Salem, 1906.
After having residents in town fallen victim to an unexplained mental disease all rights and wrongs shuffle. As victims of this plague mumble things they would never say, enchant songs they have never known and die twitching in the third day – aid comes when religion and law unite to create a lethal weapon against diabolic forces:
Now Salem awaits Governor Danforth, a supreme judge that comes to clear the city by the force of the law, and in the name of God.
The game story is in deed fiction, however, it is strongly affected by the Salem Witch Trials that took place in the real Salem Village, New England in 1692.
I was first exposed to the story when I saw The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, performed in cooperation of Habima - the national theater and Haifa Theater. Later on, I saw The film (game spoiler: watch film trailer in you tube). Both film and act left very good impressions on me.
A few years later I took part in a party game, played in some birthday party, where half of the participants where Role-Players, and it turned to be that traditionally in this birthday, they play the party game - Mafia.
The more the game progressed I could not avoid seeing the potential and dreaming abou it...
While the party game relays on how well the participants know each other to tell a behavior and a lie to expose the Mafia, they kept using a firm terminology of in-play characters: When someone was fast to accuse - he was considered as too keen to mingle with town politics. When somebody kept silent, he was considered as uncaring for the community or detached of town affairs. It lacked so little to help it become a role-play game.
To make it happen I started working with Yair Dicky Samban, a good friend of mine. After discussing the basics of the game, creating agreement about the feeling we want to create in the game and the means to do it, we split the work between us, and started operating.
The game was first written in Hebrew, and ran in Icon 2004 - a yearly Israeli convention for science fiction and fantasy.
The original game included 26 characters, including Governor Dawnsforth, which is a Game-Master character.
Since then, it ran in many more other conventions and co-operations. All of them were very successful, repaying and satisfying as much as post-game reviews can tell.
For few reasons.
First - the game mechanics.
The original trials were dealt by magistrates, in session of the court of Oyer and Terminer, while I was looking for a way to apply the decision taking on all the community, being affected by the Mafia game.
We toyed with the idea of running the game for a much larger groups then what the game is intended for, and then - instead of having a community vote, there will be not just a community town hall, but a court, appointed jury, in-session procedures, and so on.
However, we didn't see a way we can trust to get it engaged properly within the time limits of a standard convention-schedule, and took the decisions we made.
Second - we wanted to detach any bond created in players' minds from the occurring in the play and from what befell in the original trials, or Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, in case any of them is familiar with the details.
My choice was to have it set in a different time and in a different place, yet, resembles the original place whose feel we try to create by preserving the atmosphere, the places and the names.
Last - reproduction. The costumes are much more easy to gather. Not much changed in fashion in the past century concerning formal wearing.
Clothes typical for that time are available in films and in photos, they are very close to what we can get these days - at least the formal wear, accustomed by a religious community.
Also, since the game originally addressed new players, we believed that they will be more comfortable to identify, enroll and toy with the doubts of a character from the past century then a character of a good-fearing hard-day puritan.
Following my participation in Knudepunkt 2007 in Denmark, I decided to give a run of the game in Solmukohta 2008, for that I needed to translate the game to English - which I have.
Knowing I'm addressing high-level players made me very excited and enthusiastic. I decided to precede the game with a constructed presentation, and pour more details that will help the players later in the game.
Crawling among the materials once more, getting intimate with the characters, and reading more materials about the matter in English (a lot more became available on the web in those past 4 years) left me with more impressions, enough to create more characters, that's why the English version has 36 written characters.
I also had the thought to bring the game back to its original time at 1693, but decided not to, from the merely the same reasons.
I worked on it down to the last minuet before the running of the game. However, in the evening before the game I decided to make a site for the game, and started constructing this site.