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I'll say a bit about each of those in turn. Overall I like it - it does some clever things that would really enforce the right atmosphere. Don't know if I'd run it, especially in my current group, but I'd happily play.
Premise
Short version: Nobilis meets Neverwhere.
Longer version: for some reason - trauma, drugs, you decide - the PCs have stopped sleeping. As insomnia has become a habit, they've changed, becoming that little bit better, stronger, faster etc overall, and gaining a little bit of supernatural power. They feel increasingly disconnected from the world, but another has opened to them: the Mad City, lurking behind hidden doorways, a surreal place where Nightmare entities hold power but the Awake (that would be you) can tip the scales.
The protagonists (as the book terms them) have clearly identified agendas and the story will be about their pursuit of these. But getting there is basically a huge balancing act. The insomnia gives them power, but it takes a heavy toll: they can burn out on exhaustion, finally Resting their Head and allowing the Nightmares to catch up, or they can descend into madness, snapping into psychotic episodes and maybe eventually twisting their power to become Nightmares themselves. There's a dark but whimsical edge; it's kind of a modern fantasy horror.
Rules
The system here is kind of like a jigsaw. There are a number of pieces, all pretty simple on their own, but connecting together to form something quite intricate. Here are the basics.
At the fundamental level, when something's important enough to roll dice for, the player and GM both roll a pool of six-sided dice. Any result of 1, 2 or 3 is a success; counting and comparing successes tells you what happened.
But dice rolls give a second crucial output too. Different-coloured dice are in play, representing different things. The player’s core ability is Discipline, representing their ability to do anything at all in an orderly way (cf Aspect in Nobilis). There’s no distinction between proficiencies at different kinds of task. Whether you’re a computer programmer or an Olympic athlete makes no difference, rules-wise. Everyone starts maxed out at 3 Discipline. You also have variable numbers of Exhaustion and Madness dice, and roll all three types together. The GM just uses Pain dice - an abstract measure of the seriousness of the opposition, from jumping across an alleyway to fighting a Nightmare. Whichever group of dice has the highest die result (eliminate matches till one wins) is said to dominate, and colours whatever the outcome is, changing some of your current character properties. This is independent of who won more successes. (This is why you only roll when it’s important. Whatever happens, it will alter your character’s status.)
The player starts to use Exhaustion and Madness voluntarily, as more dice gives a greater success chance on important rolls – drawing on the insomnia for power. But bringing them in gives a chance for them to dominate, leading you to accumulate more. Both have subsystems where they basically build up until something goes pop, then reset, but do it in different ways. When Discipline dominates you get to relieve some of the pressure. When Pain dominates it's a bit different: the GM gets a coin in their Despair pot, which they can use to tweak rolls and make things harder for the PCs. However, a spent Despair coin goes into a Hope pot, which the players can use to shore up their stats to stave off crashing or burning.
The "funky powers" are quite limited. You have one exhaustion talent, letting you do one kind of thing supernaturally well, like eyesight or gunfighting, but tending to make your Exhaustion creep up. You have one madness talent that could be almost anything overtly supernatural, like teleportation or being practically immune to physical harm, but using it risks increasing your Madness.
There's no "experience points" as such. But tucked away at the end is a little thing called "Scars" that I rather like: note down landmark experiences in play (the example is an episode of searching through a dangerous part of the Mad City for the character's lost daughter, without success), and you can draw on them later for minor luck or major changes to the character.
Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that there’s nothing resembling a “combat system” either. There’s no provision for a character to take physical damage. You’d just lose the roll to resolve a fight, and the opponent’s goals would win out. There’s no talk of character death, because this is not about bravely slaying monsters but about struggling with your own crumbling physical and mental resources.
There’s a handy rules summary page which would be a boon in play.
Setting
This bit tells us about the surreal otherworld of the Mad City: how to get there, who lives there, and some important areas with potential adversaries. It's a place where lost things end up, where people who fall through the cracks get consumed by some job or role that they carry out eternally - unless they fall foul of the Nightmares. It's a crowded, crazy metropolis with inhabitants drawn from across the last 150 years. The Awake are undesirables; hunted revolutionaries. Yes, The Matrix and Dark City are listed as inspirations. The bits that are detailed remind me of the Underworld game, and I wouldn't have minded some more.
The "real world" is referred to as the City Slumbering, with an implication that as far as DRYH is concerned the action's confined to just one city and it doesn't much matter what its name is. The idea is that most of the time will be spent in the Mad City, with occasional trips home for grounding and contrast. Even so, the interaction of the characters with mundane reality is one area I would have liked fleshed out a bit. For instance, I'm not clear on whether the special powers work there or just in the Mad City.
Play Guidance
Two bits to this. There's the usual GM's advice bit toward the end, usefully slanted to suit DRYH. But right from the beginning, half the character sheet is devoted to five questions that the player must answer for the character. Paraphrasing: why they aren't sleeping; an opening scene for their character that they get to set in motion; their true inner nature; the way they appear to others; and the path that their story will follow, leading eventually to the resolution of their story. (This is definitely a game where characters come to an end, desired or otherwise. You just have to play long enough to reach it, and that might not take too long if you play rashly.) There's plenty of advice on coming up with these and using them, and lots of emphasis on the players’ answers being the most important thing in your group's DRYH game. The GM might inject plots of their own, but these should only be a short-term deviation from what the players have set. It depends very much on having a group with high trust who can articulate the defining elements of a character and play to them.
Presentation
The version I actually read is a hard copy of the printer-friendly PDF, which omits the page borders. It's very clear and readable, single column text, two pages to view, with a nice dissonant header font. Plenty of full-page art pieces, which I think Fred has said are stock art photos, Photoshopped - mostly people, with a tendency to a goth or down-and-out look, and some street scenes. He's made them high contrast with lots of heavy black, which looks fine and was alright on my laser printer but would be a nightmare on an inkjet (kind of invalidating the printer-friendliness). Overall they convey the urban element, but not so much the nature of the protagonists.
Niggles
Just two rather minor things.
I ended with a somewhat nebulous feeling that things could have been drawn out more. Some of that is setting greed, which is my problem not theirs and actually a good indicator that it's appealing. But also about what the characters actually do, and their roles in both the ordinary world and the Mad City. Just a bit more on that would have helped me to connect everything up. The obvious response is that it's written to be driven by what the players say they want, so it should only be a loose framework.
It suffers from a common error that bugs me: the past tense of the verb "lead" might sound like "lead", the metal, but is actually "led". Gr(amm)argh!
Conclusion
By this point you've either decided that DRYH pushes your buttons, in which case I recommend that you get it, or decided that it's not your cup of tea, in which case I don't (though it might still be worth reading an actual play account somewhere).
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