Carnage on Cape Cod,
is live!
RANDOM WORLDS Q&A
This Saturday we had a live Q&A with Dan Davenport (Hardboiled GMshoe) on their discord Randomworlds.
We covered many topics, and those that we didn't touch upon, you can likely find in the creator's diaries.
Follow the link to find our Q&A transcript:
Carnage on Cape Cod,
the upcoming horror adventure set is on ZOOP crowdfunding platform!
Introduction to Carnage on Cape Cod
"He’s sitting across from you. He has no face. Just a swirling black on his featureless head. Calming, like the rocking of the sea, or some mother’s arms. A gentle void, this gentleman. And in him, you see all you want to become. Nothing. Immense, ignorant, immaculate, inviting, Nothing. Earnest emptiness. Rest in the reign of chaos. The summer rain inside. Like waves of the sea, of his face. The ultimate death of self. Eternal peace".
Carnage on Cape Cod is a Lovecraftian mystery steeped in horror, set in Haddoc- a small, coastal, fictional (or perhaps, forgotten?) town, where something always lurks in the corner of your mind.The choices you make, your character's health, sanity, and dice rolls shape the story and ultimately determine its outcome.Carnage on Cape Cod explores themes of death, poetry, love, struggles with mental health, inner voices, and much more. It does so through memorable characters, vivid storytelling, nightmares, and your direct decisions, all the while the Great War ravages the world.This book is your storyteller. It expands on the classicinteractive formula by adding various TTRPG elements and optional journaling to fully flesh out your investigator.But don't be intimidated by this.If keeping track of your experience points and character customization isn't your cup of tea, you can tailor and scale the experience for your enjoyment by following the same story with fewer rules.If you're looking forward to the crunch, there's plenty of it to gnaw and sharpen your teeth on. You might need them sharp later on.
Player character sheet
The Interactive Solo TTRPG novel is your Game Master.A horror mystery with 135,000 words and over 900 story entries that tailor a personal journey, letting you experience 450 entries per read on average, and saving the rest for consecutive replays.Countless options and numerous skill checks will drive the narrative forward and shape your character as you progress.Volume I expands on the classic interactive novel format by adding various RPG elements and optional journaling to fully flesh out your investigator and their plight, should you wish to do so.
The classic TTRPG adventure scenario holds all a Game Master needs to run this mystery horror- a complete campaign with choice-dependent variations, timelines, backstories of all important characters, their motivations, their portraits, and player handouts.Carnage on Cape Cod is a system-independent game that comes with its own set of rules, character sheet, and it’s played with six-sided dice.The length of the campaign is 6-9 sessions, and it’s suitable for any number of players with minimal adjustments.
Hello all,And thank you so much for being with me on this journey.I love this project to bits.And I’ve been sailing blindly on it since October 2019.It started small, as a dream at first, a conceptualized thought soon after, then a line of dialogue:“Which void do you fear the most? The one with teeth or the one without?”And the next logical step was an RPG I was to GM for my closest group of friends.
We finished the adventure just before COVID sent us ZOOMing online.Even after we were done, I couldn’t let go. I was thinking about all the ups and downs and all the ways it could be improved upon.
So, in between random paying gigs, I was doing my little Carnage on the side for years to come.Given my background in interactive storytelling, an interactive novel was a no-brainer. Adding game design to that background, I wanted to explore what else I could offer to the genre. That’s where various RPG elements came into play, and the optional journaling, should you wish to explore the depths of your character, along with the depths of a strange little coastal town.This is my first solo project ever. I was a poet turned dramaturg and playwright, who worked in a theater collective before joining different teams at several gaming companies as a Narrative designer. After some professional hardships and heartbreak, I decided to try to go for it on my own. That was two and a half years ago, when Carnage on Cape Cod became my sole obsession.All the knowledge I accumulated so far, I poured into it.I was a lone rider this time around, so I knew I had to place a heavy emphasis on playtests, feedback, and critiques over the years and implement them as I went.And since I was on no one else’s time and budget, I was a cruel master and puppet.I wanted to avoid the illusion of choice at any given opportunity. I wanted to make the choices matter and offer plenty to choose from. I wanted to add scenes you can avoid if you pick a different option. I wanted you to experience a true TTRPG as much as possible without having a GM to accommodate your decisions.I wanted you to be important. And I wanted you to feel.In turn, all of this amped up the replay value, should you wish to give it another go sometime in the future.I had no idea how big this project would get or how difficult it would be to gain visibility as an introvert, both online and off. But there’s no giving up! Never giving up.This project is too important for such.And the funny thing is, I consider Carnage on Cape Cod, standalone as it is, to be the first book in a trilogy, followed by Terror on Mount Triglav, which is already mapped out. But we’ll talk about that mountain when we cross this sea.Thank you,Nina
Hi, there, you most wonderful of creatures!I hope you feel appreciated.
I hope your tea or coffee is always warm, your pillow always cold, your bureaucratic lines always short, and a fun earworm is always in your head instead of ugly, intrusive thoughts.This interactive novel happened mostly to honor you.After running Carnage on Cape Cod as a homebrew adventure for my friends, it got me thinking about forever GMs who very rarely (read, never) get to play.So, this one is for you, dear storytellers. Play a while, debate with yourself what to do for the longest time, make reckless decisions, roll badly, and do what you want.I did my best to simulate the many different paths you might take, emphasizing choices and consequences.And I believe this experience adds a special layer to climbing back to your GM’s throne after completing the adventure on your own.• You will experience the story through a novel-like structure,
• You will organically familiarize yourself with the environment,
• You will get to form spontaneous connections to the NPCs,
• And you will get to experience the nightmares you are about to give to your friends in a party-structured play.Carnage on Cape Cod Adventure Scenario is your toolbox for the paintset that was the Interactive novel.
There, you will find everything laid out in the open, with no secrets or mysteries to solve; every character's motivation will be bare before you, the backstory will be revealed from the get-go, along with plot points, hooks, and twists.You don’t have to go through the interactive novel to run this adventure. The Adventure Scenario has all your bases covered. Except maybe for those pesky emotional ones.I hope you have an extra special day,
Nina loves you
Today, I want to talk about dreams, or nightmares (the indistinguishable two), their significance in my life, and their inclusion and influence on Carnage on Cape Cod.I’m a vivid dreamer who dreams at least three dreams a night, and often wake my partner by screaming at an ungodly hour. I’m a little screech like that who would be chronically tired if not for my anxiety keeping me vigilant at all times. And there’s balance! Crooked, but functional. Sums me up nicely.At one point, my therapist suggested I keep a dream diary so that we could talk about the specifics of my anxiety. And I did it from March to July of 2020.
It backfired.
It became my personal Lost Highway. And all I could do was stop the car or crash down the road.
I became hypervigilant in my dreams as I am when awake. I was so caught up in writing them up that even when I woke up between night terrors, I was reciting the previous nightmare to myself so I don’t forget to scribble it up in the morning before I get to dreamlands again.Rinse and repeat.And I’m a person who goes all out. The one that HAS to do everything. You know, I HAVE to vacuum, I HAVE to work, I HAVE to exercise, I HAVE to relax, I HAVE to write my dreams type.
Well, at least I dropped one I have to. I stopped writing my dreams.
And all I learned from that experiment was that I am but different degrees of anxious.My dreams are as wild as ever. But I don’t hyperfocus on them anymore. They are just there, hanging out, freaking me out, and sometimes, just sometimes, inspiring me to write.Carnage on Cape Cod first materialized in a dream of sea and blood.
And I knew I mustn’t betray my night jailors by leaving them out of my playhouse. Playhouse, being Carnage.So, besides the overall nightmarish feel and the sticky atmosphere, I wrote seven disturbing nightmares that served both the narrative and as a respite from it, while spreading them around the work like red poppies in the fields of yellows and greens I adore so much.
You will experience them on your own in the Interactive novel, and you’ll pick the moments your players should be drenched in them in the Classic Adventure Scenario. This could happen either during a session, as a secret note so the other players are deaf to it, as reading it aloud in a joint meditative moment of unease, or perhaps even in between sessions as an email or a letter(!) to hype up the upcoming gathering of roleplay, dice, terror, and bonding.Dreams are weird.
They are also me. And I would love to share them with you.Nina from the depths
(this rhymes in my native tongue)
Portrayal of (in)sanity can be difficult and sometimes insensitive in games.
Fishmalks from Vampire the Masquerade come to mind, as do some portrayals of the bouts of madness from Call of Cthulhu.But I found that having such elements in a game while suffering from various mental disorders can be therapeutic. I lean towards games that have sanity or stress bars, because I’m certain that I have one in my irl ui/ux.Carnage on Cape Cod is a game of anxiety and spiraling down the hole of murder, ritual, mass hysteria, monsters, and devils. It has a Sanity bar. And it will often drop.But there are also ways of managing it.You can alleviate stress; drink a warm cup of tea or coffee, look at the ocean (before it becomes terrifying), take a bath, read a relaxing book, feel better, even if just temporarily. Sometimes, temporary relief is all that we need before facing something terrible.You will not be gone if your Sanity drops to the lowest space on your character sheet. This will only mark certain actions (of the mind) as automatic failures, given your distress in taking part in them.
The same goes for your Health, and your actions (of the body) when it drops to the lowest space on your character sheet.This is a game of struggle.
This is a game of you giving your all to make sense of yourself, to make things just, to make things right, to make sense of the incomprehensible.But there are latent powers you discover within yourself when you’re being pulled through a wringer. You will upgrade your abilities through experience and adapt yourself to face the knives outside.Not all is lost.
Some of the time.Nina of disorders
Eastern Europe, the land of depression, division, and the place where my house is.We are far away from Cape Cod.
Far away from the sea.
Never that far away from eldritch horror, as it seems.So I spiked Carnage with a little taste of home. With a little bit of what is expected, with a little bit of turning those expectations upside down.
I like to do that in my writing. I like to inject a little juice of where I come from.
And, who knows, maybe you’ll have fun translating texts written in Cyrillic letters, either on your own in the Interactive Novel or giving it as a handout to your players to decipher while running the Adventure Scenario.
And that’s not all there is to it, but I have to tease.So, why Cape Cod?
Because it looks like a fishhook on the map.
Because it has the topography that works for the story.
Because it’s isolated enough.
Because it’s not close to the War.
Because it’s close enough to Innsmouth, where the original adventure I ran took place.
And because I’m a sucker for alliteration.I’m bringing the next book (of the trilogy) closer to home, given that we successfully crowdfunded this one and kickstarted what I envisioned all along.
The second one is called Terror on Mt. Triglav. And it will be a real three-headed beast to face.I plan to keep the books independent of one another, but some seeds have already been planted in Cape Cod that will sprout on Triglav later on.Help me sprout them, will you?Nina, the planter
I’ve seen debates whether tws and cws should be included in books.
And my stance is firm. It’s a yes.
Why? Because they can easily be ignored, and more importantly, they can also be a lifesaver. When that panic hits, it feels like a struggle to remain alive. So, why chance it if there’s another option?Usual suspects against are either “it’s woke” or “it’s spoilers”.
I’m not indulging the first one, but I agree with the second.
The list can spoil the media you’re about to immerse yourself in. But I also believe that the list isn’t meant for everyone to read. Only for us, panic children.For instance, I didn’t need one ten or so years ago. But now I risk a full-blown panic attack by exposure to certain subjects. Having a list lets me make a conscious decision about whether I feel capable enough to face what I dread that day.
And also, and this one is key, it won’t sneak up on me and press its many fingers down my lung tubes.I love Doesthedogdie. It saved me so much grief over the years. And while there, I focus on the word that triggers me, avoiding the rest.Perhaps there will come a time again when I will overcome my issues enough so that I can go in blindly again. But until that day comes, I’m grateful to anyone who includes them. Thank you!So, here’s the list that comes with Carnage on Cape Cod.
CTRL+f it, read it, skip it, just have it.Suicide, Self-harm, Murder, Body horror, Amputation, Kidnapping, Torture, World War One, Bombs, Burn victims, Bugs, Worms, Maggots, Flies, Rats, Hanging, Mass Hysteria, Sacrilegious imagery, Occultism, Paganism, Possession, Stalking, Restrained people, Unconscious people, Mouth gags, Gaslighting, Killings, Botched medical procedures, Alcoholism, Autopsies, Cadavers, Exhumation, Mental facility, Violence, Anxiety, Panic, Fear, Hypochondria, Drowning, Asphyxiation, Broken bones, Teeth, Eyes, Tongue removals, Fire, Flaying, Coercion, Blood and Gore, Vomiting, Sacrifice, Death, Disability, Cheating, Underwater scene, Nudity, Razors, Prostitution, Miscarriage, Unstable reality, Creepy dolls, Vivid descriptions, Suggestive images, Nightmares, Monsters, Intrusive thoughts, Cannibalism, Police incompetence, Overdose, a dog dies (twice).And feel free to reach out if you need any further clarification.
Without judgment and only tenderness.Traumanina, who loves to read and write horror
When I first ran this adventure for my friends, they were a doctor, a scholar, and a dandy.Their selection influenced my line of thinking as I mapped out the interactive novel, but ultimately, I made some changes.
I decided to keep the doctor, turn the dandy into an artist, and trade the scholar for a cop. Not that I didn’t appreciate the scholar. He was one of the most memorable characters there.
But that’s how the cookie crumbled. And I devoured the crumbs.Each occupation has its own introduction to the character, unique to their circumstances.
The characters come from different lines of work, which means every one of them possesses a piece of information that’s relevant to them, and that’s but a piece of the big puzzle.● The doctor is aware of a recent tragedy because they are treating the victim.
● The artist is aware of a missing person’s case because they were commissioned to do a portrait of the person in question.
● The cop is aware of a recent murder that’s been pushed under the table to keep the panic at bay, and they will be the first to visit the new crime scene.
● The occultist (fingers crossed that we unlock their stretch goal!) will have a special insight into the grizzly happenings through their rituals and will always be one step ahead (or behind).Besides their unique scenes, they will all have unique dialogue and progression choices based on their profession.And that’s just the base of your character.
The rest is you. Your decisions and your journaling.You can run this story multiple times. Not only changing the profession and seeing how it impacts the overall flow of information, but also making different decisions, and rolling better (or worse).Nina, the writer
“Write what you know. Know the rules. Break them.”That was what my professors taught me. And I was always a good student. Because my anxiety would spike otherwise.I’ve been struggling with anxiety disorders ever since I was a pup, and it went on undiagnosed for the first thirty years of my life. Something was always off, but I was very good at raw-dogging it, until I wasn’t. And I’m actually not that fond of struggle anymore. I no longer view it as a badge of pride, or whatever other stupid construct I hid behind. I am no Guts. Nor do I want to be.Now, I do my best to ground myself and keep going. Be fine with living with it. And just keep on keeping on.Carnage on Cape Cod was part of that grounding for me. It was something to take over the intrusive thoughts while giving them to someone else. It was working through pre-anxiety and pre-panic attacks through someone else.
I was writing what I usually feel and do when I still have a shred of control before the big wave hits and sits in my lungs; naming the colors in my vicinity, counting, naming street addresses, distracting myself, listening, breathing, reminding myself of various things, worrying someone else’s worries, and doing anything else to stop the gray brain noise.It made a dear friend sad when she read it. She was aware of my conditions, but I’m formidable at masking them. It made me sad that she got sad. And it was a circlejerk of sadness.But the takeaway shouldn’t be the blues, but perseverance; honing endurance by small victories and an occasional hug. A safe place to ground. A good friend to get sad. Even though I’d prefer leaving out the last part.“Be honest, and your readers will believe you.” is another thing they said.And I didn’t shy away from it. It also served as a vent. Perhaps it will serve someone else.I am at my best in a crisis. And crisis is all that happens in Carnage on Cape Cod.It’s a good distraction. A puzzle to solve.When there’s an actual problem before you, there is no time for imaginary ones, right?And in this place, you’ll get to tackle literal monsters.Nina, who never wants anyone to get sad over him
WE’RE LIVE!Sorry, my mind is in caps all day.BUT THE PROJECT IS ALIVE.
CARNAGE ON CAPE COD LIVES!And on Twin Peaks day, no less!
I choose to believe this is a sign. And that the sadness will indeed end.LET'S GO!
It’s a slippery fish, so grab it while it’s still in the shallow waters of Crowdfunding and my pride and joy! It bites eagerly!I feel excited, elated, relieved, overwhelmed, stressed, blessed, grateful… I feel like dancing goth dances. Those slow, cautious, yet reckless ones. The Audrey ones.I did it. Whatever happens now. I did this.
And the project is pretty good!It features a deeply immersive and disturbing Interactive novel Solo TTRPG (135k words, over 900 story entries) and a Classic Adventure Scenario adaptation (BRP rules included) that you can run for your friends after experiencing it on your own.
The two books may be bought as a set or separately.Check it out, please!And one more thing, I will keep writing these dev diaries throughout the campaign.
Overkill or not, I deeply care about the project, and I would like to share different aspects of its creation with you before it arrives at your doorstep, and the eye on the cover cries my happiest tear in your hands!
Oh, the doorstep and hands might also be inbox and monitor. I’m happy with those, too!Be warned, these journal entries will continue to be personal. Often cringe. But always honest.
And,THANK YOU VERY MUCH!
I don’t want to yell at you. But you being here means the yelling amounts to me!Nina in CapsLock on Cape Cod
(off to watch an episode or two of Twin Peaks to calm down)