seen: the jock, the hottie, the jester, the academic, and the virginal. Lets have some gory fun! Dead of Night is a cinematic narrative ttrpg that lets you play the (likely doomed) protagonists in a horror movie. With super-fast character creation, we can be running from the monster in no time. Barricade those doors, drape yourselves in wolfsbane, put on a tinfoil hat, or all of the above. Let's find out if your characters can survive the night. From the publisher: "Dead of Night is the roleplaying game of campfire tales, slasher movies and b-movie horror. It is a game of screaming victims, unstoppable killers and slavering monsters, where the horror movie clichés flow thicker than blood and the only victory is survival."

Additional Details

How to prepare

You'll need a webcam and mic so we can see and hear you (the former is not absolutely required, but it'd be nice if you can). We will most likely be using Discord for visuals and audio. I'll send a link beforehand. You'll also need a handful of tokens of some sort (at least 5, with an equal number of differently-colored tokens). These will be used to keep track of Survival Points.

What I provide

I'll bring the story, some spooky music, and everything you'll need to know to play. But if you'd like to pick up a set of the rules, they're available from the publisher at https://steampowerpublishing/deadofnight or, in .pdf form, from https://DrivethruRPG.com (for only $6!)

Gameplay details

Dead of Night is a narrative-heavy, theater-of-the-mind roleplaying game that also rewards you for leaning into horror movie tropes (going off by yourself, making out when you should be barricading the doors, going into the basement ... for any reason whatsoever -- that sort of thing). Dead of Night has four paired sets of attributes. Whenever you're trying to accomplish something, you'll roll two 10-sided dice and add your attribute score in an attempt to beat a standard DC of 15 or another characters stat plus 10. The GM gets to use Tension Points to adjust that number up or down (depending on what the narrative demands) and ... we see what happens. Characters get to burn Survival Points to re-roll and do other cool things, and you can get more by embracing those aforementioned tropes. Beware, though, if you run out and are required to spend a Survival Point for some reason, well, then your character ... is quite, quite dead (or maybe a vampire. Who knows?) Please note that Dead of Night IS a horror-themed game that may contain graphic descriptions that aren't for all gamers. However, we will be incorporating gaming Safety Tools into gameplay and so before we start, we'll talk about Lines/Veils/and the use of the X-Card. CW: violence (almost certainly), possible mind control (removal of character agency with permission), nudity and sex (usually behind a 'Veil' of fade-to-black), and inter-character personal conflict.

Content warnings

(none)

Safety tools used

(none)

How will character creation work

I'll provide pre-generated characters. We can spend some time before the game if you want to tweak the attribute pairs an/or specializations. Then we'll get right into the slaughter.

Players can expect

• Find a game to join solo or search for a professional game master for you and your friends/coworkers/family.
• Book your session and wait for the Game Master to approve you.
• If you don't have a blast with your first game, your next game is on us.