Thursday, May 7, 2026

Running NIGHT SHIFT and Dark Places & Demogorgons: What I've Learned from Two 80s Campaigns

I’ve explored the world of 1980s supernatural gaming before.

I have done it with two OSR-adjacent rule systems, NIGHT SHIFT: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars and SURVIVE THIS!! Dark Places & Demogorgons.  This is not a post about which game is better than the other; I am not doing that. Both games are fantastic, and live very happily next to each other on my shelves and my gaming table. 

This is about what I learned from running two similar-style campaigns using rule systems drawn from the same ecology. 

And what you can learn from all of that.

NIGHT SHIFT: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars and SURVIVE THIS!! Dark Places & Demogorgons

Road to Nowhere: From Sunny Valley to Jackson

A few years ago, I played SURVIVE THIS!! Dark Places & Demogorgons from Bloat Games to revisit my love for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but with a twist. Instead of Sunnydale, California in the late 1990s, I set the story in Sunny Valley, Ohio, in 1984. The characters were still Buffy, Willow, Tara, Faith, vampires, high school drama, and a Hellmouth. But the setting felt different; colder, more Midwestern, and even more 1980s. It was like a 'kids on bikes' story, except one kid had a stake and an epic destiny.

That experiment worked out really great. Dark Places & Demogorgons was the perfect game for this idea. It’s designed for stories about kids in the 1980s facing strange things that adults ignore or don’t believe. In Sunny Valley, the supernatural crept into childhood and early adolescence. The game was all about weekly monsters, school rumors, odd teachers, creepy houses, bad weather, and that feeling of being young and sensing something is wrong, even if you can’t explain it yet.

In short, it did exactly what I wanted. 

Once in a Lifetime

Now I’m working on something similar, but it’s not the same.

Jackson, IL, is another retro-80s supernatural setting. It’s a small Midwestern town with teenagers, high school drama, monsters, ghosts, witches, and things hiding just out of sight. At first glance, you might think, “Oh, this is just like Sunny Valley.”

But it’s not.

Sunny Valley was my way of taking the Buffy mythos and setting and shifting it into a different decade, state, and game system. It was a familiar story in an alternate reality. Jackson is different. It’s not just Sunnydale with a new name, or a copy of Jeffersontown from Dark Places & Demogorgons. Still, I’ll admit Jeffersontown ("J-town" to locals) reminded me of my hometown, Jacksonville ("J-ville" to locals), which inspired me to create Jackson. 

Jackson feels more personal to me.

With Jackson, I’m trying to blend the emotional feel of a real place, Central Illinois folklore, memories of growing up in the 1980s, and the supernatural style of NIGHT SHIFT: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars. I want it to feel like it’s always belonged there.

Don’t You (Forget About Me)

There is also a difference in what the systems want from the characters.

Dark Places & Demogorgons is about kids. That is one of its greatest strengths (if not its greatest strength). It understands the fears and freedoms of being young. The characters are not adults with jobs, mortgages, failed marriages, regrets, and long histories of supernatural trauma. They are kids trying to survive school, family, bullies, monsters, and the creeping suspicion that the world is stranger than anyone told them.

That made it perfect for Sunny Valley.

In that campaign, Buffy and her friends were younger. They were not the characters from the television show yet. They were versions of those characters caught earlier, rawer, and in some ways more vulnerable. Sunny Valley did not need the full emotional architecture of adulthood. It needed bicycles, lockers, cemeteries, malls, high school rivalries, and the occasional vampire getting dusted behind the gym.

I used those characters because there was very obvious "Buffy-DNA" in DP&D. I just let it come to the surface a little bit more.

NIGHT SHIFT, on the other hand, lets me broaden the frame.

Yes, Jackson has teenagers. In fact, teenagers are central to what I am doing with it. But Jackson also has adults who know things. Adults who failed. Adults who lied. Adults who fought the dark before and lost something. Adults trying to keep kids safe, even when they cannot tell them the truth.

That is important.

Jackson is not just a place where kids discover the supernatural. It is a place where the supernatural has always been and has a history. The Veil is thin here. The Bad Land, Mauvaisterre, is not just a monster factory. It is part of the town’s buried geography. The ghosts, witches, hags, psychics, cryptids, old families, school legends, and haunted buildings all connect to something deeper.

It feels like some of the adults are veterans of previous wars and can't do anything to stop the next one.

That feels like NIGHT SHIFT to me.

Jackson, IL, is "Veterans of the Supernatural Wars" as a thesis statement. 

And all to the music of John Mellencamp's "Scarecrow."

Three witches. Just doing the best that they can.

Everybody Wants to Rule the World

This is also why I do not see Dark Places & Demogorgons and NIGHT SHIFT as competing games.

Very much the opposite.

Dark Places & Demogorgons is created by Bloat Games, and I am happy to call them friends. I buy their books. They buy our NIGHT SHIFT books. We talk at the cons we are both at. We cheer on each other's successes. That is how this hobby should work. The world has plenty of room for both of us.

I have said before that a rising tide raises all ships, and I honestly believe that. Other designers are not my competition. They are my colleagues. They are my peers. Playing their games makes my games better. Reading their work makes me think harder about my own. Seeing how someone else handles 1980s supernatural horror gives me a better sense of what I want to do, what I want to avoid, and what I want to emphasize. What I want to do different. 

Dark Places & Demogorgons helped me think through Sunny Valley.

NIGHT SHIFT is helping me build Jackson.

Those are related acts of design, but not identical ones.

I Was Born in a Small Town

Sunny Valley was a Buffy-shaped experiment. It asked, "What if Buffy had happened in Ohio in 1984?" A simple question with a very satisfying answer. 

Jackson asks something else.

Jackson asks, "What if the town itself was haunted? What if the supernatural was not an interruption, but a pressure? What if every generation had its own monsters, its own secrets, and its own kids who had to deal with what the adults left behind?"

That is a different kind of game.

In Sunny Valley, the Hellmouth was there, but it was more indistinct. The characters knew something was wrong, but the exact nature of it was part of the joke and part of the mystery. Sunny Valley was ironic. Of course, the place called Sunny Valley was cold, rainy, and full of vampires. Ohio vampires, no less. 

Jackson is not ironic in the same way.

Jackson is a nice town. A real town, at least emotionally. It has high schools, colleges, pizza places, bookstores, old houses, churches, back roads, local legends, old money, bad memories, and teenagers who think they are the first generation to discover everything. It has a public face and a hidden one. That makes it ideal for NIGHT SHIFT, because NIGHT SHIFT is very good at letting the ordinary and the supernatural occupy the same space.

The horror in Jackson is not just "there is a monster."

The horror is "there always has been a monster, and someone knew."

That is a different tone altogether.

Home Sweet Home

The other major difference is ownership.

Sunny Valley was fun because it was a remix. I was taking characters and ideas I already loved and moving them into a different system (that I also loved) and a different decade (that I ... ok, you get it now). It was a creative exercise, and a very useful one. It let me explore Buffy, Willow, Tara, Faith, and the others through a different lens.

Jackson is worldbuilding from the ground up.

It owes something to Jacksonville, Illinois. It owes something to Jeffersontown. It owes something to every small Midwestern town with a haunted school, a local ghost story, a weird patch of woods, and one bookstore owner who knows more than they should. 

But Jackson is becoming its own thing. Sunny Valley allowed me to do a lot of cheating. Jackson is less forgiving. I don't get to crib notes from someone else's creative efforts; I have to do it all on my own.

That matters because Jackson needs to support more than a single campaign idea. It needs to hold high school drama, occult mystery, monster hunting, local history, family secrets, psychic phenomena, witchcraft, cryptids, and the strange gravity of a place where the Veil is too thin.

That is bigger than Sunny Valley.

Not better. Bigger.

Sunny Valley was a great place to run a specific kind of game.

Jackson is a full-on Night World.

You are now entering Jackson, IL home of the Cougars!

We Built This City

Looking back, I can see a clear line from one project to the other.

Sunny Valley taught me that moving supernatural horror into the 1980s immediately changes the feel. No cell phones. No internet as we know it. Rumors move through notes in lockers, landlines, malls, classrooms, diners, and late-night phone calls. Research means libraries, newspapers, yearbooks, microfilm, local cranks, and that one teacher who knows too much.

Jackson takes all of that and pushes it further.

In Jackson, the 1980s are not just aesthetic. It is the structure. The period limits what characters can know, how quickly they can know it, and who they have to trust. The town becomes a network of secrets, and the kids are moving through it without a map. And it will be 15-20 years before anyone has GPS.

That is where the two projects really meet.

Sunny Valley was about taking a known supernatural teen drama and asking what it looked like through the lens of Dark Places & Demogorgons.

Jackson is about taking everything I know about 1980s horror, small towns, witches, ghosts, high school, and the supernatural, and asking what it looks like as a NIGHT SHIFT setting.

I guess a natural question is, could I play in Jackson, IL, using Dark Places & Demogorgons? Of course you could! I think if my "Plays Well with Others" posts (many linked below) are any indication, then yes, you could. Maybe I'll try it out one day. I already know Larina works well for both. But for now, I want to stick with NIGHT SHIFT since I have built so much more for it.

The Final Countdown

So no, Jackson is not Sunny Valley. But Sunny Valley helped make Jackson possible.

It gave me a place to test some ideas. It reminded me how well the 1980s work for supernatural gaming. It showed me how much fun there is in moving familiar horror tropes into Midwestern spaces. It also reminded me that the right system matters. Dark Places & Demogorgons served Sunny Valley well because it was about kids in the 1980s facing strange dangers.

NIGHT SHIFT serves Jackson because Jackson is about more than the kids.

It is about the town.

It is about the adults who remember too much, the teens who are just beginning to see, the monsters that never really left, and the old powers under the streets and fields. It is about what happens when the supernatural is not a visitor, but a resident.

Sunny Valley had a Hellmouth. Jackson has history.

That is the difference that makes each campaign unique.

Links

Plays Well With Others

Dark Places & Demogorgons

Sunny Valley, OH

NIGHT SHIFT Veterans of the Supernatural Wars

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