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The book starts with an intro and an example of play - part of a character's introduction sequence. The example is a little heavy on game terminology, which makes it tough to understand on first read. On the other hand, since it has page numbers included, it can act as a quick reference later on.
Mechanics
The game has relatively few stats. Discipline is the "overall badassity" score, which always starts at three. Normal people have one or two. You have boxes to mark madness and exhaustion - both useful things in this game, as long as they don't get too high. You get response boxes that basically tell you whether you're going to fight or run. There are exhaustion and madness talents, which provide you with narrow but incredible talent and blatantly superhuman power, respectively.
The game is somewhat heavy on its dice requirement - you need three white, six black, and up to eight red six-siders. Both high and low rolls are useful in this game. Low rolls (3 or less) are successes, used to determine who wins a particular roll. High rolls set the Strength of the roll, telling you whether your madness, discipline, or exhaustion (or the GM's Pain dice) dominate the scene. Thisis important for both flavor and game mechanics. Note that there are no "happiness," "relaxation," or "heroism" dice - this game has a mood and it's sticking with it. There are plenty of examples in the text, which is nice, and a rules summary page too. And yes, all the rules fit on one page in short form.
When Exhaustion dice dominate - or whenever you feel like it - you get a point of Exhaustion When your Exhaustion gets too high you Crash. This is bad. Playing-a-hemophiliac-in-Vampire bad. When you fall asleep, the Nightmares find you, and they'll keep following you until you stay awake for several days - and until you're an insomniac again, your powers are gone. Unless your friends can protect you, you might as well roll up a new one, as the saying goes.
When Madness dominates a scene, you start slowly racking up permanent Madness dice in place of your Discipline. When it takes over, you get to leave play and become a Nightmare yourself.
When Pain dominates, something goes bad for the protagonist, regardless of whether he or she won the roll. When Discipline dominates, you get to calm down some and erase some Exhaustion or a response box.
All this is separate from actually winning or losing the roll, which dictates whether the character or the antagonists succeed. That's just part of the narrative, though. The GM can only do two things in game terms when he or she wins: increase Exhaustion or check off response boxes. Madness or falling asleep are the only bad things that happen to you, mechanically speaking - there are no hit points, no wound levels, no conviction points, just exhaustion and madness.
The GM also gets despair coins when pain wins, and the players get hope coins when despair coins get used. These don't carry over to future games. In general, hope coins are a little better than despair coins, which counteracts the fact that every important roll in the game has a good chance of screwing your character even if you win. There's a lot of nice interplay and interaction between the various quantities in this game.
Character development is done in descriptive form, with "scars" from your experiences giving you rerolls or changing your powers.
Setting and Advice
Because the mechanics take up relatively little of the book, there's plenty of room for setting info and GM advice. Most of it is pretty good, and it avoids the more generic suggestions that most games have. There are five questions all players are required to answer for their characters, and there's a good amount of advice as to exactly how to use them in the game. There's a good bit about scene framing, and advice for specific techniques like flashbacks, revelations, and more. After the setting, there's a section about bringing the party together, running a long-term game, building nightmares, and "exit strategies" for the game (and for the characters).
The game advises putting a moderate amount of narrative control in the players' hands. They get to decide where they are and what's going on when the game starts, and it's suggested that more experienced players should be able to narrate more of what goes on.
As for the setting, the Mad City is mostly home to Nightmares, creepy horror-movie rejects. There are a few rather unfortunate normal folks who fall through the cracks and end up here, but they end up forgetting things that happened to them since they arrived, and most turn into Nightmares, their minions, or mindless workers with no identity of their own.
There are brief descriptions of a bunch of cool and creepy places: the bizarre bazaar, the thirteenth district, a creepy finishing school, the rooftop jungle (is that a window or does it have teeth?), an air fort, the kingdom of wax, and other locations. There are also descriptions of the NIghtmares who live there, and game stats (Pain is their only stat).
Oh, and for two hours each day - thirteen o'clock - you can't leave the Mad City, and many things there become more powerful. If you're in the normal world, there is no thirteen o'clock, and you're safe. Lesson: keep your eye on the time.
Design
The art is black-and-white stock photographs with various Photoshop touches applied to them. That sounds like a bad thing, but it's done well here. The effect is quite good for enhancing the creepy feeling the game evokes. You can always tell what the main focus of the picture is, but the details fade when you try to scrutinize them.
The full print version will take up quite a bit of ink if you try to print it, but there's a "lightweight" version that leaves out the black borders. You should still make sure you have quite a bit of black ink in your cartridge before you start, for the pictures. The staticky headers aren't too difficult to read in most cases, and there's a character sheet included
Finally, unlike many indie games (including my own), DRYH actually has an index. A full two pages long, in fact. Those who print out the book will undoubtedly appreciate not having to wake up a computer and use the search function every time they want to find something.
Overall
Don't Rest Your Head is one of the more atmospheric games I've ever run into. The mood of the game shows through very well in the mechanics and the text, and I get the feeling it can become a pretty intense game with little trouble. The mechanics look smooth and add to the flavor of the game. In short, this is a game that knows what it's doing, and does it well.
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