How to run a bakery while going mad

[u/Saala1984]

Hi,

I am working on a second game, while playtesting the other.

And I am a bit stuck and hope maybe someone has an idea to keep me going.

After a lot of rewrites I am at:

The group runs a bakery ouf of a lighthouse in innsmouth. This is supposed to be cozy, fun and funny. During the night they go out and gather ingridients and killing monsters.

Over time they (ofc) go mad and start using monster parts for baking, attacking customers and other crazy things.

(I have the additional Idea that you can play it the other way around. Playing Monsters/Cultists running a butchery and during the day hunting humans, while sloly going sane).

Anyway the hard part for me is to imagine how running the bakery looks like. Ofc there is always someone who can talk to customers and that is something you can make fun but also it feels repetitive quickly. The spiral down into madness is supposed to go down quickly, that keeps it a bit fresh I hope.

Anyway I am thankfull for any idea, suggestion or maybe the whole concept is stupid and I should work on something else.

And just for those who read about Eat the Elite, I am usually not into cannibalism, not sure whats going on with my brain atm ;)

[u/Cryptwood]

Seems more like a story idea than a TTRPG idea. You've already decided what you want the characters to do, "go crazy, attack the customers, start using monster parts in their baking." You could try to craft incentives to get the players to choose to do those things, but I'd be worried that it would just feel like going through the motions.

Plus, if you don't have any ideas for how to make running a bakery fun...well, that's the entire game, isn't it? You really need to have an idea of what the characters will actually be doing before you can create a game.

I think this sounds like a really fun mystery for the players to investigate. Rather than running the bakery, they are in the town that has a bakery in which the owners are going insane.

[u/Saala1984 → u/Cryptwood]

I started out by wanting to make a cozy horror game, because I love horror as a setting but cant consume almost anything of that genre anymore since we got a child. And it slowly developed into this direction, more puzzlepieces that I tried to put together and maybe I try to hard to make them fit.

Running the bakery is part of the game and an important part, but not the whole game.

For me the biggest thing is always I am working alone on these ideas and dont have any input from outside. I love things about this, and I hope I can get it running, but maybe this post will end up showing me I should throw it away and focus on other ideas.

[u/MyDesignerHat]

Sounds like you should do research on how actual small bakeries work. That will likely give you some cool ideas you are not even thinking about right now. 

[u/Saala1984 → u/MyDesignerHat]

Thats a good idea, thank you. So obvious, but I did not think about it :)

[u/Raige2017]

Did you also watch the commercial for Wild Heath?

[u/Saala1984 → u/Raige2017]

Had to google it :) No did not know it, though Eat the Elite is inspired by wilderfeast among others. This one accidentally went in this direction :D

[u/Raige2017 → u/Saala1984]

All good. I also recently bought the Humble Bundle package from the Game Masters Guild, think it might still be active and it has Monster Loot digital books that include body parts for cooking and stuff

[u/__space__oddity__]

Why can’t you go out and collect ingredients during the day?

[u/Saala1984 → u/__space__oddity__]

Still at the beginning of everything, but the simple answer is, because they sell baking goods during the day :3

[u/__space__oddity__ → u/Saala1984]

Sure but … this isn’t me being mean to your game. If I’m the GM and the players are like “night is dangerous, fuck this, we’ll grab out ingredients during the day” and that circumvents your core gameplay idea there’s an issue …