Originally posted on July 30.

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After a nice vacation last week (albeit slightly disrupted by Hurricane Dolly), it’s time for another weekly ETU: Degrees of Horror update.

First, horror website Flames Rising recently invited us to write an essay on the creative process behind writing horror games. The essay was posted last Friday, so check it out. While you’re there, check out some of their other interviews, essays, and reviews. If you like horror (and if you don’t, why are you reading this thread?), you’ll feel like a kid in a candystore.

Next, an update on the writing. On my side, the vacation really derailed my writing routine. All of last week was pretty much a wash. If you read my blog you’ll see that I lament the need to restore some writing discipline. I wrote this morning’s post yesterday (using the magic of post-dating), and last night I did in fact work on the plot points. Tonight is my “writing night”– the one night a week I leave the wife and kids at home, power up the laptop in a coffee shop, and hammer away for a few relatively uninterrupted hours. I’m not a night owl, so I’m a lot more productive at these sessions than when I’m putting the kids to bed and firing up the computer at 9 pm. I guess the point of all this is that I am still pushing forward, and I think once I build some writing momentum again then it won’t take long to finish the plot points. The rest of the book is essentially written.

Now that you’ve had a progress update, let me tell you about the game. I’ve talked about character creation, lingering over the parts unique to college such as majors, activities, final exams, and wealth. Now let’s talk about the adventures.

The less said about the plot points, the better. Generally speaking, the plot points are keyed to time: “When you reach this point in the semester, kick off this plot point”. In between the plot points, you can play Midnight Tales (renamed Savage Tales). Ed has written Midnight Tales based on your class (Freshman, Sophomore, etc.), your major (Agriculture, Engineering, etc.), extra-curricular activity (fraternity, ROTC, etc.) and location (History building, student center, etc.). He has written an insane number of Midnight Tales. (I should say we’ve also had some excellent contributions from Mike “Bloodshadows” Dukes.) The result is a campaign that is very customized to your group. While I (modestly) think that the plot point campaign is very cool, we’re giving you enough material that you could have a great campaign without ever touching them. Most likely, you could play Degrees of Horror three times without playing the same Midnight Tale twice.

Speaking of great material, I haven’t even touched on the other way to come up with an adventure– Ed’s adventure generator. I’ll save that for next week’s update since that probably deserves a post of its own.

Originally posted July 16

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This is the part where you keep me honest. Between swim lessons for the kids, a church vestry meeting, and a slew of other stuff, I’ve made very little headway on the plot points this past week. Fortunately, we’re still making progress in other areas. Ed has made refinements to character creation, wealth and spending, and several other chapters. He has also started going through all the Midnight Tales written thus far and looking for tie-ins to the plot points. I suspect most will directly tie in without much difficulty.

Last week I spent a few paragraphs talking about some of the ways we are evoking the feeling of college life at ETU, such as through final exams and the choosing of extra-curricular activities. There’s one other aspect of college life that I didn’t get to talk about, and I think it’s worth a post of its own.

One of the things many of us can remember about college life is never having enough money for the things we wanted or even needed. For most of us, it was the first time we were living on our own and sometimes those lessons on budgeting were hard-learned. In other settings tracking money is a distant concern. Heck, some GMs hand-wave it altogether. In Degrees of Horror, we think wealth (or the lack thereof) is one of the many things that is evocative of the setting. At the same time, we don’t want the game to become a class in accounting. We think we’ve struck a balance with your Semester Allowance.

Your Semester Allowance is the amount of spending money you get at the beginning of each semester. Maybe it comes from your parents, maybe from student loans or scholarships. The reasoning is up to you. If you take the Poor hindrance or engage in certain expensive extra-curricular activities it is below average, or you can take the Rich or Filthy Rich edges or land a job to increase it.

The key point is that your Semester Allowance assumes that your tuition, on campus meal plan, dorm housing, and transportation are already covered. That means you only have to deduct off-campus expenses like eating out, buying equipment, going on dates, etc. So far in playtests we’ve found that this works really well. In fact, Ed ran a game for some friends in which one of the characters had to borrow money from one of the other heroes so he could take a girl (NPC) out on a date. That sounds like college life to me! By the same token, those who choose to increase their Semester Allowance (generally at the expense of taking other edges or activities) will find that it is actually a useful advantage. Can you really say that the same holds true in most of the campaigns you’ve played?

Now, that’s our vision for how wealth works in Degrees of Horror. Some groups may absolutely not want to deal with money at all. If you want, you can still choose to hand-wave most of the issues with spending and tracking your money. That’s a conversation among the GM and the group during character creation, so that players know not to take one of the hindrances that makes me chuckle every time I think about it.

Fickle Cash Flow
Your parents sent you to ETU to study and get a degree, not waste their money. If you fail a Final Exam, decrease your Wealth by one category as they cut back your allowance.