So, my second step towards the usurpation of this blog review on this blog is now complete.

DRYH is described as a game about insomnia in the Mad City. Its basic premise is that there are people (called Awake) who didn’t sleep for so long that they’ve lost the need to sleep, gaining instead powers born from their growing madness and an ability to see secret entrances into the Mad City: an alley that wasn’t there before, a window with alien view reflected in it, a door that was always hidden in your room, etc.

The Mad City is an enormous city connected to all sufficiently populated places in our world (called City Slumbering in the game) yet remaining outside of it. It’s mostly Victorian in style, but there are plenty of anachronistic details around because it’s created out of lost and forgotten things: a burned down district, a fallen plane, a broken car, etc.

The Mad City is populated by local people and Nightmares. The former are normal people who have lost the capacity to care or even understand anything not related to their duties under the influence of the city. A shopkeeper caress only about maintaining the shop and selling goods, a taxi driver drives and chats about everything not really telling anything, etc.

The latter are monstrous creatures representing twisted versions of people who normally make a city function. There are Officer Tock, the head of brutal police force that even other Nightmares fear, and the Tacks Man, the man behind Byzantine bureaucracy who can lay claim on your possessions (even your dreams and memories) just by being near you. There are Paper Boys delivering newspapers that predict a false future and doom you to live through it. There is Mother When, a headmistress of the local school speculated to be an incarnation of death who turns urchin girls into proper Ladies in Hating and beheads everyone taller than her. And so on.

Together, various Nightmares create a mockery of ordinary life as bizarre as it is terrifying to those caught in their schemes. Normally they are content to live their lives in a twisted parody of real world, harassing the Awake only when they interrupt the routine, but that changes during the Thirteenth Hour, a secret hour that comes to the Mad City each day at noon and midnight, during which all doors to the City Slumbering are locked, and Nightmares flood the streets, searching for the Awake.

The only safe place during that time is Bizarre Bazaar, open only for the duration of Thirteenth Hour, each time in a new location. It’s a neutral ground for locals, Nightmares and the Awake alike where you can buy and sell everything and memories are used for currency.

The setting is very open to additions. It’s described in enough detail to give you a feel of the place while leaving plenty of room for new content, which is supported by the system making it very easy to create new Nightmares.

So, let’s talk about that.

A discussion about the system should start with the character creation. Characters have three prime attributes: Discipline (your skill and ability to keep the situation under control), Exhaustion (how much you pushed yourself beyond the limits. The higher your Exhaustion, the more dice you can throw around, but it brings you that much closer to collapsing) and Madness (self-explanatory). They are assigned automatically (3, 0, 0).

Then there are three reaction boxes that are divided by the player between Fight and Flight.They determine how you will react when you lose your nerve due to the growing madness.

Finally, there are Exhaustion and Madness Talents. The former is simply something mundane your character is really good at. Brawl, driving, lying, gambling, medicine – whatever. Exhaustion Talent helps you in tasks related to it and allows you to push yourself in those tasks to reach truly spectacular results at a cost.

Madness Talent is basically a superpower. It can be anything from simple super-strength to an ability to turn your ribcage into a prison, with your heart becoming a warden capable of interrogating and brainwashing those who are trapped inside (an actual power described in a supplement material). Players are encouraged to go wild with it and pick something that expands their narrative options and allows to do things nobody else can do. That’s because Madness Talent doesn’t actually help you to succeed. It has no mechanical benefits. Instead, it allows you to expand your options and reach for otherwise impossible goals.

As far as the system is concerned, that’s it. There is, however, one more very important aspect to the character creation: answering the five questions. They are, in order:


What’s been keeping you awake?
The source of character’s insomnia. The answer to that question can be used as a source of conflict for the character (if the character can’t sleep because his daughter was kidnapped by Russian Mafia, it’s obviously going to play a role in the game) as well as an inspiration for new Nightmares (nightmarish mobsters sound fun).

What just happened to you?
The very first scene in which the characters is introduced is described by the player. That helps the GM to determine what players want out of the game, what tone and atmosphere to aim for. A run-in with Nightmares would call for a game heavy on supernatural elements, while a character walking the streets of City Slumbering, unable to feel at ease, sensing someone’s presence at the edge of perception is a good start for a more slow suspenseful story.

What’s on the surface?
Basic description of the character. Things that are obvious to anyone who speaks with the character for five minutes or less. The use is obvious: it determines how the world reacts on the character normally.

What lies beneath?
More in-depth description of the character. Stuff that’s not obvious at first, dirty secrets and forgotten memories, lies you tell yourself, etc. Again, the use is obvious: it gives players something to work with as far as role-playing is concerned and it can serve as a source of conflict and an inspiration for new Nightmares, much like the first question.

What’s your path?
Character’s ultimate goal and the best possible conclusion to their story. Aside from the obvious use of the answer to give the character a motivation to act on, there is another reason why this question matter. The only way out of the Mad City is to reach the goal defined here. It is the only way to leave Nightmares behind and rest at ease. Therefore, it basically determines a winning condition to the game as far as there could be one in TRPGs.

So, as you can see, answering those questions allows players to frame the game more to their liking and influence its flow more directly than is usual for older games. It’s an interesting way to make what is usually reserved for informal discussions between players and the GM a part of the game.

The success of the method depends on cooperation of the GM and on everyone knowing what they are doing, however, which could be a problem for new people who have little prior experience with TRPGs.

The same can be said about the system in general.

The game uses a conflict resolution mechanic, as opposed to task resolution used in more traditional games like D&D, which means that instead of rolling dice for every significant action, players roll for a series of actions needed to succeed at their goal. For example, a single roll can be used to determine an outcome of an entire fight instead of going through it blow by blow. Or, if you want to make the fight more dynamic and climatic, you can break it down to a few steps: get rid of the minions, reach the big bad before it’s too late, defeat the big bad, for example. Either way, only the outcome matters, not the individual actions. The latter would simply be described by the narrator (either the GM or whoever wins the conflict) afterwards.

It’s a pretty fluid system allowing for a great control over the flow and pacing of the game. But, as I said, it’s not very newbie-friendly. One particular flaw I would note is the lack of advice on framing the conflict. Most game using the same resolution system include lengthy passages defining what is a conflict, which goals are acceptable to resolve with one roll, which would require more effort, etc. DRYH doesn’t. It goes straight into how to resolve the conflict without sparing time to talk about how to build it first.

If you have enough experience with TRPGs and know what you want out of the game, it’s not a big problem. In fact, the lack of restrictions can be a boost as it allows you to adjust mechanics to your own style. For someone relatively new to TRPGs or conflict resolution mechanic, however, it can easily be confusing.

For those who do know what they are doing, however, there are quite a few interesting things to be found in the system.

So, again, there are three prime attributes: Discipline, Exhaustion and Madness. Each forms a dicepool a player rolls to resolve a conflict. Discipline is fixed at 3 for the most part. Exhaustion starts at 0 but can be raised by 1 before any roll (representing a character pushing beyond human limits to succeed) if a player so desires. Madness is normally fixed at 0, but a player is free to add up to six dice of temporary Madness to the Madness dicepool before any roll, which represents emotional intensity of the character’s actions. If you are fighting someone and use a few dice of Madness, that would indicate you are trying to beat them to the pulp, throwing wild blows and screaming to the heavens.

The GM has only one dicepool – Pain. Typically, each Nightmare has an assigned Pain rating to be used when players act against them, but it can be adjusted based on circumstances and the exact goals of the player (for example, the GM may decide that escaping should be easier than defeating the opponents and subtract a few dice from the normal rating). If a conflict doesn’t involve Nightmares or normal people (who all have Pain rating of 1), the GM is the one to determine the difficulty of the task.

(That’s why it’s easy to create new Nightmares: technically you just need to assign them a Pain rating, and that’s it. Their abilities and quirks are purely narrative rather than mechanic.)

As you may imagine, four different dicepools require a lot of dice, preferably of different colors. Exhaustion goes up to six dice, Madness can go up to nine, and Pain sometimes can reach twentieth. That can be problematic. I ended up writing a quick program to throw dice because I don’t actually have that many six-sided dice (ten-sided are more easy to get due to the popularity of White Wolf games, which also utilizes massive dicepools).

Anyway, once the dicepools used in a given conflicts are determined and the dice are found, a roll is made, which determines two things: who wins, and which dicepool dominates.

The former is simple: each dice that landed on 1-3 counts as a success. Whoever has the most successes wins.

It’s interesting to note that the characters are the strongest entities in the game. As you can see, a player can easily get the overall dicepool of 9 thanks to temporary Madness, and get up to 15 (or 21 with the full use of Exhaustion Talent) with Exhaustion. For comparison, the strongest Nightmare described in the book (Mother When) has a Pain rating of 12.

The game, however, is far from an easy ride, and most characters I’ve seen met with sorry ends. The reson for this is the domination mechanic.

A dicepool containing a dice landed on the highest number (with exhaustive rules on resolving ties) counts as dominant. The nature of the dominant dicepool has profound effects on the framing of the conflict and has some mechanic effects as well.

When Exhaustion dominates, it means the conflict took more out of the characters than they have anticipated. The scene should be framed in a way to indicate the characters pushing themselves beyond their limits. It also increases Exhaustion, and if it ever reaches 7, the character would crash, falling asleep for at least a day, which results in a temporary reduction of traits and loss of powers. It also attracts Nightmares like candy. Because of that, the game often equals crashing with death, but it’s not really true. If you want, you can move past crashing with only a few rolls, or let the character suffer longer without actually taking their lives.

When Madness dominates, the situation spirals out of control. Even when the characters win, they may very well wish they didn’t. Chaos reigns. More, Madness dominating requires a player to check off one reaction box and act accordingly to its nature. Player’s character would either panic and run away, regardless of circumstances, or go berserk. If all boxes are checked, the character snaps, having a psychotic break for at least a scene. Discipline score drops by one, and one dice of permanent Madness, which must be rolled for all conflicts, is gained, those increasing a risk of Madness dominating in the future. If a character snaps three times, those reducing Discipline to zero, Madness takes hold and the character transforms into a Nightmare, controlled by the GM now.

It should be noted that transforming into a Nightmare is the only way to lose your character, system-wise. There are no rules for death, there are no rules for wounds. The only way to die is for the player to decide the character should die. Or for the GM, the game, again, doesn’t clarify those matters.

Discipline dominating is a good thing. It means the situation remains orderly. Even if the characters lose, they are still in control to some degree. It also has benefitial mechanical effects, allowing characters to battle growing Madness (but not permanent one, that’s here to stay) and Exhaustion.

Finally, Pain dominating means a price must be paid. Even when the characters win, their victory is tarnished in some way. Perhaps they were wounded, perhaps they lost valuable time or one of their possessions, perhaps they attracted more Nightmares, maybe something else, depending on the context of the conflict and the GM’s sadism.

Mechanically, Pain dominating doesn’t actually affect the characters. Instead, it gives the GM a Coin of Despair, which can be used to tweak which dicepool dominates in some future conflict. Since the Pain dicepool is typically the biggest on the table, those dominating more often than not, it’s a useful mechanic bringing variety to the outcomes as well as giving the GM more control over the flow of the game. Technically, it can be used to give players a break by making Discipline dominate, but, of course, it’s much more fun to go for Madness or sometimes Exhaustion. Or more Pain (though the GM doesn’t get another Coin in that case).

Each Coin of Despair spent, however, gives the players a Coin of Hope, which can be used to increase their successes or battle Madness and Exhaustion.

So, as you can see, while players can easily increase their dicepools to the point where they can defeat most of their opponents with relative ease (unless the GM starts swarming them with Nightmares, but again, few people have that many dice), but doing so increases the risk of crashing or snapping. The key to surviving in the game is to find an equilibrium between increasing your dicepools enough to overcome your challenges and keeping them low enough to avoid too much risk.

But, of course, it’s not an easy task. The system as a whole is geared towards a fast road to hell, and more often than not the characters join the ranks of Nightmares in the end.

It’s a damn good ride.

It does mean that the game works the best for relatively short games (1-5 sessions). With longer games there is a huge risk of either starting to run out of characters or losing the impact of growing Madness and Exhaustion if the consequences are postponed each time.

Also, while the system is very clearly designed to support the setting, it can be adapted for other ones as well. I had a pretty successful game of PMMM using it (with Exhaustion and Madness renamed to Weariness and Despair) and am currently pondering an idea of Persona-based game with some tweaks. The big problem with modifications, however, is that the rules are pretty tight and interconnected, so homerules should be introduced cautiously to avoid collapsing the system.

In conclusion, if you like horror TRPGs and have enough experience to know what are you doing and what do you want out of the game, you should definitely check DRYH out.It’s easy to run and fun to play if you don’t mind your character dying or going insane.