Demon City, province of Barovia

The funny thing about Demon City is... well, there are many. I firmly believe that it's the best horror RPG ever made. Anyhow, a funny thing about Demon City is how rememberable it is. I haven't played Demon City in years. When I thought about converting the Hickmans' OG Ravenloft to it, it took me a couple minutes of lazy thinking to recall how the stats, the skills, the "classes" (motivations, that is), and the rest of character creation works, without bothering to actually open the book. 

Demon City's stats system is spelled RATPACK. R for Revenue (I thought it was Resources, probably because I love FASERIP, but no matter what you call it it's about how Rich a character is), A for Agility (so that's Dexterity in D&D, more or less), T is Toughness (and it's how well you can hit and take hits, an elegant in-game solution), P is Perception (Wisdom in D&D), second A is for Appeal (charisma, don't you know), C is Calm (v. important in a horror game, and clearly separated here, designers of games who don't have a stat for willpower should be ashamed of themselves and take notes and make better games), and K is Knowledge, don't you know. There's no Intelligence because it's a player stat, Knowledge decides how much information your character can get. 

And the skills give you slightly better chances to do things than the stats do, so if you're strong you can hit hard, but if you're strong and also a boxer you can hit harder. Little reasonable things like that. 

There're skills for all occasions and you can and should come up with new ones if you need them, I'll just throw away stuff like Hacking and Electronics. I'll also replace Firearms with Archery because I don't like guns. The rest is fine as it is, from Athletics to Forgery to Mechanics it's something that fits right in Barovia. 

The character motives don't really need any changing, because they're universal in Demon City, and answer two important quesitons: why are you even on your way to Barovia, and how do you deal with the horrible things that await you there. The Problem is, of course, my favourite though I never got to play it. Ah well, maybe one day. 

I'll get back to this topic once the players get together and throw some cards and make some PCs. In the meantime, I can fill in the My First Conspiracy... fill-in-the-blanks sheet. The Villain is, of course, count Strahd. The Oracle is the vistani leader, I'll call her Madame Magda because it's a better name, and her method of divination is her Tarokka deck. The minions should take some time filling in, and it should be a fun exercise. 

The villain's Task and HQ?  Why, that's determined by the card reading after the game starts. That's what makes it interesting. 

 

I, Strahd, walk the land, and look smashing while I do.  

Illustrator Clyde Caldwell

The greatest horror game ever is here.

That's pretty much it, folks. 

DEMON CITY can now be bought, both in printed format and as a PDF. 

I've had the PDF for some time now, and I'm really happy with how it's designed.

It's pure poetry, in the sense that it's strange, follows its own rhyme and reason, and has a really high information to volume ratio.

For example: explanation of how to play takes a couple pages, and it's presented as an "Actual Play" situation. The players make decisions, forget about stuff, remind each other about the stuff, and face the consequences. It's very comprehensible and fun to read. 

Character generation is smooth and bright. 

The art is gorgeous. It's Zak Smith at his best, and Shawn Cheng also at his best. Linda Tirado added to it, too, text-wise.

There's a bestiary of sorts - descriptions of the many kinds of monsters and horrors and what they do. 

There're adventure seeds presented as movie posters, which is a great way to do this thing. 

There are rules for how to play monsters as PCs if you're into it, and frankly, who's not into it? 

My favourite part of the game is, like I always say, how easy it is to play it in the Here and Now. We played it in war-torn Ukraine, as members of local territorial defense unit who are called upon to investigate stuff that the police has no time or desire to deal with, and it felt very natural, the real bits of the city around us naturally flowed into the game. Later we played it online and the game took place in LA and it still felt natural and living. 

It's a great game.

You should get it. 

Odds and ends.

Gem at Damage to an unresisting target is always Massive wrote a cool post about the xenomorphs from Alien and the Thing from that film based on Who Goes There?, and made up monsters with Demon City stats based on those two horrible extraterrestrials. Gem is very methodic with their approach to horror films and games. 

Stygian Muse wrote a review of my doggy adventure which you can buy at J. E. Raggi IV's PDF store at Drivethru. I feel flattered. 

Raggi himself uploaded a video where he talks about how the owners of D&D change the language in the books and why it is not a good idea. It's worth watching. 

There's an Australian cartoon called "Bluey" and it's excellent, some of the episodes say more about tabletop roleplaying than some shows about tabletop roleplaying. Also, an episode of this cartoon was banned by Disney because it's about a male anthropomorphic dog pretending to be pregnant as he plays with his daughters, and that's offensive to someone?.. Anyhow, it's on Youtube and it's great.

Played some Demon City...

Some notes: 

The rules for character making are simple enough that I managed to write up something playable in a couple minutes, in a crazy hurry, and without re-reading the rules  that I've last read about half a year ago. 

If you know how your character's skills work in real life, it's more interesting and rewarding to use them in the game.

When dealing with undead monstrosities, yelling "Everyone out of the water NOW!" is a much better survival tactic than suicide bombing. 

When suffering from threatening hallucinations, closing your eyes and trying to switch to echolocation is not the worst choice, even though it doesn't really help. 

Combat is fast and deadly.

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.

Zak Smith's Demon City

I'm not a big fan of horror games. I like fantasy, I like superheroics. And in these traditions, scary things have their own important place - they're just not the main actors. 

The Black Riders are bloody scary when they first appear, because we don't know what they are and what they want, and everything about them feels just wrong - the way they talk, the way they breathe, the way they look. The Ringwraiths become less scary when we find out more about them, when they become powerful enemies but not nameless, faceless horrors. 

Batman's modus operandi is based on two things: 1) human-sized bat-like creature is scary when it jumps you in the darkness, 2) a man who dresses up as a giant bat specifically to find you and beat you up is scary because he's definitely crazy, and insanity is scary. But it's not supposed to be scary for the reader, because the criminals see the Batman, and we see Bruce Wayne who's sometimes sad and sometimes awesome and sometimes ridiculous on purpose because he pretends to be a playboy. Yes, he's somewhat crazy, but it's the crazy that we appreciate.

A good horror story works on many levels. Besides the scary, there're conflicts and tough decisions and bravery and treachery. 

That's why I like CREATURES OF THE NIGHT and CHILL. And that's why I love DEMON CITY. 

Zak's game is probably the best horror game there is, but what's better is that you can easily use it for murder mysteries, or urban fantasy, or whatever you like. It's flexible. The mechanics that Zak offers are not tied to a specific setting. Although for superheroics I AM THE WEAPON, with its amazing system of superpowered character generation, is better. But if you want to play a group of desperados in Gotham City? DEMON CITY is perfect for that. 

So what's good about it? 

- Zak's art. The book looks good. It's stylish. It keeps your attention, it's fun to read. 

- "Example of play" completes the rules nicely, showing how everything works in a simple and understandable way. 

- You can use dice if you want, but it's more fun to use a Tarot deck. And there are six ways to use the cards - plus any you can invent yourself. 

- Character "Motives" instead of classes - there are differences in the advantages and flaws with which the characters start, how they behave in critical situations, and how they recover. Which all make sense together. 

- Simple and elegant system of resolving conflicts. 

- An equally elegant system for panic and insanity, and how can characters recover. 

- Downtime - what happens to the characters between sessions and how it changes them. I love it so much, I want to use it in all my games now. 

- Advice to the Host about how to create adventures, and how to keep them from falling apart if the players find other ways of doing things that you didn't plan (and that's what players always do). HUNTER/HUNTED is my favourite way of doing it. 

- Fun facts from the real world that you can use in your game. 

- The "setting" is your own. You can - and should - comfortably use DEMON CITY with places and situations that you know well.

- And about a dozen other cool things. 

I can't wait to try it out. Probably in a couple weeks.