Playing Demon City in Ukraine: The Demon City Where We Live

 Note:

I Do Not Officially Endorse This Actual Play Report. - Zak S.

It’s Sunday, and we’re all alive and more than a little mad, up to the point that the kindest people, the ones that you see when you open the dictionary on “P – Pacifism”, and there’s their portrait, - these people speak about killing invaders in level voices and you are not worried about it, because you feel the same way.

It didn’t happen in a year. We had eight years to see and understand and accept that there’s a huge crowd of people across the border who wish us evil. The news about war crimes, torturers, rapes are grim but not surprising. We’ve heard it before. We’ve learned that this shit is very real.

Anyways, we’re still alive and we managed to deal with the end-of-the-year-must-wrap-up-all-the-projects blues, so we get together to play some tabletop games.

And I bring a printout of Demon City.  

Demon City is an urban horror game, so the setting is modern and the characters meet in a city. Also, the default setting for Demon City is the place where you all live.

So what’s happening is happening here and now. Fine by us.

Demon City requires Tarot cards for playing (they’re used in a fun way, sort of like dice but there’s more than just numbers to them). Each of us has at least one Tarot deck, obviously. I mean, we play D&D and Marvel Super Heroes and LotFP and threaten each other with GURPS and FATAL, of course we have Tarot cards.

Out of three people who are not otherwise occupied, two forget to bring their decks. Which is also normal, we tend to forget stuff even in more peaceful times. We have one deck and it’s quite enough.

We have no idea what kind of characters we want to play, because it’s a new game. Fortunately, I didn’t forget to print out a couple sets of “Quick character generation” sheets.

“Total random generation?”

“Total random generation”.

While we’re pulling cards and writing down the stats we talk about war and dating and trans people and Derry Girls and for some reason OGL. I guess it’s because we haven’t met in months.

Anyways, we’re done. The characters are a pair of Territorial Defense volunteers – a paramedic with some highly criminal skills and a morbid curiosity, which is normal, and a cosplayer who had witnessed a strange murder several years ago, which also happens.

“Hey guys, before we start, look how cool the design is in the game! Look at the random encounter table!”

“Awesome!”

“And these are the pitches and they’re made to look like movie posters!”

 “Hey, I like this one. Let’s play this”.

“The one with magic? Sure, okay”.

So we add some final features related to the pitch, and I forget that I should give the players a couple magic rituals that they can use, and the players forget it, too. So it’s fine.

“Okay. Someone called the police and said there’s a dead body near the museum. The cops are busy, and also don’t want to do anything about it, so they shove the case onto you”.

A short pause follows when the players try hard to think up names for their characters, which predictably results in stupid name-related puns.

As the characters see the horribly mutilated body, they both lose a Calm point. Which immediately sends them into Panic Mode (yes, their randomly generated characters both had a very low Calm in a horror game, I’ve been told it’s part of the fun).

The acting director of the museum calls the cops and says that perverted necrophiliacs are doing unspeakable things to the corpse. Which, to be honest, they do – at least, the paramedic does, because his curiosity is unquenchable. The cosplayer, meanwhile, feels that someone is watching him. There’s a young woman wearing a medical coat (not really suspicious, there’s a medical university and some clinics nearby) who walks away fast.

The commanding officer calls the cosplayer and asks him that legitimate question of what the fuck are they doing with the corpse. A couple lucky throws later the museum workers help them wrap up the corpse into a sheet, and they call the police to say “Hey, you guys should come and take this here dead body”. “Yeah right”, says the police, “Why don’t you drag the dead body to the prosectors while we do some real important work, which we’re not going to talk about because it’s really important?”

To put it short, what happens next is:

Cops are purposefully unhelpful more than once;

There’s a writing on the wall that looks like a war-time urban legend;

Playing in the here and now means that now and again players ask “What address was that? Okay, let me check what’s in the area on the maps, there are probably people that we can talk to…”

I’m so lazy that I steal two of Zak’s examples in a row;

Which actually leads to a pretty horrific scene in the cosplayer’s apartment – his old friend is lying in a pool of his own blood, the whole place smells like gunpowder and death, and it’s only beginners’ luck that no one ended with a negative Calm, sinking into insanity.

“And now let me explain to you how Downtime works”.

“I’ve drawn a 10, is it good?”

“… yes. It is good. Here, read what you gain”.

“Oh cool, so this works like our XP!”

“In a way, yes”.

For a first session with lots of talking and people forgetting things, it went very well. The character generation was fun enough and fast enough. The fast-paced combat system, even slowed down by me forgetting things again, proved to be quick and deadly.

So after sending the characters to have their downtime, we went our separate ways, to different ways of the Demon City where we live.