DM Notes: Bluebeard's Bride (Part One)
Added 2020-12-22 14:00:00 +0000 UTC
The Bride with the Fox Boy (by Jorie)
I hope you enjoyed listening to the first half of our Bluebeard's Bride game! It's such a unique RPG with so much personality and perspective to play with. It's also a really intense horror game with a lot of dark themes.
Our last horror game, Sleepaway, was before our Patreon, and I thought it might be interesting to talk about the techniques we use to play horror games safely and effectively. Our safety and content mechanics don't tend to make it to air, both because we prefer to focus on story and so the cast can speak more freely without the pressure of recording, but there were a few things I wanted to draw attention to with Bluebeard's Bride.
First, I made sure the cast knew about the content of the game (and that it wasn't about pirates...). After talking it through, Jillian made the decision not to play this game, since she didn't think it would be a good fit for her.
Before playing, the cast read through the safety section in the game rules, and at the top of the record, we reiterated that we were fine with pausing or modifying play at any point.
As GM, I also tried my best to play close attention to how the players were feeling as the game progressed. As we see in the actual episode, Jorie ended up asking for a change in the stable scene, and I'm glad that we got a rare chance to have that in the episode to show an example of how we talk about safety in games.
This just scratches the surface, but I hope you enjoyed a little peek behind the scenes at production of this episode. Next week I'll talk a bit about the music featured in Bluebeard's Bride!
