Hunger Games RPG

Well I promised a post about our RPG, so here it is. If any of you aren't already into gaming here's a good tip: find a geeky friend to help you. I LARP and play RPGS, but I was a bit over my head when it came to initial planning of the whole thing. Thankfully, I had my trusted friend Josh to help me out.

While I was waiting for him to come help me with getting character sheets and explaining how to be an ST (storyteller or GM, if you prefer Game Master - since that's what they were called in the books), I took it upon myself to map out my arena and get an idea of what weapons I wanted available to my players. If I had graph paper, I would've used it - instead, I measured and drew the grid. In my head, each square was 1/4 mile, but I don't think that was realistic enough. It probably would've only been 100 ft or so. *shrugs* The great thing about being GM is that if you find things that aren't working, you can spontaneously change them.

The first map is the one that only I could see.
 I mapped out the terrain and any predators, traps, and poisonous animals/plants that I wanted them to run into. This is also the map I used to keep track of where they all were.
In a normal RPG game, all the players are working together - so it doesn't matter if they know where each other are on the map. In this game, since the players were all against each other, I had to come up with a way to keep them from knowing that, hence the second map. See - if this game was "real life", the characters would have NO IDEA where the other people were. For them to look on a map and see would have given them an unfair way to find each other. The second map was totally blank. I don't even know why I gave it to them, except that so they could keep track of where they were in their heads. Pretty much, I showed them where they were to start out, and then when they wanted to move they would tell me "x # of spaces in X direction" (i.e. 3 squares north or 2 squares southwest). I drew a little dot in each space they moved, so I had a little line to help me keep track of things.

I found a list of weapons on a DnD website, and used a lot of those. Things like a spear, a trident, throwing knives, and a bow and a quiver of arrows are all good weapons. Things like firearms are not, as they were not used in the books. Things like +1 damage mean the player gets to roll an additional dice to see if they hit someone.

It's interesting. I ran this game with two very different groups of kids. My teens at the Main library had all read the books, so they were very cautious and strategic about EVERYTHING. My teens at FW hadn't read any of the books, so they dove head-on and even attacked each other during the first game! Awesome! As much as the game is cool because it brings the story to life for the kids, I actually preferred playing with the kids who hadn't read the books yet. Hopefully, playing this game will spur them to do so. I'm thinking about doing an event close to the time of the movie opening in March. I want to get some archery stations set up and show the kids how to do things like camouflage paint and rope-tying - you know, survival skills.

The Hunger Games

If you work for a library, and you don't know what The Hunger Games is, then you are stuck in some sort of time wormhole where it's permanently 2004 (or something). It's a fantastic series written by Suzanne Collins and you really need to check it out. I had heard about it and intended to read it, but didn't get off my butt and do it until a bunch of my adult friends got swept up in the stories.

Now, as a little back story, let me tell you that I am a HUGE geek/nerd. I'm part of a stage-combat group that does the living chessboard at the Hoggetowne Medieval Faire every year. I LOVE Doctor Who and Being Human (esp. the British version). The nerdiest thing of all is that I LARP - that's live action role-playing. If you're really old-school, it's a modified version of Dungeons and Dragons, but without the dice. That's what I do every Friday night (I know, you're jealous).

Now that you know all that, I can tell you that when I read The Hunger Games, I got inspired. What book would make a better RPG than that? For those of you totally unfamiliar with the premise of the book, America has fallen and a new country, Panem, has taken its place. The country is divided into 12 Districts and the Capitol. The distribution of goods is a bit uneven, so some districts are starving, while people in the Capitol drink liquids that make them vomit just so they can eat more at the fancy parties they go to. A long time ago, the districts tried to revolt against the Capitol and lost. As a punishment, every year they have something called The Hunger Games. 2 tributes are sent from each district to fight in an arena battle to the death. The last person standing wins. If they win, their district gets food for a year (the other reason it is called The Hunger Games is that kids can put their names in more times to be drawn in order to get food for their family).

It's pretty messed up and violent (making it one of the top 10 most challenged books of 2009-2010), but at the same time, I figured it would be something the kids would really get into. It will definitely make for a battle-heavy RPG, but I'm still confident the kids will enjoy it. We're using basic character sheets from World of Darkness, and I'm trying to make the dice-rolling as simple as possible. I will put up another post detailing more of my pre-planning as soon as I have it all figured out.

We're not starting this til November, but I have put up signs and posted a sign-up sheet to try to generate some early interest. I'm doing a scavenger hunt for Banned Books Week and decided today to give away a copy of the book to the winner. Not that anyone really reads this, but in case you do - check out your local Walmart this week! When I went to pick up copies of The Hunger Games (which were only $6.25/each), I noticed they had a lot of the banned books for sale i.e. 1984, Catcher in the Rye, Adventure of Huckleberry Finn, etc.