Premise: I use the email gaming format* of our old Paranoia games to run a horror game in which one person (or more) is the killer, trying to pick off the others.
*The email gaming format in question is that everything filters through me as GM. That is, everyone emails (or PMs) me what actions their character will be attempting. I put it all into a single cohesive narrative. Then I parcel it out and each player only gets the pieces of the narrative their character can see.
I don't have a setting yet (possibly a cabin in the woods
), but the killer could be amongst the players as a hidden traitor, or they could be some supernatural monster in the hills. I'm hoping it will be fun for the villain to play a real villain, and I'm hoping it will be genuinely creepy and scary for the others.Things I would like to incorporate:
1. It would be cool to use my Mostly Dead/Horrified rules for action resolution. Maybe this can be another Discord game some day.
2. I'd like characters who are mostly tropes, stat-wise. Players can flesh them out and add flavor, but their strengths and weaknesses that they play from will usually match some horror stereotype.
3. I'd like some mechanism for keeping players in the game after their character is murdered. In a game where the bad guy is obvious, maybe dead protagonists get to keep playing as a new villain character. For example, in a Hills Have Eyes scenario, players who die get to take over yet another inbred cannibal who has come to join the party.** In a secret traitor game, though, players can come back as characters whose motives are unknown. Maybe they're the sheriff who arrives mid-movie to investigate, and they could really be a good guy, or they could potentially be in cahoots with the killer. DUN DUN DUN!
Okay, a lot of that doesn't quite work. If it's a secret identity game, and I get killed, I'm very likely to know who the killer is if I come back as another good guy. Hmmm. Needs work.
**There's a variation: There's a split of good guys and bad guys. When you die, you return as a character for the other team. First team to have all the players wins. Disadvantage is that I worry that with enough back and forth, it would lose its narrative focus and be more about the winning/losing.
Hmmm. Like I say, just a thought. If I can get a working plot and structure figured out in my head, maybe we'll make a go of this somewhere down the road. We'll see.
