Dread: the Game aka that Jenga Game, and a few homebrew specifics

I've mentioned Dread: the Game here before. In short, it is a roleplaying game where instead of rolling dice, you pull from a Jenga tower for conflict resolution. Pull from the tower, succeed in an action. Don't pull. and you fail. If the tower falls, the character dies. There are other rules for further effects, but you get the gist of it.

The setting is going to be a farm where the farmer has recently died, and each character has a reason to be there the day before the property auction - the bereaved daughter, the ex-wife, the farmhand, the neighbor, the state executor, real estate buyers, a reporter, the banker, a cop. (Some of my players may be reading this blog, so no spoilers. But yes, Dread is a horror game, so that's what they should be expecting.)

I chose to pre-make characters to have them relate to one another in a specific way. Each character knows of the other but isn't very close - the daughter lived out of state, the ex-wife was married to the farmer when the daughter was too young to remember, the neighbor wasn't too neighborly over the years, the cop and the banker have said hello at the coffeeshop once or twice, etc. This mirrors the general familiarity players have with each other's characters at the beginning of campaigns. A player may say that their character has a past with this other character, but unless they sit down together and write a novel about their backstory, how close are they, really? This way, each character has the familiarity of knowing each other in a small town without having to deal with being too close. I think it is the perfect analogy for "you meet in the tavern" beginnings of your usual hack and slash game.

A tough decision was choosing how to distribute the characters. Complete randomness may create unsatisfied players. Players choosing one by one means the last few players to choose will scrape the bottom of the barrel. For now, I have decided to distribute randomly, then allow people to trade characters if both agree.

There's a juicy mathematical analysis there, I just know it! Maybe next post.

I've been drawing up the layout of the farm and each building. I've detailed the plots and various things that will be happening. Here's hoping it will be loads of fun for everyone.