The All Crotchety Old Folks With Shotguns Game, by Lily Benderskaya and Tory Root
There's a neighborhood where the police don't go. Where gunshots sometimes ring in the streets. No, it ain't some run-down ghetto or nest of teenaged gangsters. It's a little winding suburban development, lawns and shrubbery, arbors and porches, with soft meows echoing from that crazy cat lady's house. But it's also a place full of old folks, and they're old folks that didn't go down easy. No nursing homes for them. Independent living for men and women old enough that they've paid all their dues and no longer give a damn about what other people think. And, one and all, they're armed and dangerous...
The All Crotchety Old Folks With Shotguns Game - does exactly what it says on the tin!
"Snookums runs across the lawn, Jesus in his mouth."
- a GM
Our first experiment with a purely cracky gmae.* We blame this entirely on Brad, who is neither short nor a fangirl, but who somehow still came up with the brilliant idea of a game consisting entirely of crotchety old people with shotguns. Why we did not come up with this genius plan earlier is beyond us. We promptly bid the gmae*, forgot about it, wrote it two days before the con while drunk, printed it that morning, and forgot a stack of item cards. We wanted this to be an experience, you see.
November 20, 2010, at SLAW at WPI in Worcester, MA. There are Photos of this game!
April 13, 2013, at the Brandeis Festival of the LARPs in Waltham, MA.
The All Crotchety Old Folks With Shotguns Game, version 1.0, is a gmae* for eleven players (some characters have predefined genders and some are up to the player) which runs for one hour, in one average-sized room, under the direction of one or two GMs. Average character sheet length is about five hundred words. This game can be cast at the door, and we're not sure whether it could run short, although it would probably not be ideal.
The game is ready to run again, because the typos are part of the experience and we give no fucks. The game has no casting, stuffing, or runtime information, but that would be trivial to write up at some point.
* Please be advised that The All Crotchety Old Folks With Shotguns Game shall be properly referred to as a gmae in all formal contexts as an indicator of its innate qualities.