Don't Rest Your Head, by Fred Hicks of Evil Hat Productions is an intense little game of exhaustion and madness in the surreal landscape hidden between the cracks of the "normal" world. You play a character who has gone without sleep for so long that suddenly he can see this secret world, and the Nightmares that inhabit it can see him.
The book itself is a small paperback, only about 80 pages long, but it doesn't waste a single page. The artwork in the book consists of high-contrast black and white close-ups of mysterious people, which does a nice job of setting the mood, and the font used for the titles and headings lends a ragged feel to things, all of which while understated, are appropriate for the game's focus.
Character creation is quick and mechanically easy, though putting the creativity in to make a "good" character might take a few minutes. The character sheet consists mostly of a "questionaire", with things like "What's been keeping you awake?", "What just happened to you?", and "What's your path?" All of these questions, while unquantified, are very important to how the game plays. On the crunchier side, you get to assign three "slots" to "Fight" or "Flight", which is what you have to choose between when the craziness all gets to be too much for you. Other "stats" that you have, that you don't get to choose, are "Discipline" (how skilled and together you are), "Permanent Madness" (how crazy you are) and "Current Exhuastion" (how tired you are). Those stats are important, because if you ever fall asleep again, the Nightmares will get you, and if you go too crazy, you'll become one of them.
So you should just stay calm and stay awake, right? The problem is, the Nightmares don't like you, and they're after you so it's hard to stay in control of the situation. However, this new insight into how the universe works grants you a not insignificant boon. You get "powers". One power is to do something "normal" supernaturally well, like Neo dodging bullets in "The Matrix". Anybody can dodge things that are coming at them, buy you can dodge things ridiculously well. You also gain the ability to do something that's outright IMPOSSIBLE, like teleporting or talking to inanimate objects or hurling fireballs from your bare hands. These talents will help you protect yourself from the Nightmares and maybe to solve whatever problem has been keeping you awake.
But here's the catch. Being super-good at something makes you tired, and doing the impossible makes you crazy. The more you work to save yourself, the more danger you're in! Can you follow your path before everything comes crashing down? Will your friends be able to protect you when you finally crash, falling asleep for days?
All of this exhaustion and madness are handled by different-colored dice. One color for your nice, safe discipline dice (which are enough to make you better than the average guy at everything), another color for your exhaustion dice (which make you super-humanly competent at your talent, but make falling asleep that much more likely) and another color for your madness dice (which run the risk of making you freak out at inopportune moments). The GM only gets one kind of dice, "pain". When the dice (d6s) are rolled, low numbers determine who wins, but high numbers determine what "flavors" the conflict, be it Discipline, Exhaustion, Madness or Pain. Each die type, when "dominant" has certain mechanical and narrative effects. When Pain is dominant, for instance, the GM gets a Despair token to use to screw with the PCs. Once he uses it, however, it becomes a Hope token, that the PCs can use.
That's the gist of the rules and it fills about 35 of the 80 pages. The remainder is really good advice on how to run the game (about 20 pages) and a broad description of the "Mad City" the freaky world that exists parallel to our own "City Slumbering" (about 25 pages). The Mad City is very bizarre and dream-like. I recently rented the movie "Mirrormask" and I think that's kind of what the Mad City is like, though the movie "Dark City" apparently shares a great many concepts and images. I should rent that movie again. The Nightmares are covered, from "Mother When" and her "Ladies in Hating" to "Officer Tock" and his creepy wind-up policemen to the almost benevolent "Wax King" and his "Smothered Folk" vassals.
Anyway, Don't Rest Your Head is an intense, focused, surreal and slightly terrifying journey into the imagination and I can't wait to go.
The books costs $7.95 US for the PDF, or you can get the PDF and the paperback as a bundle for $20 US.