Way-Out Wednesday: Don't Rest Your Head
Welcome to another edition of Way-Out Wednesday! This week I'll be looking at an indie RPG that my friends played while I was on vacation and I've never forgiven them for it because it's so damn cool. The game is Evil Hat's Don't Rest Your Head.
Don't Rest Your Head where you play an insomniac, someone who stayed awake night after night for whatever reason until something changed—you went from being awake to being Awake. You've seen the world for what it truly is, riddled with secret paths to the Mad City, and there's only one way you can avoid becoming just another casualty of the Nightmare: use your exhaustion and madness to fuel your newfound superpowers, and most of all, stay alive by staying awake.
Read more about the game about sleeplessness that we probably can all relate to (minus the superpowers) after the jump!
What initially drew me into this game was its character sheet, which takes the form of a questionnaire. Players create their characters by writing the answers to five questions: "What's been keeping you awake?" "What just happened to you?" "What's on the surface?" "What lies beneath?" and "What's your path?" The answers you give to these questions guide you on how your roleplay your character, and also gives your GM quite a bit more information that a more ordinary character sheet ever could.
After answering the questions, you choose an "Exhaustion Talent," which is something that any person could do but you become extraordinarily proficient at it when you're tired. Next you choose your "Madness Talent," basically a superpower—telekenetics, shapeshiting, pyrokinetics—whatever you can think of, really. Your character uses their Exhaustion and Madness Talents to try to stay alive in the Mad City, but at the risk of leading to ever more madness and exhaustion (and, most terrifying at all, at the risk of falling asleep—and that basically means death).
All of the game's mechanics are very specific and focussed on the themes of the game, and they focus around D6 dice pools representing exhaustion, madness and discipline, along with coins in two bowls called the "Despair Bowl" and the "Hope Bowl"—the GM can take a coin from the Despair Bowl for a benefit to one of their rolls and then places it in the Hope Bowl, where players can use it for similar benefits on their rolls. (Cool, no? Simple but I wouldn't have thought of it.)
The last part of your character sheet are the "Response boxes," three for "Fight" and three for "Flight." If your character fails an action the GM can add a check to one of the boxes, forcing the character to flee or to engage in conflict or else they get even more exhausted. As you might expect, it makes for very tense gameplay.
The setting is the Mad City—normally our dreams hide it from us, but once Awake, one can see the paths, the alleyways, the doors and the manholes that lead to a world very different from our own, a kind of Carrollian nightmare that's just detailed enough in the book to tantalize but really is meant as a springboard for whatever the GM and the players care to come up with.
Don't Rest Your Head is a game that takes the sleeplessness that all of us experience at some point and makes it into a superpower; it takes those familiar feelings of wide-awake 5:30 a.m. fluorescent-lit desperation and draws out an entire world from them. In short, it's your indie game of the week.
Mad Pawn
Posted to Hot Stuff, Roleplaying Games on 5 December 2007
Other stuff like this: don't rest your head, evil hat productions, indie, insomnia, way-out wednesday
