Post Breakout Updates!

Breakout!

I finally got a chance to really play the game at Breakout a few weeks ago and I have to say it worked much better than expected. Breakout is a fantastic game convention in Toronto, and there's a huge amount of games being played there both board and RPGs and there was a lot more interest in Indie RPGs this convention (not that there wasn't before, but like the players were more interested if that makes any sense).

We played Friday night at 9:00pm which was probably too late because we were all exhausted by the end of it, and we called it after the first death. The group was me, Eric P (who I've known in the Canadian gaming scene for ages) and another player whose name I wish I remembered or wrote down because it was fantastic playing with her. We had a lovely discussion around horror, and things that make it great, and people who make it terrible, and what the game did well and what it could do better.

It's always refreshing to play a game with strangers. People who know you can start to understand your short hands for things, and so while they may give great feedback there's also a chance they're missing things that you miss. 

The game!

We ended up setting a scene where we were a family at Christmas time at Grandma's manor farmhouse somewhere in "the North." The reason it was generic "northern" was that it just needed to have enough snow that there was a blizzard that prevented anyone from leaving the house, and even going to some possible areas was going to be fraught with danger. Honestly it was very French Canadian with me and Eric both infusing our own backgrounds into that place. We chose Tradition and Knowledge as our two Norms.

We had the Rebel (Elizabeth "Razor" Shaw - she/her - 17), the Occultist (Jean-Charles Desjardins - he/him - 16) and the Ingenue (Marie-Philipe Drouin - she/they - 18) all as characters who were all cousins at family dinner. The other characters in the line were Marie-Philipe's older brother Patrick, her younger brother Marc-André, and their Grandma Mabel. 

It started with bickering at dinner, and then the "kids" were told to go play by their parents (because Tradition was one of the Norms we had chosen it was very clear you weren't an 'adult' until you had children of your own so they treated the older teens as if they were small children) which led to some "drinking poker." Then those who were winning were sent upstairs to recover while dishes were being done.

We did have a situation where Marie-Philipe was alone in the kitchen and the killer attacked, but she managed to run away leaving Grandma Mabel vulnerable in the line. Then when the killer did strike, the characters were all in the kitchen after the other two player characters having calmed Marie-Philipe down that it was just a prank. They suggested Grandma might like tea after dinner and when they went up to find her she was killed in her bathroom.

We stopped there, it was just a fantastic fun time!

Change Log

I made a few changes to the game itself.

• Made sure to make it more clear about characters being able to run away and removed the "reduce the roll by the number of horror tokens rule"
• Added a 3 strike rule instead. You can run away from the killer twice as a player character but the third time you are dead regardless of what you could roll.
• Updated the cover photo of the book. This was originally going to be an interior image but it works so much better as the cover than the previous image did.