Alright, now that everyone reading this doesn’t care about being spoiled, let’s hop into the game. So the troubles, if you didn’t read the article about the TV show Haven from yesterday, are basically issues that manifest in people, it can be touching someone or something and they explode, it can be that you don’t feel anything, which works fine for a Barbarian fights through pain, instead there is just no pain. But it’s bigger than that, every 27 years these troubles are activated and someone, in fact, probably our crack team of heroes or one of them anyways, is sent in to save the town and restart the 27 year cycle.

Now, you give a player free will with their character and they are going to see the end of the 27 year cycle coming, and a lot of players are going to want to try and stop it completely instead of just stopping the cycle. In the show, Audrey Parker is the key to getting the troubles to stop and then restarting the 27 year cycle. But in the show she falls in love with Nathan Wuornos, a detective in the town, and he wants her to stay and they want to solve the troubles for good. Now, I doubt that the players are going to have characters fall in love, but who knows, they might. But even if they don’t, most of the time, unless a player has completed their character arc and feels like they have nothing more to do with that character, they’re going to be attached to the character and want to keep them alive, so hence, they need to figure out a way to stop the troubles, but also not have to restart the cycle.

Probably more to explain at this point, the troubles are stopped when Audrey, in the show, or the chosen character, goes basically into a stasis for 27 years only to come back out when the time is up and the troubles are coming back. And for elves, that’s not that long, for dwarves, they have a few lifetimes of going through the cycles, but for humans, you get maybe two of these cycles in the prime of your life, so that’s why the love angle worked well for the show (granted the show isn’t elves and dwarves fantasy either). And when I say stasis, I mean trapped basically in limbo, a space between dimensions and worlds.

So we have a lot of the set-up, how would you pull something off like this?

I think there are a handful of interesting things you can do. First, I think that this is a good chance to have a larger group game. If you have one consistent person, the “Audrey” character who can make it to most if not all sessions, you can have a rotating cast of PC’s supporting them. Have them deal with an trouble per session, and by deal, I don’t mean kill the troubled person, that generally causes more troubles to manifest and troubles are in a bloodline, so the next generation would have the troubles show up. I mean, there can be conflict and there should be conflict, probably with a group who is hunting down the troubles, so almost a rival group with pretty unlimited minions and an almost untouchable boss that the players can fight. But since it’s a one and done with the stopping the troubles for good and not having “Audrey” disappear as the main over arcing story, that means it works well for having people drop in and out without missing that much.

Next, the troubles themselves, in the show “Audrey” is immune to all the old troubles, which is probably a good thing, because they can be nasty. But other people aren’t, and I think that’s where you can have some fun. “Audrey” might be immune to getting blown up if she’s touched by someone with that trouble, but the rest of the party isn’t, so how can you deal with that, plus “Audrey” can still die to a sword through the chest or any other natural means. And there’s someone who draws pictures and if something happens to the picture, like a branch on a tree is pushed, it’d push that branch in real life and break it off, so you can knock someone out that way, such as “Audrey” even though it was caused by a trouble, or explode the house around “Audrey” dealing her shrapnel damage, even though “Audrey” can’t be exploded herself.

Also, give the other PC’s troubles. In the show, Nathan, who is Audrey’s closest friend in Haven and who she ends up falling in love with can’t feel pain or touch, so he gets his hand broken, he can’t feel it, he gets shot, he can’t feel it, his hand is touching something dangerously hot or cold, he can’t feel it. Give the PC’s troubles like that. Give them the ability to heat something up to a scalding temp or free something small instantly, give them something that’s powerful but not too powerful. Don’t give your PC the ability to explode someone, they would just immediately take the town hostage.

Finally, keep this localized. Keep it in a single town that is off on it’s own away from everything else. Make it harder to get to, hard to run away from, in fact, you could use the mists like those that surround Castle Ravenloft and Barovia in D&D already where you can’t get through them, you walk in and then you just walk back out into the same town. But even if you don’t force it through magic to be localized, keep the troubles and the stories close to that town. The reason for that in the show is that the troubled would be killed or experimented on if their troubles manifested outside of Haven, so Haven is a safe haven for the troubled, make that the case for your town as well. The secondary reason for that is that if you start and end in town almost every session, you can have players drop in and out.

So end game for this, it’s about stopping the troubles once and for all. This stasis should have a physical manifestation that they can destroy. But that shouldn’t end the troubles, give them a false end, instead, for a final epic arc, give them a chance to go and find that untouchable being that wants to kill off all the troubled, give that being a way to actually end the troubles, and maybe even have them live in limbo and have the town be their experiment, again stealing some of this from the show. Use that to end it, but give them a timeline because once “Audrey” isn’t in stasis at the right time, things need to go from back to worse for our heroes and the town, and the world, probably.

So, would you play in a game like this? I think that I would run something like this, but I think that it might be harder to pull off than some games. There are definitely some trickier things, such as the players just running away from the town to stop having to deal with all of the issues that crop up. I think a session 0 where players really work together and develop the town with you, or at least plenty of people they care about in the town, you’d be able to get them to want to stay.

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Audrey Parker is an FBI agent who is sent after a wanted man and she tracks him down to the town of Haven. When part of the road gives way on the coast, she is rescued from her car by Nathan Wuornos, a detective in the police department and someone who is “troubled” (has a special ability) where he can’t feel pain, which as some upsides and downsides. Audrey quickly figures out that there’s a lot of “troubled” people in the town and she figures out that she can help them. Not only that, with being adopted, the two journalists in the small town show her a picture of someone who looks like her mother. She decides to use some of the vacation time that she’s saved up and spend some time in Haven, helping out the police department and see what she can find out about her mother, and that might be what Agent Howard, her superior, really wanted to happen.

That, by the way, is basically the synopsis of the first episode of a five season show and it doesn’t change massively as time goes on. The first couple of seasons are a bit more episodic, but eventually you start to get bigger story arcs as Audrey, Nathan, and Duke (who is introduced in episode one as well), keep having to solve the problems and deal with the troubles. And the troubles can get out there, there’s someone who basically put their soul into the work on their house and keeping their family safe that they took control over their own house and use the mirrors to see, which is pretty horrifying. Or there’s someone with whatever they touch in with their hands, it causes it to explode. Or time travel or mermen. There are so many, and it’s almost one per episode, though we do get to go back and visit. And while we get that, they spend more time building up Audrey Parker’s past and delve into the mystery surrounding her mother and an unexplained Colorado Kid mystery. In the end, I think that they tie it up quite well, though, it ends differently than I would have expected, but it ends smartly. They are given time to wrap up the mystery and complete the full story which is really nice.

Now for a downside of the show, I think that some of the special affects haven’t aged the best, and that’s kind of to be expected. While this show had a solid budget in terms of what they were able to pull of it was still early 2010’s and that’s going to look dated now. I just kind of expect that because some of the other shows I really like from the SyFy channel has the same issue, Eureka and Warehouse 13. Another thing is the early season storytelling, I think that they have a few arcs that are being set-up that would have had great long term potential, and then they rush through them in a couple of episodes. Some of that was the product of the time, and some of that was just poorer storytelling. The issue with the storytelling like that is that you feel like you lose the payoff, but in the early 2010’s, the larger story arcs were generally secondary.

Finally, as a downside and an upside, I want to talk about the acting in this show. I would say that the acting is okay for the show. I don’t think that it’s bad and I don’t think that it’s great. With Audrey, Nathan, and Duke, though, it ends up being good on screen chemistry, it just takes a bit to get there. The early episodes, in fact I’d say through a good chunk of season 1, the acting is quite rough. Now there are some characters, Vince and Dave, the journalist brothers, played by Richard Donat and John Dunsworth who are great from the start. Eventually the acting does get better and I think that’s mainly as the chemistry on screen gets better. Plus, it’s a show where Edge and Christian from the WWE are both in it, and Edge (Aaron Copeland) playing Dwight Hendrickson actually has a big role in the show and does really well with his acting. There are other professional wrestlers who have acted, but he’s one of the best that I’ve seen besides the ones who have gone to Hollywood, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and John Cena.

So, who is this show for? I think that’s a good question, I think that the supernatural element is going to keep some people a way as it dabbles in dimensions, time travel, ghosts, and so much more that would give away a lot of the plot if I continue down that route. I would say that it probably would make sense for fans of Supernatural but maybe aligns itself closer with Locke & Key in terms of feel. Also fans of Eureka and Warehouse 13, while it’s kind of in a different genre, it definitely has some similar feel to those shows.

Overall, I really like this show. I think it suffers a tiny bit from Stephen King syndrome where the ending is a little bit out there, but they build towards that well. There are also some story elements that are just dropped in an odd way, but overall, it’s good. And I think some shows like this, Supernatural, suffer from having the world ending event at the end of every season that needs to be stopped, Haven does a good job of building up the stakes for the seasons as time goes on.

Is this a show that you watched when it came out or one that interests you now? If you’ve seen it, did you enjoy it?

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