Title Left as an Exercise for Future Collaborators

For the last few years, you’ve been a student at an exclusive co-ed boarding school for highly achieving students.  Your time here has been full of ups and downs, dealing with the pressures of an unapologetically difficult course load and the reality of living away from home for the first time at a young age.  Plenty of people washed out, but you made it through to graduation.  Earlier today you walked across the stage and your time as a high school student ended.

Now, it’s graduation night.  You and most of your classmates have rented out hotel rooms at the Silver Moon Inn for the afterparty.  It’s a sketchy, run-down place on the outskirts of town.  On graduation night the management charges outrageous prices but there’s a tacit agreement that as long as there’s no excessive property damage, no one will call the cops on account of underage drinking or drug use.  The school and your parents have a general sense of what goes down there, but they turn a blind eye to it.  You’re all good kids and after all, it’s tradition.  

Materials

Character Sheet (or just a sheet of paper to answer a few questions on)
Tokens

Making Characters

In the days leading up to graduation, you’ve had two questions on your mind.  

Who are you?
What does your future look like?

You think you know the answers to both.  Write them down.

There are a couple other things that you’ve been thinking about:

Why did you think you might not be able to attend this year?
What happened last year that only you and one character know about?
Why were you secretly (or not secretly) hoping that another character wouldn’t show up?

Work out the answers to these questions together as a group.  

Once you’ve all got answers, you’re ready to start playing.  Everyone should introduce their character, sharing both their conception of themselves and their future plans.  These should be stated as certainties.

Intro Scenes

For the first scene, describe the last time you saw your family.  If they attended your graduation, this is most likely sometime after the ceremony before you left for the hotel.  What is your relationship like? What did you talk about?  What did they think about you going to the party?

For the second scene, describe your impressions of the hotel when you arrive.  What does it look like?  What are your personal accommodations like?  Do you have your own room or just the promise of some space on the floor of a friend’s room?  What did you bring with you?

These should be short, dictated scenes lasting no more than a minute or two.

Party Scenes

<I don’t know.  Do something cool here, future collaborator!>

Taking Risks

Over the course of the party scenes, you will be collecting risk tokens.  Any time you do something that could endanger your future, another player can reach into the bowl of tokens in the center of the table and hand one to you.  Typically you won’t get more than a single risk token per action, but if what you’re doing is especially detrimental to your state future, your co-players can opt to give you two or, in extreme cases, three tokens for a single action.

For example, in one scene, Alice and Bob are smoking pot on the hotel’s roof.  The other players give Bob one risk token, but Alice gets two because she thinks he’s going to be a doctor and a drug conviction would make that future much harder to realize.  Later, they go to the edge of the roof and lean over it.  Alice gets a single token but Bob gets two because he thinks he’s attending college on a sports scholarship, which a physical injury would jeopardize.

The Death

At the halfway point of the game (however that’s determined), the character with the least amount of risk tokens will die.  That character’s player should take a moment to describe the circumstances of the death.  The manner of death can be anything, but it should be sudden, surprising, and preventable.  The other characters are all present in the scene but none of them stop the death.  

They should each say what they could have done to save the character and why they didn’t.  There might be some overlap here.  It’s fine if two characters each believe that they should have done the same thing.  What’s important is that each character can imagine a scenario where they could have prevented the victim’s death.

Interrogation Scenes

After the death scene, the police arrive at the hotel and the the player of the dead character takes on the role of the lead investigator.  They should give the lead investigator a name and a brief description of how they arrive on the scene and take control of the situation.

The police keep all of the other characters (and possibly any notable NPCs) in a pair of rooms with an adjoining door while they wait to be interviewed one at a time.  The characters can get a bit of privacy to have conversations with each other, but they can’t leave the room.  

The lead investigator’s scenes will all be interview scenes.  The other players should probably still get more scenes as well to discuss the death among themselves.

<I’m thinking there should be some function for the risk tokens in the interview scenes, but I don’t know what exactly.>

<I was also thinking there could be some mechanical benefit to resolving the questions on the character sheets.  Changing your perception of who you are as a person or what your future holds should be especially powerful.>

Epilogue Scenes

All surviving characters should take a moment to tell short epilogue scenes.  These scenes should mirror the intro scenes.  

For the first epilogue scene, describe how you leave the hotel.  What are you taking with you?  This can and should include lessons that you’ve learned or things that you’ve discovered about yourself or others.

For the second epilogue scene, describe seeing your family again for the first time.  How much do you tell them about what happened?  How do they respond?

Finally, describe the future that you actually achieve.  Does it look like you thought it would?