Dead of Night: Hacked Up

Dead of Night, Second Edition

One of my favourite games, and an influence on how I play, run and design others, is Dead of Night by Andrew Kenrick: it's a deceptively simple horror game, which models movies & campfire tales excellently. It's not so much the rules of the game which do this but the meta-rules: the second edition contains extensive guidance on how to tweak the rules, adjusting variables and circumstantial effects to best reflect the style of horror game you want to emulate, whether that's dark horror comedy or tense, claustrophobic psychological thriller.

The nature of these meta-rules encourages experimentation and I've had some success playing with the possible combinations to produce different effects: my Cold Fusion scenario, which appears in the book, changes the ways Survival point are used, splitting them into two colours which are drawn randomly from a bag, providing a countdown to a fate other than death for the player-characters.

I've also hacked the game more extensively, to profoundly change the assumptions of play, tailoring it to extended campaign play or ensemble disaster movies. Presented here is the essence of those two hacks, plus one more to represent tense, situational horror that can still be used in conjunction with 'humans vs. monsters' style games.

Blood & Water: Mixing the Miraculous, the Morbid and the Mundane

There’s this werewolf, a vampire and a ghost who share a house... but this is no joke. As it turns out, death is not the end for everybody, though it usually puts an end to your social life. Somewhere between being human and being a monster you’ll find the characters in this game: people who cannot return to the family they knew but aren't ready to embrace the thing they have become.


They say that blood is thicker than water, but when your own blood turns against you, you have to find a new kind of family, one who will accept you for what you are.

Now Boarding The Selene

The Final Voyage of The Selene is a little structured freeform game I came up with over 3 years ago, in response to playing and being impressed by Witch: The Road to Lindisfarne and now I've put a bumper edition of the game up for sale on Drivethru. I plan for this to be the first of many short, simple games I release commercially as pdfs this year, along with plans for extra material for The 'Hood and another RPG project which I'll deal with in my next blog post.

The bumper edition of The Final Voyage of The Selene includes the original game booklet and the dozen Role & Agenda cards it came with, but I've also written an accompanying booklet about the development of the game and how to get more from it, plus a dozen new, never-before-seen Roles & Agendas.

Vox Populi

Congratulations! You and your comrades have overthrown the Evil Overlord and liberated the land from his tyrannical grip; now all citizens are free once more to live their lives as they choose, within the new laws & policies being laid down by the Republic, i.e. you and your comrades.

This is a short game about what happens after the heroes win in an epic fantasy story: the Big
Bad Evil is dead, but now who gets to run the country? Well, to begin with, the heroes do! As the committee of the new Republic, they (that is, you) have to determine the way ahead for the newly liberated people of the old Evil Empire.

Power Grab

Only two more sleeps until Indiecon! Yay! So, in the spirit of over-exuberance and hyper-activity, here's a super-quick superhero game; now I'm off to eat a bag of sugar and run around the garden pretending to be an air-plane!


This is a game in the superhero genre for 3-5 players plus a GM: start by dealing 5 index cards to each player, who then write down a superpower on each card. You can go for the standards like flight, super-strength, X-ray vision, etc, but feel free to be as creative as you like, as long as you include a tone discussion within this process. In other words, don't come up with gonzo, silly powers without clearing that with everyone else first: you don't have to say what powers you're writing down, but it's best for everyone to be on the same page tone-wise.

Back to the Start: A Game from the Graveyard

My hard drive is full of gaming projects I got started on and either never completed or completed but never playtested: this is one of those, from 2010. It would probably make a good nano-game if you're looking for a break from the norm.

Char. Gen.

This is a nano-game I designed in 2013 at the end of a session of A Penny for My Thoughts which had been particularly gruelling: we needed something light and fun to cheer ourselves up with, but we only had 30 minutes until the venue closed. Earlier during that convention, I had played Cheat Your Own Adventure, a nano-game concerned with the process of playing another game and I'd really liked it, so I quickly came up with one of my own. The version presented here is a faithful reproduction of the game we played that evening, which was flexible enough to allow players to drop in & out as their own games finished and a parade of convention attendees stopped by to ask us what we were playing. Please enjoy.