Dire, Zombie, Cyber Turkey
By Cape Rust
After writing about running a Halloween centric game, I started to think about the upcoming holiday season as a whole. When I say holiday season, I am including Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years. Yes, I am looking at primarily western holidays, but seeing that I am a westerner, I’ll stick to what I know. This week I’d like to tackle a holiday that most people don’t associate with gaming: Turkey Day. I have seen people who have successfully integrated a seasonal “event” into their normal game, but success in this arena is difficult to achieve. I like taking a strategic pause in your normal game to accommodate these seasonal sessions. During my Halloween article, I gave a few examples of how past GMs have been successful in integration efforts and will try to focus on stuffing your mind with great Thanksgiving ideas.
On the heels of Halloween comes Thanksgiving. Of all the holidays that I’ll look at, Thanksgiving seems to be the least promising; however, it is in fact a cornucopia of gaming goodness. The first and easiest way to integrate Turkey Day into an existing campaign is to have your heroes fight a Dire Turkey! Yes, I just went there. If your game is in a fantasy setting, add a few templates: zombie dire turkey, legendary zombie dire turkey, or my personal favorite, feral, legendary, zombie, dire turkey! Always jack up the intelligence of whatever fiendish turkey you come up with. Turkeys are known for their intelligence and at one time were in the running with the bald eagle to be America’s symbol.
While fantasy settings and their tricked out turkeys are great and murder mysteries make for a great main dish, there are other settings that will play for a Thanksgiving game as well. Call of Cthulhu is an easy choice that can create quite a few interesting opportunities. I am not advocating the introduction of elder turkeys, but there is some waddle room. What would happen if, say, a coastal community of Deep Ones and their land bound kin decided to have a beachside Thanksgiving meal that included the PCs doing their best impression of a Turkey dinner?
The first few Thanksgivings happened near the same area of the United States that H.P. Lovecraft set many of his stories. One idea is to have the descendants of the first settlers and Native Americans meet at the site of the first Thanksgiving to prevent horrible, world ending things from happening. The PCs can be decedents of Native Americans or settlers and there can be internal factions of both sides trying to bring about the turkeypocalypse. Sprinkle in a shaman and an evil corporation and you are golden.
The game Colonial Gothic seems to provide the perfect mixture of horror and history. If you are not familiar with the setting, the name kind of says it all. Imagine if H.P. Lovecraft had a love child with Tim Burton’s movie Sleepy Hallow. It is a gritty setting that is rife with opportunity for Thanksgiving adventures. You can play as settlers from different European nations or as Native Americans. You could role play the first Thanksgiving or have it occur after a combined party of Native Americans and settlers destroy a coven of witches blighting the land. There are plenty of support products for this setting and the idea of supernatural interactions during this time period is unique.
Let’s move from a horror filled Thanksgiving to a more contemporary setting. Modern settings lend themselves to murder mystery dinner theater. If you don’t like turkey, why not serve up your game as a great feast, that can easily turn into a murder mystery? I guess most seasonal games can end up with a murder mystery but if done well, they can be fun. If you are looking for a change of pace in your game without leaving it, the murder mystery dinner is great. Characters have to eat or at least go to their local watering hole to get information. Running a futuristic, cyber murder mystery adds a whole new dimension to this old trope. If you are running a war themed game, Thanksgiving is a time when even the most forward deployed troops hope for a turkey dinner or any hot meal for that matter. The quest for hot food alone is a great way to change things up without completely messing up your normal storyline.
Vampires! The whole feasting thing is almost too good to pass up. Yes, this takes people back to filling in for Turkey but it works so well. I would actually use this interlude to add a little humor to the normally dark world of Vampires (pun intended). There is a great argument about turkey and its ability to make you sleepy. What would happen if sucking the blood from people who were stuffed with turkey had a similar effect on vampires? The stupor caused by feeding on turkey stuffed people could be funny and dangerous. What if there are a group of “Hunters” that gather once a year to hunt the vampires who are in that turkey stuffed people stupor? This idea alone will give you two years worth of Thanksgiving vampire themed games. The first year the players can be the vampires and the next year, hunters.
I have to admit that I didn’t think I would get anything near a full article out of this topic, but as the concept of Thanksgiving centric games started cooking in my twisted little brain, I realized just what great things you can do on this rather unlikely gaming holiday. I still believe that making a holiday game should be a fun way to take a break while staying at the table, but there are some real good, serious holiday situations that can add great flavor to any game. The key to holiday gaming is in the preparation. You have to start preparing early and make sure that no matter what you prepare, you don’t over cook it!
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