filmreroll

Character Sheets: Friday the 13th

Added 2019-07-06 19:50:24 +0000 UTC

Ah, Summerspell. This episode still has a special place in my heart. What a joy it was to do. And you guys only had the final result. I had two months of slow deception. I had to go to a lot of lengths to even get my players to 50% believe that Summerspell was a real movie. They're naturally suspicious people.

Take a look at the pdfs called "Objectives" and you'll see where the real meat of this session was. I wrote those, extrapolated from the characters in the actual movie, but really found a lot of fun in the complex interrelationships. This is in a lot of ways the kind of work I have to do every day as an actor; we're trained to look at a scene and find a bunch of stuff that's subtly driving the characters that the author hinted at or that we're inventing based on the text, and this is essentially that. Now, while I was lying to the players about the nature of the movie, all this characters stuff I got was in there to be found (with some strong invention and extrapolation) in a movie that has the depth of a paper plate. Goes to show that there's always fun to be had in character relationships, even when our source material seems thin.

Doing the campaign this way made me want to actually do a Chekhovian campaign where it's all about character desires and secrets and relationships. Of course, the love mechanic would some fleshing out, I designed it to be a cover, not actually to be a fully functional mechanic, though the players made really good use of it. It might not really work for our show, but a straight playthrough of Summerspell, or something like it, sounds like a ton of fun to me.