Dawn Guard

I read bits and pieces of Unknown Armies, I also read a review of the Ghost Dog RPG.

The Ghost Dog RPG was published by a small company that went bust some time ago. You can't get it in the UK. You can only get it secondhand in the US. because I will never see a copy I have to imagine what it would be like. (incidentally the guys who made the Ghost Dog RPG only had a poor VHS copy of the film to view before they created the RPG, further increasing the rashamon-type decay-of-memory-as-creation aspect of the whole thing.)

I saw someone on the Internet talking about their favourite poem, which has the Dawn, and this made me think of my favourite poem. John Donne's 'On The Sun Rising'. Which is also about the dawn.

And this is the distantly envisioned crypto-culture RPG I imagined:

Powers rule the night, powers rule the day. But in the brief span between night and day there is an unseen anarchy. Who guards the Dawn?

You do.

Between the first light hazing the sky and the moment the suns disc clears the horizon, you and a bunch of other low level mediocrities are all that stands between the world and undreamed-of horror.


In you normal lives you are irrelevant nobodies, the world's geography teachers, tax adjusters, binmen. But for an hour and a half at the beginning of each day you are heros. With nothing more than a few stolen tricks, some scratched-together firepower and your own two hands.

No-one can ever know.


Play would observe the unity of time and space, play for an hour, you survive for an hour, time would be described using my advanced marvel superhero rules, in panels, pages and issues.


Lonely, brave nobodies hunting the empty streets of cities, revolver in one hand, poetry and comics clutched in the other. The light is always grey and diffuse, time is always running out. The more you can see the worse things are. Get it done and save the people before they fill the streets with work and in their ignorance, damn themselves.


Allies? Only people too drunk, drugged, lost, lonely or weird to fit into the normal world. Ever been high or drunk all day and felt things slipped into a different sort of space around dawn? Or that things can happen then which couldn't happen any other time? This is why. You probably forgot the really strange shit you saw, you probably thought it was a dream or a corrupted memory. 

It was all real. They are still out there, every morning. Fighting to keep you safe. Thank god you're asleep.