Adventure Calendar 2024 4: Musical Chairs

Adventure Calendar 2024

4: Musical Chairs

Musical Chairs: Dance in a circle around a number of chairs, lower than the number of players. When the music stops everybody tries to get a seat, If you fail you’re out. Remove a chair every round so the game has an ending.

Since I mentioned it in relation to Pass The Parcel this is a more active game and sometimes involves wrestling over a chair or trying to hip-check someone else off. Best played with people you know will take that with good grace.

According to sketch show Big Train it can also be used to make people speak in group therapy sessions. Maybe don’t do that. :D

But it could be used to put players on the spot when you want them to introduce their characters or something. Hmm... not serious...or am I?

Okay, in character ideas...

With a dwindling space and fighting over who gets to stay, a more intellectual version would be the lifeboat or hot air balloon thought experiment. Entire settings like Our Brilliant Ruin are about dealing with resources and even land running out. And on a smaller scale lots of groups could end up in lifeboats, on icebergs breaking up and so on. PCs being PCs someone will probably offer to stay behind in a heroic sacrifice.

Okay, less grim version, only so many people can get into the Important Room in the adventure. Assuming the PCs arent being totally selfish they’ll have to work together to decide who gets in.

V5: City Of Angels 1.26

We got to the vampire restaurant!

We did not burn it down.

Some of us might be considering it.

Adventure Calendar 2024 3: Blind Man's Buff

Adventure Calendar 2024

3: Blind Man’s Buff

Blind Man’s Buff: a variation or tig / tag where the one doing the tagging is blindfold.

It goes back centuries, so characters in ancient or medieval style settings could play it.

Having to sneak around a sleeping or blind monster is one of the classic stealth sequences. Probably good for extended stealth rules where one failure by the noisiest party member doesn’t ruin the whole attempt. Check out Black Seven, a small RPG all about sneaking around enemy bases and not making it just a couple of rolls.

See A Quiet Place for an entire post-apocalypse setting about this. And this game would be a way to LARP it!

In a location without trip hazards anyway.

If the PCs are “it”, chasing something they can’t see is another issue again. An invisible enemy, say? Limiting how many chances they get to work out its position do can raise the tension considerably. Of course then you’re playing Battleship more than Blind Man’s Buff. Maybe a time limit to keep things frantic?

Adventure Calendar 2024 2: Charades

Adventure Calendar 2024

2: Charades

Charades: You get a word or phrase and have to mime it out. There are some specific gestures like category and number of words or syllables. Formalised in France and the UK in the 19th century, based on a previous version about writing tricky descriptions.

I am actually pretty good at charades, thanks to years of Give Us A Clue running on TV at lunchtimes in my youth.

But anyway.

Obviously the PCs being rendered unable to speak like the classic Buffy episode Hush forces this. Could be hard to sustain in a vocal medium like RPGs though...

GRABYOURCHRISTMASTREE

GRABYOURCHRISTMASTREE, a charity Goth and such Christmas cover and new album.

Featuring an eerie take on The Power Of Love (Frankie, not Huey) by Witch Of The Vale.

V5 Empire 1.10

Due to a player focusing on the Vampire: The Masquerade V5 “oracle” take on the Malkavian clan and establishing the character being from a brood like that, I’ve leaned into it with all the NPC clan members they’ve met as well. Any resemblance to the Mekhet from Vampire: The Requiem is - hey look over there!

So tonight they met a photographer who had seen an omen while taking pictures, a descendant of a cult leader obsessed with the Red Star who was a broodmate of the PC’s sire, as well as another of the leader’s childer trying to pursue his studies.

Adventure Calendar 2024 1: Pass The Parcel

Adventure Calendar 2024

1: Pass The Parcel

Pass The Parcel: Pass a parcel between you, a gift wrapped in several layers of wrapping paper, as music plays. When it stops the holder unwraps a layer, and then the music restarts. Continue until unwrapping the final layer means you win the prize inside.

(Apparently British, with some Canadian play as well, hence the description. It’s kind of like Musical Chairs but less active - you can play a whole game sitting down, which you usually can’t with Musical Chairs.)

In most RPGs and other adventure-ish media this is just asking to be a bomb.

This was also the climactic problem in The Dark Knight Rises and that's not a coincidence.

To be doubly festive, you could also borrow from Casting The Runes by M. R. James, a curse that has to be passed on before it comes due...

Adventure Calendar 2024

Adventure Calendar 2024

0: Party Games

This is real. Some friends have it. I may have to help with a daily riddle when I visir.

For my sixth time doing festive adventure ideas daily (click December 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 in my blog archive) and as one thing people do at Christmas that they might not do much the rest of the year...

GAMES.

Particularly party games.

And how they might end up in RPG adventures...

December

December, and World AIDS Day.

Low the light, low the tide

Comes the sun again

--Thea Gilmore, Sol Invictus

Deck the halls and snowflakes fall but I’m not feeling glad at all

-- Charly Bliss, It’s Christmas And I Fucking Miss You