As with Fiasco, One by One will have scripts that describe the particular setting to be used in a game session. Four will be included in the rulebook, including:
- Arkham County: Massachusetts, 1923. You received a letter from an old colleague, begging you to come to Arkham County to help him protect its residents from some unnamed horror. Your friend had dabbled in the occult and read many ancient, strange books, but you have never heard him so disturbed. People have been disappearing in the county, and now whatever is taking them, is after you.
- Camp Chippapuok: In the early 1980s, a group of teenagers are looking for a place to party. Someone mentions the old, abandoned Camp Chippapuok upstate. Hey, why not? No one’s there right now, not after all those kids died years ago. It’s the perfect place to drink some beer, smoke some weed, and maybe even get lucky! But the thing that killed those kids is still there, and it’s not happy to find all these teenagers in the summer camp.
- Cold, Dark Space: The deep space exploration vessel Henry Hudson surveyed planet HN-112 as ordered. The scientists, crew, and Marines found the planet to be Earth-like, full of life and ripe for colonization. Samples of the local flora and fauna were taken as per regulations, and now the Hudson is on route to Earth. But something killed the captain, and whatever did it is still loose on the ship. And it’s hungry.
- Whitechapel Vigilance Committee: Jack the Ripper is terrorizing London’s Whitechapel neighborhood. Ladies of the evening have not only been murdered but mutilated as well. With the police unable to protect the people or find the killer, volunteers have formed a “vigilance” committee to patrol the evening streets. But tonight, something is hunting the hunters–the volunteers are now being killed by this mysterious Jack.
These scripts do more than create the setting. Each has two parts:
The first is character creation. When you make a character for One by One, you’ll roll on tables in the chosen script to generate a connection between your character and the one on your right. In Arkham County, the two characters could be academic rivals, veterans of the Great War, or a bootlegger and a cop on the take. But in Cold Dark Space, the two can be clueless scientists, android and android-hater, or weary bughunt vets. This makes every character different yet perfect for the setting.
The second is scene resolution. When you finish a scene, the player whose turn it is picks one die and rolls on a table included in the script. For a flashback scene, this brings complications such as “The lead character is secretly a cultist” or, “The supporting character is not human and hasn’t been for years”. In a continuing scene, one character will die! (But since you can roleplay a flashback, you are never out of the game.) Again, these are tailored to the specific setting: Your character can be driven insane in Arkham County, chased by a madman in Camp Chippapouk, covered in acidic alien blood in Cold, Dark Space, and accused of being the killer in Whitechapel Vigilance Committee.
As we said, the core book will include four scripts. Additional scripts will be made available for free downloads at our website, and we will encourage other designers (especially new ones!) to create their own.