EVENT: An afternoon of playing Werewolf, and a variety of other hidden role games
CAUSE: Raising money for homeless charity, St. Mungo's
DATE: November 11th 2017 (12ppm onwards)
LOCATION: A pub in Tooting, south London (The Antelope)
DETAILS: An afternoon (technically from around lunch and into the evening) to not only raise a bit of money for charity, but also to hunt werewolves hiding out amongst the villagers. We hope to have several games going at once so that, as players get eliminated from one game they can join another one that is just about to start, rather than sit in their first game and be unable to start another game.
And it won't just be werewolves plaguing villages. We've also got alien parasites inhabiting isolated scientists and soldiers, cultists picking off investigators in a house during an unnatural storm, agents of dystopian governments infiltrating rebellious cells, outlaws and renegades trying to take down the sheriff in a wild west frontier town. And possibly other hidden role games on top.
At the end of the night we are planning to have a few games with a bit more dramatic flair, as we've asked Jon Gracey to run some sessions of his show Werewolf Live for us, wherein ten people at a time will don silly hats and perform for the rest of us.
It's not long after Halloween, so feel free to treat it as a second opportunity to dress up a bit. Admittedly, most of you will be innocent villagers, but any decorations you have post-Halloween, or bloody wound special effects you can use to make your deaths looks somewhat more authentic are welcome.
Possibly their will a small auction and cakes to buy, to further pry charity money from your hands. :-)
I've set up the event as a Private event on Facebook, but if you're interested message me there or via Twitter - I can invite Friends to join, or strangers via their email addresses. More than anything this is just to keep an eye on who is attending, and so that there's not a complete influx of people (including those I've played with before who've displayed a knack for making the gaming experience less fun).
WHAT IS WEREWOLF? Werewolf, to use it's simplest name, is a spin-off (or 'reskin') of an older game called Mafia, wherein everyone around a table is given a random playing card which determines which side they are on and, through a process of turns during which people are instructed to close their eyes and some are asked to open their eyes and select victims, the bad guys slowly whittle down the good guys, whilst the good guys have a chance to accuse and lynch the bad guys, with the chance they'll kill one of their own. It's a game of bluff and deduction, but also a game of adopting a fictional role and acting the part of a villager in an archetypal isolated old village - it can be played as seriously or as silly as the participants wish. Games are given extra depth and complexity by having additional good guy/bad guy characters with special abilities they can choose to use.
I'll have several versions of the game, including the popular Ultimate Werewolf, the beautifully illustrated Wolfed (see the art work above), the more abstractly illustrated Werewolves of Miller's Hollow, the Werewolves of Miller's Hollow spin-off The Village (which gives most characters a home from which to earn a living plus, thematically, some poor villagers without a home), plus others. I may have even have created a pack of my own.
OTHER GAMES? I will have a few other games with me but, at the very least, you'll be able to play Salem 1692, wherein you seek witches in the real world town (featuring real world historical salem townsfolk), Are You The Cultist? which transplants the action to an isolated mansion during a storm in the 1920s, pitting cultists against decent upstanding investigators, Stay Away! which rips off the film The Thing but with a nice Cthulhuesque twist, The Resistance, wherein agents of the rebellion fight to find the government spies in their midsts whilst they perform missions, Leaders of Euphoria, a similar dystopian future where two rival factions equipped with amusing tools try to take out the hidden enemy leaders and Bang! The Dice Game, wherein the Sheriff of a western town must pick off the hidden Outlaws and Renegades, with the aid of his unknown Deputies.
Other games may be available, and people are encouraged to bring their own.
ELABORATE BACKSTORY: A while back, after seeing Jon Gracey's Werewolf Live, I was reminded of the Werewolf sessions I used to play with friends years ago, including a session with Dave Gorman that - due to a number of factors - never made it into his book of games. Off the back of Jon's event myself and another Werewolf player of old put our heads together and decided to arrange an event to raise a bit of money.