Sunday night I got to do a playtest of The Real Housespouses of X in its current state. I learned a lot but also too little. The biggest takeaway was that this is a module that will take multiple sessions to run. It’s my intention to unpack why below, as I take you through the night.

A few things to note up front:

• The table consists of 6 players
• We generally only have 2, to 2 1/2 hours to play
• A few of my players decided to get real lit in the spirit of things

Part 1: Rolling Characters

Rolling characters was the absolute strongest part of the night, and should have been my first cue to slow things down. This is a group that usually balks at dice fueled character creation. But by the time they were rolling for the number of marriages and children they had, the table came alive. Everyone began talking about the reasons why their marriages had failed, what their kids were like.

Now this is also a group that has trouble staying on task, and so when we got to rolling for their traits things went off the rails a bit. Now six players is a lot and I should have known that they would want to discuss each trait they got with each other. To give you an idea of what was rolled, there was:

Felicia - 3 marriages, 1 child, and dating. Their aspirational trait was that they had a pilots license. Their flaw was that they let their need to settle the score get in the way every time. Their secret was that they had bailed their child out the night before. And they were serving a, and I quote from their sheet because it’s better than my prompt, “great glitter bitch” look.

-and-

Teea’l - 5 marriages, 4 children, and single. They took their aspirational prompt to mean, “wants to be dead.” Their flaw was that they gestured aggressively with their hands. Their secret was that they were having money trouble. And they were wearing an oversized streetwear crew sweater with above the knee stiletto boots and oversized glasses.

Even missing the background table I forgot to include, everyone was having fun elaborating on their characters as I tried to settle them down for game time. Character creation had taken about 30 minutes already.

Part 2: Why so fast?

With only about an hour and a half left in the evening and knowing that I only had this session to playtest with the group, I decided to make it a speedrun. The PDF manuscript sits at 30 pages right now, and 5 of those are devoted to character creation. In contrast, the room descriptions for the mansion sits at 12 pages and is going to expand even more in the next edit. Point being there’s a lot here and I didn’t spend a lot of time building it up because I wanted to get to the characters doing something as fast as possible.

Part 3: The Playthrough

You should skip this part if you want to avoid spoilers. But I’m guessing you’re here because you want some.

I started them at dinner with The Clairvoyant. I played her closely to the clairvoyant that appears in a season of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills - saying things like, “Oh, I feel like JFK is sitting at the table with us. Isn’t that so marvelous?” I encouraged them to ask the clairvoyant some questions, but they were still having fun just being their characters. I pressed with an, “Anything? Anything?” and finally I got a question out of Teea’l.

“Will JFK endorse my line of designer dogs?”

I did my best to build some tension with some deep breaths and some “oooooms” before fake convulsing and declaring that The Clairvoyant had just faceplanted into her dinner as the power went out briefly before backup generators kicked in, providing only auxilary power to the house.

This got them involved in their surroundings, like I wanted them to. Just not for very long. They wanted instead to do some interviews before proceeding. We did a few, and although I told them that they could retcon in an item or some experience that would help them in the moment, they struggled to come up with something in the moment.

We moved back to doing some exploring of the mansion. I used the Filmcrawl table to decide when they would encounter a haunting or monster. There were a few haunting encounters on the first floor before I, ever mindful of the time, used my role as The Producer to direct them to the basement utility room. They, ever faithful to their characters, decided that this was a PA’s job at first and so there was a bit of back and forth over why they should even be involved. They followed along in the end and I got them to one of the many access points in the mansion to the secret subbasement where I knew I could force a main encounter.

The Filmcrawl dice did not disappoint and I rolled a monster encounter as they arrived. I gave them some time to prepare, keeping the Aesthete behind a locked door for two rounds. When it broke into the room it was able to seriously fuck up one of the Housespouses before being put down. I came in as The Doctor to explain the Aesthete’s existence - the reception was lukewarm at best. And as they tried to punch holes in the “why even is this guy doing this?” I rolled the Filmcrawl dice and got a 1, which meant dire portent. In this case, I got to kill The Doctor using another Aesthete and no longer had to answer questions.

This was the endgame for them. 3 Aesthetes, 4 DEX saves a piece to escape. Failure meant an Aesthete caught you and did some damage, but that was it. If they rolled a successful DEX save after failing I let them be caught up. I had about 15 minutes to wrap up. I killed the Housespouse that got attacked previously, as well as Teea’l. The rest escaped in the sprinter van while they watched more monsters exit the house and try to chase after them.

Part 4: Takeaways

There are quite a few takeaways, and I’ve mentioned the biggest one already.

This is a module that is best run over three 2ish hour sessions at least. It behooves whomever is running the game to let the players develop their Housespouse a bit first. One thing that I wasn’t sure would play well was the trope of the Housewives picking rooms when they’re on a trip. Now I’m certain its necessary to help root the players in their character and in the mansion. I can see the first hour of the first session easily devoted to character creation, the mansion tour and room picking.

There are also so many rooms and so many details and clues to fill them. We only picked up one or two during the playtest. But they are essential to establishing the coherence of the obsessed doctor and the actual weirdness the clairvoyant is up to. Also, I have this whole, “your friend has gone missing since the beginning of the season” thing that I totally dropped the ball on.

I also introduce the idea of progressively worse Fallout tables. The idea behind this is that the Fallout they encounter at the beginning of the module is going to be less intense, but the wilder things become so does the Fallout. I initially thought to link it to the Clout stat the players can earn and then spend to make things go their way, but in retrospect it makes more sense to tie it to the phases of haunting that occur. My concern though is that the idea is a little overwrought or bulky.

Part 5: Conclusion

The things that worked, worked well. And the things that didn’t seem to work would have probably been helped by spending more time building things up for the players. The mansion is a dungeon that the players should get to see most of before the weirdness gets set off. They should have a collection of clues before The Clairvoyant inevitably bites it. And the players also need time to get into character. They have a lot to work with by the end of character creation, so it’s important to let that develop. It’s only for the better when shit does get weird.

There’s a lot of things that I want to change, and frankly I’m a little disappointed in myself for how I ran the game. But here’s the thing: everyone was laughing and having fun the entire time.

It is a reminder to not take things too seriously as much as it is a reminder of why even do this in the first place.