Night Shift

1d4chan.org/wiki/Night_Shift
Does anyone remember this? There were threads a couple years ago and it just popped into my head again. What happened to user's screenplay? Did anything ever come of it?

Other urls found in this thread:

suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=Urban unease
suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?searchall=Night Shift
youtube.com/watch?v=ufAUonsYhVU
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

""Welcome to the Night Shift: Minimum Wage, Maximum Weird."

The Night Shift is a setting and resources for running a horror-game. It is the brainchild of a collaboration of some anons on Veeky Forums. Players are employees working the night shift at a gas station on the lonely side of nowhere. They must balance the drudgery of their mundane duties and responsibilities with the uncanny, preternatural, supernatural, and paranormal events which seem to happen at this particular gas station."

Had this on my hard drive, I believe it was supposed to be an example questionnaire I wrote up for running Night Shift in Dread. Might have posted it before, but I never had a chance to run it myself.

This is almost two years old, but I believe the idea behind the * questions was hoping that the players would contradict each other for maximum weirdness.

>Did anything ever come of it?
I don't know, did you ever cause anything to come of it?

I didn't, user. Did you?

Also if this thread doesn't work out op, I advise you to try again mid-october

I didn't realize it before, but Night Shift is probably a predecessor to Urban Unease.

What's that?

suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=Urban unease

They've been calling it comfy dark. There're horror elements and slice of life elements mixed together in different settings.

>Around 2:15PM a very large, hairless man comes in and buys a Mr. Pibb, a watermelon airhead, and a bag of peanut M&Ms.
>This comes to $3.33
>He always takes 3 pennies from the take a penny leave a penny tray
>Make sure the tray does not run out before he arrives

>PM
fuck I meant AM.
Those assholes on the day shift don't have to deal with this crap.

One of my favorite things that Veeky Forums has ever made.

I'm torn between it and bugworld.

The same thing happened that happens to anything "good" or "interesting" on Veeky Forums. A handful of user take the thing off the board, form their own insular circlejerk, and bleed members as petty infighting tears the group apart, while not allowing anyone else in because they aren't good enough to behold the wonders they have wrought.

Every. Single. Time. This is what happens, and people are still surprised. This is why Veeky Forums never gets shit done, and it's why the board has gone to shit.

What's with the name my dude?

Turn off your name, Wayne. And your bad attitude.

Just watched Safety Not Guaranteed. It is a movie about people relationships but that is not why it is important. The important thing is the premise: in a local newspaper an entry is found and people go to investigate:

>Wanted: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 91 Ocean View, WA 99393. You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.

We need to make some Night Shift adds

What kind of positions are there at a gas station?

I really think this would be a lot of fun combined with that Martian highway idea someone had a while back.

I really would like to play something in this setting some day.

One of the original pdfs lists various positions and archetypes as Clare like classes.

But that's not what happened at all, you moronic tripfag.

Instead of going back in time, why not go back in space? Inspace.

suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?searchall=Night Shift

I work nights at a gas station and just got off shift, AMA

What places of work other than gas stations might fit the general vibe?

DID anything come of it though? It seems like Night Shift is just a collection of ideas with no real grounding to it all. It's less of a setting and more a description of a setting.

Fast Food restaurants, coffee shops, and if you want people to come and sit down at your establishment something like a Denny's or any roadside greasy spoon, those tend to attract the weird graveyard shift people.

And don't forget truck stops.

Ever had a robbery or something that you thought was going to turn into a robbery?

Pic related?

Never been robbed at this store thankfully, but we suspect there was a potential for it on days. Two guys came into the parking lot at a gas pump, never filled up and just watched the store for 3 hours, drove off in a hurry when a cop car showed up. Came back the next day, we call another cop car, he speeds off.
The day after that was the single busiest on record at that store, and there was never any place for the guys to keep casing the store.

Still pretty scary. We're told "give them anything they want that we have, and don't call the cops until after they've left"

youtube.com/watch?v=ufAUonsYhVU

If I ever have more than one day off in a row, night shift is top of my list to run with my Veeky Forums inclined coworkers and friends. There's a lot of crossover with hospo/FOH and gas station stuff.

I love the idea and even tried to do something with it, but I can honestly hardly imagine it to work with anything more than a short one-shot. Unless the PCs would be somehow motivated to actually investigate the weird and fight evil themselves beyond the station, not just trying to keep their asses safe and collect the wage.

I think the reason is more then that. I like the idea behind but every time I see one of those threads I think "what should be discussed". LIke the basic aideas are down. e already have large list of small spooky ideas. And adding more plot hooks "found pentagram with a devil hooker number in the bathroom" is pointless.

Some writefaggotry would be good.but it requires serious effort.

What should we do?

We can define the setting cosmology but getting the cosmology down takes away all mystery from the setting.

Maybe we could run some sort of SCP wiki....
But what would be the enteries?

And what more would you expect to happen? Get a whole fucking sourcebook and lorebooks released? Not going to happen, definitely not with a bunch of anons who don't even know each other and each of them possibly has their own idea about how things should look like. It was a neat idea to play around with a bit and that's what happened, what more to want out of it?

Nobody posted the Player's Manual?

Frame PC motivation around protecting the gas station and its supplies. You get weird guys in gas masks in strange, unlicensed cars that try to steal gasoline. You have a group of bag ladies that may or may not be witches that are after the candy-but only yellow flavored candy. You have an absurdly tall man suddenly enter the store and hold it up-but not for cash, for your souls. He's asking you to whip out your souls and show them to him. Or else.

A ghost keeps trying to steal your pennies, looking for its one special penny from 1911.

The magazines that get dropped off at the store don't seem to be from this timeline. And the temporal corruption is starting to spread to your stock, turning it into Earth-2 versions of whatever it was before. This is bad because the Earth-2 food tastes like garbage.

The rats are shockingly intelligent. You think they're trying to communicate in the spilt candy they leave on the floor. But what are they trying to tell you? Either way, the boss wants the rats gone. You're going to have to either make them go or come to some sort of an understanding with them.

For some reason you keep napping off at work. While you're sleeping you're in another gas station, in another place, serving other customers. The boss doesn't want you to slack off...but the money from your dream sales are in your till...

What do you think of these hooks?

One thing we can do is to write a oneshot and polish to perfection.

Ok I'm thrilled. WHat is your favoirte hook?

The Gray Man is always a classic.

Should the "boss" (which still answers to management) be a player character or an antagonistic NPC?

They're all great, I'm not saying otherwise, but what I mean is, you deal with the issue, usually on the spot by just getting rid of whatever is causing problems to the station, and then it's just probably another night, another hook thrown at you. It quickly gets boring. To make it more interesting, you would somehow have to force players into investigating beyond the station(or make them want that themselves).
For example, said weird guys stealing gasoline. Players could simply drive them off(shoot, scare, whatever) and it would resolve the issue, but that would quickly get boring. To make the scenario interesting, they would need a motivation to actually track them, discover whoever they are etc. Sitting in the station just wouldn't do for long.

Enemies and problems should be grouped under the umbrella term "weirdness".


COMMON WEIRDNESS

SNIFFITS: Strange black clad people that wear gasmasks and steal gas. They move around slowly and strangely as if not all parts of their body work right, but are capable of shocking feats of strength, sometimes ripping a gas tank out of the ground with their bare hands. They travel around in strange looking vehicles unlike anything you'd find in a car lot. Employees have tried tailing the Sniffits only to lose them on the high way every time. They just seem to blink out of existence.

Threats: Steals Gasoline
Weakness: Light hurts them, slow, not dexterous
Strength: Physically very strong

SEEKERS OF YELLOW: Dirty, smelly old ladies that never come through the door (how they come in is a mystery in itself). They only want one thing: yellow candy. Some will try to purchase it, often with strange currency. Others will try to steal candy. They tend to make a mess rummaging through the store looking for what they want, but they don't often resort to violence. They also scare off customers...even customers that cant' be scared off by normal means, which is both a good and a bad thing.

The yellow cats that roam around the gas station are their familiars or themselves transformed into a different shape. A comely lass with blonde hair might also enter the store and try to chat up an employee. Is she a familiar? A summoned spirit? A young witch in training? The very being the seekers worship?

Threat: Steals Yellow Candy. Disturbs customers. Makes messes
Weakness: Code against (direct) violence against those that offend them
Strength: Can place curses. Frightens away customers of all kinds (can be a good and bad thing)


RATS: The rats are shockingly, disturbingly intelligent, possibly the result of a government experiment. You think you saw one in a cloak the other night...

-cont

Come to think of it, if it would just go with "another night, another weird shit to deal with on the spot happens" it would probably work better with some elaborate tabletop or card game than a ttrpg.

You got a point, I still think there should be "generic" threats against the station. Stuff the old guys just accept as normal after working at the gas station for so long.

The rats target soda, and lots of it. You think it might be because they need the glucose to keep their hyper intelligent brains functioning.

More disturbingly, they sometimes steal from the till. For what end you can only guess at.

The rats can be reasoned and communicated with. If you're willing to work with them, they're willing to help you.

They are also a terrible, terrible enemy to have.

Threats: Steals soda, sometimes money
Weakness: Code of honor means they will only try to steal from you "fairly". They won't escalate into violence unless you hurt one of their own first. If caught and treated fairly the rat will owe you a favor, sort of like a leprechaun. They can be reasoned with, even befriended
Strength: A colony of hyper-intelligent rats. What more needs to be said?

While this is a fun little book I think the rules need more defining. I think a hack of Don't Rest Your Head would work. I'm actually working on an alternate dicr system based on DRYH that plays more like FFG dice. It should be pretty straight forward.
This game needs really quick character gen, easy dice resolution, and light mechanics for both player and GM.
Rules to follow as I write up an outline.

How would we include concepts like the phone in the staff room into a game like that?

I am still around. I have run my Night Shift World hack a couple times but it has since evolved away from using Apocalypse World as a base. It has always been tremendously well received by the groups I've run it for.

The script thing didn't work out. I have outlines and two episodes still sitting in my GDrive, however.

>I have run my Night Shift World hack a couple times but it has since evolved away from using Apocalypse World as a base. It has always been tremendously well received by the groups I've run it for.

Do you have any stories?

TRASHMEN: A sheet, a paper bag, and some old shoes. The discarded trash of the station can sometimes take on a life of its own. Even more frustratingly the trash from the businesses down the street like the dreaded other gas station tends to find its way to your doorstep.

Trashmen are fine so long as you make sure that when the animating force within them departs they collapse outside in the dumpster as opposed to on the floor. Separate trashmen seem to share the same memory and will remember how they're treated. There might only be "one" trashman with several bodies.

The trashman will go about dropping bits of itself all over your clean floors, curiously looking at al the stuff on the shelves. Force, particularly the threat of fire, seem to be the only thing that will force it out of the store. But it can also be "bribed" to leave the station and go around back to the dumpsters with interesting objects sacrificed as trash. Sometimes it will even give up something in return.

But never try stealing from the trash out back. That belongs to the Trashmen. It is theirs. Steal from them at your own peril.

Threats: Cleanliness, disturbs customers
Weakness: Fire, can be bartered with
Strength: Conventional damage isn't very effective

Fuck yeah, I do. Gimme a bit and I'll greentext 'em.

I will also post the rules I used in the last couple iterations.

...

will be waiting. I'm actually interested in dynamics of a Night Shift session.

I'm gonna summarize a lot because I don't have detailed notes of some of the earlier games.

Pick your poison.

>"The Fire Clown Below"
My least favorite session because all the PC's were "lol so whacky XD". But also my favorite Weirdness; clowns are good for that.

>"Humanitarianism"
Second favorite Weirdness. Great group. Basis for one of the script episodes. Dimensional travel and air conditioners.

>"They Are Empty and So Can You"
I was pretty drunk when I wrote up the notes. It got weird, fast. Also dimensional travel, maybe, and people who shouldn't be and likely aren't people.

>"An OSHA of Possibilities"
This session led to one of my players wanting to run Night Shift. Training new employees is difficult.

I don't know, I'm not a mechanic designer, but I've played enough weird tabletop games that I'm sure it could be done well.
I was imagining something like that: Every night is another game turn, players draw one or more random events and then have to resolve them using some kind of resources or other mechanics that might be in the game. It could be also made in a sort of mini "choose your adventure" kind of thing. The phone might provide assistance, but also make them use some points, resources or whatever. Or decrease the cash they get for a night, which helps them to prepare themselves.
Hell, it could even be resolved through normal roleplaying, just the whole game structure would be more organised and "game-ish".
I by no means claim that this is THE way it should be done, but I just feel it would make the game less repetitive and prone to become boring if we assume that players are not supposed to leave the station and stick to the "weird of the night" formula. With this restrictions, it would be hard to make a campaign or even more than 1-2 one-shots out of that, but I think that making it feel more like sitting for a round of board game than an actual TTRPG would fix the problem
That's just my take on things though.

I run night shift infrequently for my group when we have no other plans.

Let's start with the Fire Clown and go by order of worst to best session.

Do the "Humanitarianism" first or second, this one sounds really interesting.

>Humanitarianism
seconding it.

can you tell us detail of a session you played?

Also, nice quints.

Get four sets of d6. Make sure you can tell them apart. For convention let's say Red, Blue, Yellow, White.

So the player has four stats. Point distribution is 2/1/1/-1. These use Blue dice, except the -1 which is Yellow.
>Brain - mental and academic checks
>Meat - physical and constitution checks
>Will - keeping it together and arguing checks
>Skill - dexterity and handiwork checks

Now choose four talents, which can be things like Engine Mechanics, Negotiation, Lock Picking, Knowledge (subject field), broad but not catchall things. Distribute points in these in a 3/2/1/1 spread. These also use Blue dice.

Now ask your players to distribute four points between Sanity and Charity.
>Sanity: your grip on what is real, your ability to keep collected, the line at which you devolve into a raving lunatic
>Charity: your empathy, your ability to pit up with people bullshit, the line at which you stop seeing fellow humans as people
These are White dice. Each player has a reserve of white dice for each stat equal to their score. Players may take dice out of these pools and spend them on their rolls. They don't go back. Sanity may be used in weird situations, charity in situations that require interpersonal connection. Being at zero is so sign of being unhinged in the corresponding stat.

A player may choose to add a number of Yellow dice to his check, up to five. These represent pushing themselves to their physical and mental limits.

Players add Blue, White, and Yellow dice together.

GMs present Red dice in opposition. Up to ten dice (1 for trivial, 10 for unimaginable misfortune) may be used to represent the threat which must be overcome.

The player rolls the dice, with 1/2/3 counting as successes (Blue, White, Yellow) and failures (Red). The player succeeds if there are more successes than failures.

(Cont)

Actually, contrary to this Wayne's statement I was actually in charge of adapting the game to a solid system back when I was running the /fvgt/...Then Finals happened, the /fvgt/ as well as Fading Embers died because nobody else was putting effort into them and keeping them productive, and when I tried to start them back up they remained dead.

I'm actually going to bring back both those threads soon and quit being Wayne, as apparently using satirical Shitposting to try and get the idiots on the board to learn to ignore bait is indistinguishable from actual shitposting and doesn't actually work.

You should have known, Wayne.

Yeah. Doesn't help that I really lost sight of what Wayne was supposed to be doing. Half the time he was antagonizing our (fairly useless) mods, antagonizing other trolls, or posting what I call "BIG RED FLAG SHITPOSTS" that were designed to derail the thread while it was less than 20 posts, dominate the conversation, and result in the deletion of the thread(I pulled this one off around four times)

24/7 groceries, diners, fast food restaurants, 24/7 gyms...

>designed to derail the thread while it was less than 20 posts
Wait a second...

So there would still be a GM?

(Cont)
Now why the colors? Look for the dice with the highest value. The color of the dice triggers a secondary effect. If multiple dice are the same highest color, Reds and Blues cancel out 1-for-1. Everything else resolves simultaneously.
>Blue: Advantage. The situation, success or failure, turns out better than you expected and in some small way works in your favor.
>Red: Disadvantage. The situation, success or failure, has gone badly and in some small way worked against your favor.
>White: Relief. Something within you finds strength. Either add 1 White dice to either Sanity or Charity OR introduce an important narrative detail of your choice (GM must approve)
>Yellow: Disaster. The GM may either introduce a serious narrative downturn of events or impose a permanent narrative effect upon the player (such as a persistent injury or condition)

Between the amounts of Successes and Failures and the Dice Color of influence, the situation is resolved.

Players loose Health (5+Meat+Will+Charity) or Psyche (5+Brain+Skill+Sanity) equal to Failures (failure from generating zero total successes results in zero injury), depending on the type of check made (physical vs emotional vs weird).

Every day the players refresh their Charity and Sanity by two points (their choice in distrivution), and their Health and Psyche by five points (their choice in distribution).

And that's the game. Thoughts and feedback?

Well, when the OP is one of those /pol/ posts that looks Veeky Forums enough to go under the radar, or is one of those classic Veeky Forums bait threads that you know will just cause more and more shit until bump limit, you really have to nip those in the bud so they don't reach the point where they're too big for the mods to delete, because at this point, they reason that some intelligent conversation must be going on, right?

Humanitarianism first, Fire Clown Below second.

The Group
>Keyboard-warrior Veeky Forums stereotype Assistant Manager. Early 20's.
>Russian Gas Attendant. Claims he sold fridges in his past life. Late 50's.
>Incomprehensible Redneck Stock Clerk. Late 30's.
>Stoner Cashier. Stoned. Stoner stoned. Late 30's.

This was actually the same group as "Fire Clown Below", with the same characters. It was before I instituted a mandatory firing at the end of each session chosen using arbitrary metrics (whomever rolled the most 1's, which have no mechanical impact) and human spite (Assistant Manager chooses on ties).

>Group is struggling to find the walk-in because the door keeps moving
>Kids in Halloween costumes show up, Stoner "fixes" the clocks.
>It is hot, they decide to turn on the AC against company policy ("Management believes in the power of positive thinking when it comes to thermodynamics.")
>Doing so shorts out everything in the entire store.
>Russian Attendant sets about fixing everything, using only his knowledge of refriderators. Has the Stock Clerk read to him from the manual.
>This goes as well as you could anticipate.
>Strange drifter eventually shows up, wild hair, weird grey jumpsuit.
>Locks himself in the Office after the Assistant Manager goes to yell at Stoner.
>Later two men in black jumpsuits come in, grill Stoner about whether any livestock has been seen.
>Stock Clerk and Gas Attendant are having a nearly incomprehensible argument over the hot pockets they want to eat
>More specifically, have they always had "That Real Human Taste!" on them.
>Assistant Manager has given up trying to get the Office open and instead is telling the drifter why the earlier seasons of his favorite anime (Sama Sama Panty Raid Kaipatsu VI) were objectively better.
>Late night news is wrong, radio is weird, lots of evidence pointing to them being in a different reality
>In which cannibalism is legalized.
>Players get it, characters don't
Cont.

Should it be
>Health (5+Meat+Will+Charity)
>Psyche (5+Brain+Skill+Sanity)
Or
>Health (5+Meat+Skill+Sanity)
>Psyche (5+Brain+Will+Charity)
Or
>Health (5+Meat+Brain+Will+Skill)
>Psyche (5+Charity+Sanity)

>They eventually figure out that the grey jumpsuit guy is cattle
>Black jumpsuits eventually return, with more trucks, figuring out that the cattle was in fact there
>Stand-off ensues with the black jumpsuits threatening to bust in, the cattle threatening to start stabbing people, and the Assistant Manager trying to validate how bad Season 3 of Sama Sama Panty Raid Kaipatsu VI was
>Stock Clerk and Gas Attendant accidentally blow the AC
>Problem solved, back to own reality
>Cattle came with the gas station, steals a bunch of stuff and runs
>Stock Clerk gets yelled at by Assistant Manager for throwing out cannibal Hot Pockets
>Management docks everyone's pay for turning on the AC

This was a good session because the players really got into the spirit-- they could care about the Threat and the Weirdness. But their characters should never, ever, give a single shit.

This group later fucked it up with the Fire Clown Below-- and I fucked up because they were the same PLAYERS but not the same CHARACTERS. I had forgotten that.

You want me to go right into "Fire Clown Below"? Or should I talk about the mechanics for a bit?

Could you go over the mechanics for a little bit?

Sure. Originally it was based on Apocalypse world (my namefag is short for "Night Shift World user") but I eventually left the 6/7-9/10 thing behind.

This is the newest character sheet. As you can see, a PC has 5 Attributes (Emotional, Physical, Logical, Awareness, and Weird).

Each PC has a pool of 5 dice to draw from ("Effort") and a communal 5 dice as well ("Station").

When I called for a roll I would tell them which Attribute it was based on (and thus which bonus or malus they should apply); they started with 1 die, adding a second if the task relates to their job description, and up to two more for fictional reasons. Importantly, these last two were drawn from the "Station pool".

A PC could add any number of dice from their own Effort pool, and other PC's could contribute from their Effort pools as well if they were helping. The different job roles had rules which keyed off rolling 6's and how they contributed or not to the Effort pool economy.

Roll the dice, counting each 5+ as a success. If your successes equal or exceed the Target Number, congrats, if not, c'est la vie.

At the end of the session whomever rolled the most 1's was fired (in one session that PC was the one who had singlehandedly kept everyone alive, which seemed appropriate). The Assistant Manager was never fired but could instead fire anyone if they rolled the most 1's. This petty power was entirely on purpose.

Emphasis during play was to have the PC's rebound off one another-- they had different aims and goals which had very little to do with the success or failure of the gas station, nor even the discovery or resolution of the Weirdness.

The Weirdness happens for the players to resolve, not the characters. This mindset seemed key to having enjoyable sessions of Night Shift. Many of the sessions had characters inadvertently or accidentally solve the Weirdness while trying to satisfy some base or petty desire of theirs.

It seems we both have similar ideas, even though we are coming from two different angles (Apocolypse World vs Don't Rest Your Head). May I use some of your design elements and integrate them with mine? I like the idea of adding a Station pool and character motivations.

Add in the Random Situation Table and I think we could be close to a (more) finished product.

I like the idea that whoever survives the night has to go through a final harrowing against the largely absent Manager, which is like the anxiety inducing final stage of Paranoia, the Debriefing.

What's FNORD?

The setting is made. The rules are made. The game is good. If tg wants to keep working on it, rather than more and more spooky blurbs what we need is premade adventure outlines.

On a different note, something that I firmly believe about the setting is that it ought to be mundane. It annoys me when people want to explain -why- creepy things happen or make some kind of conspiracy theory surrounding the gas station.

The thing that makes the game brilliant is that there's a lot of cosmic horror in being a deadbeat nobody in a typical gas station where you have no idea what the fuck is going on, or why, or even if what you see is real. Its what grounds the game despite the supernatural events, because on some level the players can imagine it happening to them. If you make it about a government conspiracy or some shit you lose that.

A reference to the Principia Discordia and Robert Anton Wilson; supposedly the Illuminati introduced a word into our subconcious which provokes fear and anxiety, and which we are unable to see. It is represented textually by "FNORD" which isn't the actual word, since we can't actually see the word.

Sure man. I'm not super familiar with Don't Rest Your Head-- my baseline is a hacked up version of some John Harper stuff (Lady Blackbird foremost).

I'm always glad to see Night Shift threads still popping up every now and then. I played in a short Night Shift campaign not too long ago that went pretty really well. If I can get a little break-time at work I'll post a few highlights.

I have always maintained that, thematically, the game should be about the Uncanny, a bubbling sub-strata of reality that only occasionally breaks through the banal facade. I make it a point to never have particularly accessible or coherent explanations for the Weirdness in my games-- it is about regular people defying every convention of the horror genre by simply not caring. They want to get paid, they want to move on with their life, and besides yetis aren't even real.

All my games have taken place in the same gas station but only occasionally have the same characters. All my games take place in the same Night Shift universe. There will never be a game in which the origin of the Weirdness is explained-- no meta-arc, no grander narrative bridging episodes.

When writing the script I resisted the urge to replicate that. Instead I designed a background logic which will never be explained or portrayed on-screen but which exists by inference and which the characters nonetheless have to contend with.

Awesome, if I make a PDF how do you want to be attributed.

23 skidoo.

"NSWanon - CRV" works for me.

The Uncanny bit sounds a lot like Magical Realism. I can totally get behind that too.

Here's a thought. You know how you can run Paranoia as either Classic, Straight or Zap? I imagine you can run Night Shift similarly on a spectrum between Stephen King, Kentucky Route 0 or Evil Dead.

What it should really -never- be, though, is Delta Green or Werewolf.

Just found a previous write-up of this and I seem to have conflated sessions. My memory is worse than I thought.

I agree that there shouldn't be some huge conspiracy or concrete explanation responsible for the weirdness, but at the same time I do like the Station to have enough of a history to suggest that things have been weird there for quite a while.

In my games, previous sessions always leave a mark on the station. I briefly fiddled with a subsystem of rewarding players (rather than characters) by way of new resources for the station.

Don't fuck up and you get an x-presso machine. It's like an espresso machine but with intermittent disembodied screaming.

Out of curiosity, why? What does giving the station a weird history add to the game for you?

>Stephen King, Kentucky Route 0 or Evil Dead

So, you'd basically be able to play a Night Shift game as cold and creeping terror, supernatural slice-of-life, or campy survival-horror? I can totally see that, and I remember it being said in the original threads that Night Shift was really well-suited to operating on a sliding scale like that, based on what sort of game the group wanted to run.

>Uh, manager? What do I do if the state tax goes up?
>...hide.

Didn't the movie come after the actual article?

I like it because I like settings to have layers of history in general, but with Night Shift in particular...

I think that can help increase the feelings of dread and the intrigue surrounding the Station. It gives a sense that whatever is going on is bigger than the characters, has been going on since long before they started this terrible job and will continue going on long after their employment there has ended.

It's why the "Ghost of the Assistant Manager" is one of my favorite pieces of fluff. She adds a cryptic bit of history to the Station and helps illustrate what fate might befall the characters.

Yes, you're right.

What if there was a companion game called Day Shift that involved revealing more about the world?

Day shift would just be Clerks: The Game.

No

Right.

Day Shifters are generally thought of as "those assholes" that leave messes for the Night Shift to clean up, hassle the PCs at the beginning of the session during shift-change and throw disbelief and scorn there way at the end of the session at shift change again if the PCs leave a mess or try to explain how their night went.

That being said, it can be good to throw in a Day Shift NPC from time to time, or give a new character a background as a former Day Shifter who'll come to learn that all the bizarre shit he was told is real.

I would assume there are 3 shifts, not just 2.

You're right. I think we were figuring something like:

>6:00-2:00 Sunny Assholes

>2:00-10:00 Surly Assholes

>10:00-6:00 Night Shift

I really like this idea, if we're going to write a longer rulebook we should include the idea of different playstyles in there.

And although I agree that having some large backstory, cosmology or conspiracy behind it would kill the mood, I like the idea of some continuity. For example I really like the idea that all the weird shit is happening to only one chain of gas stations with branches all over the world/States for whatever unexplained reason. There might be a society of ex-workers with some experience in fighting the creeps, who can offer assistance to rookies if shit gets too serious.

we were actually discussing in some of the most recent threads about expanding not only the immediate surroundings for the Gas-N-Go, but also the nearby Town and it's surroundings as well, I'll have to go dig up my notes on this

yeah there shouldn't be anything resembling a consistent explanation, although individual bits of weird can have an explanation occasionally

>Praxis Industries
Yes, strands of continuity but with no explanation.

Right. Individual events can certainly have a cause or even a bit of history, but there is no concrete reason as to why weirdness seems to be drawn to this shitty old gas station.

That last bit is actually what the Ghost of the Assistant Manager is for. Fluff was that she was this super-competent employee back in the 80s that died at the station, and still haunts the place, occasionally helping the PCs out with their nightly tasks.