Lots of unique and fresh madness powers for your Don’t Rest Your Head RPG characters.
Find Don’t Lose Your Mind (Don’t Rest Your Head RPG)
Premise
In the Don’t Rest Your Head RPG, you are an insomniac that is pushed to the point where you can enter a nightmare world, interact with others like yourself – the Awakened – or interact with creatures of nightmare in the Mac City. Don’t Lose Your Mind is a powers book for the Madness powers you get in the game, plus a few addition suggestions and clarifications on how to run or play the game. The product gives you one power for each letter in the alphabet, with some creepy story segment and some mechanical help.
The premise of the book – to provide you with a better understanding of madness power – mostly succeeds in providing game masters with more powers and rules to go with them.
Rating 4/5
Character Creation
This adds new powers – it is all about character creation and conception. You get 26 new powers. A a game master resource, it provides a lot of value as a time saver for helping players create new characters. The text is strong and the powers mostly unique and fresh.
An excellent resource for the narrator, beyond picking your madness power itself, this book has much less value to players. You can only have one power at a time. The only downside to that is that the “What Am I Becoming” section usually ends with some word play about the character or power that isn’t nearly as interesting as the author probably thought it would be.
Rating 4/5
Base Mechanics
Each power is broken into sections: 1) What Can I Do? 2) How Does it Break Me, 3) How Do I Change and 4) What Am I Becoming. While the mechanics do not suggest guidelines for designing your own powers, they do clarify what you can do with your powers and what the consequences are for using them. Mostly indispensable for a game master planning to run a Don’t Rest Your Head Game.
Rating 4/5
Longevity
The powers and rules don’t do anything in particular to make a campaign more viable than the base game does, but it does provide a lot of options that make easier to run a game. The 26 pages of non-powers are useful.
This gives some useful mechanics and thoughtful interpretations to help a game master run a game of Don’t Rest Your Head – this is a little better than the RPG core rules.
Rating 2/5
Presentation
Like the RPG book, the cover art is in color, interior is black and white. Artwork is heavily Photoshop’d photos. There is more line art here, blended also with photos and creepy use of fonts. The arwork works better though, and there is more of it. Given that this is, again, a print-on-demand product – I dont see how they could have made the artwork any better without moving to new medium.
The artwork just works better than in the original RPG, and it looks like the artist took the time to understand what the game was all about.
Rating 4/5
Statistics
Title: Don’t Lose Your Mind
Publisher: Evil Hat Productions
Genre: Horror
Author: Fred Hicks, Benjamin Baugh
Type: Powers Supplement for Don’t Rest Your Head RPG
Ratings
premise: 4/5
character creation: 4/5
base mechanics:4/5
longevity: 2/5
presentation: 4/5
Total Score: 4.0 (rounded up from 3.6/5)
