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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& #39;s-style restaurant.
(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& #39;s-style restaurant.
Pizza Time! takes place around the closing of a legendary pizza/family entertainment restaurant called Calamity Raccoon& #39;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& #39;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.
-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:
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& #39;s the bigger thing going on in the background—the supernatural element that is making this restaurant such a nexus point of horror?
2. What happened to a kid who has recently gone missing.
3. What& #39;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& #39;s on the players to interpret the clues they discover and collaboratively come up with answers to these questions.
It& #39;s a style of TTRPG play called “emergent mystery,” one that almost all of my design work revolves around. It& #39;s meant to bypass the frustrations of traditional mystery TTRPGs and make it so the players feel like they& #39;re actually sleuthing something out.
Part of that emergent mystery is discovering the characters& #39; connections to the events taking place in the story. The gradual revealing of the characters& #39; backstories and how they relate to Calamity Raccoon& #39;s is a major feature of gameplay.
I haven& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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.
