A short thread about Pizza Time!, a game I am working on at the moment

(CW: child horror, child abduction, general nastiness)

Pizza Time! is a short-form mystery game about a missing child, traumatized adults, and the last days of a Chuck E. Cheese's-style restaurant.

Pizza Time! takes place around the closing of a legendary pizza/family entertainment restaurant called Calamity Raccoon's Good-Time Pizza Jamboree. Players play adults who have some kind of haunting or traumatic memory from when they were kids associated with the restaurant.

The characters have paid a large sum of money to stay overnight during the last Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of the restaurant being open. The restaurant will be closed for good that Monday.

The game's inspirations are many:

-My own years working at a Chuck E. Cheese’s
-Urban legends and the stories we tell each other about child-centered places like Disneyland.
-IT by Stephen King.
-Creepypasta culture.
-Various retro and kitsch enthusiasms.

Mechanically, the game uses the core system of Brindlewood Bay and The Between. Those games are longer, campaign-style games, whereas Pizza Time! is designed to play a complete story arc in just a few sessions.

There are 3 mysteries the characters are trying to solve:

1. What happened to a teenager who used to work at the restaurant in the 1980s
2. What happened to a kid who has recently gone missing.
3. What's the bigger thing going on in the background—the supernatural element that is making this restaurant such a nexus point of horror?

As in Brindlewood Bay, the GM is using a skeletal mystery structure to present these questions to the players, but it's on the players to interpret the clues they discover and collaboratively come up with answers to these questions.

It's a style of TTRPG play called “emergent mystery,” one that almost all of my design work revolves around. It's meant to bypass the frustrations of traditional mystery TTRPGs and make it so the players feel like they're actually sleuthing something out.

Part of that emergent mystery is discovering the characters' connections to the events taking place in the story. The gradual revealing of the characters' backstories and how they relate to Calamity Raccoon's is a major feature of gameplay.

I haven't play-tested any of it yet, but if it works the way I want it to, you should end up with a story that has major IT vibes: a small town, a supernatural threat, missing kids, adults haunted by the events of the past, and the fight to defeat an insidious, calamitous evil.

Another thing to note: like Brindlewood Bay—and unlike most indie TTRPGs out there—Pizza Time! has an emphasis on setting. The restaurant is important. The town the game takes place in is important. There's a history there, and lore embedded throughout.

The game lingers on some of these details in a way that makes the setting usable for other games, such as Kids on Bikes and similar. The restaurant, in particular, breathes on the page, and includes a full menu, a list of arcade games, a map, a short history, and more.

I’ll end this thread by noting that the game's origin is a Lovecraftesque scenario by the same name I published a few years ago (the logo above is from that). That scenario had a slightly different premise, but a lot of the core themes are the same.

I also wrote a Cthulhu Dark mystery called Calamity Raccoon's Good-Time Pizza Farm which has the same premise and themes.

This incarnation of Pizza Time! will be the fullest expression of the idea, but I'm very glad to have done those earlier versions in order to try it out.

That's it for the thread. If you backed the Codex Vol. 1 KS, you're getting this game for free, probably early summer. For everyone else, it will be available on DriveThru.