The Bittersweet Horror of Byron Falls: Teen Hearts and Monstrous Minds

A few days ago, John Wick posted that he had another little game ready to be consumed.  I am always hungry for a Wick idea, but when I read his description and thought about the teen girls in the high school gaming club, I was starving for this new number.  I had to say goodbye to another fiver.

Here is how Mr. Wick pitches this one at John Wick Presents:

In the small town of Byron Falls, Minnesota, there’s more going on than most suspect. Witches and warlocks, vampires and werewolves, mummies and ghosts haunt every corner. And, of course, brilliant, beautiful young girls who want desperately to fall in love with them.

Byron Falls is the second Little Game from John Wick’s forthcoming Big Book of Little Games. Players take the roles of lonely, beautiful and misunderstood high school girls who meet and fall in love with lonely, beautiful and misunderstood monsters.

Instead of stats like “strength” or “dexterity,” players roll dice for their relationships, building life-long friendships and bitter rivalries while trying to romance the moody vampire in study hall.

Welcome to Byron Falls.

Don’t you dare fall in love.

I paid up, downloaded, and started telling the girl gamers about the game.  They smiled as if to say, “Do you know what you are getting yourself into?”  I think I did.  I have watched these girls toting around darkly romantic teen literature for years now.  So, today we played our first session and had a pleasantly unsettling blast. 

I had fun prepping for the game by destroying an old, junk yearbook from 1998 (and from another school) that I got from the yearbook advisor at school.  What? Destroy a yearbook? Well, yes…the character sheet has nice boxes for PC and NPC sketches.  I ripped out the senior portrait section complete with those old, corny senior wishes for the future and told the players to pick their characters from those pages.  They taped them to the character sheet and then moved on to discovering the characters’ friends. These were taken from the smaller underclassmen pictures.  This process was filled with giggly wisecracks.  You can imagine three tenth graders and one twelfth grader laughing at old snapshots from more than a decade ago.  I also got into the act and used the yearbook to secure some images of NPCs: teachers, fellow students, and other school staff members.

The most prominent yearbook NPC of our first session was THE JANITOR.  I thought that this picture of a thin, older man holding his mop and staring at the camera without a hint of a smile had some dramatic life in it.  And it did.  Thus far, the janitor appears to be some sort of shapeshifting creep that lures kids out of town to party at his house.  But, kids are not dumb.  He uses cute, unfamilar waiters at the local teen hangout to do his recruiting. 

And the high school math teacher locks parents in the freezer at Jane’s Waffles.

And the scary cheerleaders (great pics from the yearbook) call the janitor their father(s).

And the only boy PC is running home from the lake in the pitch dark February night.

And–TAKE A BREATH, FIGTREE–right before the session ended, two of the female PCs were standing outside of the mop man’s frightening house when they heard a howl coming from the basement. 

The source of this howl needs them.  But they need him even more.  And so does the other girl who shouldn’t have come to this place.  She went into the house, only to be promptly and forcibly fitted with a cheerleading outfit, and is still at this very hour cheering over and over and over and over with the janitor’s weird daughters.  READY! NO-KAY!

Shotgun Diaries: The Mechanical Hound Mod

     I had just finished teaching Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and wanted to enrich the reading a bit with some exciting character interaction. It was time to turn the mechanical hounds of the novel on the students with the help of John Wick’s lethal little game of zombie survival, Shotgun Diaries.

Here is the procedure:

• Students read the novel.
• Students read the rules concerning survivor types.
• Students create survivor types based on the main characters of the novel, complete with specific skills.
• The teacher assesses the students’ understanding the novel’s characters.
• Students read the rest of the rules.
• The teacher quizzes the students’ comprehension of the rules. 
• The students play the game.
• The teacher watches to see if the rules are played correctly as a way to assess reading comprehension.
• Most of the characters die.
• The teacher and the students reflect on the game and the congruency of the novel’s characters with their own versions of the same in relation to their behavior in the game.

Zombies and Team Building

    

    

     I was consumed by zombies last night. That’s right, in the middle of the Allegheny River, I was transformed into an all-you-can-eat buffet for the undead.  BUT, IT WAS WORTH IT.   In the process of becoming sausage for the soft casing that is zombie esophagus, I realized that John Wick’s Shotgun Diaries is a fun way to work on team building skills. The game takes place after a zombie apocalypse, and each of the players takes on the role of a survivor with a specific skill.

Types of Survivors and their Special Talents

• clever survivor=Macguyver
• dangerous survivor=weapons dude
• fast survivor=speedy
• sneaky survivor=stealthy
• strong survivor=Mr. Physical
• helpless survivor=not much hope without help

     These characters must work together in order to survive, for if a character takes a risk outside of her skill, she cannot roll any dice.  She NEEDS the others.  In addition, if the characters work together, the dice rules give them a better chance at not becoming bloodlunch.  But, here is the fun part.  Certain rolls require the character to narrate their character to safety in a manner interested solely in self-protection.  Though you might WANT to help your friends get into the bank vault along with you, the dice might say otherwise.  You may have to close the door behind your own panicked self, leaving your partners to fend off some blood-drooling bank tellers obsessed with the currency of their colons.

     But this moment of self-preserving fear does not have to last the rest of the game.  You can immediately begin your road to redemption by figuring out ways to join your friends and help them survive.  That is, if you can survive.  The dice mechanic in the game does a great job of simulating the desperation found in zombie movies.  In some of them, no characters survive.  It is easy to die in these flicks and in this game, especially without the help of your friends (see Night of the Living Dead and Dead Snow).  GO TEAM!

Bonus:  Here is a fun way to get the players’ attention before beginning narration.

• Inject fake blood into an old, junk CD player.
• Play “With a Little Help From My Friends” by the Beatles while explaining the concept of the game.
• Smash the radio with a baseball bat, sending it across the room.
• Dim the lights and replace the Beatles with some creepy ambient music or your scary music of choice.