Dead Until Dawn
Dead End Jobs Suck
By: Jacob Possin
Technology has moved forward, faster than even the brightest could have figured. Innovation is the last bastion of true merit in the world. People go through their days in dead end jobs seeking to make enough money so that they can buy the newest gadget and escape for a while. Novelty has become the primary source of amusement among the populous.
The earth is clean, the air, the water, all of it. It is cleaner than it has ever been. Even the forests have been replanted, but no one goes there. No one even cares anymore. The cities climb ever higher each year, majestic works of art. If one were to look at it, the world has become a utopia. This perfection has bred a distance from consequences, joy, or anything real. All that matters is new things, novel ideas, and feelings. The executives of the mega corporations and the lifelong politicians all work hard to ensure the people stay in place and enjoy the simple things. Wars are no longer fought, at least not openly. The battles are secret. These hidden wars are fought over new ideas, new technologies, bigger emotions, and the control of public perception. Nothing matters anymore. Nothing is sacred, not even the dead.
You are one of the dead bodies, reanimated with nanite pseudo-blood and various other concoctions. Repurposed to fight the petty wars of the spoiled tyrants at the top. You spend your nights fighting these shadow wars and your days dead. You are faster, stronger, tougher, and more capable than any human, until the day breaks. Pseudo-blood does not work when the sun is up. If anyone knows why, they aren't telling you.
The Rules
The Basics
Dead Until Dawn is an adventure game about playing techno-vampires committing crimes in the night. It is a game for between 2 and 6 players, one of which has a special role. Most of you will be playing the vampires who go on secret missions. One of you will be playing the game master, who will portray the other people, places, and things in the world and how they react to your meddling. This game is like a conversation between you and the rest of the players. You will describe your actions, the other vampire players will describe their actions, and the GM will provide the setup and reactions for those actions.
What you need to play
Pencils & Paper(or the digital equivalent)
About 10 coins per player(Each coin must have a “heads” side and a “tails” side that are distinct)
A big sheet of butcher paper everyone can write on to showcase the world(or again something equivalent)
Scenes
This game is focused around scenes. Each scene represents a discrete set of actions in play. Often times a scene will have an obstacle, and each scene should have a goal or intent. Once you have achieved or failed to achieve that goal or intent, the scene has come to an end. The first session will start with the setup, where you will find out what your first heist will be. You will get a say in how that plays out. Then the game will continue from there. You actions in scenes will affect how future scene progress.
Flipping For It
When you encounter an obstacle you must describe how you are getting past that obstacle. There are four basic tactics you may use to get past the obstacle: Stealth, Charm, Muscle, and Intelligence. Stealth is the use of your your physicality for directly stealthy or agile actions as well as avoidance of notice or trouble. Charm is the use of social skills and emotional manipulation to get past trouble or avoid it all together. Muscle is the use of physical force to solve a problem in the most direct way possible. Intelligence is the use of observation, knowledge, and technology to overcome issues.
Once you have described your action you must choose which keywords you will use that fit your description which describe your skills, powers, and drives to overcome the obstacle. For each keyword you use you will spend a coin from your personal pool or from the preparation pool and flip them.
If you get a heads that is a basic success. Sometimes you will need to get more than one head showing to succeed. This will be when you are using a tactic that is at odds with the situation or when the Alarm Level has increased. If you flip heads and are also showing tails you get a complication. If you have half or less of the coins showing tails you get a minor complication. If you have over half of the coins showing tails it is a major complication. If you have no heads showing and all tails, then the situation has grown quite dangerous. For a total failure like this beyond increasing Alarm Level, the Sunrise Clock, Wounds, or Stress, it also will increase the difficulty of the next two obstacle you encounter. For each coin that comes up tails you need to either mark off an Alarm Level, an hour of the Sunrise Clock, Your Personal Stress, or a Wound. Every tail you flip is also a coin you get back in your personal pool once the obstacle is over, whether that coin originated in your personal pool or from the preparation pool.
Character Creation
To create your character you must choose a concept for a repurposed vampire corpse. Once you have a name and basic idea you pick an area of specialty. An area of specialty is a unique power that allows you to interact with the rules in a way other players cannot. Only one area of specialty may be chosen. So choose wisely.
Areas of Specialty
Intel: During Surveillance you may spend two coins per round of surveillance rather than just one.
Heavy: Once per session you may feed to recover a wound without having to mark off stress.
Face: Once per session, when you successfully charm your way past an obstacle, you may ignore one single tails result on the flip.
Ghost: Once per session you may spend two coins during the heist to reduce the alarm level by one.
Once you have chosen an area of specialty you must choose ten key words from the keywords lists(or come up with your own, if you have a cool idea and the rest of the table agrees). Each type of keyword has slightly different ways of using them. Each list will explain how they are used.
Keywords
Skills: Skill keywords are the standard keywords. For each one you use to overcome an obstacle you spend a coin to flip for it. There are no additional rules for using Skill Keywords.
Examples: Martial Arts, Hacking, Deception, Gun Fu, Lock Picking, Climbing, Athleticism, Physical Might, Driving, Sniping, Cooking, Dancing, Inspiration, Genius, Quick Reflexes, Archery, Technical Know-how, Blade work, Intimidation, Interrogation, Torture, Medicine, Science(pick a science), History, Law Enforcement.
Drives: Drives represent your reasons for doing what you are doing, or your reasons for trying to get away from what you are doing. You may spend for them as a normal key word, but the game master may also give you a coin to make the current situation more difficult due to your drive. If you accept the coin you must then play out how this makes the obstacle more difficult and the game master will increase the difficulty by one.
Examples: My one true love, Hope for a better world, My friends are all I have, Justice must be done, People are sheep, Peace is a lie, Look out for number one, Dream big, Plan for the worst, Always sees the best in people.
Vampire: Vampire keywords are pretty tricky. When you have no stress they act as normal keywords. When you have taken stress you may choose to spend two coins to automatically bypass the obstacle with you vampiric powers. The use of powers must make some sort of sense, so if everyone else at the table thinks it shouldn’t work, just go with it and use them as normal.
Examples: Enhanced Sense, Super Strength, Bullet Time, Weird Blood Tricks, Addictive Saliva, Poison Sweat, Involuntary Muscle Control, Enhanced Beauty, Pheromone control, appearance alteration, invisible to cameras, Cartilaginous Bones, Immune to Pain, Hypnotic Voice, Chameleon Skin, Wall Crawling.
Environmental: these keywords are not given to characters but describe the important parts of the environment that you may use. These will never appear on your vampire sheet, but it is best to mention them here. They operate as a normal keyword but represent facts of the environment that you can use to increase your odds of success.
Examples: Raining, Dark, Cramped Hallways, Byzantine Bureaucracy, Remodeling in Progress, Large Machinery, Useful Chemicals in the Closet.
Then you need to choose your vice. You vice is a stress track that lets you know how in control you are. Being brought back from the dead has an odd effect on the human brain chemistry, it can lead to extremes of passion or lethargy, and all sorts of other things. Vampires have learned to channel this vice into "spooky action" that allows for impossible things to occur allowing them to truly harness their inhuman powers. The Vices are Greed, Lust, Wrath, Sloth, Gluttony, Pride, and Envy. When you pick your vice then that is your stress relief, the thing that gets you past all the things you do in the night. You have a stress track that goes to six. When it would hinder you or complicate your unlife, the GM can give you a coin in order to have you behave irrationally and selfishly for the scene in a way that fits your vice. If you accept it then you must overcome an obstacle with the difficulty equal to your current stress level.
You get ten coins that go in your personal pool, these are used up when you succeed at tasks. You also have three wounds, which are the physical damage you can take before your body's supply of pseudo-blood is used up.
Recovery
You may recover your personal stress or your physical wounds. To recover your personal stress you must either spend time to calm down, or cause a bit of a ruckus. Describe how you recover and then clear a stress box. For every stress box you clear in this manner you must either increase the alarm level or mark off an hour from the sunrise clock. To recover from physical wounds you must take in enough human blood or meat for your nanites to process into new flesh for you. When you feed in this way you may clear a wound, but you must then mark stress as eating raw human meat and drinking blood are not very human things to do. Those vampires who get used to doing it are crazy. You don’t want to be crazy, do you?
Sunrise and Alarm Level
There are two tracks that the game master keeps track of: The Sunrise Clock, and the Alarm Level. These tracks should be visible by all the players as they will be manipulating it throughout the game. The Sunrise Clock is the amount of time remaining before the rise of the sun and you stop functioning. The Sunrise clock always has eight segments. You’ve got eight hours until dawn. The Alarm Level is how aware of you security is. The number of alarm levels can vary depending on the mission, though you will want to keep it over four and under twelve. If either runs out then the mission has failed. Either dead on the ground due to sunrise, or dead because security is fully on alert and after you.
Your First Session
Make Big Decisions
The game master must come up with a company name and two non-player characters who will be interacting with the players: their handler and their technician. The handler is the face of the company for the vampire players. It is they who come to them with the missions. The technician is the person who created these vampire characters and makes sure the nanite pseudo-blood continues to run through their veins. For each of these non-player characters the GM must come up with a name, a one sentence description, a basic goal, and a dark secret.
Each of these non-player characters will also have a relationship rating with the vampires. It is a rating from +4 to -4 and it starts at 0(indifference). If they have a positive relationship with their handler or technician, they get a bonus coin added to their preparation pool for each point of positive relationships. If they have a negative relationship they subtract a coin from the preparation pool for each point of negative relationship(to minimum of 1 coin).
Get Your First Assignment
Once you have nailed down the relationships between the players’ characters and the non-player characters, it is time to give them their first assignment. The game master will talk for the non-player characters and hand out the assignment, this first time. The assignment will generally be either sabotage or theft from another corporation. So give them something to steal or something to break and then get them moving on doing that task. At this point the game master must decide how many obstacles there will be in play. For a normal heist you want between sixteen and twenty obstacles for a group of four players. This will leave each of them with very few coins left by the end, and that is what you are aiming for. Finding just the right number of obstacles is a bit tricky, and is very group dependant. For the first few assignments you may want to lowball the number of obstacles just until you get a feel for the flow of play. The players may want to ask questions and interact with the non-player characters at this point and feel free to go ahead with that. Bear in mind that many of their questions will be answered during surveillance, which is the next thing.
Surveillance
The players must then decide if they want to do surveillance. If they don’t do surveillance you may tell them as much or as little about the heist as you like. If they do surveillance they may each take turns spending coins to declare facts about the obstacles in the heist. Each round of surveillance marks one section of the Sunrise Clock. Each round each player gets the chance to spend one coin and declare one obstacle and one fact about that obstacle. This fact can be either an environmental keyword relevant to the obstacle, or the optimum tactic for overcoming that obstacle. For each coin spent in this manner the players add two coins to the preparation pool, from which they can all spend coins whenever they would normally be allowed to spend coins.
Gear Up
Each player will then choose one piece of high tech gear for their vampire. Each gets to describe the item, and if they want to have a fun scene talking with the technician, this is a good time to do that. Gear works like a normal key word except that you may choose to spend a coin and use up the gear in order to automatically overcome an obstacle. However once it is used up you may not use that gear again for the rest of the mission.
Get In
The game master must then take a moment to come up with the first set of obstacles. Each obstacle represents something that prevents the vampires from getting to the goal. Usually this is security guards, sensor systems, fences, guard dogs, camera systems, robots, motion activated turrets, door locks, and safes. Each will be more difficult to overcome with some tactics and easier to overcome with others. In the list of sample obstacles each is given the difficulty of the flip for each type of tactic. To get in their should be about half of the obstacles chosen used. Sometimes you can vary this amount, if you want it to be easy to get in and hard to get out, or vice versa, but in generall half will work for getting in. Once the game master has chosen the obstacles it is time for the players to start describing their actions. When they would encounter an obstacle the person who starts describing the action is the person who will flip for it, even if that person’s vampire is poor at those sorts of obstacles. For each complication that comes up the player will get to decide how it affects play, so use how they have chosen to complicate their mission to describe the outcomes of these obstacles. On a total failure, the game master will increase the difficulty of the next two obstacles by one. Make sure to let the players know that this is in addition to any other complications that occur.
Sample Obstacles
Easy
Guards Intelligence 2; Muscle 1; Charm 1; Stealth 1
Dogs Intelligence 1; Muscle 2;Charm 1; Stealth 1
Fence Intelligence 1; Muscle 1; Charm 2; Stealth 1
Sensors Intelligence 1; Muscle 3; Charm 2; Stealth 1
Locks Intelligence 2; Muscle 2; Charm 3; Stealth1
Difficult
Alert Guards Intelligence 2; Muscle 1; Charm 1; Stealth 2
Drones Intelligence 1; Muscle 3; Charm 3; Stealth 2
Sensors Intelligence 1; Muscle 4; Charm 3; Stealth 1
Biometric locks Intelligence 3; Muscle 2; Charm 4; Stealth 1
Hard
Vampire Guards Intelligence 3; Muscle 2; Charm 2; Stealth 3
Combat Drones Intelligence 2; Muscle 4; Charm 4; Stealth 3
AI Controlled Sensors Intelligence 2; Muscle 4; Charm 4; Stealth 2
Full Lockdown Intelligence 4; Muscle 3; Charm 4; Stealth 2
Getting Out
Getting out is much like getting in, but in reverse. Once they have gotten the goal, they must leave. The game master should try and use new obstacles, or reintroduce previous obstacles in a new, scarier way. Perhaps those guards you talked your way past realized what you did and are now on their guard, or perhaps when you kicked that door down you inadvertently filled the hallway with flamable gas and sparks. The idea is to really make them nervous about getting out with the goal and their lives by dawn. Ramp up the tension.
Getting Paid/Getting Betrayed
Once the vampires have gotten out they must then report back to their handler. They must face a charm based obstacle with a difficulty equal to the alarm level of the mission. If they succeed they increase their relationship with either their handler or their technician. If they fail they decrease their relationship with their handler or technician. The players get to pick which of the two will be affected by the roll. This is also the only obstacle where tails do not mean anything, it is the end of the session, and by the beginning of the next session all the stress, wounds, Alarm Levels, and the Sunrise Clock will all be back to normal.
Fallout
Keep track of the corporation that the characters just stole from or damaged. If they stole a piece of technology and their alarm level was below half, then that technology goes on to have good impact on the player's corporation and on the world. If they completed the mission with an alarm level of half or higher than their has been some blowback on the company. If they failed the mission, then the corporation is in trouble and will need to spend time repairing their reputation.
Ask your players some questions:
If they did good
To what evil end was the other corporation going to use this technology(or thing you sabotaged)?
What is one positive knock on effect of our corporation having stolen/destroyed that thing?
Which board member gained the most from this heist?
If they did poorly
To what evil end is our company going to use this technology, or what harmful advantage did our company gain from the sabotage?
What is one negative knock on effect our corporation will face due to our actions?
Which board member gained the most from our actions?
Which rival corporation gained from this mission?
If they failed entirely
How did we get back to our corporation(or do we need to do another mission to escape captivity in the rival corporation)?
What board member dislikes our unit now?
Which rival corporation spun the situation to gain the most?
Let the players know that they are free to invent board members or parts of the city or anything else that seems relevant and has not yet been invented. This section is what will build up the world around the players and let them see the immediate knock on effects of their actions. As the sessions go on the players should begin to see a complex web of corporations and groups within those corporations. Also some of the missions might be run by one board member(through the handler) in order to stop the machinations of another board member. The game master should use this time to come up with a few ideas for future heists.
The next session will go in a similar manner, though the details will change and the game master will not need to make up the player's’ corporation name, or the names details of the technician and Handler.