Halloween is around the corner, and you know what that means. It's time for a Night Shift thread!
>what is Night Shift?
In Night Shift the PCs, known as Attendants, are employees during the titular night shift at a little old 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.
The gas station has recently come under new management, and now policy is to keep a shelf of books for sale next to the registry, to encourage literacy in the community or some bullshit.
Perusal of the collection of books, either at their place on the shelf or in the boxes out back, reveals such titles as "The Hive Queen and the Hegemon", "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy", "The Princess Bride", etc.
Cameron Allen
Oh thank god I was just considering making a thread for this.
So I'm considering making a spinoff of the game for park/Forrest rangers and other such jobs. Anyone interested in brainstorming with me?
Justin Jackson
What would the firearm situation look like? I'm not sure how it is in real life
Leo Reed
Me nether. I always assumed however that park rangers always have a gun in there look out cabins [forgot the actual name lol] just in case of a emergency.
Wyatt Gutierrez
park rangers typically have a rifle or locked up in the cabin, well equipped offices might have one in each truck and a handful of sidearms
Matthew Walker
Well there ya go. So for Night in the Woods (place holder name) should we keep the tone of the original game or change it a bit to match the the isolation for park rangers?
Grayson Williams
Yeah, uh, let's go with something else. Back Country, maybe? Night Country if we want to keep the night in there?
A Park Ranger game sounds a lot like it would be more serious if we go by fiction, but in my experience campers are absolute retards, so the retail humor could still be there in a different form.
Easton Brooks
i mean you could keep more or less the same tone, lets be honest, how hard do you think it is to shoot something in the dark while you're nervous? probably hard. also a lot of supernatural shit just does not give a shit about bullets
James Wilson
Thanks for getting the reference. And yeah Night Contry works too. retail humor could still stay. I also think there should be some insensitive on protecting park go'ers as well
Remember though. There's still non supernatural threats in Nightshift all ready
Liam Phillips
Judging by the skinwalker/ shapeshifter/ spoopy stuff threads that periodically appear on /k/ , rangers are usually aware of (and either try to avoid or eliminate) the supernatural beings that roam within their area of responsibility. Whether they carry a rifle or shotgun is as much a matter of personal taste and "official" threat level of natural animals as it is one of state policy, but their pistol will always be on their person.
Bentley Turner
bump
Jeremiah Cruz
I mean, I understand this is coming from what the reality is in America, but I think the concept would be better served with only two guns in the Ranger Cabin (a handgun and a shotgun/rifle) to limit players before they decide to unload on some cryptid.
Just my opinion is all.
Gavin Allen
Well, they do only have those kinds of guns. Like Night Shift I'm assuming the main idea is focusing on stopping the issue intelligently, not shooting it to death with automatic rifles.
You just take night shift and put it in the woods and add cryptids, weird campers, portals to other dimensions (thematically wilderness of some kind), etc. And there's no shortage of cryptids and shit to add since humans have stories of weird shit in nature more than we do for urban areas. We have been doing that since before we even had things above the basic tribal level.
You could make 1,001 scenarios with bigfoot alone.
Tyler Reyes
And Back Country sounds better than Night Country. It may be a spinoff game, but that doesn't mean it needs to have night in the title. Night Shift fits the theme of the game: working the overnight shift at a gas station.
Night Country doesn't fit the theme. It just sounds dumb. If you really have to add something related then do Dark Country or something, because at least that can be a play on both the time of day, monsters/shit that goes on, and being in the country. Night Country is a little too blatant of a ripoff name and makes no sense.
The only issue is getting more than one person to play, because rangers are usually alone or with one partner. And the main park stations where there may be a bunch of them are near civilization.
You'd either have to make it a solo/2 player game, or go full parody and make them like beat cops in the woods or a secret ranger squad sent out to assess and handle weird activity.
Aaron James
You could have one or two actual rangers, with the rest being cryptozoological researcher scientists, journalists, etc., that they've been assigned to guide and/or guard...
Anthony Lopez
Anyone here played a game? How'd it go?
Evan Foster
I don't get this can someone explain?
Kayden White
I'm planning to run a Night Shift game on Halloween, but my question is: how do you make sitting around the station interesting for the PCs? And I don't mean by throwing weird shit at them, because that makes the session very passive: you just wait for the next thing to happen, react and wait some more and that is not good. So how can you make the actual work there, a session that revolves around sitting in one place rather than more usual traveling, interesting? On the similar note, how to make the players grow a sense of attachment with the station?
Cameron Bailey
Fictional books I think. I don't know the other 2 titles, but "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy" is a book from "The Man in the High Castle", quite vital to the plot
Nicholas Morris
Down for that if you're still here, although I'm a Euro, so I don't know much about American Park Rangers. On related note, I was considering making some random(or not random) tables for Night Shift character creation. Stuff like your PCs background, hobbies, personality etc., which could affect the stuff he can do. Anyone has any similar tables which could be used as a basis?
Gabriel Russell
No sleeping on the shift damn it! Wake the fuck up!
Sebastian Adams
Do you enjoy hurting people?
Hunter Wilson
How can I be sure they're really people?
Easton Mitchell
I think that a lot of what you're looking for revolves around making the gas station a "character" in its own right. Lots of work was done in the original threads to give lists that a GM can pull from to give each part of the station its own quirks and oddities that players could investigate, discuss and later turn into plot-points as needed.
Joshua Perez
Hive Queen and Hegemon is a fictional book (pair of books?) from Ender's Game
Grayson Collins
Does Night Shift have a system? The wiki page is just a premise and links to a dozen threads to sort through.
Jaxson Lee
There's an apocalypse world hack, it should be linked at the bottom of the page.
Grayson Lee
You people don't know The Princess Bride? Is this really Veeky Forums?
Matthew Garcia
In a thread few months back someone actually linked a PDF with a nicely released and edited mini set of rules, but I haven't saved it.
Logan Harris
Inconceivable!
Levi Howard
Bump Come on Amerifats, my night shift begins and I would love this thread to still be here in the morning!
Caleb Cooper
Perhaps have 2 players as Park Rangers, and the rest as scared campers/cons/natives etc.
Nice variety to the team I guess
Mason Morales
I wonder if this could work well with that martian highway system Veeky Forums was working on a few months ago.
Samuel Myers
bump
Anthony Roberts
Goddammit!
me neither
Adam Watson
It leans a little hard on the light hearted aspect but I always thought this show was a decent example of what a Night Shift TV show could be like.
Easton Torres
This?
Christopher Brown
Found the thread, the links are just in the beginning archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/54191269/#q54204915 Honestly it's not that much, but further down the line there is some quality discussion about the system, including some good suggestions of running and expanding it.
Nathan Russell
I'm planning to run a Night Shift game with an UFO crashing in the woods near the station, mutating some of the local plants, animals and people into weird and dangerous half-alien abominations. Any ideas of what could budge or force the PCs into going out to the forest and finding the wreckage?
Jonathan Ross
Yeah this seems best. 1 or 2 rangers and the rest of the players are campers/tourists/hunters.
Though you could maybe do a skinwalker/bodysnatchers pvp thing and have an extra ranger. Like 3 of the players are rangers and (claim) to have memories of working togther as the 3 for a decent length of time. But their station and everything is clearly equipped and set up for only 2 rangers.
Julian Stewart
Last summer I was actually thinking of writing up rules for a game set in the woods at night. My basic premise was the players all go out into the actual woods, actually at night (or whatever reasonable facsimile they can manage, empty city streets at night or a foggy beach at dawn could work just as well) and shuffle up some sealed envelopes with scenarios in them. The group discusses how to get out of the scenario, Baron Munchausen style, then moves on down the path and opens another envelope. The scenarios all hold continuity with each other, though, so if one envelope has an attempted alien abduction in it, it's possible that the werewolf the players escaped from earlier might ambush them and inadvertently rescue the players.
The title I was working from was "The Evil In These Woods", and I mean that literally, I started with the title and tried to come up with a game around it.
Leo Jones
This however creates large differences between the players: the rangers would probably be very knowledgable about the park, everything in it, and quite possibly even the spooks inhabiting it, while tourists would be complete strangers, with maybe perhaps some useful skills. For a year I've been messing with an idea of running a horror larp since I moved to a VERY spooky and climatic area. There are however lots of logistic problems and the fact that I never participated in a larp before, so I'm not even sure how to approach it. Also I would obviously ideally want to run the game on Halloween, but my country has completely different traditions associated with this holiday which would make it problematic. And weather usually changes to utter shit around this time of the year.
Landon Cook
You could go with the non rangers being local experienced outdoorsmen/hunters. So the gap won't be so big if you want that.
Alternatively you could hand off skills and occult knowledge to the non-rangers.
Jacob Phillips
It's a real book with a fictional pretense within the narrative. Not the same as the other two.
Isaiah Stewart
Just to specify, I don't claim that this can't work or that it is a bad idea per se, but having half of PCs being complete outsiders and the other half having local knowledge on levels usually reserved for NPCs creates a huge dichotomy, it's almost dividing the PCs into 2 teams.
Luis Howard
Thats why i suggested the hunters thing, say 2 of the party are rangers and 2 are campers who've come to the park for a couple weeks every season for most lf the last 7 years. So they've now got a more comparable skill and experience level.
My family did that kind of thing while i was growing up. We had "our" camp ground we'd visit every summer break and we got to know the area pretty well.
Nathan Robinson
The park rangers idea reminded me, there are obviously many different national parks, all with their own weird shit in them, so the settings would be pretty diverse. But the same could be applied to Night Shift. I think everyone assumes that the station stands in some forested area, but it could just as well stand in the middle of Arizona desert or near Louisiana's bayous and these areas give opportunities for new and unique types of spooks and encounters. Even when it comes to forests, there is a big difference between what is most likely to be encountered somewhere in New England, in the Appalachians and in Oregon. Same can apply to the PCs themselves: they're abilities and possibilities can change depending on the location, for example in a game set in Texas the PCs could have much easier access to guns and better skill with them. So, any ideas for some region specific spooks and encounters and how could the regions affect the characters?
Brody Torres
Have them see the crash while they're cleaning the windows or taking out the trash or something. If they don't check out the crash right then and there having some mutated animals or people come through The Station should pique their curiosity.
Thomas Adams
>Curiosity Not him, but that's one of the main problems with Night Shift. The PCs are not adventurers. They're regular Joes and they're at work. Their job is to simply keep the station running and they have no business in risking their lives to investigate and get involved with weird shit. In fact, they probably should NOT leave the station without a very good reason - you don't just leave work in the middle of the shift because you saw something interesting through the window. I know this may sound like inventing problems, but players who actually consider their character's situation and roleplay accordingly instead of always going D&D mode will probably(and I'm speaking from experience here) refuse to go into the spooky woods just because, instead of staying in the safety of the station which is their goddamn job anyway. I mean, everyone who has seen a horror movie in their life should know that going there would end up badly.
Jace Evans
>Their job is to simply keep the station running and they have no business in risking their lives to investigate and get involved with weird shit. Sure, but this is also a game that leans a little on the campy side and, even if you're playing it more straight, it's not unreasonable for a character to check out something that fell out of the sky if it landed nearby and they're taking out the trash during a slow moment or on their smoke break. Plus, at least in my experience running the game, at least one Night Shift PC is usually a fuckup of some sort who has no qualms with slacking off on the job and checking stuff out when he gets the chance.
James Cooper
Perhaps, but I just know that my main group suffers from a heavy and annoying "why the fuck should we do that?" syndrome, so it would never fly in their case, especially in a setting like this that kind of encourages passivity.
Ryan Nelson
The thing that I dig most in NightShift is the fact you need to do pretty mundane tasks above all. No one cares you solo’d a dragon if no sales were made. There any resources about actually running the shop? I’d love to go full on with a horror-economics game where nothing is scarier than bankruptcy.
Jonathan Kelly
>tfw you have to chose whether to discount the sandwiches that are going out of date, selling more but for a reduced profit, or risk having to write them off for a complete loss on whatever didn't sell...
Jeremiah Rivera
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Leo Wright
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Logan Lewis
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Dominic Fisher
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William Mitchell
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Wyatt Murphy
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Adrian Evans
I always assumed West Texas, I guess this is why we have these threads.
My guess is that everyone uses the boondocks they know best
Landon King
If you're looking for some inspiration for a horror themed adventure check out "The Void."
The films premise is basically a really bad night in a middle of nowhere hospital and it just devolves from there.
do you think their should be regular customers? Like Officer Fatso, the methheads, stoner kids?
Ayden Garcia
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Aiden Roberts
It depends on who authored the book.
David Anderson
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Jace Taylor
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Jacob Bennett
Dont want to be that guy but Wendigos
Logan Roberts
Why are Wendigos that-guyish?
Andrew Baker
I was wondering about variations to the format of the cozy gas station. What about a truck stop?
Those tend to be physical larger and have more night-oriented activity. A distant line of ever-changing parked trucks in the night would serve as a new point of balance. The truckers get upset if you wake them, because of course they havent seen anything strangethey were asleepand stop asking us if there were always 13 trucks in this line, because there were 14 trucks before each of them pulled in and of course there are only 12 now.
Maybe a specific run through of the game could even be designed around Iowa 80 itself.
Angel Reed
The Princess Bride is narration and then "The good stuff" version. It's a story about a (fictional) book the author's (fictional) grandfather read him as a child. It makes reference to edits and removals from the "original" book, and refers to the (fictional) setting as if it were a real place and the events actually happened and the original book was historical.
I assume the copy in the station is the "First Edition" Princess Bride
Mason Parker
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Jeremiah Long
How about a roadside motel? This opens a lot of whole new encounters based on the fact that people(and not only people) will actually stay there overnight instead of just dropping by
William Ramirez
My moniker is slowly becoming less and less relevant.