Hot Guys Making Out (HGMO) is a roleplaying game by Ben Lehman, and is set in a remote village in the Pyrenees during the Spanish Civil War (1930s). You play one of two main male protagonists (or ancillary other folks), and it's a game of passion. I haven't played it.
A hack of this game called HGMO: Sherlock was written by my friend Lauren McManamon (a fellow Gauntleteer) and is instead about those Baker Street detectives, Sherlock Holmes, and Watson, and the steamy relationship that simmers right under the covers of daily mysteries.
River was running this game, and I got to play it along with Agatha, Asher, and Larry. And I got to be Sherlock Holmes, himself. As is usual during Gauntlet games, the character keepers stored in Google documents was excellent, and really lent to immediately getting to get into the gaming, and having an easy-to-use reference:
The rules splayed out in a Google doc, true to form for The Gauntlet
Fortunately River led all us newbies through the process of the game, and bless her heart because she was sick at the time, but suffered through it to give us this joy.
This is one of those interesting games where you take turns framing scenelets (I use that made up word, because they are less scenes, and more little vignettes). It helped when River said that we should imagine framing little pieces of story in a comic book, in the order of a few frames. In the actual play you'll hear us start to get into that flow a little bit into the game.
The story starts with choosing a framework for the story, but everything is very, very loose, and you end up doing lots of improvisation. The mechanics are all based around a set of cards you hold in your hand, with some giving you special narrative rights, and others just allowing you to describe setting details, and allow for some uncomfortable silences and looks. All in all, it seems to support the mood its going for pretty well.
Interested in hearing our actual play? Here's an MP3 of the thing, after I edited the hell out of it. The original game was in the order of about 3 hours, but here it is chopped down to about an hour. I left in a little of the setup, some initial mechanics (but quickly throw most of that away as we continue with the game), and took out all the white space. Enjoy!
You can find HGMO: Sherlock in The Gauntlet's Codex - Lies zine (Jan 2018), and it can be purchased off of DriveThruRPG. Interested in an ongoing Codex subscription? Check out the Gauntlet Patreon.
The actual play video of this game is also available on Youtube here: