One of the creepiest games I've read
The Premise is simple: you are a ‘resident’ (aka prisoner) on the Farm, a small city located on a remote island. If your group of 6 characters manages to survive for 6 sessions, they will be killed and eaten by the Headmasters who run this place.
The Object: ... is to escape.
… did you say ‘eaten’?
Aside from escape attempts, there are at least 5 other types of situations I could think of exploring in this setting:
1) personal relationships with other prisoners (including forbidden sexual liasons);
2) relationships with the administrators of the Farm;
3) rebelling against the authority of the Farm;
4) a method-actor look at your character’s deteriorating state of mind; and
5) the game’s subtext puts us in the role of animals many of us consume every day.
The System
The resolution system reveals a philosophy behind the game, seemingly designed to create a conflict between ‘working as a team’ and ‘working as individuals’.
The system’s first step is to focus on the group. It's assumed that six people are playing this game. They get 48 dice to divide between their mental and physical scores (Psyche & Stamina). So almost the first thing you do in this game is try to co-operate on allocating resources. In a fair distribution, you should end up with 4 dice in Psyche and 4 in Stamina.
Your Psyche and Stamina scores each have three sub-skills. Each one is given an unique number between one and six.
Now the actual system took a while to wrap my head around it because it’s so simple. It involves matching numbers. Say you’re trying to hide. That uses Stealth, one of Stamina’s sub-skills. If you’ve put 5 dice into Stamina and given Stealth the number 3 (out of 1-6), then you roll five dice and hope at least one of them gave you a 3.
If you were trying to fight, you’d use Combat. Say you’d assigned the number 6 to that. Because this is also a Stamina sub-skill, you’d roll 5 dice and again hope to get at least one 6.
So the rule is: roll the number of dice you’ve assigned to your score. If the numbers on any of your dice match the number of the skill you’re using, then you succeed.
Rolls can also be opposed by an appropriate skill. If you were trying to hide, this could be opposed by Perception (a sub-skill of Psyche). In this case the person with the most successes (matched numbers) would win.
While this is simple, a few more examples of the system in action would have cleared up my initial confusion about how it works.
Leaders and Pigs
In this harsh environment there are 2 ways to stack the odds in your favour.
A Leader can be “voted into office by the group during any of the three feeding times” (my personal 'creepiest sentence' of the entire game). If lots of players need to make a skill check at the same time, the Leader can take their dice, roll them and then allocate each player the number they say they need to succeed.
The Leader has no compulsion to keep their word. They can hand out a different (unwanted) number and/or keep good results for themselves. So maneuvering yourself into the Leader role when it’s advantageous is always an option.
The second way of looking out for Number 1 is to be ‘The Pig’. After the Leader rolls dice for the group, a player can say (using these precise words), “I am a pig. Give me all the 4’s” if – for instance – they want 4s. Although it’s not clarified, I suspect that only one person can claim the role of Pig during any group roll.
“It always hurts to help.”
Another neat wrinkle in the rules: you can loan successes to another player … but this puts you into “Skill Debt”. Until that Skill Debt is repaid, you can never succeed in the skill you’ve allocated to that number. Other players can’t pay you back. The only ways to regain your ability are: a) to rely on luck (each time you roll that number removes 1 die of skill debt; or b) to be the Pig.
That means helping other players is a conscious act of pure altruism …
So what’s the conclusion? Jared summarises the point of the game as, “to band together as a group and escape. But is that even possible? I don't know the answer to that question. But if I had to make a guess, I'd say no. No, it's not possible.
“But maybe one person can make it to freedom. … Maybe.”
the farm is testing its players. Is this a world where only an individual can survive? Do you have to act like an animal to escape an animal’s fate? If you need the help of others to even get a shot at escaping, then at what point do you betray your friends? It’s almost a ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’-type exercise in trust and co-operation.
Some thoughts on the feel
There are a lot of influences to draw on when running the farm.
Because transgressing ‘normal’ behaviour at the Farm is followed by swift and severe punishments, the setting raises the question of whether you’ll obey authority or defy it. It creates an impression of life in a totalitarian regime – specifically asking what would it be like to live in a concentration camp.
The game also invokes the “Being Eaten by People” sub-genre of horror. Now I’m sure there’s a book by John Saul that deals with an organised and sophisticated club of cannibals, but there are also elements in here of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Most Dangerous Game, the short story by Richard Connell about hunting humans (filmed at least 3 times).
At the same time the game creates a very specific feeling, like it’s referencing an established work, some sort of ‘60s TV series like The Prisoner that was far too extreme and quickly cancelled.
I found even reading the rules for the farm was nerve-wracking. A few reasons for that:
This isn’t a game about cannibalism; it’s about the tension of knowing you’re going to be cannibalised. I find that focus on waiting and anticipation horrific.
The setting treats preparing people to be eaten as a normal institutional routine. However, details about the Farm’s day-to-day running are sketchy, forcing the GM and players to figure it out for themselves. Maybe that unnerves me because If I can imagine how it runs, part of me can accept it existing (existing in the game, that is!) – and on some metaphysical level that makes me complicit in its evil.
The people who control the Farm are called Headmasters. They’re the ones who eat surviving characters. While they lack any empathy for the Farm’s residents, at the same time they can engage residents in pleasant conversation. This duality is insane, fascinating. It’s a ‘nice evil’ that’s also inhuman.
And there’s a final twist. As a resident advances closer to being 'processed', they get tokens - which can be used to make life more pleasant on the Farm. While these could be used to provide opportunities to escape, their more obvious function is as an incentive to stay docile. To create a more complacent resident, who thinks that maybe living here isn’t so bad.
In some ways that’s the most horrific way of all to run The Farm, encouraging the players to bury their knowledge of what’s about to happen to them.
Overall Rating
Style: the farm has a simple presentation, slightly hampered by one-too-few examples but still convenying a cold, clinical horror. [3]
Substance: This is a game with challenging subject material, mechanics that reflect the underlying themes of the game, multiple ways to play and a killer hook. Definitely not a one-shot game. If you’re going to play it, stick around for the full 6 sessions. [5]
Official Site: Memento Mori Theatricks
