""Welcome to the Night Shift: Minimum Wage, Maximum Weird."

The Night Shift is a setting and resources for running a horror-game. It is the brainchild of a collaboration of some anons on /tg/. Players are employees working the night shift at a gas station on the lonely side of nowhere. They must balance the drudgery of their mundane duties and responsibilities with the uncanny, preternatural, supernatural, and paranormal events which seem to happen at this particular gas station."

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Had this on my hard drive, I believe it was supposed to be an example questionnaire I wrote up for running Night Shift in Dread. Might have posted it before, but I never had a chance to run it myself.

This is almost two years old, but I believe the idea behind the * questions was hoping that the players would contradict each other for maximum weirdness.

>>54191269
>Did anything ever come of it?
I don't know, did you ever cause anything to come of it?

>>54191590
I didn't, anon. Did you?

>>54191583
Also if this thread doesn't work out op, I advise you to try again mid-october

I didn't realize it before, but Night Shift is probably a predecessor to Urban Unease.

>>54191998
What's that?

>>54192020
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=Urban%20unease

They've been calling it comfy dark. There're horror elements and slice of life elements mixed together in different settings.

>Around 2:15PM a very large, hairless man comes in and buys a Mr. Pibb, a watermelon airhead, and a bag of peanut M&Ms.
>This comes to $3.33
>He always takes 3 pennies from the take a penny leave a penny tray
>Make sure the tray does not run out before he arrives

>>54192137
>PM
fuck I meant AM.
Those assholes on the day shift don't have to deal with this crap.

>>54191269
One of my favorite things that /tg/ has ever made.

>>54192652
I'm torn between it and bugworld.

>>54191269
The same thing happened that happens to anything "good" or "interesting" on /tg/. A handful of anon take the thing off the board, form their own insular circlejerk, and bleed members as petty infighting tears the group apart, while not allowing anyone else in because they aren't good enough to behold the wonders they have wrought.

Every. Single. Time. This is what happens, and people are still surprised. This is why /tg/ never gets shit done, and it's why the board has gone to shit.

>>54193073
What's with the name my dude?

>>54193073
Turn off your name, Wayne. And your bad attitude.

Just watched Safety Not Guaranteed. It is a movie about people relationships but that is not why it is important. The important thing is the premise: in a local newspaper an entry is found and people go to investigate:

>Wanted: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 91 Ocean View, WA 99393. You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.

We need to make some Night Shift adds

>>54193263
What kind of positions are there at a gas station?

I really think this would be a lot of fun combined with that Martian highway idea someone had a while back.

I really would like to play something in this setting some day.

>>54193299
One of the original pdfs lists various positions and archetypes as Clare like classes.

>>54193073

But that's not what happened at all, you moronic tripfag.

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>>54193263
Instead of going back in time, why not go back in space? Inspace.

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http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?searchall=Night+Shift

I work nights at a gas station and just got off shift, AMA

What places of work other than gas stations might fit the general vibe?

>>54194373
DID anything come of it though? It seems like Night Shift is just a collection of ideas with no real grounding to it all. It's less of a setting and more a description of a setting.

>>54198594
Fast Food restaurants, coffee shops, and if you want people to come and sit down at your establishment something like a Denny's or any roadside greasy spoon, those tend to attract the weird graveyard shift people.

And don't forget truck stops.

>>54198531
Ever had a robbery or something that you thought was going to turn into a robbery?

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>>54198594
Pic related?

>>54198659
Never been robbed at this store thankfully, but we suspect there was a potential for it on days. Two guys came into the parking lot at a gas pump, never filled up and just watched the store for 3 hours, drove off in a hurry when a cop car showed up. Came back the next day, we call another cop car, he speeds off.
The day after that was the single busiest on record at that store, and there was never any place for the guys to keep casing the store.

Still pretty scary. We're told "give them anything they want that we have, and don't call the cops until after they've left"

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufAUonsYhVU

>>54191269
If I ever have more than one day off in a row, night shift is top of my list to run with my /tg/ inclined coworkers and friends. There's a lot of crossover with hospo/FOH and gas station stuff.

>>54191269
I love the idea and even tried to do something with it, but I can honestly hardly imagine it to work with anything more than a short one-shot. Unless the PCs would be somehow motivated to actually investigate the weird and fight evil themselves beyond the station, not just trying to keep their asses safe and collect the wage.

>>54193073
I think the reason is more then that. I like the idea behind but every time I see one of those threads I think "what should be discussed". LIke the basic aideas are down. e already have large list of small spooky ideas. And adding more plot hooks "found pentagram with a devil hooker number in the bathroom" is pointless.

Some writefaggotry would be good.but it requires serious effort.

What should we do?

We can define the setting cosmology but getting the cosmology down takes away all mystery from the setting.

Maybe we could run some sort of SCP wiki....
But what would be the enteries?

>>54193073
And what more would you expect to happen? Get a whole fucking sourcebook and lorebooks released? Not going to happen, definitely not with a bunch of anons who don't even know each other and each of them possibly has their own idea about how things should look like. It was a neat idea to play around with a bit and that's what happened, what more to want out of it?

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>>54191269
Nobody posted the Player's Manual?

>>54199910
Frame PC motivation around protecting the gas station and its supplies. You get weird guys in gas masks in strange, unlicensed cars that try to steal gasoline. You have a group of bag ladies that may or may not be witches that are after the candy-but only yellow flavored candy. You have an absurdly tall man suddenly enter the store and hold it up-but not for cash, for your souls. He's asking you to whip out your souls and show them to him. Or else.

A ghost keeps trying to steal your pennies, looking for its one special penny from 1911.

The magazines that get dropped off at the store don't seem to be from this timeline. And the temporal corruption is starting to spread to your stock, turning it into Earth-2 versions of whatever it was before. This is bad because the Earth-2 food tastes like garbage.

The rats are shockingly intelligent. You think they're trying to communicate in the spilt candy they leave on the floor. But what are they trying to tell you? Either way, the boss wants the rats gone. You're going to have to either make them go or come to some sort of an understanding with them.

For some reason you keep napping off at work. While you're sleeping you're in another gas station, in another place, serving other customers. The boss doesn't want you to slack off...but the money from your dream sales are in your till...

What do you think of these hooks?

One thing we can do is to write a oneshot and polish to perfection.

Ok I'm thrilled. WHat is your favoirte hook?

>>54200056
The Gray Man is always a classic.

Should the "boss" (which still answers to management) be a player character or an antagonistic NPC?

>>54200033
They're all great, I'm not saying otherwise, but what I mean is, you deal with the issue, usually on the spot by just getting rid of whatever is causing problems to the station, and then it's just probably another night, another hook thrown at you. It quickly gets boring. To make it more interesting, you would somehow have to force players into investigating beyond the station(or make them want that themselves).
For example, said weird guys stealing gasoline. Players could simply drive them off(shoot, scare, whatever) and it would resolve the issue, but that would quickly get boring. To make the scenario interesting, they would need a motivation to actually track them, discover whoever they are etc. Sitting in the station just wouldn't do for long.

>>54200033

Enemies and problems should be grouped under the umbrella term "weirdness".


COMMON WEIRDNESS

SNIFFITS: Strange black clad people that wear gasmasks and steal gas. They move around slowly and strangely as if not all parts of their body work right, but are capable of shocking feats of strength, sometimes ripping a gas tank out of the ground with their bare hands. They travel around in strange looking vehicles unlike anything you'd find in a car lot. Employees have tried tailing the Sniffits only to lose them on the high way every time. They just seem to blink out of existence.

Threats: Steals Gasoline
Weakness: Light hurts them, slow, not dexterous
Strength: Physically very strong

SEEKERS OF YELLOW: Dirty, smelly old ladies that never come through the door (how they come in is a mystery in itself). They only want one thing: yellow candy. Some will try to purchase it, often with strange currency. Others will try to steal candy. They tend to make a mess rummaging through the store looking for what they want, but they don't often resort to violence. They also scare off customers...even customers that cant' be scared off by normal means, which is both a good and a bad thing.

The yellow cats that roam around the gas station are their familiars or themselves transformed into a different shape. A comely lass with blonde hair might also enter the store and try to chat up an employee. Is she a familiar? A summoned spirit? A young witch in training? The very being the seekers worship?

Threat: Steals Yellow Candy. Disturbs customers. Makes messes
Weakness: Code against (direct) violence against those that offend them
Strength: Can place curses. Frightens away customers of all kinds (can be a good and bad thing)


RATS: The rats are shockingly, disturbingly intelligent, possibly the result of a government experiment. You think you saw one in a cloak the other night...

-cont

>>54200168
Come to think of it, if it would just go with "another night, another weird shit to deal with on the spot happens" it would probably work better with some elaborate tabletop or card game than a ttrpg.

>>54200168
You got a point, I still think there should be "generic" threats against the station. Stuff the old guys just accept as normal after working at the gas station for so long.

>>54200176


The rats target soda, and lots of it. You think it might be because they need the glucose to keep their hyper intelligent brains functioning.

More disturbingly, they sometimes steal from the till. For what end you can only guess at.

The rats can be reasoned and communicated with. If you're willing to work with them, they're willing to help you.

They are also a terrible, terrible enemy to have.

Threats: Steals soda, sometimes money
Weakness: Code of honor means they will only try to steal from you "fairly". They won't escalate into violence unless you hurt one of their own first. If caught and treated fairly the rat will owe you a favor, sort of like a leprechaun. They can be reasoned with, even befriended
Strength: A colony of hyper-intelligent rats. What more needs to be said?

>>54199999
While this is a fun little book I think the rules need more defining. I think a hack of Don't Rest Your Head would work. I'm actually working on an alternate dicr system based on DRYH that plays more like FFG dice. It should be pretty straight forward.
This game needs really quick character gen, easy dice resolution, and light mechanics for both player and GM.
Rules to follow as I write up an outline.

>>54200232
How would we include concepts like the phone in the staff room into a game like that?

>>54191269

I am still around. I have run my Night Shift World hack a couple times but it has since evolved away from using Apocalypse World as a base. It has always been tremendously well received by the groups I've run it for.

The script thing didn't work out. I have outlines and two episodes still sitting in my GDrive, however.

>>54200312
>I have run my Night Shift World hack a couple times but it has since evolved away from using Apocalypse World as a base. It has always been tremendously well received by the groups I've run it for.

Do you have any stories?

>>54200251

TRASHMEN: A sheet, a paper bag, and some old shoes. The discarded trash of the station can sometimes take on a life of its own. Even more frustratingly the trash from the businesses down the street like the dreaded other gas station tends to find its way to your doorstep.

Trashmen are fine so long as you make sure that when the animating force within them departs they collapse outside in the dumpster as opposed to on the floor. Separate trashmen seem to share the same memory and will remember how they're treated. There might only be "one" trashman with several bodies.

The trashman will go about dropping bits of itself all over your clean floors, curiously looking at al the stuff on the shelves. Force, particularly the threat of fire, seem to be the only thing that will force it out of the store. But it can also be "bribed" to leave the station and go around back to the dumpsters with interesting objects sacrificed as trash. Sometimes it will even give up something in return.

But never try stealing from the trash out back. That belongs to the Trashmen. It is theirs. Steal from them at your own peril.

Threats: Cleanliness, disturbs customers
Weakness: Fire, can be bartered with
Strength: Conventional damage isn't very effective

>>54200362

Fuck yeah, I do. Gimme a bit and I'll greentext 'em.

I will also post the rules I used in the last couple iterations.

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>>54200398

>>54200430
will be waiting. I'm actually interested in dynamics of a Night Shift session.

>>54200362

I'm gonna summarize a lot because I don't have detailed notes of some of the earlier games.

Pick your poison.

>"The Fire Clown Below"
My least favorite session because all the PC's were "lol so whacky XD". But also my favorite Weirdness; clowns are good for that.

>"Humanitarianism"
Second favorite Weirdness. Great group. Basis for one of the script episodes. Dimensional travel and air conditioners.

>"They Are Empty and So Can You"
I was pretty drunk when I wrote up the notes. It got weird, fast. Also dimensional travel, maybe, and people who shouldn't be and likely aren't people.

>"An OSHA of Possibilities"
This session led to one of my players wanting to run Night Shift. Training new employees is difficult.

>>54200270
I don't know, I'm not a mechanic designer, but I've played enough weird tabletop games that I'm sure it could be done well.
I was imagining something like that: Every night is another game turn, players draw one or more random events and then have to resolve them using some kind of resources or other mechanics that might be in the game. It could be also made in a sort of mini "choose your adventure" kind of thing. The phone might provide assistance, but also make them use some points, resources or whatever. Or decrease the cash they get for a night, which helps them to prepare themselves.
Hell, it could even be resolved through normal roleplaying, just the whole game structure would be more organised and "game-ish".
I by no means claim that this is THE way it should be done, but I just feel it would make the game less repetitive and prone to become boring if we assume that players are not supposed to leave the station and stick to the "weird of the night" formula. With this restrictions, it would be hard to make a campaign or even more than 1-2 one-shots out of that, but I think that making it feel more like sitting for a round of board game than an actual TTRPG would fix the problem
That's just my take on things though.

>>54191269
I run night shift infrequently for my group when we have no other plans.

>>54200540
Let's start with the Fire Clown and go by order of worst to best session.

>>54200540
>>54200592
Do the "Humanitarianism" first or second, this one sounds really interesting.

>>54200540
>Humanitarianism
seconding it.

>>54200587
can you tell us detail of a session you played?

>>54199999
Also, nice quints.

>>54200266
Get four sets of d6. Make sure you can tell them apart. For convention let's say Red, Blue, Yellow, White.

So the player has four stats. Point distribution is 2/1/1/-1. These use Blue dice, except the -1 which is Yellow.
>Brain - mental and academic checks
>Meat - physical and constitution checks
>Will - keeping it together and arguing checks
>Skill - dexterity and handiwork checks

Now choose four talents, which can be things like Engine Mechanics, Negotiation, Lock Picking, Knowledge (subject field), broad but not catchall things. Distribute points in these in a 3/2/1/1 spread. These also use Blue dice.

Now ask your players to distribute four points between Sanity and Charity.
>Sanity: your grip on what is real, your ability to keep collected, the line at which you devolve into a raving lunatic
>Charity: your empathy, your ability to pit up with people bullshit, the line at which you stop seeing fellow humans as people
These are White dice. Each player has a reserve of white dice for each stat equal to their score. Players may take dice out of these pools and spend them on their rolls. They don't go back. Sanity may be used in weird situations, charity in situations that require interpersonal connection. Being at zero is so sign of being unhinged in the corresponding stat.

A player may choose to add a number of Yellow dice to his check, up to five. These represent pushing themselves to their physical and mental limits.

Players add Blue, White, and Yellow dice together.

GMs present Red dice in opposition. Up to ten dice (1 for trivial, 10 for unimaginable misfortune) may be used to represent the threat which must be overcome.

The player rolls the dice, with 1/2/3 counting as successes (Blue, White, Yellow) and failures (Red). The player succeeds if there are more successes than failures.

(Cont)

>>54193073
Actually, contrary to this Wayne's statement I was actually in charge of adapting the game to a solid system back when I was running the /fvgt/...Then Finals happened, the /fvgt/ as well as Fading Embers died because nobody else was putting effort into them and keeping them productive, and when I tried to start them back up they remained dead.

I'm actually going to bring back both those threads soon and quit being Wayne, as apparently using satirical Shitposting to try and get the idiots on the board to learn to ignore bait is indistinguishable from actual shitposting and doesn't actually work.

>>54200756
You should have known, Wayne.

>>54200778
Yeah. Doesn't help that I really lost sight of what Wayne was supposed to be doing. Half the time he was antagonizing our (fairly useless) mods, antagonizing other trolls, or posting what I call "BIG RED FLAG SHITPOSTS" that were designed to derail the thread while it was less than 20 posts, dominate the conversation, and result in the deletion of the thread(I pulled this one off around four times)

>>54198594
24/7 groceries, diners, fast food restaurants, 24/7 gyms...

>>54200829
>designed to derail the thread while it was less than 20 posts
Wait a second...

>>54200671
So there would still be a GM?

>>54200671
(Cont)
Now why the colors? Look for the dice with the highest value. The color of the dice triggers a secondary effect. If multiple dice are the same highest color, Reds and Blues cancel out 1-for-1. Everything else resolves simultaneously.
>Blue: Advantage. The situation, success or failure, turns out better than you expected and in some small way works in your favor.
>Red: Disadvantage. The situation, success or failure, has gone badly and in some small way worked against your favor.
>White: Relief. Something within you finds strength. Either add 1 White dice to either Sanity or Charity OR introduce an important narrative detail of your choice (GM must approve)
>Yellow: Disaster. The GM may either introduce a serious narrative downturn of events or impose a permanent narrative effect upon the player (such as a persistent injury or condition)

Between the amounts of Successes and Failures and the Dice Color of influence, the situation is resolved.

Players loose Health (5+Meat+Will+Charity) or Psyche (5+Brain+Skill+Sanity) equal to Failures (failure from generating zero total successes results in zero injury), depending on the type of check made (physical vs emotional vs weird).

Every day the players refresh their Charity and Sanity by two points (their choice in distrivution), and their Health and Psyche by five points (their choice in distribution).

And that's the game. Thoughts and feedback?

>>54200857
Well, when the OP is one of those /pol/ posts that looks /tg/ enough to go under the radar, or is one of those classic /tg/ bait threads that you know will just cause more and more shit until bump limit, you really have to nip those in the bud so they don't reach the point where they're too big for the mods to delete, because at this point, they reason that some intelligent conversation must be going on, right?

>>54200633
>>54200644

Humanitarianism first, Fire Clown Below second.

The Group
>Keyboard-warrior 4chan stereotype Assistant Manager. Early 20's.
>Russian Gas Attendant. Claims he sold fridges in his past life. Late 50's.
>Incomprehensible Redneck Stock Clerk. Late 30's.
>Stoner Cashier. Stoned. Stoner stoned. Late 30's.

This was actually the same group as "Fire Clown Below", with the same characters. It was before I instituted a mandatory firing at the end of each session chosen using arbitrary metrics (whomever rolled the most 1's, which have no mechanical impact) and human spite (Assistant Manager chooses on ties).

>Group is struggling to find the walk-in because the door keeps moving
>Kids in Halloween costumes show up, Stoner "fixes" the clocks.
>It is hot, they decide to turn on the AC against company policy ("Management believes in the power of positive thinking when it comes to thermodynamics.")
>Doing so shorts out everything in the entire store.
>Russian Attendant sets about fixing everything, using only his knowledge of refriderators. Has the Stock Clerk read to him from the manual.
>This goes as well as you could anticipate.
>Strange drifter eventually shows up, wild hair, weird grey jumpsuit.
>Locks himself in the Office after the Assistant Manager goes to yell at Stoner.
>Later two men in black jumpsuits come in, grill Stoner about whether any livestock has been seen.
>Stock Clerk and Gas Attendant are having a nearly incomprehensible argument over the hot pockets they want to eat
>More specifically, have they always had "That Real Human Taste!" on them.
>Assistant Manager has given up trying to get the Office open and instead is telling the drifter why the earlier seasons of his favorite anime (Sama Sama Panty Raid Kaipatsu VI) were objectively better.
>Late night news is wrong, radio is weird, lots of evidence pointing to them being in a different reality
>In which cannibalism is legalized.
>Players get it, characters don't
Cont.

>>54200909
Should it be
>Health (5+Meat+Will+Charity)
>Psyche (5+Brain+Skill+Sanity)
Or
>Health (5+Meat+Skill+Sanity)
>Psyche (5+Brain+Will+Charity)
Or
>Health (5+Meat+Brain+Will+Skill)
>Psyche (5+Charity+Sanity)

>>54200967

>They eventually figure out that the grey jumpsuit guy is cattle
>Black jumpsuits eventually return, with more trucks, figuring out that the cattle was in fact there
>Stand-off ensues with the black jumpsuits threatening to bust in, the cattle threatening to start stabbing people, and the Assistant Manager trying to validate how bad Season 3 of Sama Sama Panty Raid Kaipatsu VI was
>Stock Clerk and Gas Attendant accidentally blow the AC
>Problem solved, back to own reality
>Cattle came with the gas station, steals a bunch of stuff and runs
>Stock Clerk gets yelled at by Assistant Manager for throwing out cannibal Hot Pockets
>Management docks everyone's pay for turning on the AC

This was a good session because the players really got into the spirit-- they could care about the Threat and the Weirdness. But their characters should never, ever, give a single shit.

This group later fucked it up with the Fire Clown Below-- and I fucked up because they were the same PLAYERS but not the same CHARACTERS. I had forgotten that.

You want me to go right into "Fire Clown Below"? Or should I talk about the mechanics for a bit?

>>54201048
Could you go over the mechanics for a little bit?

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>>54201254

Sure. Originally it was based on Apocalypse world (my namefag is short for "Night Shift World anon") but I eventually left the 6/7-9/10 thing behind.

This is the newest character sheet. As you can see, a PC has 5 Attributes (Emotional, Physical, Logical, Awareness, and Weird).

Each PC has a pool of 5 dice to draw from ("Effort") and a communal 5 dice as well ("Station").

When I called for a roll I would tell them which Attribute it was based on (and thus which bonus or malus they should apply); they started with 1 die, adding a second if the task relates to their job description, and up to two more for fictional reasons. Importantly, these last two were drawn from the "Station pool".

A PC could add any number of dice from their own Effort pool, and other PC's could contribute from their Effort pools as well if they were helping. The different job roles had rules which keyed off rolling 6's and how they contributed or not to the Effort pool economy.

Roll the dice, counting each 5+ as a success. If your successes equal or exceed the Target Number, congrats, if not, c'est la vie.

At the end of the session whomever rolled the most 1's was fired (in one session that PC was the one who had singlehandedly kept everyone alive, which seemed appropriate). The Assistant Manager was never fired but could instead fire anyone if they rolled the most 1's. This petty power was entirely on purpose.

Emphasis during play was to have the PC's rebound off one another-- they had different aims and goals which had very little to do with the success or failure of the gas station, nor even the discovery or resolution of the Weirdness.

The Weirdness happens for the players to resolve, not the characters. This mindset seemed key to having enjoyable sessions of Night Shift. Many of the sessions had characters inadvertently or accidentally solve the Weirdness while trying to satisfy some base or petty desire of theirs.

>>54201383
It seems we both have similar ideas, even though we are coming from two different angles (Apocolypse World vs Don't Rest Your Head). May I use some of your design elements and integrate them with mine? I like the idea of adding a Station pool and character motivations.

Add in the Random Situation Table and I think we could be close to a (more) finished product.

I like the idea that whoever survives the night has to go through a final harrowing against the largely absent Manager, which is like the anxiety inducing final stage of Paranoia, the Debriefing.

>>54201383
What's FNORD?

>>54191269
The setting is made. The rules are made. The game is good. If tg wants to keep working on it, rather than more and more spooky blurbs what we need is premade adventure outlines.

On a different note, something that I firmly believe about the setting is that it ought to be mundane. It annoys me when people want to explain -why- creepy things happen or make some kind of conspiracy theory surrounding the gas station.

The thing that makes the game brilliant is that there's a lot of cosmic horror in being a deadbeat nobody in a typical gas station where you have no idea what the fuck is going on, or why, or even if what you see is real. Its what grounds the game despite the supernatural events, because on some level the players can imagine it happening to them. If you make it about a government conspiracy or some shit you lose that.

>>54201708

A reference to the Principia Discordia and Robert Anton Wilson; supposedly the Illuminati introduced a word into our subconcious which provokes fear and anxiety, and which we are unable to see. It is represented textually by "FNORD" which isn't the actual word, since we can't actually see the word.

>>54201628
Sure man. I'm not super familiar with Don't Rest Your Head-- my baseline is a hacked up version of some John Harper stuff (Lady Blackbird foremost).

I'm always glad to see Night Shift threads still popping up every now and then. I played in a short Night Shift campaign not too long ago that went pretty really well. If I can get a little break-time at work I'll post a few highlights.

>>54201911

I have always maintained that, thematically, the game should be about the Uncanny, a bubbling sub-strata of reality that only occasionally breaks through the banal facade. I make it a point to never have particularly accessible or coherent explanations for the Weirdness in my games-- it is about regular people defying every convention of the horror genre by simply not caring. They want to get paid, they want to move on with their life, and besides yetis aren't even real.

All my games have taken place in the same gas station but only occasionally have the same characters. All my games take place in the same Night Shift universe. There will never be a game in which the origin of the Weirdness is explained-- no meta-arc, no grander narrative bridging episodes.

When writing the script I resisted the urge to replicate that. Instead I designed a background logic which will never be explained or portrayed on-screen but which exists by inference and which the characters nonetheless have to contend with.

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>>54201966
Awesome, if I make a PDF how do you want to be attributed.

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>>54200232
>>54201966
23 skidoo.

>>54202078

"NSWanon - CRV" works for me.

>>54202012
The Uncanny bit sounds a lot like Magical Realism. I can totally get behind that too.

Here's a thought. You know how you can run Paranoia as either Classic, Straight or Zap? I imagine you can run Night Shift similarly on a spectrum between Stephen King, Kentucky Route 0 or Evil Dead.

What it should really -never- be, though, is Delta Green or Werewolf.

>>54200967
>>54201048

Just found a previous write-up of this and I seem to have conflated sessions. My memory is worse than I thought.

>>54202012
>>54201911
I agree that there shouldn't be some huge conspiracy or concrete explanation responsible for the weirdness, but at the same time I do like the Station to have enough of a history to suggest that things have been weird there for quite a while.

>>54202326

In my games, previous sessions always leave a mark on the station. I briefly fiddled with a subsystem of rewarding players (rather than characters) by way of new resources for the station.

Don't fuck up and you get an x-presso machine. It's like an espresso machine but with intermittent disembodied screaming.

>>54202326
Out of curiosity, why? What does giving the station a weird history add to the game for you?

>>54202240
>Stephen King, Kentucky Route 0 or Evil Dead

So, you'd basically be able to play a Night Shift game as cold and creeping terror, supernatural slice-of-life, or campy survival-horror? I can totally see that, and I remember it being said in the original threads that Night Shift was really well-suited to operating on a sliding scale like that, based on what sort of game the group wanted to run.

>>54192137
>Uh, manager? What do I do if the state tax goes up?
>...hide.

>>54193263
Didn't the movie come after the actual article?

>>54202431
I like it because I like settings to have layers of history in general, but with Night Shift in particular...

I think that can help increase the feelings of dread and the intrigue surrounding the Station. It gives a sense that whatever is going on is bigger than the characters, has been going on since long before they started this terrible job and will continue going on long after their employment there has ended.

It's why the "Ghost of the Assistant Manager" is one of my favorite pieces of fluff. She adds a cryptic bit of history to the Station and helps illustrate what fate might befall the characters.

>>54202664
Yes, you're right.

What if there was a companion game called Day Shift that involved revealing more about the world?

>>54203534
Day shift would just be Clerks: The Game.

>>54203534
No

>>54203564
Right.

>>54203534
Day Shifters are generally thought of as "those assholes" that leave messes for the Night Shift to clean up, hassle the PCs at the beginning of the session during shift-change and throw disbelief and scorn there way at the end of the session at shift change again if the PCs leave a mess or try to explain how their night went.

>>54203688
That being said, it can be good to throw in a Day Shift NPC from time to time, or give a new character a background as a former Day Shifter who'll come to learn that all the bizarre shit he was told is real.

I would assume there are 3 shifts, not just 2.

>>54203863
You're right. I think we were figuring something like:

>6:00-2:00 Sunny Assholes

>2:00-10:00 Surly Assholes

>10:00-6:00 Night Shift

>>54202240
>>54202465
I really like this idea, if we're going to write a longer rulebook we should include the idea of different playstyles in there.

And although I agree that having some large backstory, cosmology or conspiracy behind it would kill the mood, I like the idea of some continuity. For example I really like the idea that all the weird shit is happening to only one chain of gas stations with branches all over the world/States for whatever unexplained reason. There might be a society of ex-workers with some experience in fighting the creeps, who can offer assistance to rookies if shit gets too serious.

>>54198594
we were actually discussing in some of the most recent threads about expanding not only the immediate surroundings for the Gas-N-Go, but also the nearby Town and it's surroundings as well, I'll have to go dig up my notes on this

>>54201911
yeah there shouldn't be anything resembling a consistent explanation, although individual bits of weird can have an explanation occasionally

>>54204195
>Praxis Industries
Yes, strands of continuity but with no explanation.

>>54204251
Right. Individual events can certainly have a cause or even a bit of history, but there is no concrete reason as to why weirdness seems to be drawn to this shitty old gas station.

>>54204195
That last bit is actually what the Ghost of the Assistant Manager is for. Fluff was that she was this super-competent employee back in the 80s that died at the station, and still haunts the place, occasionally helping the PCs out with their nightly tasks.

>>54204195
>Horror
A customer complains that a toilet is overflowing. You go into the bathroom with a plunger. The problem toilet is full of brown, soupy liquid. You hold your nose and start plunging it. There's a squelch and bubbling noise, and the water coming out of the hole is now deep red. When you take out the plunger it has a clump of blonde hair with skin on it. The toilet starts to bubble with blood and spill over the entire floor. You hear a scream.

Then the lights go out.
>Surrealism
A man with the head of a fish walks in at 3AM wearing a trench coat and fedora. He drives a beat up camper and his eyes are shiny yellow. He asks if you sell bait and tackle. You direct him to the frozen worms and get a mop to deal with the watery slime he tracks in his wake.
>Horror-Comedy
There's an hour left on your shift. A legion of undead surrounds the gas station. You barricade the doors as you realize you forgot to restock the soda machine. You curse and run to the back room for the soda bags. If you forget to refill the machine again your boss is gunna kill you, man.

>>54204690
Any more ideas for Surrealism? Cause I really like that idea and would love to hear if you got anymore.

>>54204690
I'm definitely including these in my LEG, word for word. Could we make a few more examples of each? It would be great to have three teasers for each genre.

>>54204800
PDF not LEG

>>54204814
I was wondering what the fuck you were on about.

>>54204794
You look up from your smutty magazine at the sound of the door opening. You look down at a small smiling child in ornate clothing whose eyes have no irises or pupils, but instead look to be transparent balls filled with blood, his teeth are large and pointed. In one hand is an O- blood bag (complete with neon colored crazy draw), the other a fist full of coins. He looks up through shaggy blonde hair and giggles expectantly. You know he wants a candy bar, but you don't know which one, and are unsure what he'll do if you don't deliver complete customer satisfaction.

>>54204800
You can try mining the old Google Doc for ideas. There were a lot of them:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aQBCHdWak95SdkViMptGEpi5U4FMW9yo3o9jqtTC_Wo/htmlview

>>54204690
These are more themes than playstyles, but what you've written is an important distinction as well. I meant rather something like:
>survival
Something dangerous is happening at the station. Try to survive until daylight
>a shift
Get trough the shift resolving whatever problems may arise. You should usually be able to take care of them quickly and multiple ones will probably appear
>investigation
A whole session focusing on single weird and going more indepth to its backstory. Players will have to learn more about whatever they're dealing with to stop it and it may possibly require them to leave the station.

>>54204872
I admit it, I'm a dirty phone poster.

Case in point
>>54204903
Crazy straw not crazy draw

>>54204690
>>54204915
Combine the two, giving nine total scenario types and exactly the adventure type you want. In this case we have
>flushed blonde - horror/investigation
>fish man - surreal/shift
>soda zombies - horror-commedy/survival

>>54204794
The basic elements of Surrealism here are:

1. Some really outwardly strange, but not necessarily threatening problem happens.
2. Nobody (except maybe the player) ACTS like anything strange is going on.
3. The solution is either mundane, or fantastical but played as commonplace. Preferably a mix of both.

So, for example:

>An Amazonian woman riding a dinosaur enters the parking lot, pulls in to the pump. The woman dismounts and walks in and asks for $50 of dinosaur feed on Pump 4.
>You had no idea we sell dinosaur feed.
>Make some rolls, maybe fix something. You go into the back room and find a crate from the last truck labeled "DINOSAUR FEED", but it is being held by a giant packrat who is sad his girlfriend left him and won't let it go. You roll and RP, convince his rat girlfriend to get back together with him, and he gives you the crate.
>Fill weird pump slot labeled "FEED" with contents of crate, woman puts gas hose in dino mouth, fills up and rides away.

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>>54205010
Holy shit.

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>>54205010
Excellent post, anon.

>>54202720
>Ghost of the Assistant Manager
what is actusly written about her?

>>54204918
Haha what a fag

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Note II

>>54204915
Hmm. Well, the theme or tone of the game is what distinguishes say, Classic from Straight Paranoia, which is what I was riffing on. But I think what you have hit on is distinct and also super important: the outline of the different plots you can run.

So for example you can run DnD as a Dungeon Crawl, or Court Intrigue, etc. Night Shift can be, as you say, either an Investigation, Survival or Shift.

The only one I wish I had a better word for is Shift. I get the concept immediately, though. Weird, unrelated things happen throughout the session, with no direct connection, and the point is to get through X number.

>>54200965
What about 4chan gives anyone the impression intelligent conversation is happening, ever?

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I made these for Night Shift a while ago. I've kind of ignored the weird mechanic for creating weird events and just go by the tone and flow of the game.

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>>54205634

>>54205439
Sup/tg/, and, ironically enough, 1d4chan, which are what usually brings newbies to the board and guarantees a perpetual Summer on the board. They are to this board what Critical Role is to 5e.

Also they're mods. At this point I think they have to settle for whatever isn't the current lowest standard.

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>>54205655

>angry red comet visible in the sky
>staticky radio broadcasts include NASA and government officials telling people not to worry but not what they shouldn't worry about; preachers talking about the end times but seemingly advocating for instead of against decadent behavior; strange EBS alerts about cascading tachyon flux disturbances caused by extreme deceleration of the massive body
>customers in the store seem confused about which state they are in or what some of the products are, and why is the price of gas so odd?

>sheriff rolls in to the store, pulls his gun and demands to know if the cashier is human
>cashier is pretty sure he's human
>funny thing is, the invisible eye chime on the door detects the presence of everyone but the cashier

What happens when employers try to call the police?

Can't be reached is a bit boring.

>>54205149
She had several pieces of writing done for her, both before she died and after, and at least one GM had great success using her as an NPC. I'll see if I can find the stories in the archive to post them, but the gist is this:

She was a highschooler with dark hair and pale skin who started working the Night Shift at the Station in the 1980s, and through a combination of hard work, canny wits and survival instincts went on to become employee of the month and assistant manager for several years. She was killed at the Station, possibly sacrificing herself to save the other attendants, and has haunted the place since.

Her role as an NPC was to allow the GM to assist the PCs where necessary, like having her complete one of their nightly chores while they were dealing with more pressing matters, or by pointing out clues through poltergeist activity. If the PCs managed to make contact with her, she'd prove to be a loyal ally who was more "in-tune" with the weirdness of the Station.

>>54205933
The police have a long history of getting calls like this from the gas station, and then having everything be normal when they show up.

By now they just threaten the employees with charging them with filing a false police report and hang up

I run Night Shift using Savage Worlds for about a year now. Best game to bring out for parties. The only thing I tell them about the setting is "You work in a gas station and you're not paid enough for this"

>>54205933
The Station is out in the middle of nowhere, so the police may only arrive after whatever's happened happened. Sometimes, the PC attendants can't afford to wait that long. Other times when they have called the disaster resolved itself shortly thereafter, making them look like liars. On occasion, they really can't reach he police. All told, the mentality probably is something like:

"If we can even reach the police, they probably won't believe us, and if they believe us they probably won't get here in time."

Unless, of course, you want to include the police in on the horrific fun.

>>54205933

Nobody who hasn't worked the Night Shift will believe all that crazy shit was real. And the ones who did and have gotten out generally start to doubt it once their world starts behaving normally again.
Day Shift Randy is probably the only exception - he seems to be with the general consensus of the Day Shift assholes that you guys are all full of it, but he also leaves helpful notes and things out for the Night Shift guys.

>>54205933
This is covered in some of the earlier threads. I think in the first one.

You are in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. Possibly on the bad side of town. It will take the cops like half an hour to get there.

When they -do-, you can play it one of several ways. Fit to taste as either the story or your GMing style dictates, or roll for it:

>The police are bumbling idiots who get eaten by whatever is out there.
>The police don't believe you. They start threatening/interrogating you.
>The police make the problem worse. Maybe they are also aliens in disguise or something.
>The police are actually helpful and sort out the aliens or whatever. Then the Sheriff tips his cowboy hat, tells you to fill out a police report in the morning, and goes to stake a vampire or something on the other side of town.

>>54206016
>"If we can even reach the police, they probably won't believe us, and if they believe us they probably won't get here in time."

"And even if they got here, what would they do? It's a goddamn Sasquatch in aisle three, eating all of the beef sticks."

>>54205933
What about the manager? Does he know what's happening?

I could see it two ways:
>he's aware
But he could. not. give. a. shit. In the most cosmic of ways.
"Don't give me that zombie bullshit! The women's bathroom was supposed to be CLEAN but it ISN'T. Do you know the meaning of "responsibility"?!"

>He wouldn't believe you
It's up to the players to think of increasingly convoluted explanations (during the post session debriefing) about why the gas station is the way it is. Because the only thing worse than the alien skirmish you fought last night is getting fired over those plasma burns on the wall.

I vote that we name the asshole manager Wayne, because he put alot of work into this and should be immortalized and :^)'d for being a namefriend

>>54206036
Exactly!

>>54206465
only gentle bully towards Wayne, don't be hurt your PDFs and work are pretty kino

Is there ANY way to make there be a cold open for a session? Because once the players are interested the groove of the game it would fit the theme nicely, but I don't know if it would be possible to put it into practice.

>>54206465
one of the things we established in older threads is that 1) Management is almost never actually at the Gas-N-Go, especially during the Night Shift(indeed 99% of your communications with him will be over the phone, even though he does keep a fully stocked office in the back of the station), and 2) the Manager himself is actually relatively nice all things considered, if in a somewhat distant manner, one of the reasons you want to keep the place from getting too badly trashed(cause while Something keeps the Gas-N-Go from being permanently destroyed or damaged beyond a certain extent, it can still end up a mess) is because besides the docked pay that usually results from that, the ensuing talk from the Manager makes you feel like awful due to how he usually gives it, also because those pricks in Day Shift will give you crap about it for weeks afterwards

also in general it should be difficult to be outright fired from the Gas-N-Go while you're on the Night Shift, would make things too easy for the people stuck in it

but I do like the idea of a particularly assholish assistant manager, who seemingly lives to give people on the Night Shift crap for what they "let" happen to the station(since he's never actually there for the Night Shift he just thinks the people working there are a bunch of lazy, destructive morons), he's a solid 80% of why the people on the Day Shift are such pricks

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>>54205940

>>54206792
This isn't really specific to Night Shift, but in general I would say that there are some things that work for visual media that don't work for RPGs, and Cold Opens are one of them.

I mean the whole point of a cold open is to spike tension for the credits, and RPGs don't have credits.

You could do an opening scene to spike tension and then cut out of it to something else, but it wouldn't really be a cold open.

Some things that work for series do work well for RPGs though, like the idea of scenes as short dramatic questions that you cut from after they are answered, or the episodic format generally.

>>54194373

Namefag, not tripfag, dumbass.

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>>54207894
Anyone else got any good gas station/convenience store late night art?

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>>54208112
Let's see what I've got.

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>>54208199

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>>54208210

Wasn't someone doing a tv show out of this?

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>>54208032

Pardon me for not paying close attention to the precise variety of shit that was stinking up the thread.

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>>54208282

>>54208298

There was some attempt to get an indie film made. A screenplay was written and shopped around, but the people they took it to wanted to rework it entirely to be more conventional.

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>>54208305

>>54208321
Right. As I recall, they'd wanted a Clerks-style office comedy with the supernatural elements removed completely.

>>54208361
>Right. As I recall, they'd wanted a Clerks-style office comedy with the supernatural elements removed completely.
which completely kills the point of doing it in the first place

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>>54208324

>>54208369
Exactly.

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>>54208377

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>>54208432

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>>54208460

>>54208511
I'll look for more, but that might be all I have for now.

I found my descriptions for the Gas-N-Go and it's surroundings, keep the thread alive and I'll post them in a little while

>>54209457
Looking forward to it!

>>54191269
I used to come on /tg/ a lot back when this was a thing, I left for a long time, and now as I'm slowly creeping back into /tg/ threads, this shit is getting brought up again too.

It's almost like I'm sending out a psychic signal and am being accommodated on purpose.

>>54210212
The only explanation is that everyone else is a bot.

>>54210232
I've long suspected that.

I've been reading through the old threads, there's a bunch of good shit there.

What's a skinwalker?

This would make for a solid Everyone is John game. Most gas stations only have one person on at night. If you alter the setting to a diner or something, you can have multiple people playing multiple characters.

Could you use It Came From Somewhere Else or a variation thereof for this?

>>54211719
I'm working on a variation of Don't Rest Your Head with more character depth. Honestly DRYH vanilla would probably be good enough but I think this deserves it's own project. The PbtA stuff is good, but I dislike the core mechanics, but there's alot of good stuff in the PDFs I want to keep.
When I dive in a bit deeper I'll have to read all 15 archive threads...

>>54198594
I work night shifts at McDonald's, and I gotta say, it'll have to be somewhere that isn't an international corporation.
Like, I haven't seen anything weirder than a homeless guy sleeping here.

If it was like a family run fast food joint/gas station/24hr coffee shop, I could see more strange happenings

>>54198594
Radio station?

>>54199910
Back when I was running Night Shift for my group I gave it kind of an episodic "monster of the week" structure. It was the same characters at the same gas station every session but it was more focused on the PCs and the couple of major NPCs that work at and frequented the station. I think my players understood that it didn't really matter where the weird stuff came from, it was all just a part of the job.

>>54198594
Night shift at a hospital in the sticks. Weird shit comes in at night.

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>>54200756
>using satirical Shitposting to try and get the idiots on the board to learn to ignore bait is indistinguishable from actual shitposting and doesn't actually work.
>what is Poes law?
Who would have thought, huh?

>>54208112
Is a donut shop fine too?

>>54206465
For me, the capital M Management were always a strangely pleasant/vaguely threatening automated voice service you could only reach by using the green phone.

The night manager was the guy who actually interacted with the PCs. I don't remember if we ever really fleshed that specific character out but I always played him and a jaded guy who's been working the night shift for way too long and gets really impatient whenever a PC interrupts whatever he does in the manager's office to ask if they got a blood delivery last shift or if they should just kill the vampires in aisle 2 before anything bad happens.

Having a contrast of this guy and the aforementioned nice ghost girl worked wonders in my games.

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Whoever the anon is who was talking about putting together an updated Nigh Shift handbook PDF, here are some old scenarios I wrote at various stages of completion from way back in the first batch of Night Shift threads, along with various bits of weirdness I compiled during that time.

If you're interested I can work on cleaning it up and fleshing stuff out so it can look nice in the final PDF, otherwise here's some content for everybody else in the thread.

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>>54214338
And here's some additional notes on a few of the scenarios that I ended up running, all statted up for Unknown Armies 2e.

>>54204195
>There might be a society of ex-workers with some experience in fighting the creeps, who can offer assistance to rookies if shit gets too serious.
I would want to see this specific thing only if it were handled exclusively in fiction sidebars by writefags. Like in Delta Green or Unknown Armies where it's in-universe dialogue from old email exchanges or chatroom threads with no further explanation outside of what can be inferred from that or short stories from the perspective of the Attendants.

One of my favorite things about Night Shift was the idea that while there are a few concrete things that have become sort of emblematic of the setting (The comedy/horror focus, The Grey Man, the green phone, the shotgun, the Station itself) those are all single entities and the rest of the stuff about the big guys behind it all is left pretty vague. Having it be "canon" that there is a loose organization of Night Shift employees exchanging information somehow would cheapen the idea that Night Shift is primarily about the weird stuff that happens at this particular gas station and the people who have to deal with it. I think everything else should be explicitly optional or left up to interpretation by the GM.

>>54201048
Nice.

So what exactly have gone wrong with Fire Clown Below?

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>>54213447
If a donut shop is fine, then a laundromat may be fine too.

>>54213463
Were you the one who storytimed your games a while back? Those were pretty good, as I remember.

>>54214672
Like you said, I also like that there are semi-canonical elements that the GM can pick and choose from to give the Station a little bit of history and continuity if he chooses, but that the nature of working as an Attendant means that while you may occasionally be nagged by thoughts of why these things are happening, you have far more pressing concerns to deal with like making sure the shelves are stocked while a poltergeist is bent on violently un-stocking them and making sure that the flying canned goods don't break anything irreplaceable.

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I love the fact that giving each event/session of Night Shift a punny name has become a bit of a thing.

So I've been running sessions of Night Shift every now and again, and it's a great system as it is, but I think it lacks in two areas, progression and the Weird stat. Progression for players should see them become more attuned to the weirdness of the station, as they will in real life. I suggest that a player should add up all their stats excluding weird, so a -1 and a +2 equal 1 and so on, then be able to add 1 point to a stat of their choice, besides weird. If the character has survived up to the point that they can level up a fourth time, the character retires and leaves the station. I'd also suggest weird as less of a stat that determines what the threat does, as the GM should determine how the situation plays out according to theming and mood, but more as a stat that can lead characters in the direction of the solution to the threat. I'm thinking that players start off with the weird from their character sheet, but also gain more from witnessing strange things during a session. The players can then spend this weird to do something strange that leads them along the path to the solution. I'm thinking like the scene in Twin Peaks when Cooper and the police are throwing the rocks and marking off names on the chalkboard. I need some help refining the weird mechanic, specifically the actual mechanics of it, but I think the core thematic idea is solid.

>>54215377
I'm not great when it comes to crunch, but your idea sounds pretty solid. As the characters progress through their shifts, they grow a little more in-tune with the weirdness they're forced to deal with on a nightly basis, leading to some "out of the box thinking" that can help them solve their paranormal problems.

>>54211509
Bump

I love you Night Shift Anon, you are an inspiration to horror. May a swarm of vaginas find their way to your crotch soon.

Also I will shamelessly plug in my previous horror hotel thread from three years ago if you guys need inspiration.

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/35215455/

>>54192089
haha shit i was just talking about those threads yesterday

im the guy who first said "urban unease"

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>>54193263
that thing is as old as forever, jesus

>>54215053
I've done a couple of storytimes here so probably. Glad you enjoyed it.

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>>54198594
>>54198659

Having an old greasy-spoon diner as a possible Night Shift location sounds pretty appealing, though it would of course have a slightly different feeling than a gas station would. It almost seems to me that a diner might be better suited for a variation of Night Shift that focuses more heavily on social interaction.

>Nighthawks

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>>54222470
Plus, you could potentially move the location from a lonely highway in the middle of nowhere to a dingy side street in the middle of the big city.

Hey guys, TV Guy here. Just saw this thread and wanted to explain what happened.

When we first pitched it as a TV show, my connection didn't like it and said that horror TV would never take off; I've since pitched it twice more only to be met with similar responses about the premise.

Later, I found a guy willing to produce it as a moderately-budgeted short film. He liked the idea but wanted to buy it off of me which I was weary about. He eventually moved to England before we could settle a deal, however.

My last-ditch effort was to get a few friends and make a low/no budget, college made short film. But I had a falling out with two of the actors and even still couldn't find a location.

Honestly I wish NS could have been made at any of these points. But it just couldn't be done. Right now Night Shift is on the shelf. I do definitely want to do something with it. But at this point if it does get made chances are it won't be made by me.

>>54224367
Hey TV Guy. I'm sorry to hear how things have fallen through for you, but thanks for all your hard work in trying to get Night Shift made. I can imagine how the horror genre is harder to sell, but maybe in the future with successes like Stranger things, more doors may open up. Sit on those scripts for a year or two and maybe someone like Netflix or Amazon might want to pick it up.

>>54224367
Its okay guy. We appreciate your efforts and understand mass media is dicks when it comes to original intellectual properties.

>>54224367
I don't know if it's possible, but this seems like something Netflix would make.

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>>54191269
I remember the writer anon coming back and saying that no one picked up the idea for a tv series, posted the script for the pilot episode, and saying they'd keep trying
If you wanna know more, check up the archives

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>>54191269
>>54226776
never mind >>54224367
thanks for your efforts nonetheless TVanon

Hey >>54226776, take a look at: >>54224367. Your advice to check the archives was good but we've got an update from the man himself.

Speaking of archives, we ought to archive this thread along with the others.

>>54216454
Seriously what the fuck is a skinwalker? The Wikipedia page doesn't match the things described in the old threads.

>>54227219
/x/ borrows the name Skinwalker for their version simply because it sounds cool

bump

>>54215239
This was one of my favorite bits of weirdness, especially when combined with a more overt and in-your-face kind of threat, like some kind of robbery or attack. Just combining threats in interesting ways was always a fun.

>just discovered it
>played simillar campaign in Monster of the Week lately, but this is SO MUCH BETTER

Wow, you guys did some awesome work. Truth to be told I doubt that anyone will ever do antything serious with it- there is pretty much writing/groundwork to do and it's not like they have right to even claim autorship/do something with it.

>>54230354
Combining threats can be a real nasty treat, for sure.

>>54231481
For instance, giving the shift a mundane problem to deal with as part of their nightly chores, a minor weird issue to make their job a little more difficult and a major supernatural threat they have to survive. It's also fun to give mundane problems paranormal causes, or have mundane problems turn into paranormal problems.

Threw the thread up on the Sup/tg/ archive:

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?searchall=Night+Shift%3A+Working+Overtime

>>54191269
>Did anything ever come of it?
I used the setting in a 2d6 system over the last year or two, it's consistently been the most highly rated games I've run.

>>54198594
>>54198659
I did a combined highway stop. Small old diner, a one-garage mechanics shop(closed during the night shift for the most part), and a 7-eleven-style gas station in the middle, all connected.

I went cross-country 2-3 times over the last few years, so it gave me lots of ideas and layout-sense.

>>54222842
Big Cities can be just as lonely and isolated feeling at 3am as a roadside highway-especially when it's in a part of town that's more industrial than apartment.

>>54199086
Fucking love this game.

>>54200162
The Main manager should not be a PC. The Manager is essentially a threat to the PC's. If they ask for help they risk the Managers wraith.

>>54211509
Nothing to worry about.

>>54233323

I think you're confusing Manager with The Management. Most multi-location businesses will have some kind of regional management, and then individual stores will have their own on-site managers, who answer to the folks upstairs.

I would have the night manager just avoid ever coming in, because he's seen too much shit, and so maybe sometimes you see him around sunset for like twenty minutes to fill out some paperwork, and then he'll wish you luck as he jumps in his car and drives like crazy to get away before it's dark.

>>54211599
That's an interesting idea. You could have the different personalities of John be geared towards specific jobs. And they want to complete tasks for their job.

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First time hearing about this and man, is awesome. Would love to play with creepy void music in the background. https://youtu.be/OgjEymUAgaQ

So, I was thinking, the gas station is supposed to stand next to the road in the middle of nowhere, right? Most of us probably imagine it as some forested area, possibly in USA. Like Maine, full of weird deepwoods stuff. But it doesn't have to always be this way. The stations chain probably has branches all over the States or even the world. The station could just as well stand in the middle of Arizona desert, somewhere in hill billy infested Appalachians, just next to some swamps in Louisiana, there are lots of possibilities and all of them have potential for different kinds of weird and spooks.
So I was thinking, how about designing some region specific encounters and monsters? Could the station itself also somehow differ depending on where is it located? Could it somehow affect the PCs skills?

>>54222470
Gas stations can have diners. Think of truck stops.

>>54227219
I wouldn't worry about it.

>>54233644
For this game I consider them to be the same. Of course IRL there is more of a chain of command, however I think management and the Manager to be some faceless entity adds to the wierdness. And can easily make the PC's feel alone or that they have to take of business on their own.

>>54200756
Is Wayne the new Dan?

I wonder if you could set a similar thing on a college campus in the summer.

>>54236283
I smell a great new urban unease thread
Wait for some higher traffic hours with making it though.

>>54236510
>>54236283
You know, I was thinking about making a "creepy college campus" thread a while ago. I'd definitely take part in one.

Would it fit the theme for the weirdness to follow the player characters home? What kind of things do night shifters do when they're off work, anyways?

>>54236805
Go home and drink. Heavily.

>>54236805
I had some bits in my games where Management would pay the Attendants in weird ways based on how well they did during the session. If they did good they'd come home to an envelope nailed to their door with a railroad spike, if they did bad they'd find a dead raccoon stuffed with cash on their doorstep or their bed would be replaced with a coffin or something. That was the extent of the weirdness following them home though.

>>54236805
I feel like trouble from home might follows them to work, but that trouble from work might not necessarily follow them home. If the weirdness wasn't restricted to the station and was a town-wide phenomena, then I feel like you'd have a good but slightly different game.

>>54238199
>trouble from home
Like what? Anything supernatural?

An old shopping mall would be a nice setting for a game like this, too.

>>54238440
Originally I'd not thought anything supernatural. Things like drug or alcohol problems, scholastic or relationship issues or friends and relatives wanting to visit at the worst times. But, what if some of them were supernatural?

>Attendant's dead girlfriend pulls up in the car she'd crashed, looking... a little mangled... but otherwise seeming pretty darn chipper about the whole thing.

>>54239408

>She keeps coming around the station, never looking any worse, but never looking any better.

>She becomes a regular, hanging about and making friends with all the other Attendants.

>She wonders why the PC Attendant never wants to take her out on the town anymore.

File: OLLY OLLY OXENFREE.gif (7.4 MB, 1069x1539)

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>>54234011
I could definitely see the basic plotline of OXENFREE working as a session of Night Shift.

>Gas station sits on the highway passing an old atomic testing site, abandoned for decades.

>There's a certain radio station that produces only squelches and static when it's tuned to.

>Older employees claim that the station is an old military frequency, also unused for decades.

>One night while searching for some decent music, the Attendants hear something different.

>The radio-ghosts of a platoon of soldiers that were lost during a-bomb testing begin manifesting.

>Is.Leave.Possible?

I always see people talking about combining events, but no one ever really follows through and talks about what would happen. Like, what if the Hollow Man ate all the candy bars that were for the Grey Man?

>>54198594
denny's

>>54242302
The Grey Man doesn't do anything himself, but disappointing him never bodes well.

>>54242302

One of the central points about the Grey Man, though, is that everything else is kind of scared of him for reasons that are never quite clear.
I don't know that the Hollow Man would eat his candy bars, at least not intentionally.

>>54241299
bit too much on the nose. Really the closed box-ness is what made the 'is. leave. possible.' aspect really shine in regard to that story.

Also werent you the exact same guy from a thread a few days ago about spoopy radio station shit? I distinctly remember that gif and that name soooo....

>one day when the PCs arrive at the gas station, the pumps have been replaced with phonebooths

What happens, /tg/?

>>54242662
Yeah, that was me. Since the first Night Shift threads, the concepts of surreal and sometimes comfy horror have really appealed to me. I'd played OXENFREE a wile back, and finding that gif inspired me to make a thread to see what other supernatural radio fun could be had.

You're right to that I might have been a little bit too on-the-nose with there, but I was just trying to fit the basic "radio-ghost" premise into a Night Shift framework. What might you do to make it work better?

>>54242868
Consider yourself a shillord considering that gif alone brought about the series of events that led me to getting OXENFREE. wheck

yeah radio ghosts is fine but give them a different motivation or something. like i dunno ghosts of plant sabetours trying to get people to show up to finish the job for them and ghost soliders trying to keep them out or something.

>>54242926
https://www.youtube.com/embed/X9H41sI96hU?autoplay=1

Good points! You could take an opposite approach and have the radio-ghosts trying to warn the PCs of something that is happening, or will happen, or did happen and may happen again.

Maybe there's an old nuke buried 'round about the station, or the detonation that killed them is about to repeat. The radio-ghosts are trying to warn the PCs, but their off-putting natures scare people off.

>>54202536
Precalculate the amount it will come to, make sure the difference is in the in the take a penny leave a penny tray, IN PENNIES ONLY. Politely explain the increase in tax when the total comes. Do NOT indicate that there are more pennies in the tray, as this will offend the customer.

Failure to follow these procedures can lead to disciplinary actions up to and including termination.

>>54243082
Or maybe there's nothing and they're jsut stuck. Either way, it wont really affect things (you ARE at your work shift after all; leaving to save the world is not a valid excuse. I know, I've tried) until the gas pumps Geiger counters start clicking because angry radioactive ghost are showing up.

Some nights the radio plays a cover of Doll Parts by Hole, sung by an old woman. You swear she sings the line "someday, you will ache like I ache" too many times, but you never get the chance to count.

>>54243156
Maybe they just want to communicate, but their communication hurts.

>>54243241
hey, you know, sound waves, electromagnetic waves, radiation waves. Same diff, right?

>>54243105
Now, when you say termination...

>>54243218
Sometimes you can swear she says Hate instead of Ache

>>54212710
I work super early shifts and yeah, we get weirder shit than night guys. Fully decked-out SWAT team fucking destroying a huge sack of Egg McMuffins, every methhead, cokefiend, and drunk in town wanting something to make coming down easier. The same person four or five times. The mysyery of whatever the fuck night shift did to leave the place so filfthy. Shit got weird, man.

I'm reading through the ideas presented in previous threads at the moment. I really like the idea of this setting, but I feel some of the game mechanic concepts are more miss than hit. In particular, I feel that the game master for this game should be considered the Manager, or the Boss, or otherwise the owner/operator of the gas station, and the players answer to them. If a character can be fired, then the reasons for why should be left to their Boss to decide; likewise, any job that character attempts and fails should be left to their Boss to decide whether it can/should be done again or not.

So, Five Nights at Freddy's?

Sister Location for sure.

>>54236805
>>54238440
>>54239408
>>54238199
I think it's be fine, so long as it's something benign or harmless, for example:
>The crows that prey on the trash outside have decided to become talkative today. They warn you about the dogs.
so you could have a crow follow the player, maybe harmless little reminders that whatever happened during the night was real and make them stay on their toes

>>54242719
you've GOT to have quarters, God forbid you run out of them...

>>54244389
I can see that, yeah.

>After that spot of trouble with the Men in Black at the station, you notice what you're pretty sure is a government surveillance van parked on the street outside your crappy apartment building.

>>54244351
I haven't played them. Are there parallels?

>>54234046
Desert seem like the most natural place to encounter aliens. And swampy southern areas just beg for some voodoo vibes. And ghosts of Confederates.

>>54245830
No. The 5 Nights games are horror, but not comfy. Pretty autistic fanbase.

General plot is Chuck E. Cheese animatronic killed a kid a while ago and now the characters come to life at night and try to kill people. You're a security guy and you gotta stay alive and keep the monsters from getting out.

>>54201383
How does the bonus/malus system work in this case? Are they added to the result of each die rolled? Do they modify how many dice are rolled (in which case, what do negative numbers mean)? Do they add/subtract successes?

>>54246972
I don't know if Night Shift is supposed to be comfy, but it's certainly lighter than 5 Nights by virtue of its absurdity. Sometimes.

>>54248039
It's that sliding scale again. You can play Night Shift as creeping terror, action horror or supernatural slice-of-life. If you've got a long-running Night Shift game, you're likely to have a few "comfy" elements to keep the PCs from quitting.

>>54248184
The sliding scale is honestly one of my favorite aspects of the setting.

>>54198594
I work at a busy Marina, I've got all sorts of strange folk coming in at night. Fish people and the like

>>54243993
In this game GM doesn't stand for Game Master, it stands for General Manager.

In all seriousness, I like the idea of every game ending with a "chat" with the Manager (GM) about what happened, and if anyone should be fired.

>>54249858
I personally prefer the manager to be completely ignorant of the weird shit surrounding the station. The PCs should be on their own with dealing with the creeps. Who would believe them if they'd told anyone? And their boss threatens to fire them if they will even start talking about all this crazy made up shit again, let alone call him in the middle of night about it.

>>54250051
That's what makes the morning debrief such a gauntlet. How do you explain the mess?

>>54250107
I don't know, I think I prefer an interpretation where Management is either the faceless voice you talk to over the phone or someone who knows about all the paranormal shit but doesn't care because you've got a job to do, dammit.

>>54249858
>>54250051
>>54250107
>>54251396
personally I like the idea that there's several levels of management you have to deal with, in order from bottom to top;

>Assistant Manager
only works on the day shift, is a complete prick, thankfully he can't fire you, but does have enough authority to dock your pay for any messes or damage left uncleaned or unfixed by the end of the Night Shift, has no knowledge of the weirdness that happens at night(and indeed I'd say he's literally the only person in the region who can't be exposed to the weirdness), although even if he did know he'd still be a complete douche to you

>Store Manager/Owner
doesn't come to the station too often(but has an office in the back of the station anyways) and you'll mostly communicate with him through the phone, but is surprisingly nice all things considered(indeed being disciplined by him will almost always make you feel like a kid getting punished by his dad), will generally only fire a Night Shift employee of the Gas-N-Go if they screw up massively in a manner they are directly responsible for, while he won't directly admit knowledge of the supernatural most of the time, it is pretty obvious he's on some level aware of it, which is one of the reasons he usually avoids firing Night Shift employees if he can(on a meta level I feel it should be hard to actually get fired, and similarly quitting the Gas-N-Go to be an arduous enough process that it's generally not worth trying)

>Corporate Management
you'll pretty much only ever hear from these guys through writing, you generally have to be a colossal screwup to be directly contacted by them as an individual, which almost always leads to a firing, otherwise you mostly will be receiving generic orders and regulations from them, they almost definitely are aware of the weirdness, since a lot of the stuff they send you blatantly mentions it(but will almost always disappear before the day shift begins)

>>54251720
I think assistant manager should be a player character.

>>54251396
>>54250107
>>54250051
The beauty of the idea that the GM is management is that you get to decide how management works. You could run them as a hardass that personally shows up to relieve the night shift workers and knows nothing about the weirdness of the midnight hour and doesn't believe it's actually happening, while another GM can play management as a faceless entity that may or may not be aware of the weird shit but only cares whether or not you're doing your job.

>>54251720
100% agree with this write up, this is how it should look like

>>54251765
I think >>54251720 is most on the nose, then you can have both elements within the story. By having a half way position, there can be a level of antagonism and scepticism between you and a more understanding authority figure.

>>54251755
For the night shift, it should definitely be an option. But any attempts to bring outside sanity at the end of the session are always blocked by the slightly more senior Day Time Manager.

>>54203739
>plot twist
>everyone starts as night shift
>everyone
>including those day shifters that mock you now
>they know of your pain and either mock you for not handling it as well as they did or do it to block out their own memories

Anyone have any spooky IRL night shift stories?

>>54253898

We've had some on previous threads that were pretty cool.

>>54251864
>double plot twist!
>the guys who will end up on the day shift will never have a thing happen to them
>their not-having-anything-happening-to-them-ness is what the emploers are looking for

>>54245762
>you know they're probably here for your protection, but you can't shake the feeling that they're here to monitor you specifically

>>54251864
>>54254276
>triple plot twist
>two of the guys on the day shift ARE the things happening to the guys on the night shift

>>54251864
>>54254276
>>54255473
I've gotta say, I'm not a fan.

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>>54256265
If Night Shift is anything like 2 In the A.M. P.M., you'll be a fan eventually.
Pic related.

One old idea that I haven't seen brought up yet in this thread is "A.C. Prime," a giant, faceless, unsettlingly "normal" corporate conglomerate that tries to buy the Station on ocassion. Does anyone remember their whole deal?

>>54256830
From what I remember AC Prime was either the company the delivery driver worked for or pretty much exactly what you described. As far as a regular antagonist goes they weren't a bad idea but they never really got fleshed out besides being a vaguely threatening corporate entity, which honestly seems like enough information to get by on.

>>54256830
>>54257245
>Hey guys, late isn't it? Doesn't matter though, such a lovely night we're having! I work A.C. Prime, you must have surely heard of us? Anyway, I'm here to offer you guys a deal, one you just won't be able to refuse! We're interested in buying this lovely gas station of yours and I'm sure you'll love all the improvements we'll make. A drive-through with hefty discounts for our workers, a stuff room with a TV and separate bathroom, flexible work hours, career opportunities, easy day shift places, how does all that sound, eh? Great, isn't it? All you had to do is sign here... and here... Oh, no wait, don't call the manager! It's so late at night, he would certainly be angry, but he will surely be up for a pleasant surprise in the morning when he sees what a great deal you've made! So let's just settle this between us pals, shall we?

Fuckers should have some shady world domination plans and actually want to buy off the station due to all the weird shit surrounding it

>>54193073
Wayne you nerd.

>>54198594
I think the main idea is isolating the players in a space where any kind of people could show up, where the players are expected to be sociable and serve said people at a moment's notice, and where they can't expect a quick rescue if something goes wrong.

Oh dear god, I just thought of a small, but ridiculous encounter.
>quiet night, nothing much else happening
>two players on shift, one on the register and one mopping
>suddenly, they can hear distant music that seems to be getting closer
>sounds like someone made a techno beat out of pitchshifted moaning noises
>music keeps getting closer and louder
>small green flying object suddenly breaks in through a window at blurry speed
>smacks one player in the head
>bounces off
>smacks other player in the head
>bounces out another window
>whole event from entrance to exit occurred in less than one second
>green object flies off into the night like it was never there

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc--vzVRDTE

>>54200251
>"generic" threats against the station. Stuff the old guys just accept as normal after working at the gas station for so long.

Kind of like all the anomalies that came up the AGP ship?

Probably have some weird ritual to access the men's bathroom after a voodoo wizard died there, a PA system that sometimes starts shouting in german unless you turn it off, an aisle where gravity goes slightly left so stuff slides off unless you put up a barrier or tilt the shelf the other way, a creepy guy covered in bird feathers who lives on the roof and eats the garbage sometimes...

>>54257732
This reminds me that another good thing about working with the Night Shift setting is that you can tailor the night's events to however many players you have that session.

>>54257541
The blandest man in the blandest suit making the blandest sales pitch on Earth somehow manages to be disquietingly comforting in his blandness.

>>54222470
If we're doin greasy spoon, we gotta have old school Tom Waits

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8rsq6lYrwU

>>54222470
>>54258056
>Night Shift in a greasy spoon
>pool tables, arcade cabinets, and video poker in the back of the room
Ultimate supernatural comfy, especially with the "spirited" regulars that always drop in.

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>>54258175
Coney Islands give me the A E S T H E T I C

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>>54258274
nut

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>>54258294
>>54258274
>>54258175
>>54258056
Might be worth a closer look in the next "Urban Unease" thread.

>>54258482
Is it me or does UU remind you a lot of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book? It just seems to have a similar vibe.

Thoughts on these two rules changes/additions for the Night Shift world hack?
- Minimum Wage, Maximum Weird: When the employees begin their shift at the Stop N' Gas, each player rolls a D3 for their Weird stat, adding modifiers for any Special Trainees or Drifters. Add each employees' Weird stat together. On a 10+, 3 Threats are present. On a 7-9, 2 Threats are present. On a 6-, only 1 Threat is present. (The GM should only ask the players to roll the dice, but should not explain this rule to the players.)

Getting Weird With It: As the employees of the Stop N' Gas continue to survive the horrors that routinely threaten the station, they become more attuned to the station's strangeness. An employee can spend 3 Paycheck to increase one stat by +1, up to a max of +3. On the fourth time an employee can do this, they quit their job at the Stop N' Gas and are assumed to move onto greener pastures.

>>54258503
Forge Lords are gay

Given the average quality of these threads it's the "F" that should be blocked out on the sign.

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>>54259078

Oh anon, you're so clever!

>>54259078
We give you a F

>>54259078
Actually, in one of the original threads, some guy was making gifs of the Night Shift logo and that was exactly what he did

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>>54259353
I saved that image, because it was actually pretty funny.

>>54259463

Yeah, it's precisely the letter most likely to be shot out by some dumb teenagers with a BB gun.

>>54259506
Too true.

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>>54257797
do go on...

This small town, commercial free radio station i found while channel surfing on a roadtrip gave me feelings for the gas station. You can listen on their, very meager, site.

http://www.wrciradio.com/

>>54191469
I always felt like Night Shift was better as short story fodder, aka writefaggotry, than for actual gaming.

Strange occurrence leaves cashier feeling uneasy, then he goes back to restocking the cigarettes.

>>54259971
I feel like this setting is ripe for some /qst/ shenanigans, given that the qm has an endgame set up for the story.

>>54260052
Yeah, a quest thread could work well too.

>>54259971
The thing about Night Shift is that it's not really meant for your standard campaign-style game where an over-arching storyline is important. If you're running Night Shift right, you're either going to be playing an intensely horrific, one-shot, survive-the-night game, or a darkly comedic, episodic, paranormal slice-of-life game.

>>54260090
>>54260052
I'd been meaning to visit /qst/. A Night Shift Quest would get me over there.

>>54259506

I also think it matches with how a gas station employee would describe what they night shift is going through

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Made this for a one-shot I ran, thought I'd share