A backstage tour of Lights Out (see it 24 Oct, one night only!)
All right, luvvies? It's suddenly almost showtime: we perform Lights Out in just a couple of weekends' time, on Sunday 24 October. (Coming?) It feels like no time at all has passed since we applied for the slot at the London Horror Festival, and it also feels like I've arranged many, many things since then.
Something doesn't want me to write this newsletter - my laptop suffered a catastrophic crash six words in and is still trying to self-repair as I type this, and the desktop machine I'm now working on is barking at me to let it update the operating system before it'll trust buttondown not to steal my identity - but I am soldiering on!
Coming right up
Next on Merely Roleplayers the podcast
A close look at Merely Roleplayers on stage
Pin-on darkness and light
Vigil: Bad Dog
is now playing in the Main House.
For this production, we put together all the most ancient beings in Sherrydown, and I made them deal with teenagers, golf, and corporate overreach. They're all very delightfully curmudgeonly about the situation, and do their level best to solve the mystery without having to charm or persuade anybody of anything, especially not anybody in a suit. Acts One and Two of five total are available now.
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The weekend after this issue goes out, we're recording our next Studio production, which will start airing after Bad Dog wraps up in November. We're playing The Andromeda Ward, by Chloe Mashiter of roll/flip/draw. It's a game where you play actors playing characters in a cancelled cult classic TV show, just like cult classic TV show Garth Marenghi's Darkplace:
Because we're working in an audio medium, our version of The Andromeda Ward is a cancelled cult classic BBC Radio 4 audio drama, and because of when this production is airing, we'll be performing the long-lost and highly troubled Christmas episode. Expect cheesy noir-ish monologues, low-budget foley work, an old miser learning a lesson, and meta jokes about audio storytelling.
Tarot cards and candles
are how we keep the story unpredictable in Lights Out. The candles represent hope, and life; the cards portray the role of fate and chance. But just exactly how does that work?
The system that drives Lights Out started life with Ten Candles by Stephen Dewey. You play Ten Candles by the light of ten tea lights. When characters face conflict, they roll a pool of six-sided dice. If a character fails a conflict, a candle is darkened, a new scene begins, and the dice pool gets smaller. If a candle goes out by accident, the scene still ends, and the dice pool still shrinks. When all the candles are out, all the characters die (if they haven't already).
What we all liked about Ten Candles, and what we thought gave it potential to be the foundation for a live show, was that:
the promise that everyone dies at the end is inherently dramatic
so is the option for a player to voluntarily darken a candle to heroically sacrifice their character
playing in a circle of candlelight in a dark space creates a beautiful kind of tense intimacy that a spectating audience could share in pretty easily
the dice pool shrinking, and success becoming less likely, as the story goes on naturally creates escalating tension and drama
But! We knew from the start that we couldn't just decide to play a round of Ten Candles on stage and call it a day. There were several compelling reasons why that wouldn't work:
a stage show needs a set running time, and it's impossible to control how long a game of Ten Candles lasts - it's down to dice rolls and the speed at which tea lights go out (we once played a game that lasted about four hours)
my personal feeling was that the rattle of 10d6 hitting the table, and the pause as players hunt for successes by candlelight, would break the audience's immersion
So I worked with Chris Starkey and Strat (who you can hear in many episodes of Merely Roleplayers, most recently Vigil: Cold Snap) to create a game that aims to preserve the effects we liked from Ten Candles, while also creating the most streamlined and easy-to-understand experience for the audience in the space.
Here's what we ended up with. I want to publish this properly once the show is finished, but as a Foggy Outline newsletter subscriber, you get a sneak peek. If you want to come see the show without knowing all the mechanics behind it, that's fair too - maybe keep this email saved in case you want to look behind the curtain after it's all over?
How to play Lights Out: setup
You will need:
one game master (the Darkness) and four players (the Blackout Four)
one tarot deck for the Darkness, all major arcana removed
one tarot deck for the Blackout Four, all major arcana separated and set aside
three remote controlled, battery powered fake candles (or proper candle fittings controlled from the theatre desk, if you're feeling fancy)
four actual candles, plus matches or a lighter to light them with, and a snuffer to snuff them with
eight postcard-sized pieces of flash paper
one or two flame-proof bowls (depending on stage setup)
Volunteers from the audience shuffle both tarot decks. The players' deck is divided between the four of them after shuffling; the Darkness gets an entire deck to themself.
In front of each player is a candle (unlit); a single card from the major arcana, face down; and two bits of flash paper. On one is written their character's virtue: a single word that describes a good quality they have, like 'brave' or 'caring'. On the other is written their character's hope, a phrase starting with 'I will find hope when...' - for example, 'when I get a message to the outside world', or 'when I face down the Darkness without flinching'.
Everyone should be able to reach a lighter, a snuffer, and a flame-proof bowl.
The three e-candles need to be somewhere the cast and audience can clearly see, and all three start the show lit. These are the pace candles. They tell us how far through the story we are and how bad things are for the Blackout Four.
Start of the show: Act 1. All three pace candles lit.
Half an hour in: one pace candle goes out and Act 2 begins.
15 minutes after that: a second pace candle goes out and Act 3 begins.
10 minutes after that: the third and final pace candle goes out and the finale takes place.
(This is how we keep the good feeling of candles gradually going out and darkness drawing in as the story goes on, while also keeping control over the length of the show.)
Each player introduces their character to the audience and lights the candle in front of them. This candle represents their character's life; when the character dies, they'll extinguish the candle. If it goes out by accident (because the player spoke too loudly or gestured too wildly), something really bad will happen to their character immediately. They can also choose to extinguish it to have their character heroically sacrifice themself to save someone else.
Gameplay
The Darkness narrates the story, starting from the moment the lights go out, leaving the Blackout Four isolated and alone together in the dark. During Act 1, the Darkness that will eventually kill the Blackout Four stays offstage, but they can discover sinister traces of it.
The conceit of the show is that the Blackout Four were real people who died in mysterious circumstances, and that the players have gone Method on them, studying their lives in order to portray them accurately on stage. Understanding this helps us work out when to start drawing tarot cards. The idea is that the tarot is filling in the gaps left by the evidential record. Having studied their subjects, the actors can tell us with confidence that they would have tried to kick down that door, but understanding that person's personality can't tell us how sturdy the door was or what was on the other side - so that's when the player draws a card.
Ssshh, don't tell anyone this, but we're really only using the tarot for flavour; this would work just as well with ordinary playing cards. When a player draws a card (and announces what it is, and shows it to the audience - much better for them than watching us roll a load of dice!), all they're looking for is the suit.
In Act 1, when all 3 pace candles are lit, 3 of the suits (cups, pentacles, wands) mean success, and 1 (swords) belongs to the Darkness. In this Act, no challenge is life-threatening.
In Act 2, when 2 pace candles remain lit, 2 of the suits (cups & pentacles) mean success, and 2 (swords & wands) belong to the Darkness. In this Act, the supernatural nature and malevolent will of the Darkness is apparent, and challenges can result in serious consequences like injury and separation.
In Act 3, when only 1 pace candle remains lit, only 1 of the suits (cups) means success, and the other 3 (swords, wands, pentacles) all belong to the Darkness. In this Act, the Darkness takes centre stage, attacking the characters directly, and challenges can result in death.
In the finale, when all the pace candles are extinguished, success is impossible.
It's a very simple resolution system with very simple odds, designed so that:
success/failure is always immediately comprehensible to the audience, as soon as the card is announced (the Darkness's stage patter establishes which suits to watch out for)
the characters probably have a great time with maybe a couple of significant failures in the first half hour, then everything becomes more and more of a struggle
Once the player's drawn their card and announced what it means in the fiction (the door flies off its hinges vs will not budge, for example), the Darkness draws. If they draw one of the current success suits, hope is on the characters' side for the moment, and the players continue narration. If the Darkness draws one of the other suits, they take over narration instead, and have free rein to turn successes into good news/bad news scenarios, or to make failures worse.
Player resources
Virtue: a player can burn their virtue (with an impressive whoomf, since it's written on flash paper) in response to another player drawing a Darkness suit. They say how their virtue helps them rally the other survivors to help the character who just failed, and all other surviving players (minus the one who already drew the failure) draw cards. As long as just one of the cards drawn shows a success suit, the group succeeds together.
This is quite different to how virtues (and vices) work in Ten Candles, where burning them lets you re-roll some of your dice to increase your chances of success. I feel like simple re-rolls (re-draws, in our case) aren't satisfying for a live audience; they feel like the story pausing and going briefly backwards. In our version, a new thing happens in the story. Plus, the players were keen to have a 'help out' mechanic, and I wanted that too - it's tragic enough that we know the characters are all doomed, so let's tell a story where they at least try to help each other survive, in this year 2021!
(This is also why we ditched Ten Candles' Brink mechanic, which kind of represents characters being reduced to base impulses once virtues, hope, etc are burned away. That's just not the story we wanted to tell this year.)
Hope: when a character is in a position to achieve their hope, they burn up their hope and draw a card. If it's a failure, the opportunity to gain hope is lost forever, and the player should describe the emotional fallout for their character. If it's a success, the player gets to flip their major arcana face up. It should be a card that represents the character's potential in a crisis. From this point on, if that player draws a failure, they can substitute their major arcana once to turn it into a success.
This is cribbed pretty closely from Ten Candles' Moment mechanic; the possibility of achieving hope, and its power to make you more likely to succeed at future challenges, is thematically key to the game, so it would be hard to hack out and still create the story we wanted. In Ten Candles it's more persistent, rather than a one-off automatic success; in Lights Out, it doesn't matter that it's only one-use, because the show doesn't last as long.
If a character achieves hope, flips their major arcana face up, but then sacrifices themself before getting a chance to use it, they can pass it to the person they sacrificed themself to save.
Ends of Acts
The end of an Act is abrupt. A pace candle goes out, a sudden loud sound effect plays, and whoever was speaking at that moment is cut off. The Darkness announces which suit has gone bad, and re-establishes the situation, potentially moving things on a bit if they were dragging.
When Act 3 ends and the finale begins, the Darkness describes an attack or manifestation so overwhelming that nothing could possibly survive it. Each surviving player describes their character's final moments: what they're feeling, and any last futile actions they take. Then ... lights out.
That was pretty long! This last bit is shorter
I broke off halfway through writing all that, and in the meantime my laptop seems to have recovered. To restore some kind of balance, though, I pranged my kneecap on the corner of a pointy volume at the climbing wall today. Nobody make any jokes about stage performances and breaking legs!
Speaking of balance:
Left: a large round button badge with a deep purple border and a sinister shadowy figure inside; it says 'Dark Scout' round the edge. This is Welcome to Night Vale merch, of which I have a non-creepy amount. Dark Scout could be an alternative name for the Darkness player role in Lights Out, to disambiguate from the Darkness itself, that which will end the Blackout Four.
And right: a shiny enamel pin of a cartoon flame with a face. Last time I wore this fellow out and about there was a baby present, who was very taken with him. By BunnysBeadsUK on Etsy.
See you after the show!
Matt x