Finally I got around to writhing this, yeah!

Last Easter me and something around 10/12 other guys went out for the holiday to dedicate 6 days to playing everything from card games (Poker, Bang!, etc.), consoles (Wii, PS2, Xbox, etc.), boardgames (Puerto Rico, Game Of Thrones, etc.) and RPG.

So planing for this I brought some things with me, Dogs In The Vineyard, Capes, Spirit Of The century and TSoY. However surprise struck me when once we got there and started to unpack e decide what to start playing a nice couple and another fine chap turned to me and said "Hey, you got to GM a Don't Rest Your Head story for us!". Some time ago I lend the book to guy who owned the house we went to, because he was going to play with me in another game, and apparently he showed it off to some of those guys and they really liked it. So now here I am, far away from home completely ambushed into GMing a game to witch I didn't even brought the book for, and it went something like this.

Characters
Daniel Lopez - Poker player. Just caught cheating in a game with the Triads. His talents has a player have been slipping, because of his flamboyant life style and it's keeping him awake at night. On the surface his an accomplished poker player with a high and easy life style, but beneath his depressed on account of his inability to make real friendship with people who aren't just after his money. What he really wants is to have the willpower to abandon his lifestyle and go back to the "simpler days".

David - 19 year old base player. Just broke every clock in his house on a rage outburst. Overnight he felt that his "inner rhythm" wasn't in synch with the rest of the world and he's being trying to find a solution to it everynight since then. On the surface he's a great player and a bit shy, however he hides a bipolar disorder. He wants to get his mojo/rhythm back in order to once again find his right place in the world.

Marylin Lopez (Daniel's Sister) - 32 year old business woman. Just watch with her husband the news about a decomposed body that was found by the cops. Hasn't slept since she accidentally killed her husband's mother with her car and hid the corpse. On the surface she's a perfectly normal business woman, but beneath she hides an obsessive and paranoia disorder, both have just been charged up. She wants her life back, like it was before the accident.

Game
All the characters stories sort of interwined on the Blackjack Casino.

Daniel was faced with a sort of forced invitation to the Big Fish, The Big Kahuna, The Big Boss (yes, this is the Nightmare's whole name) yearly poker tournament. After a lot of fighting and running he decided to go to the tournament, the rules were very simple, the 3 final contestants got to play a single hand of poker against the Big Fish, The Big Kahuna, The Big Boss, if they won they were granted access to the Wishing Well but to do that they had to bet high stakes.
During the eliminations I made a conflict were a woman would try to hit on him and he would have to try to see if she was doing it for the money or not (she wasn't and he knew), he failed and lost his chance at love.
So the finalists were Mr. Fan, a "guy" who was... well a Fan (I don't know if I wrote it well, it's one of those things that usually rotate and have paddles inside to produce a cool fresh breeze), he made a bet on his soul in order to became all mighty and powerfull. Daniel who putted his player's talents on the line to save his sister from Mother When. A 10 year old girl who putted her life on the line in order to gain World peace.
David won and chose to get the Scar "I killed a 10 year old girl and prevented World peace".
The end scene for him (and his sister) was a return to the Wishing Well were he and his sister played yet another hand, this time he betted all of his happy memories and the ability to ever be happy in the future in order to get the paper boys off of both their backs. Afterwards he concluded that his gambling habit had cause enough damage and chaos in his life, so he left it all behind.

Marylin began with her husband almost reading in the Mad City Buggle (the Paper Boys news paper) about her involvement in his mother death, so she (oh my god so brilliantly) used her Madness Talent of "Bringing out the dead" to make his dead mother appear in the living room in order to distract the husband, witch allowed her to run off with the newspaper (another brilliant scar came from this).
When she arrived at the Blackjack they told her she had a meeting with Mother When, while she waited the Lady's In Hating show her the future where she would be a debauched backstabbing cold hearted bitch, that would do anything in order to get more power and was able to handle each and every hard situation she was faced. She decided that she would have none of that, even if Mother When would make all her problems go away, so she ran, unfortunately one the Lady's infected her during the escape.
After a lot of chases around Mad City she came back to her and asked her to remove the infection in exchange she would became her servant in the Real World but not a Lady In Hating, she did so and also told her that her biggest problem was the Paper Boys, who were hell bent on catching her and publishing the news about her husband's mother, they had already spread the news all over Mad City witch was freaking her out (specially when some one like Jack The Ripper asked her for an autographed news paper).
In the end she used her Madness Talent to bring out the victims of the Titanic so that she and her brother could break into the Big Fish, The Big Kahuna, The Big Boss's boat and get to the Wishing Well. Afterwards she decided that she had enough running and hidding and went back to tell the truth to her husband.

David found in his apartment a big tower clock that had a very nice rhythm to it and when she tried to fix all the clocks he had in order to be like that one Madness Dominated and he threw it out the window, when it shattered against the pavement all the pieces gained life and started to run away in different directions and melting into the ground.
It was an Austriac Type clock, witch was the kind that ran away from people and once broken would reform at the Time Factory, located smackdown on the center of the 13th District. This one in special was the one that hold the perfect rhythm that he was looking for. She got all of this information from the White Rabbit after beating Officer Tok who wanted him to became one of his subjects and emanated a kind of oppressive rhythm, the kind she didn't liked.
She used a couple of Austriac Type clocks she stole from the White Rabbit and made hostage (this gained her a scar, because she liked the little ones and it was a terrible thing to torture information out of them) to tell her the right way to the factory. Once she got there she had to make a deal with the Wax King, but the King tried to mislead and hypnotise her into his service but she was able to fight him off with her Madness Talent that brought out another personality of his that was much more violent and hot headed.
Despite this he go into the Factory through the sewers, since the building it self was surrounded by a constant blaze like an eternal structure on fire, found his clock only it was incomplete, the missing piece was in the possession of Officer Tok who was reforming in the Center Of Time It Self, a big battle ensued and he was able to get the missing piece, dismantle the Officer a regain her rhythm/place in the world.
This, by the way, was the freakiest story I've ever saw and I have no idea how all of us were able to come up with this, it was more of a quest-like story than that of the other characters only with higher concentration of insanity, witch for me is pretty damn awesome.

Remarks
We didn't had the book (has I've explained) so I had to improvise some of the rules I didn't knew by heart, like the Hope Coins, we decided that they could be used to change the value of a die by one number higher or lower (like the Pain).

First of all it was really great the way I was able to explain to them how to play the game just by going through the character sheet (didn't even needed the book), unfortunately I don't get to see enough games were you get to do that and I think that's one of the wonderful things about this game, everything you'll ever need is in there.

While being played completely on improvisation I think it went pretty well, there was although a couple of failures on my part regarding the structure of the story. Since I thought that it would be a fast paced very short term play I focused on the "What's you path?" answer from the beginning to create conflicts, the problem with this is that when afterwards I wanted to use the "What lies beneath?" it came out... weird, like it was totally out of place and force fed into the story.

From this I learned that if I'm really going for this type of game again (and I probably will, with a trio of Boardgames geeks who have been asking me to show them what an RPG is all about) probably a better conlfict-structure would be to start with some intense short lived stuff right from the Kicker (trying to get a dominance or two), then move along to the "What lies beneath?" and burn it a bit slower, so to get that really juicy paranoia feeling out of them, escalating in big jumps in order to blaze everything in resolving the "What's your path?" answer. Any thoughts/suggestions/advice on this?

Concerning the players I get the feeling (unfortunately I haven't had the chance to speak to them since then) that they really clicked with the whole feeling and structure of the game (and of course the brilliant setting), like in this one time we're we all invested our coins in order to give one of the players a dominance in Madness, I mean wow! the players were working with me so that they could explore a Madness Dominance and put their character into a whole new level of troubles, another brilliant scene was when the player of Daniel also had a Madness Dominance and described how after wining the cards on the table started to shift forms a showed of like one hundred million ways that there was for him to lose the hand and he had to come to grips with the fact that he didn't in fact won the game through skill, he just got lucky (this was a big thing for him).

I think that the motto from them during the game was, "this is great! I really get to influence the story and work with my character, totally unlike D&D (the only thing they had ever played so d so far)", there were a couple of hitches on some Stakes settings and Scene framing, but considering that none of them had ever played this way I think we all got it done really well.

So all in all it was a great couple of hours of gaming, a great start for me has a 1st time DRYH GM and a great start for the 1st time players also, who really help me to build that story in such a short notice and totally on the fly. And of course a great game like this also helps a lot hehe.