Opera House – RPG

Welcome to the Royal Grand Opera House, the largest and most prestigious theatre in the city of Pavilion. All of your characters have just joined the company of the Royal Grand in one of several potential roles. You might be an actor, dancer or musician, but you might also work backstage on the crew, in wardrobe, lighting or sound or even as a stage manager.

Your contract had an extra section asking if you would be happy to do ‘additional duties’ for a very small bump in salary. You thought that might be just putting out chairs before a rehearsal, or having to help tidy the auditorium or suchlike. Unfortunately, it turns out to be much more.

Other theatres send spies and saboteurs in to try and ruin the show, and you have to stop them. But that’s not all, ghosts haunt the theatre looking to suck the life out of the audience. Horrors are often drawn up from the impossibly deep basement levels by the sounds of the show. Then there are the cursed props that need to be handled exceptionally carefully. The rats in the building are also intelligent, so watch out for that.

You and the other poor souls who agreed to additional duties have to solve all these problems. No one cares how, as long as the audience never knows. However, you also have a job in the show to do, and if you miss a cue because you were fighting a ghost, chasing a saboteur or trying to intimidate a morlock that’s no excuse.

Opera House is a tabletop roleplaying game designed with three things in mind.

First, its everything you’d expect of a tabletop RPG, with the option to tell stories in the strange world of the Royal Grand Opera House.

Second, the game can be played in a single session, ‘one night only’ mode where events occur in real time during the performance of a show.

Finally, Opera house is a theatre sourcebook. It explains what each department does in a theatre, and how a show is put together from auditions to the final night.

The book also offers a full description of the Royal Grand Opera House itself. It is a vast building with more than enough stories packed inside its walls to run whole campaigns without ever setting foot outside. As the building is self contained it might be transplanted into almost any setting to suit your group’s current campaign.

Opera House is a complete stand alone RPG.