I got up this morning with the full intent of actually working, but the Mad City wouldn't let me.  Instead I spent about an hour looking over character sheets and thinking up Nightmares.

The one previous game of DRYH that I ran, I 100% winged it.  I had no plan, I had a couple of Nightmares that I'd thought up ahead of time, and I let the City do the driving, as it were.  It was a lot of fun, that game, and I think the players had good resolution, but I did feel like the story could have been tighter.  There was some random wandering around, some encounters with NPCs that didn't have any actual purpose other than to demonstrate how Very Weird This All Is, which was all good fun but didn't really satisfy me.

So this time around I want to attempt to streamline things, make sure that whatever is happening to the Awakened is meaningful and important.  And at the same time, keep the story free and loose and off that goddamned railroad.  This is going to be a challenge.  The best way I can think of is to take a look at their sheets and make sure that everyone they meet is interested in them for a particular reason.  Which means making some Nightmares just for them. 

Lucky, lucky PCs!

There's a part in the supplemental Don't Lose Your Mind that talks about drawing Madness talents from the questions on the character sheets, and how each type of question can guide you into choosing a Talent that is really tailored to the person.  We dipped a bit into this in our character creation, and it gave us George's Talent of manifesting musicals around him.  Can't wait to see that one in action.  It seemed to me that this was also an ideal way to create Nightmares.  The books don't talk much about this creation process - there's about a page in DRYH that talks about looking for common threads among the characters and also about manifesting modern fears - and I think that Fred probably assumed that if you'd gotten that far, you could extrapolate from how the rest of the game is described.  In a game that's as free form as I really need touchstones like personally tailored Nightmares to prevent the wheels from spinning.  And I came up with a doozy.  I think.  I hope.  I guess we'll see.