A role playing game based on Poe's short story The Masque of the Red Death
-- THE "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal --the redness and the horror of blood.
This is a role playing game to collectively create stories of horror and dreamed fantasy. Have you read Poe's short story title: "The Masque of the Red Death"? Poe wrote a kind of terrifying dream about how people try to fool themselves with the idea that they may evade the death. They say that Poe consumed opium in quantities. I don't know, and I don't care. But we will play about it.
In this game players play dreamers smoking opium in a dim ornate room. They lay in the carpet or in black leather canapes. They smoke and talk. Talk about their dreams, until what they talk about, takes form on all their minds. From the cloud of smoke, it arises a sealed palace. A castellated abbey enclosed by big ramparts and iron-barred doors. Prince Prospero has gathered there a thousand nobles and courtiers, to protect themselves from the raging Red-Death which devastates the country outside. The prince is organizing a bizarre masquerade of the most unusual magnificence to please his guests. There are seven brightly colored and illuminated ball-rooms. But the seventh one is black, red, ghastly. The dreamers dream about the characters who try to keep on living their lives on that strange party. They smoke and trade opium to dream their fates. But, one of characters will eventually enter the seventh room, and will discover what is behind the masques, just before the others.
If you play this game, you and your friends will tell a story about the dreamers and the characters inside the palace. You will tell a story about the Red-Death.
During the review stage of GameChef'07, this game was critique by several reviewers. Most of them pointed out that the players has no real objective in the game. If they play, they may fulfill their drivers, but they risk to come nearer to the dead-end. But achieving the drivers has no mechanical incentive. The best tactic is not to play.
Thus, the game is currently lame. The character drivers should be involved in the mechanics to produce a kind of clear objective and reward for the players.
For the moment there is only one version of this game. It is the GameChef'07 entry as it was submitted.
Última modificación: 13 June 2008 00:16
