GM: Timothy Grant
Players: Elias Muhall, Eleanor Truman, Avram Grumer, Peter Hogmann, Sean Nittner, Marcy Lerner
System: A Town Called Eerie
In Eerie, strange things happen every day—but adults never notice. By eighteen, people begin dismissing the impossible and forgetting what they’ve seen. The Office of Standardization knows the truth, but works to keep everyone complacent and ensure the strange things are forgotten. That leaves the kids. Players take on unique roles through playbooks like: The New Kid, The Sidekick, The Gadgeteer, The Enigma, and The Overachiever. Together, they investigate strange occurrences, gather evidence, document discoveries, and stop dangerous events from spiraling out of control. Their secret hideout is the one safe place to preserve the truth. Eerie uses a dice-pool system where every roll matters. Success can come at a cost, escalating danger through the Distortion track.
Playtesting Goals: Test the dice mechanics and consequences, playbook balance and uniqueness, and Distortion pacing. Does escalating danger create tension without overwhelming investigations? Do the mechanics encourage meaningful choices and capture the feeling of kids facing the impossible?
This game was a delightful romp though a 90s small town (pop 2665) where the adults didn’t think anything wrong. They shucked corn, they made corn chowder, the worshiped corn gods. Normals stuff. The kids however, at least until they turned 18, knew something was eerie!
We played:
- Dakota Sterling, the Overachiever (Avram)
- Heather, the Gadgeteer (Marcy)
- Rosie, the Rebel (Eleanor)
- Holden, the Enigma (Elias)
- Clay, the New Kid (Peter)
- Charlie, the Sidekick (Sean)
Together in an abandoned tractor factory we made our hideout including a mysterious board, comic books, satanic band posters, A-D and M-O of the Encyclopedia Britannia, and a cat named pretzel.
Holden mostly lived there and we all pitched in to bring him good. Charlie brought corn flakes, corn pops, capn’ corn crunch, you know, all the kinds of cereal there are.
Tomorrow would be the Corn Harvest Festival, the biggest celebration all year. It’s where Kirk Jackman (owner of Jackman fields and Charlie’s uncle) would host a corn maze for the kids, a lot for vendors to sell wares, and fun activities for everyone.
We’d been hearing rumors about folks hearing whispers in the corn maze, which the adults dismissed as the wind carrying voices.
We hung out, Holden played Stairway to Heaven on his guitar, and Charlie told Rosie how envious she was that Rosie had a shot at being Ms. Junior Cornflower in the pageant, a title Rosie very much did not wand to have!
That night Rosie’s family tried to get her to wear the corn costume at the festival which caused a big fight.
Meanwhile Clay was over at Charlie’s house having corn flakes for dinner with her brothers red shadows came from under the door of the meeting of the Loyal Order of the Corn, which Charlie’s parents led and Clay’s mom Doreen had joined.
Mystery solving
In the morning, the day of the festival we:
- Saw Martha, the waitress at the diner who always brought Holden blueberry pancakes, get mind controlled and start walking towards the corn silo.
- Rewired the radio to broadcast people’s thoughts (all Heather’s work)
- Followed the signal back the decommissioned corn silo
- Distracted uncle Jackman and overhead them talking about gaining recruits and dealing with the “thing in the silo” (Clay and Charlie)
- Broke into the silo (thanks to Rosie giving the door a swift kick) snuck down into the gloom (brave Holden), incentives the machine below as something affecting brainwaves (Dakota), found the power source (Heather), and pulled it free (a group effort, with Rosie at the lead).
The festival went on as we all hoped, with nothing worse than a run of the mill cult meeting (which Clay told Charlie it didn’t have to be that way, an eye opener for her). The town of Eerie was safe from the “HARVEST”, whatever that might have been.
Thoughts on the Game
The core mechanic was similar to Forged in the Dark (d6 die pool, take the highest result) with some additional granularity including four outcomes (1,2-3,4-5,6) and and escalating weird track driven by rolling 1s. Most of those extra options introduce mechanical complexity without adding tactical depth. I’m a big fan of Forged mechanics but I find that to really customize them, they often need to be broken down before being added to or modified.
We didn’t see a clock for how the weird was progressing so all the strange behaviors felt like they came from the adventure itself rather than being a result of our rolls.
There wasn’t a mechanic for group actions. That’s probably fine, but there should be an answer “what do we do when we’re all pulling on the cable to pull it free of the transceiver?”
Adding multiple skills to a single die roll made the dice pools easily exceed 5 dice without much effort and I think for Forged rolls, 2-3 is the sweet spot.
Being in the 90s posited lots of questions for the gadgeteer, most significantly I think the game needs an answer to questions about the internet and cell phones, both of which have huge effects on game play.
Despite my critiques, I had a great time playing this game. The spooky town felt like a lovely cross between Welcome to Nightvale and Stranger Things. Our kids were normal kids in an abnormal world. Our relationships were heartfelt and spurred us to action and reflection. I had a delight.
