Paint The Town Red Episode 1 Out Now!
Elliot and Brian On Writing Their Custom Adventure
We’ve learned how to play the game, we’ve met the monsters, and now we’re ready to Paint The Town Red! Episode one of our vampiric adventure is out now everywhere you listen to podcasts and just in time for the launch of the Paint The Town Red crowdfunding campaign. Dawn may be approaching on a new era for New York City, but our gang of bloodsuckers remains blissfully unaware…for now, at least.
Pour yourself a nice thick glass of “port” and enjoy!
— You Friendly Local Sad Vampires
NPCs With Rich Unlives
Building Contacts in a Paint The Town Red Adventure
Paint The Town Red does NPCs right. The system of Contacts is one of the most usable and rich that I’ve seen in a TTRPG. When we got to work on writing It Never Sleeps, the 1920s NYC adventure you can hear played on this season, Brian and I were eager to play within the framework Zach Cox had created.
As Zach puts it, “The best Contacts are the kind of person you’d meet at a party and who’d become the centre of your whole night.”
In Paint the Town Red, your “whole night” is often a session of play, particularly the Paint the Town Red phase. So these NPCs need to be quick to pick up, be dripping with plot hooks, and just be a blast to interact with.
Here’s a name you’ll hear in episode one: Good Luck Freddie. This was one of my favorite contacts to write. If you are GMing and want to introduce your players to Freddie, here is what you have at your disposal.
Adjectives for Roleplay & Reaction
Good Luck Freddie has three key adjectives: Romantic, Impulsive, & Childish. As a GM, these three words can inform how you roleplay him immediately. You know what this person sounds like from three words. I wanted Freddie to be likable, yes, but he also needed to be a handful.
A Description that Sets the Scene
The description for Freddie is as such:
“A student at NYU who bites off more than he can chew. Freddie keeps “dying” and coming back due to his undead curse. He seems to have no idea that this is the case and will insist to you that he is just really lucky.”
You might choose to read this aloud to your players or just incorporate it into the context in which your players meet him. When we were writing these contacts, there were two kinds of Undead to consider:
Those that are of the time of the adventure—maybe they’ve turned recently or maybe they are just took to this city like a fish to water
Those that exist outside of time—these are the undead whose history oozes off of them. The Roman gladiator who has fought their way to New York City, for example
Freddie is very much of the time our adventure is set in. He is a young undead, not even able to process his own curse. He is a foil to the player characters and a project they might feel compelled to take on.
To ground him in the setting and give him a place to bring our party, I made him a student. Now, you as a GM can have fun with “what does a university look like at this time in this place?” Freddie is a character but he is also a piece of New York City.
Jobs/Rewards - Plot Hooks or Character Building?
Each of our Contacts in a Paint the Town Red adventure comes with three jobs and three rewards. I am a huge fan of small bits of writing in game design that convey a lot, and these lists were a fun opportunity to do just that.
Freddie might present the job: “Help him get to class on time after he pissed off a hostile Faction” that could drive the plot of a whole session, entangling the party in a new faction. He might also just need some help with a job like “Scrape him up and put him back together after a particularly nasty flatline”. The first is plot-forward, the second is more focused on who Freddie is and how his particular quirk plays out when reality meets his rose-colored worldview.
As for rewards, some Contacts will offer problem-solving rewards like “backing you up in a fight” but for Freddie, the rewards all speak to who he is and where he fits into the world. He can’t get you out of hot water with a hostile faction, but he might make up a secret handshake just for the two of you.
An Unliving Unbreathing World to Explore
My GMs out there have probably already thought about how they might build a full session or even multi-session arc out of this lovable undead-in-denial, but I’m here to tell you to put down the pencil. Paint The Town Red adventures each come with twenty-four Contacts, just like Freddie.
If each of them is the sort to become the center of your whole night, then with a full guest list of twenty-four, your session is sure to be one hell of a party.
— Elliot
Combining Preparation and Improvisation
For me, My First Dungeon: Paint the Town Red is Schrödinger’s season. That’s because it is simultaneously the most and the least I’ve ever prepped as a GM. When we partnered with SoulMuppet Publishing for this season, Elliot and I were also brought on to write an adventure module for the game. We pitched It Never Sleeps, which brings the undead world of Paint the Town Red to New York City at the very end of the Roaring Twenties and the start of The Great Depression. As long-time New Yorkers it was a joy to infuse our neighborhoods with vampiric sadness, undead parties, and even a little bit of twisted New York City history. The final document we turned in was around 23 pages and over 5,000 words of fully written material developed so anyone could pick up the module and run a group of sad vampires through The Big Apple. And since we were going to be running this module on My First Dungeon, all this writing also served as my de facto prep work.
As I wrote this article I flipped through my campaign notes for past games–both on- and off-mic–and recently my prep work rarely goes beyond a few pages and is mostly notes on the PC backstories and a few plot hooks I can throw their way. I’ve gotten quite used to very low-prep systems like 9 Lives to Valhalla or Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast and have learned to lean on improvisation much more than I did when I was first DMing D&D for a group of friends in a home game.
But despite all that writing and the thousands of words of prep at my disposal, this season has some of the most improv heavy storytelling that we’ve seen on My First Dungeon. That’s because more than any previous season I relied on random roll tables during play to guide the story. Every time we meet a new contact or determine consequences—in the phase aptly-named Consequences—it was always based on the roll of the dice. So while I was very familiar with everything in the city, I never had any idea who we would meet next or if it would fit neatly into the story we were telling. Usually as a GM you can stack the odds in your favor, but in this season we chose to fully embrace the chaos and let the city come at us however it chose.
What type of prep work do you usually do before a game session?
This duality of preparation and randomization is exactly what Paint the Town Red wants and why it works so well. This isn’t a game where you’re facing off against an orderly adversary that you can strive to defeat. Instead you’re fending off a dozen threats coming at you from all sides until you’re ultimately overwhelmed and forced out of this city and onto the next. This isn’t a game about victory, though you may find some if you’re very lucky. It’s a game about living and partying as much as you can while you’re still able. You won’t be able to save New York City in It Never Sleeps, but you can soak up the last dregs of life while you’re there.
— Brian
🗞️ News Worthy
Brian wins Best GM at Minnesota Webfest!
Mage Hand High Five wins big at New Jersey Webfest, taking home three prizes—Best Editing of an Actual Play, Best Ensemble Cast of an Actual Play (Podcast), and Outstanding Fantasy Actual Play (Podcast).
Elliot Davis premieres a new trailer for The Time We Have starring Harlan Guthrie of Malevolent and Jamie Petronis of The Cellar Letters.
🎲 What We’re Bringing to The Table
🎥 Watch: The new video trailer for A Fool’s Errand by Planet Arcana
📚 Read: Elliot released the demo version of his latest game, The Time We Have.
🎧 Listen: Dice Exploder: Accessibility & Graphic Design (Mork Borg) w/ Marc Muszynski
🎙️ New From The Studio
My First Dungeon presents: Paint The Town Red: Episode 1 — The Shallow Grave
Talk of the Table (w/ A.A. Voigt) (Monday 10/14)