I was just informed that my semi-old-skool aventure, Khas Fara: Village of Fear won an honorable mention in the Fight On! adventure writing contest. I’m stoked! Anything that results in me being sent Gnolls in the mail is pretty much a big win. I will chain them up in my shed.
The winner was David Bowman’s Spawning Grounds of the Crab Men, which deserves all praise for that earth-movingly rad title alone!
(comments welcome on this introduction. I want to communicate both an overview of the game’s milieu and intentions and a sense of adventure and fun. It’s essentially ad copy. Also - I am addicted to hyphens - this is a cry for help!)
This is a game about modern medicine, and the men and women who practice it.
Theirs is a world of professional expertise and deeply human urges, often in conflict. Where the pressure is enormous, the pace grueling, and the demands Sisyphean. And where the tiniest error in judgment can have deadly reverberations. These men and women work - and, for all practical purposes, live - in the hospital. The hospital is a hotbed of intrigue, romance, and black humor. Love, death, and the extremes of human distress and triumph all stalk the wards. It is a microcosm of human society with every interaction turned up to eleven. No one is safe, nothing is sacred, and everyone needs a nap.
Given these exciting extremes within so focused an environment, it’s no surprise that the medical drama has been a staple of fiction since, well, medicine weaned itself from the barber’s pole. In the past century, as media evolved, the drama has been joined by the medical romance, the medical comedy, and the medical mystery in popular entertainment. Genres-within-genres, they all rely on the thrilling tropes of the medical world to make their stories go. This game is no different.
In Medical Hospital, you’ll create a cast of characters and play out their stories. You’ll help craft wonderful and terrible situations for the rest of the staff, and by extension your fellow players. You’ll step into the trauma theater to save failing lives. You’ll perform risky, complex procedures with a steady hand and the capable assistance of your surgical team. And finally, you’ll pursue your own character’s goals, seeking fulfillment - or maybe just a good night’s sleep. I hope you have a great time.
I’ve been thinking about weird materials to incorporate into procedures, like string and twigs. I want to show people how to incorporate weird stuff into fun procedures, and I want to have a wide range of activities for people to choose from out of the box. If all you have are scissors, sticky notes, and paper clips, you are good to go, but with a little extra prep you can go further.
Medical Hospital is all about the index cards - you make character, situation, and associated stuff on cards that interrelate in play. There are a few places where having a reference will come in handy, and it’s never a lot of stuff, so I made a handout of index-card sized cheat sheets. They can be double-sided, too.
There’s a card for stress actions, two cards for perks (gaining and spending), a card for cardiac arrests, two for surgical complications, and a list of jargon for the anaesthesiologist to shout when a procedure gets out of control.
My hope is that people will have a stack of index cards they can carry around,with characters and situations they can mix and match and the references obviating the need for hauling the actual rules.
I more or less doubled the word count of Medical Hospital this weekend, which feels great. A lot of assumptions and hand-wavings got articulated and a lot of useful material got added. Maybe more important than that, I found the game’s voice, which is a little irreverent and conversational.
Expect to see me flacking playtests of this and Business Solutions at Gen Con! I’m going to write a bunch of examples and then shop it around for external playtesting. If you are interested, please get in touch.