Some ideas for Shot in the Dark inspired by The Final Girl
I finally read the game The Final Girl by Bret Gillan after hearing good things about it. It is as awesome and elegant as I had heard, representing the terror and foreboding as characters die off one by one like in slasher flicks.
Since I’m working on a high-lethality alien invasion hack of Blades, I am intrigued to draw some ideas from The Final Girl that might aptly convey dread and vulnerability within the Blades system. Granted, some of these ideas go well outside standard Blades mechanics.
This is all just brainstorm musing at the moment:
—Maybe the campaign opens with something like the First Blood scene from The Final Girl (or an entire game of Final Girl) to establish the overwhelming threat and style of the invasion with a costly first contact mission where nobody (or almost nobody) survives.
—Maybe on missions, players try to achieve as many objectives as possible—to earn crucial resources and intel for the agency—all under the omnipresent threat of a casualty clock, making each additional action a gamble with dire consequences. Whenever the clock fills up—usually due to fails or partial successes—at least one agent will die and the clock resets. This could be resolved similar to standard scenes in Final Girl but targeted characters roll an appropriate action to avoid a sudden threat: dying on a 1-3, and incurring consequences but living on a 4-5. This sudden-death phase doesn’t stop until at least one agent dies however.
—Maybe a mission’s engagement roll prescribes from the outset how many agents must die in the mission, maybe none, maybe all of them. Playing out the mission then becomes less about if and more about how, stretching out the dread while learning about characters and finding out who ends up lost or surviving. By this means, while flashbacks in Blades help convey character competence (they’re always prepared even more than players realize), maybe tones of mystery/investigation, tragedy, heroism, or dread could come from diving into a mission just before (or after) a casualty occurs, using flashbacks to contextualize and discover what led the mission to that point, and give the fallen agent either a heroic or tragic spotlight.
—Maybe flashbacks could serve a reverse or alternate function from what they do in Blades. Would there be some way to compellingly flip flashbacks into flash-forwards, anticipations, foreshadowing, or highlighting of details the agents actually fail to notice or prepare for (since anticipating an outcome is key to dread, and can be more riveting than the actual outcome itself) maybe as a way to zoom in on the psychological experience and imaginings of the agents in the moment? That could explain why ‘flashbacks’ cost/cause stress, but there would have to either be an incentive for players to activate them or they could be a consequence. Investigating clues before facing obstacles, conflict, or threats is boring to play out, so maybe players still start a mission when action breaks out, and get to narrate a fast-forwarded investigative flashback whenever an action succeeds, and narrate a personal/home-life flashback whenever an action fails.