The Ghost Killers

Version 2 updated 12/29/5

The Ghost Killers is a game of team roleplaying. It plays out like Ghostbusters meets Hellraiser (the good ones: Hellraiser One and Two), with a little Silent Hill thrown in, where you fight the forces of evil by shooting at them with 1-gauge shotguns out the windows of your green El Camino.

NOTE: This game was a failure, it could not be completed in 24 hours. It is only being recorded for prosterity, and to motivate me to complete it soon.

A rag-tag team of people from all walks of life get together and kill creatures from the spirit world. The game itself involves a lot of gambling-style mechanics, amateur theatrics, coolness and narration control (in the form of ?Fortune in the Middle?). This game is a total ripoff of Dread: The First Book of Pandemonium by Rafael Chandler, Examplar (first edition) by Jeff Schecter and Pretender by Kirt Dankmeyer.

Breakdown: This game is about living on the edge, fighting unnatural creatures beyond reason. It is about teamwork, risk, violence, brotherhood and tension, loss and love, all set to the tune of adventures where the players are above the law.
Teamwork: The team, or ?Pack?, has a special character sheet that has all their shared resources on it. There are mechanics within the Roles (character classes) that lead to teamwork and mutual support. Brotherhood: As above, and players can gain by having their characters push towards their mutual goals.
Tension: The character have personal goals which sometimes conflict with the group goals. Risk: The die system is a roll-under system that encourages high risk for great reward; But the greater the risk, the easier it is to fail. A lot like gambling. Violence: Lots of focus on combat, natural and supernatural. ?The Ghost Killers? and all that. Loss and Love: Players have karmic ties to the world that keep them tied to the everyday world. These pawns are always at risk of being taken, driving the player to madness and despair. Amateur theatrics and coolness: Players reward each other for doing cool things, providing cool description, saying cool lines, doing things that are just enough out of character to blow minds without being stupid, etc.
Narration control: The Flip Mode mechanic changes the rules on how to roll dice: The action moves from ?task resolution? to ?conflict resolution?, and narration lies entirely in the hands of the player. Flip Mode is known as ?Fortune in the Middle?, where you pick the dice to roll and roll them, and then describe what happens.

Download

• The_Ghost_Killers.pdf
• The_Ghost_Killers_0.2.0.pdf

Tags: Andy Kitkowski

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Free RPGs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.