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Introduction

Don't Rest Your Head is an indie game by Evil Hat studios, which has also produced Spirit of the Century. I'd heard a lot about this game on RPGNet, and when the call went out for reviewers for Horror Week, I jumped on the chance despite not having reviewed anything previously. I had the good fortune to be given a copy of the pdf for the purpose, and immediately set out to reading it, and finished shortly after. I found the writing engaging, and the strange concept gripping. Evil Hat has three pricing schemes: just under 8$ for the pdf, 15$ for the print, and 20$ for print and pdf. The website link for Don't Rest Your Head is http://www.evilhat.com/?dryh.

Concept

The concept of the game is that you can't sleep. You can't sleep so much that you get superpowers. These powers have a downside, however: not only do they exhaust you and drive you more toward the brink of insanity, the things that go bump in the night know about you, and want to hunt you down.

Setting

The setting is presented implicitly throughout, and mentioned explicitly near the end. The game takes place in a world like ours - the City Slumbering - and a weird alternate dimension called the Mad City. This world is accessable from our own, by those who can see what their sane mind won't let them. These are the Awake - those who have been kept from sleeping for so long something clicks in their brain and they can see the extra angles and doors that shouldn't be there. Sometimes, they go through to the Mad City.

This City is where the missing things go. People get lost here sometimes, the missing socks end up here, and some planes have crashed here. The locals embody a profession, to the extent that they have forgotten everything else. A miller spends all his time milling. It is always night. Various districts are described - for instance, the Rooftops filled with doorways that lead to places jumbling up the place, and patrolled by the Paper Boys.

The Paper Boys are a group of Nightmares - things that go "bump in the night". They are strange creatures that appear anything from human to something no longer human - the Paper Boys, for instance, appear as folded newsprint, and whatever they print does its best to come true. Of course, the Paper Boys are not the only Nightmares described in the book, with five groups described, as well as their interrelations, and what makes them tick.

The setting is not provided as defined, but rather as an example and springboard for ideas. The setting information is, therefore, sketchier than a more prescriptive setting presentation, and leaves a lot to the group. However, there's good support for determining what the group's setting is like in character creation, with several questions being required information - such as "What keeps him awake?" and "What is he afraid of?"

System

Being an indie style game, the game's mechanics are different than a traditional game would be, including some strange concepts. The game's mechanics are meant to support the concept and setting. Each player needs 3 white dice, 6 black dice, and 6 red dice, and a handful of coins or other tokens. The GM needs about 10 to 15 dice. All dice used are d6. There also needs two bowls - one black, and one white - to be present at the table.

Character Creation

Characters are primarily defined by several stats and a couple powers. Characters have a Discipline of 3, Madness of 0, Exhaustion of 0, and three boxes in the Fight or Flight track, selected by the player, giving some indication of their standard responses. Characters also have an Exhaustion Talent - a more or less "natural" ability amped up to 11 - and a Madness Talent - something purely supernatural, like retroactive planning.

As part of the character generation process for Don't Rest Your Head, it is important to answer a series of questions, as these are what give the campaign direction. The sequence is "My name is ... and I am ..." defining who the character is, followed by the questions "what's been keeping you awake?", "What just happened to you?", "what's on the surface?", "what lies beneath?", and "what's your path?". The questions ask about why the character found himself Awake, and what drives him. There's advice given in the book for the GM to interpret these questions and design a story around them.

Resolution

The resolution system is presented mostly as a conflict resolution type system, with a roll to determine the direction of the scene. These rolls should come as dramatically important - specifically, when there's a conflict to resolve. Whenever a roll happens, the player rolls his Discipline dice, any permanent Exhaustion dice, and up to 6 Madness dice. The GM rolls his dice, which are called Pain dice. The system has an interesting quirk, in that successes are low half (1-3), but the highest number in any one pool (Discipline, Exhaustion, Madness, or Pain) will "rule" the scene and present mechanical side effects. That is, the side with the most successes "wins", but depending on which pool is dominant, the consequences will be different. For instance, if the PC wins the combat, but Exhaustion rules, it was a tiring effort that raises the PC's Exhaustion score by one. When Exhaustion exceeds 6, the character shuts down and falls asleep. When the PC's response track exceeds 3 points (the 3 boxes chosen at character creation), then the PC goes crazy.

It is important to note that Don't Rest Your Head's resolution system only handles head to head resolution. There is support for aiding, but in those cases, the aiding characters only roll their Discipline dice and add their successes to their friend, and also suffer all consequences.

Earlier, I mentioned that players need coins. If Pain dominates a scene, the player puts a coin into the black bowl, giving the GM a point to spend on a conflict to remove or add 6s to pools. When these coins are spent, they shift to the white bowl, giving the players a pool of points to reduce Exhaustion, and otherwise help out their characters.

Characters have their two techniques for a reason: they provide mechanical benefit when they come into play. They're activated by either raising Exhaustion (for Exhaustion talents), or by spending a certain amount of Madness dice (for Madness talents). The mechanics of these are different, but the simplest is that they add bonus successes.

PDF

I was given a copy of the PDF package, which includes a PDF character sheet, a two-to-a-page simple layout with no borders or backgrounds, and a full graphical layout pdf. The artwork really adds to the surreal horror style of the game, being completely black and white (no grayscale) with some haze around the edges. The pdf is reasonably small for the amount of graphics, and is very fast to load and to switch pages.

Conclusion

Plusses

This game does something that I wish more games did: that is: the example of play is plausable, covers almost all aspects of the game, and provides full page references to where the information is presented. The game is well-written, with a tight focus, and images that assist with the presentation.

Minuses

There are only a couple negatives about this game. The first, and most major, flaw is that the mechanics are presented occasionally as a sort of task-based mechanic (for instance, the opening of a safe, if there's something behind it), muddying the water of how the mechanics are meant to be used. The other is that, as a tightly focused game about madness and what makes people tick, it may not make for a good game - this depends on the group, however. I should also make the point here that, for those whose only window to indie style games is Dogs in the Vineyard, that the GM advice is nowhere near as thoroughly presented as in Dogs. It's definitely adequate for the game, but doesn't present anything I found revolutionary, which disappointed me.

Summary

Style is the easiest category to choose - a simple 5, as it is pretty, well written, and well focused on presenting the game and the concept. Substance is a little harder to choose, simply because the concept is a little strange, and the mechanics look like they want to fit somewhere between task and conflict resolution systems. 4.5 is a fair number for it, meaning that I need to choose a method to round. Given my disappointment about the GM advice bit, I think that drops it a tick, so I'm going to give it a 4.

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