What is in store for you when we hit the $5,000 stretch goal of The Night Companion for Night Shift?
A LOT!
Long-time readers might remember an idea I had for a Tabloid RPG called "Scoop! The RPG of Muckrakers, Tabloids, and Yellow Journalism." But there was an RPG with a similar name and purpose out there. Granted it was never published for sale as far I know. I still didn't want to compete with a product with the same name.
Prior to that, I had ideas for a different sort of game I was calling "The Front Page" which was also about being part of a newspaper, but more in the vein of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. It had a more serious tone since it was about normal people, not so much as fighting against the darkness but certainly confronting it.
That game also grew out of my time of working with newspapers in high school and college. In college, I was the editor for a semester of The East Side Story, the campus newspaper for the east side of campus, and I had been the editor of our High School newspaper. This was a time when these sorts of things were still in print. It was a lot of fun and I even very, very briefly flirted with the idea of going into journalism.
At the $5,000 stretch goal for The Night Companion, I am going to bring you the "Weirdly World News."
In WWN you will play the part of a normal human, more or less*. You are not the Chosen One, or some road weary hunter, or powerful witch. You are just a reporter working for hire for the Weirdly World News the Nation's Greatest Newspaper! So your character can be anywhere in the country. You can travel to any place you like to get your story, as long as you keep your receipts and don't go over your per diem. Your Editor (the GM) helps you find the story, you figure out what to do when you get there.
Whether you stop the threats is up to you. The goal here is to provide a very low level, no magic, "normal humans" vs "the monsters" sort of game.
Of course, not all monsters are more powerful than you. Are the reports of strange nearly-human creatures (goblins) living in the sewers of Sheboygan true? Well, that sounds like a story to me!
And some are more powerful, but they are really human. Like poor Wilbur above, not his fault that an evil cult of an Elder God needed his body for...reasons.
*Now I say this, but one of my playtest characters was a vampire working the...huh...the Night Shift, at his local newspaper. I based this character on Stuart Townsend who played Lestat in "Queen of the Damned," Dorian Gray in "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," and Carl Kolchak in the updated, critically panned, and short-lived, Night Stalker from 2006.
Originally I wanted to use the Fudge system for this (not FATE) but I never really got it all the way I wanted.
With Night Shift and the Night Companion, I can finally get this out to you.
You can play the Weirdly World News just like any other Night World. You can even mix it in with any other Night World that features the Supernatural-is-Real-but-Hidden aspect. So it works great with Ordinary World (in fact it is the opposite side of the same coin) or any of Jason's Night Worlds.
You can play it straight, say like the newer Night Stalker where the enemies are powerful, evil and you are way, way outmatched. Or with an air of comedy. Sure the vampires, werewolves and whatever are all still dangerous, but they are NOTHING compared to dealing with accounting and that $20 you overspent!
I imagine most folks will want to play this with the harder edge. Night Shift is the best system for this and I have tried it in a few now! You have no magic, no powers, and everything you are against is a lot more powerful than you.
I have also played this as independent reporters like bloggers (wonder where that idea came from) submitting stories to WWN. At GaryCon I ran a version of this called Spector Detectors! where everyone was part of a "U-Tube" ghost hunting show.
So, there is a lot you can do with this. The stretch goal lets us pay for some more art.
Who knows. Maybe YOU will hear the awful squeaking in the night of the legendary Rat Baby!
