Sleepaway – A long, sweet rest - a flickering nightmare in the wind

            Sleepaway is a “No Dice, No Masters” game, based on the Belonging Outside belonging system formed for the games Dream Askew and Dream Apart, and is written by Jay Dragon. Rich summer nights with brisk wind, camp games played around the table, and rituals – both named and unnamed – that bring your world of tabletop role-playing into the space where you are, even a bit too close for comfort. To say that I love Sleepaway might be an eternal understatement, but it’s not for everyone.

            Sleepaway takes place in a summer camp – one that the players create around the table as they begin, with a set of sticking places and forms to which players can create a coherent camp. The metaphors in Jay’s work, both in setting and in the entities and motifs, are in all places beautifully crafted, but in many places either thinly veiled or outright explained – not to the detriment of the game, but instead to a large strength of its narrative satisfaction, and especially for the sake of safety at your table. Safety isn’t something that I wasn’t originally introduced to in my first days of roleplaying, and now think is a necessity at least to bring up to your players in a session zero, or even a session negative one, and Sleepaway is a prime example of that – it’s a game, like Jay’s first book, Esoteric – that has teeth, and bares them often. We see these gossamer-veiled, wickedly sharp metaphors instantly in the form of the Lindworm, an entity that haunts every camp that springs forth from Sleepaway.

            The Lindworm is a skin-stealer, a vast and cruel shapeshifter that taunts and torments the players – and most importantly no player role-plays as the Lindworm. Not only is this built into the game but becomes a critical point of making the game bearable for the errant player for anything other than a oneshot. The source of randomness in this game comes from the Lindworm being simply channeled through a player, and decisions being made through a table of playing cards, some of which can get… a little grisly. As for the metaphor, the Lindworm exists as a physical force of the world outside this summer camp, and the campers, that your players protect, and Jay explicitly writes this in the pages that introduce the Lindworm.

History (kind of)

            The reason I say “kind of” history this time, is that there isn’t a ton of historical context surrounding this particular game in my opinion. Sleepaway, in physical form, came into print in the early months of 2020 – almost a year after Covid began to raise its head. The most well-known work of Jay’s that was released before then, only one of two if I’ve looked at my dates right, was Jay’s book aforementioned, Esoteric, released in 2019. I will not discuss the contents of Esoteric here – such is the nature of that game book, but I will say that these two books, Esoteric and Sleepaway both have an almost desperate, hungry need for physicality, something I greatly appreciate with TTRPGS. Sleepaway has a multitude of things that augment physical play over digital play (though digital play certainly is possible and quite enjoyable from personal experience) – as mentioned before, it has literal game mechanics called rituals that employ things like soaking index cards used in the game in water, tearing them up, having all the players lay on the ground, among other incredibly satisfying ways to tease the idea of LARP-ing to your classically tabletop players.

            Instead of discussing Esoteric, we move into Dream Askew/Dream Apart – the original propagators of the Belonging Outside Belonging (BOB) system. This system was surely not the first to have a gm-less and dice-less play experience, but it was one of the first to do so in a larger campaign setting, and certainly one of the more complex systems that made use of it. Dream Askew takes place in a post-apocalyptic and burgeoning world of queer love. 2018, when it was released, seems to be the tail end of the boom (in video games at least) in post-apocalyptic fiction, and even without formal research, one can guess why the genre fell sharply into dystopic fiction rather than post-apocalypse (looking at Ms. Rona). Even at the middle point of the pandemic in early 2021, I was attending a university under an art program, and among the people who were art majors (superior) and the art minors (peons) (I’m kidding) (mostly), there was a sharp divide between the types of art being created – covid had been ongoing for 2 years at that point, and it was becoming a tired subject for the majors in the art department. Everyone and their dog (who also wanted an art minor) would make art about how hard quarantine was, how much it impacted them, how much of a strain it was. All well and good, but I noticed that even among professional artists, it was no longer a subject of interest. People were living through it, not only did no-one want to hear it, practically no-one who created in my circles wanted anything to do with covid-art.

            However, Dream Askew came out right before then – enjoying the relative safety of pre-rona times and enjoying success of being an amazing system for exploring the systems that arise from the end of times, with your queer friends and more-than-friends. If you are a queer person who plays tabletop games, well, you know we travel in packs, and often those groups interlace. We are given the opportunity to literally play the narrative of us against the world.

            In any case, this is about Sleepaway, not Dream Askew. Sleepaway came out shortly after Dream Askew in 2020, but was in pretty public development before then, having an active kickstarter in June of 2019. Having started its development before the hit of covid, we can see that it was built with many of Jay’s physical-play sensibilities. I think the masterstroke of this all was that use of a system built for queer players and then made more real. It was simply unfortunate timing that it need be released during the height of covid (take “the height” with a grain of salt – that’s a topic I’m not going to touch in particular detail).

Sleepaway enjoyed some amount of publicity from “Oneshot Podcast” where a couple of notable players, including ND Stevenson, creator of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power; Brennan Lee Mulligan, DM for many a session of Dimension 20, and Molly Ostertag, writer for The Owl House. As is common though, anything in the tabletop podcasting world not DnD related often enjoys a lesser amount of fame than their dragon-y counterparts. However, in 2020 Sleepaway was nominated for the Indie GroundBreaker Awards, as well as the Judge’s Spotlight Award for the Ennies.

The Gamer Experience 

            So, I’ve played Sleepaway twice now, and I’ll go into them with some amount of detail, because they were extremely different play experiences. Sleepaway requires things of your players, and what it requires leads in to a small discussion about the utmost importance of session 0, or even a session -1 in order to establish what everyone at the table wants. The first session is ongoing, though on hiatus, and more of an enjoyable experience – it’ll help illustrate the pro’s of the game a little bit more, and will be referred to as session A. The second of the two was a oneshot, played at an event. I’m not going to outright say it wasn’t enjoyable, because it was fun. However, the way it manifested and the balance of players made the necessities of the game more glaringly obvious – this will help to illustrate the con’s and the more pressing needs of the game and your players, henceforth referred to as session B.

            Session A was played with a larger group of players, that I’ve known for a longer time. I played with this group as their first DnD DM, and this was their first introduction to a game like Sleepaway – less structured, more improvisational. We started playing in June of 2022, and have had roughly 2 sessions after. We had a session 0, and had been talking for multiple weeks about trying to get back into the gaming moods – a lot of them had been starting up things that led to not being able to play till summer, and I had been doing the same. From the beginning of us starting the session, the players were clear on what was going into the game – namely the knowledge that this was GM-less horror. In our session 0, we set up the Lines and Veils, as well as multiple explanations of the X-Card mechanic. For the most part, in any game aside from ones where we do the consent checklist of topics, Lines and Veils, while extremely important, requires a deep amount of trust in the players around the table: you’re opening yourself up to the specific topics that you want to keep out of the game, even if they don’t require an explanation. The X-Card is a great mechanic, but suffers from online play where people are opening up multiple windows at any one time to keep track of rules and mechanics, and the board where it is displayed is not always in focus.

            Initially, the players were apprehensive – I was their first DM, and this was their first divergence away from how light and airy DnD can be, as well as a foray into GM-less games. As it turns out, they didn’t have to worry about that at all, as they took to the system like ducks to the murky depths of Sleepaway. Though the games did start up a little bit meandering at times, the players started taking up the initiative – because they weren’t necessarily “beholden” to anyone, they were also more invested in how their characters interacted with the world, “splitting the party” became a non-issue as people figured out how to partition time dramatically to make the best “camera cuts” – which is another thing. In games like this especially with new players, the introduction of what can be known as “the narrative camera” is a life saver. Being able to make narrative decisions on what we can and cannot see is an absolute banger of a way to develop the story you make at the table: low angle shots across a path at camp, aerial shots of the mess hall, slow zooms toward the edge of the darkened forest; all of these become fantastic ways to build tension (something that Sleepaway is already fantastic at doing) and to explain how a player is viewing the scene. We used this mechanism a lot, and it turned our theater of the mind up to 11.

            Session B however, was an entirely different experience. Sleepaway on it’s surface seems somewhat simple to get into – it’s a camp, with easy set up from a list, character sheets, and some safety mechanics. What isn’t immediately obvious with a pdf is that Sleepaway is 131 pages long. This isn’t to say that Sleepaway is being deceptive at all with its setup, or that it’s particularly bloated as some other games can be. Rather, Sleepaway feels like a game that you don’t even bring up unless you’re already at a table you know you can trust. Session B was played at an event, and didn’t necessarily suffer from that – rather, it suffered from the fact that the players present at that table did not have the web of trust built up that most tables playing this game would have, either professionally or from camaraderie.

In Sleepaway, you’re given a list with which you determine how the Lindworm operates – “The Lindworm first kills animals. Then adults. Then children. Then, finally, the Characters. Always  in that order.” This particular tidbit which helps you build that aforementioned tension was in the Tip section of Channeling the Lindworm – and it was immediately lost for Session B. In addition, the group cohesion struggled from the fact that there was no in-born desire from these strangers brought together to create something that was narratively satisfying to everyone, and the fact of the matter remains that Sleepaway is not an individual sport. Your characters have a built-in singular goal – to protect the camp no matter what. How you do that is completely up to you, but inheriting from that goal – your characters are inherently less selfish than a classical DnD party can be; theres a dedication to the order built in Sleepaway in trusted campaigns. This is legitimately as simple as knowing that the players at the table want to be playing a game in which they aren’t playing with necessarily their own goals – since there’s no gm to “direct your movie” per se, wanting to create a story together is often different than the type of play that often emerges in events – often games with a GM, where opposition is introduced through that GM, rather than the players setting up their own obstacles to increase tension.

That’s a Wrap 

            So. You’ve read over 2000 words of this review. First of all, thanks for making it this far. Here’s what all of that means. Sleepaway, created by Jay Dragon, is an incredible game. It builds tension, helps you create characters that will maximize that tension, tug on your heartstrings, and make a unique and poignant story which you can relive time and time again. HOWEVER. This game requires things from us, as players around a table. Note that these are not actual requirements for playing this game – I don’t necessarily think that this game can or should be gated off from sets of players – if you want to play a horror game about being at camp, then this might be the game for you. Sleepaway, in my opinion, requires trust between your players – not only in the construction of the world and the relationships in the characters, not only in the subject matter and the safety tools that are used in this game. This trust comes from each of the players, to the other players at the table. If you don’t trust the other players enough that if the time comes, you can truly play the X-card, that you can enforce that Line/Veil without blowback, without questioning? I don’t think you should play this game with that group. That type of trust takes time, it takes playing with them for a while, and that’s perfectly fine. Even with the expectation of that trust and the knowledge of what type of game this is, it can be difficult to feel that out in a particularly new setting.

            In addition, it requires that you at least want to drive a narrative together – as in Session A, the players were apprehensive, but willing to try, and informed enough that we could attempt this, to great success. If you don’t want to do that, if you want to create a story for your character, and have no stake in the actions of others, you don’t want to see others succeed in the face of extreme peril, or inflict emotional harm on them (the CHARACTER, NOT the player), if you want to have a lighthearted game about the cartoonish antics of fantastical characters with no real consequences, then perhaps a game about a queer summer camp fighting against the horror of the world that is inflicted on a daily basis, then perhaps this game might not be the best fit.

            Jay Dragon is an incredible author, whose works are dazzling to look at, queer in all the best ways, and are played with a taste of blood in your mouth. Sleepaway was masterfully constructed, but demands safety in the face of horrible potential for damage. In short, do I think you should play Sleepaway? I don’t think there’s a good answer for that. Of course, my first instinct, the one that screams in the front of my brain is “Yes, play this game, please for the love of god and the love of the table play this game,” is also the part of me that, as a GM, wants to make my players cry because they found something profound and true and painful. There’s a slightly less enthusiastic little gremlin sitting behind that GM-brain, that says “yes,” but quieter – its the part of me that is part of the queer community, that (repressed and just a little bit fearfully) connects with other people and wants to understand and be understood in turn. Behind that smaller gremlin sits a pit of fear, hollow and whispering caution. Sleepaway wants things from you, and if you can’t give it the respect that it needs, it can be at best boring for your players, and at worst dig up things that each player wants to keep hidden. Play with caution, and remember:

Never play as the Lindworm.