Morgan's Dead of Winter 2012 Adventures

This year, Dead of Winter moved to Placerville or what used to be called Hangtown. You can tell from the boastful street signs -- nice, huh?  Placerville has a mixed population of young ski bums and old retirees.  The store fronts are old antique stores and leftovers from an era long ago.  Numerous restaurants fill the main street.  The hardware store celebrated its 160 anniversary and is the 2nd oldest running establishment in California and the oldest store west of the Mississippi.  The Cary House Hotel, where we played our games, has the 2nd oldest elevator in California.

Old Hangtown Street Sign

California Historical Landmark.  Nice, huh?

Historic Cary House Hotel

It took us 5 hours to get to Hangtown from the South Bay Area.  We took a local's recommended route and it was a bad decision.  Other people from the Bay Area took only 3-1/2 hours to get to Hangtown. The return trip to the Bay Area without recommended route took only 3 hours.

In this discussion of the games I was in, I'm going to focus on pacing.

I like to think of the games I run like a movie.  Where the GM is the director, setting up the scene, costumes, props, and plot.  The players are improv actors, making up their lines and action.

For me, pacing is defined by the tension level in the scene.  Generally, the more tension, the faster paced the scene; the less tension, the slower pace.  Tension also depends on the system used for the game.  For example, I playtested Mike G's With a Million Voices, it suffered from pacing problems because it was the first time Mike ran Dread.  One of the lessons of Dread is that the GM has to watch the tower very closely.  The GM can't just pay attention to the plot and characters.  In other traditional RPGs that use dice, the dice are random number generators, which the GM has no control over.  The GM can adjust the bonuses and such during the game in an effort to fudge the results, but the GM can't control the tower that way.  The only way the GM can control the tension level is to gauge its stability and throw "preset" encounters at the players to destabilize the tower as they reach a crisis so the scene becomes fraught with tension.  If the tower falls, the tension level suddenly drops and it is a bad time to have a boss battle or critical scene since every test becomes easy.  I mentioned this to Mike after the playtest and I heard that when he ran his game at DoW, it went very well.

I hide spoiler sections with JavaScript. If you have JavaScript turned off, you can skip the spoiler sections I have marked.

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Saturday, December 8, 11AM – 5PM
Game System: Fear Itself / Unknown Armies
Scenario Title: Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?
GM: Morgan Hua
Power Level: Varies
Number of Players: 5
All Characters Provided
Description: Scooby-Doo, Shaggy, Velma, Daphne, and Fred investigate the disappearance of a professor from Coolsville University.  The game starts as a standard Scooby-Doo episode, but things aren’t what they seem and events go very, very wrong.  As the characters “harden” we will switch to another gaming system to reflect the changes in characters and the world as it descends into darkness.

In The Misery Machine:
Jim M. (Scooby-Doo)
Wayne C. (Shaggy)
Nik G. (Fred)
Alicia H. (Daphne)
Elisabeth B. (Velma)

Matt contacted me and asked me to run a game.  I told him that I remembered that he told us "No Scooby-Doo games" but the only game I have that is new is a "Scooby-Doo" game.
"Really," he asked.
"Seriously, Scooby-Doo, for real," I replied.
I emailed him pictures of the setting and character concepts and I got the Matt S. seal of approval.
So, you can't run a Scooby-Doo game at DoW except if it is Scooby-Doo.  Matt S. accepts no imitations.  Disclaimer:  When Matt says, no "Scooby-Doo," he means a game with no supernatural elements and it's just a guy with a mask.

The game starts with the Scooby-Doo characters that we know and love.  I used Fear Itself for the starting system since the game starts off as a pure investigation.

My whole plan was to go through an investigation phase and then an escalating action phase.  One flaw with the Gumshoe system (Fear Itself, Trail of Cthulhu, etc), is that the combat system is dull and lacks drama.  Basically, combat sucks.   One of the better fixes for Gumshoe is Lorefinder where it uses Gumshoe investigation skills and Pathfinder combat skills.

I originally designed the game to be 3 acts with 3 game systems.  But due to time constraints and the difficulty of explaining 3 game systems in a six hour time slot, I decided to switch it to two acts with two systems, merging the 2nd and 3rd act into a single 2nd act.

Well, the players actually skipped a part of the investigation and finished the first act in 1-1/2 hours.  So, that meant that I could actually go with my original 3 act structure.  If I knew this would have happened, I would have brought the 3rd act Feng Shui character sheets and introduced them to Feng Shui.

They continued to gallop through my scenario at breakneck speed and when they went through the three acts, we were only at the 4th hour.  The good news was that they didn't reach a satisfactory ending with their solution to the 3rd act.  So, I added a 4th act (I re-purposed material and conflict from the 3rd act that they had handily avoided) and added an entirely new 5th act to the game.  We finally wrapped up at the 5-1/2 hour mark with a satisfying ending.

The game didn't really go as planned, the pacing felt a little dead in a few spots as the players struggled to figure out what to do next. At the end of the third and forth act, some players wondered whether that was the end of the game.  I asked them what they wanted to do next and that prompted them to come up with additional plans to save the world and thankfully, if it weren't for those meddling kids, we'd be up to our eyeballs in non-Euclidean zombies.

In the spoiler section is art work from the game, the game plot, and surprises from the playtest and the DoW game.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

Act 3 Post-Apocalyptic Velma and Scooby-Doo

The whole game was inspired by a post-apocalyptic picture of Velma and Scooby-Doo by Travis Pitts. I wanted to tell the story of how you can get from Scooby-Doo to post-apocalyptic Scooby-Doo.

The progression was to be from non-combat (Fear Itself) to gun combat (Unknown Armies) to uber-hand-to-hand combat (Feng Shui) as they survive in a post-apocalyptic landscape low on bullets and supplies.  But when I merged the 2nd and 3rd act, I just created powered up Unknown Army characters and discarded the Feng Shui character sheets.  I actually playtested with the Feng Shui characters and they worked well.

But the problem with Feng Shui is that it seems like half the players can't get the hang of a descriptive cinematic system -- even for people with a black belt in Kung Fu movie viewing.

Some non-Euclidean math

So, the game really starts with a missing university professor, Prof White.  The Mystery Machine is asked to find an old woman's missing husband.  Gone for only half a day -- he didn't return for dinner -- she resorts to calling in the Mystery Machine to find him since his disappearance isn't technically a missing person until he is missing much longer.  The professor teaches Metaphysics -- why we exist, why we are here, religious studies, etc.  In the home are pictures of him and his wife meeting at the 5th Annual County Fair many years ago.  He was a judge for her Rhubarb pie which won first place.  On his desk are journals of what he is working on.  Only Velma can tell it has something to do with particle physics.  11 dimensions: our standard 4, plus 7 more tightly wound dimensions.

On the way to the Coolsville University, a bunch of grad students and a professor stand around the University's dead Mascot, Betsy, the Cow.  Apparently, something has chewed on parts of Betsy and killed her.  After some investigation, the Mystery Machine can discover that several individuals chewed on Betsy and another had arrived at the scene and shot one of the individuals with a gun and dragged the body into the surrounding corn field.

At Coolsville University, the Mystery Machine would find that Prof White is collaborating with a physics professor and sharing a lab.  Prof White has grad students who are also missing.  Prof White's car is still in the parking lot.  They would find that Prof White was working on non-Euclidean math, trying to find a Unified Theory for the Universe.  This was the part that was skipped by the players at DoW.

Further into the corn field, on the edge of University property is an abandoned amusement park.  The same park that Prof White met his wife.  The players at DoW just kept on tracking through the corn field until they found the amusement park.

The sign says, "Welcome 2 Zombie-land, Kids."

After the players see the above sign, flesh eating zombies show up and chase the characters throughout the park.  Getting the rusty roller coaster ride to work is a favorite -- with zombies riding in the car trying to get to the characters.  The roller coaster ends with broken tracks and dumps the players into the water ride's tidal pool.

Eventually, the characters find an abandoned highrise hotel in the park.  In the basement is a working kitchen and a chocolate cake in the fridge that hides behind it a cleanly severed head -- one of the missing graduate students.  Close examination will uncover that the head was severed with an unnaturally clean cut.  The grad student was killed by a dimensional shear.  In the penthouse is the owner of the abandoned theme park.  He reveals that he has hired Prof White to complete mysterious drawings he has found in a cave in one of the park's hidden basement areas.  The owner, if asked, does confess that he shot the zombie that killed Betsy and zombies did appear after Prof White started working on the mysterious drawings.  He will also lead the players to Prof White.

In the playtest, the players built a trap and lured Prof White out of the cave and then Velma went into the cave and smudged the drawing.  At DoW, Velma convinces the owner that she is another grad student of Prof White and winds up in the cave and finds an error in the drawing and completes it for Prof White.  In either case, the Drawing comes to life, glowing unearthly green, and opens 7 portals throughout the Earth where zombies pour out.  At the playtest, Prof White quipped, "Look at what you've done, you meddling kids have destroyed the world.  I was trying to gracefully shut down the gate and now you've ruined everything."

This ends Act 1.

Act 2 Gun Toting Characters

Act 2 starts with the Mystery Machine several years later and the characters converted to Unknown Armies.  They've got guns and knives. Velma has developed a metallic grapefruit-sized device that lets them shutdown gates gracefully, but they must be in the gate's center for it to work.  They've shutdown all the small and easy ones and have two left.  They follow Velma's gate detector to Texas near Dallas where the SSC, the Superconducting Super Collider resides. It was a massive multi-million dollar abandoned cyclotron.

Texas Superconducting Super Collider

They have to get through a clogged freeway filled with abandoned cars and some zombies as civilization is collapsing.

As they approach the SCC, an odd thing happens, the players may discover that they are now left handed.  This gate is so massive that it affects an area much larger than anything they would have encountered before.

Control Room of Many Random Doors

At the facility, they'll have to shoot several lab coated zombies.  Once inside, they'll have to find the "center."  One of the key areas is the control room with multiple doors.  Once the players start searching the tunnels, they'll be chased by zombies and one of the center pieces of the location is the doors that open to other doors in the same room.  If done right, the characters should be running away from zombies from door to random door echoing one of the chase montages from the TV show.

While in the tunnels, they should encounter some non-Euclidean geometry.  At one point, they should see themselves in the tunnel ahead, but facing away from themselves.  They would see a zombie trying to attack one of them.  They can either react to the threat by shooting in front or turning to the threat and attacking.

Eventually, the players will find the center. It is where the supercollider is and the gate.   A strange creature is being paid homage by extra-dimensional zombies.

By now the players should have found out that the zombies are odd and some have extra limbs, but in an extra-dimensional way.  e.g. if they follow the extra limb, it folds into the body somehow in a logical fashion.  Hand, arm, elbow, shoulder, torso, etc, but folded upon itself in an extra-dimensional way.

The gate glows green and zombies and strange creatures are shuffling through the gate.

King of Escher-land

At this time, the players should find a way to get to the base of the gate and activate Velma's device.  In the playtest, the players fought their way in.  At DoW, Velma got captured and was taken to this location.

One weirdness is that sometimes they have to miss badly to hit as the non-Euclidean space affects their linear geometry in this warped space.

In both cases, the players shutdown the gate and ran for it.  Outside, they find that they have shutdown the gate from the wrong side.  They are stuck in the wrong dimension.  They remain left-handed.

This ends Act 2.

Oops, we're not in Kansas anymore.

Act 3 Dope Fiend Shaggy

Act 3 starts with the characters buffed up.  They've been living off the land in the foreign dimension.  They're mostly out of ammo and are now hand-to-hand combat experts.

Act 3 Homeless Fred

Act 3 Dominatrix Daphne

They now have contacts with locals and their goal is to find the last gate, go through it, and close it from the correct side.  In the playtest, the players actually got their Mystery Machine Van to go 88 mile per hour and returned to their own dimension "Back to the Future"-style and then assaulted the last gate and closed it from the correct side.  At DoW, the players schemed to get enough cash to pay their way through the long lines of emigrants wanting a better life in a new dimension.  Once on the other side, the players shutdown the gate and find that the King of Escher-land has taken over Earth.  In both cases, the players get into a boss fight with the King and his body guards.  The guards use swords that are extra-dimensional shears.  They basically erase parts that they hit.  Pretty bad if you're a cartoon character.  :-)

The DoW players made their own gate, as Velma is now an expert in non-Euclidean geometry and math, and lured the King to them with promise of a way back home.  The new gate actually was flawed and opened up into R'lyeh.  The players actually pushed the King through the gate and shut it down as the King tried to climb back through, shearing through his hand that was gripping the rim of the gate.  But a survey of the world after the King showed that Earth was trashed.

So, the players decided to open a gate through time, to attend the 5th Annual County Fair.  They went back in time and killed Prof White and destroyed the cave drawings.

In both the playtest and DoW, during Act 1, one player went with the Scooby-Doo trope and ripped the face off of a zombie, thinking that it was a mask, but revealed bone and muscle instead of Mr Jenkins.  Score 1 for insanity.  :-)

In the playtest the players really got the wacky flavor of Scooby-Doo as they ran from zombies and offered Scooby snacks as incentives.  At DoW, the players went very, very dark.

At the beginning, the DoW players ran from the flesh eating zombies.  At the end, Scooby-Doo and Shaggy started eating people alive -- just like what the zombies did.  They became what they feared at the beginning of the game.

Citizens of non-Euclidean-land

To make money to cross over back to Earth, Fred and Velma went on a killing spree.  Daphne performed erotic Euclidean services for non-Euclidean clients -- the perversion, the horror.  Scooby-Doo made and sold Euclidean art which was heralded as the new, new modern.

To poison Prof White, they asked his wife in the post-apocalyptic future to bake a Rhubarb pie (a reoccurring joke in the game) and poisoned it.  They then took it back to the past and fed it to Prof White at the 5th Annual County Fair's pie contest.  While this was happening a dog catcher went after Scooby-Doo, but with help from Shaggy, they turned the tables on the dog catcher and ate him alive.  After this, the gang entered the cave and defaced the inactive drawings on the wall, thus saving the world.

As the very dark versions of the Mystery Machine (or should I say Misery Machine) left the fair, Velma noticed 5 kids, their younger selves, enjoying the venue.  And maybe later, the kids would look at the newspaper and wonder about the missing persons at the County Fair -- A new mystery to be solved.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Saturday, December 8, 7PM – 1AM
Game System: Call of Cthulhu (d20)
Scenario Title: MAD Men
GM: Jim Mathews
Power Level: Realistic (4^th level characters)
Number of Players: 6
All Characters Provided
Description: The cold war may be over, but the shadows still linger, as your START team heads off into the dark, cold, northern reaches of Russia to inspect a decommissioned missile complex.

START Team:
Patrick I. (American #1, Team Lead)
Jack Y. (American #2, Nuclear Dude)
Gil T. (Russian #1, Guy in Charge)
Ben H. (Russian #2, Bureaucrat)
Tom I. (Russian #3, Security Officer)
Morgan H. (Russian #4, Driver)

Because of the title, and the descriptive words, "cold war," I thought the game was going to be set in the 1950's.  Now that I've re-read the game description carefully, it is clear that was going to be set in the modern day because "the cold war is over."  I was actually looking forward to some 1950's spy-fu.

In any case, when I saw the list of players, I knew we were going to have a lot of fun.  We randomly pulled characters and we wound up with 2 Americans and 4 Russians.  Our job was to accompany the Americans to three random decommissioned silos, so they can verify that Russia is in compliance with the START treaty.

We really got into our Russian accents and misconceptions about what America was like.  The back-and-forth was a lot of fun.  My character drove a piece-of-sh*t truck that was held together with spit and discarded pieces of wire.  I think we spent at least an hour f*ing around and having a good time in character before we even started on the road trip.

Then we got into the weirdness and being in character, we were wigged out and had to weigh completing our mission or leaving for better equipment and maybe never returning.  I think this is where things went wrong.  I knew the players and trusted them and I'm not sure our GM, Jim, did.  At the hint of us abandoning the scenario, Jim hit the GM panic button and launched the end game.  So, we went into full-on end game and we finished 2 hours early -- even with our 1 hour of f*ing around.

I had a lot of fun, but I would have liked to have more of a middle game and wished that Jim trusted us a bit more.  The game felt truncated as we went from slight creepiness to an adrenaline rush end game.

The highlight of the game was Gil's performance during the end game.  Details in the spoiler section.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

We were in the Russian Urals in the middle of winter to inspect 3 decommissioned nuclear missile silos.  For various GM reasons, we had to go back to a small backwoods village between each trip.  We couldn't go from silo to silo.

The Russians thought all this was a bullsh*t mission and would have preferred the Americans to declare everything was ok and then we could hangout in Moscow or somewhere comfortable until it was time to return home.  Our team and the American team seemed to be a bunch of misfits on a bullsh*t mission.  We were deliberately under-equipped and setup for failure, so we made the best of a bad situation.  I couldn't even requisition extra fuel or vodka, outrageous!

My truck kept on stalling and breaking down, so it wasn't reliable.  It also didn't help that I rolled two 1's during repairs.  For CoC d20, 1 = fumble.

The first creepy thing that happened was our vehicle got rammed by some mysterious creature that left blood and slime on the truck.  (I think some characters found out it was a slime covered bear, but I never found out how they knew.  The room was very noisy and I think I must of missed that).

We also kept on getting traveling radiation readings on our vehicle and skittering noises around the vehicle.

The village had a creepy old woman who warned us and an over-the-top-religious headman.

At the first silo, we found a dead area around the silo grounds and giant insect nests inside the silo, but a mostly decommissioned silo.  Computer equipment and generators were still present.  So, the Americans did declare that the first silo was not in violation of the treaty.  We had an option of staying overnight in the silo or leaving, after a discussion, we decided to leave.  What we didn't know was the silo was completely abandoned by the giant insects and we could have explored it more and gotten some clues.  Considering the circumstances, I don't think we would have done that.  None of our characters were heroic in nature.

We returned to the village and this is where the GM hit the panic button.  We had discussed returning to our starting point and getting a new truck.  I think the GM thought that we were abandoning the scenario.  At this point, we found the gas station attendant was killed in a horrible and inexplicable manner.  After this, we decided to flee.  Then the sh*t hit the fan and we all basically got overwhelmed by an army of mutant bugs and died.

Jim told us afterwards that we were supposed to inspect the 2nd silo where the bugs were nesting.  But the bugs at the village was a backup plan.

Things that could have been done to extend the game:
1.  We could have returned to get a new truck and Moscow could have ordered us to finish the mission. We would have done so.  I don't think any of us wanted to be shot for not doing our duty.
2.  If the dead body didn't show up or seemed more natural, we would have continued to the 2nd silo.  Considering how hard it was to get equipment, we would have just soldiered on.
3.  Add a deadline to inspecting the silos.  e.g. tell us that if the silos don't get inspected in time, we're all in big trouble.

One issue I had was that our deaths were pretty much cookie cutter.  3 characters were bitten and eaten by mutant spider bugs.  2 characters were shot.  In teen slasher movies, the deaths are strange and unique.  If we were going to die, we should all die in various strange and creative ways.

If we gave out a best RPGer award for this game, Gil would have gotten it.  When we found out there was no escape, Gil phoned the American Embassy and told them he was al-Qaeda and holding the Americans hostage and that he would torture and execute them unless they come and stop him.  At first, Patrick played along and made "I'm being tortured" noises.  When that didn't seem to work, Gil asked for a shotgun from one of the other players, and blew Patrick's foot off.  After some fleeing, the helicopters with the snipers came and shot both Gil's and Tom's characters and rescued Patrick's.   Afterwards, Patrick asked Gil why he shot him, and why not in the arm vs the leg.  Gil listed various reasons and then concluded with, "It would have been funny."  It was.

When we heard the helicopters coming, we thought it would have been funnier if it were giant wasps coming.  And if a character was on a roof waving, it would have been hilarious if a giant wasp swooped down and carried him off instead of being rescued.

At one point of the game, the crazed old gypsy woman told my character to mix my blood with an ointment and to spread it on my face (actually, she said my whole body, but I didn't hear that in the noisy room).  I did that and the bugs avoided my face, but ate the rest of my body.  In a bug nest somewhere there's just the face of my character.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Sunday, December 9, 11AM – 5PM
Game System: Cthulhu by Gaslight (1850)
Scenario Title: The Golden Rule
GM: Leon C Glover III
Power Level: Moderate – some prior SAN losses, a few “odd” experiences
Number of Players: 6
All Characters Provided
Description:  Eureka! The gold rush is on in California!  Brought together by fortune and Wells Fargo, the gold country will test your fortitude and your ideals. Power and greed aren’t the only things that can corrupt a man’s soul.  Remember the Golden Rule – he who owns the gold makes the rules!

You are jumping off at the boom town, San Francisco, on your way to Hangtown/Placerville.  The “locals” will be very grateful to help you with anything you might need.

Would-be Rulers:
June G. (Mormon)
Josh C. (Franciscan Friar)
Frank F. (Madame)
Badger M. (Enforcer/Body Guard)
Basil B. (Calvary)
Morgan H. (East Coast City Guy)

We all started on a stage coach from San Francisco to Placerville.  Leon did a great job of invoking the setting.  I felt like I was in the TV show, Deadwood.

Unfortunately, we spent 4 hours building up our fortunes in Placerville.  I hate the Sims and I felt like I was playing the Sims and going through the motion of collecting gold.  Things didn't really happen until the last 2 hours.  It felt like we were just doing our own thing with no real danger or tension.  There weren't enough character motivation or interaction or weirdness or threat to make us want to figure out what was going on.

I think the game needed more interlocking character motivations and more events in town to make us act sooner.  4 hours of collecting gold was just too slow a pace for me.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

When we arrived at Hangtown, the first thing that happened was a hanging.  My character was a sociopath (on the character sheet), so he didn't really care.  He actually bet on the hanging and won a substantial amount of money.

Later, Badger found out that every week or so, various people would be round up and thrown in jail and then they would confess and would be hung.  This only happened after the 4th hour which set off the end game.  By that time, my character was making distilled spirits and started a plan to knock off the Assayer's office with the help of the local Chinese.  He had no real connection with the other characters, so there was no reason he would help them.  Also he wasn't told about the trumped up hangings, though he probably didn't care due to his mental condition.  I did help the other characters in minor ways, but under the threat of bodily harm.

I think if there were more character back story that connected us together, the game would have been better.  That would also explain why we would be traveling together vs six strangers in a stage coach.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===

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Sunday, December 9, 7PM – 1AM - The Killer Session
Game System: Call of Cthulhu V6
Scenario Title: The Day the Whole World Went Away
GM: Gil Trevizo
Power Level: Average People
Number of Players: 6
All Characters Provided
Description: You wake up to the taste of ashes and the smell of dead flesh, surrounded by the freshly ruined landscape that was modern civilization not so long ago. You don’t know who you are or how this came to be, your dwindling cache of memory suppression drugs having kept your sanity intact in the face of the madness that has swallowed the rest of humanity. Now, as the stars come right and all men kill and revel in joy amidst a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom, even stranger things rise from dark depths to end the time of mankind. A number scrawled on your skin – “1121221121″ – and fragmented memories of impossible things will lead you through this day, when all of your world goes away.

1121221121:
Frank F. (Army Sniper)
Morgan H. (Jet Pilot)
Shannon M. (Psychologist?)
Michael G. (Geologist?)
June G. (Pharmacist?)

For me, this game was the highlight of DoW.  Gil showed us character portraits and we picked characters based solely on the pictures.  We then got blank character sheets to reflect our amnesia.  When we tried to figure out something, if we made our roll, Gil would tell us our real score.  A few years ago, Jeff Y. did the same thing, but used an invisible ink for your stats and you can wipe a marker over the invisible ink to reveal your stats.

The game was actually various scenes stitched together, with each scene having a time gap.  When we started a new scene, Gil would hand out new character sheets with additional information on them, then we would have to transfer what we learned from the previous character sheet.  I liked Jeff Y's method better; it was more efficient and had less down time.

The game worked very well because we went from scene to scene without any dead spots.  The scene shifts were also integral to the overall plot line.  Some scenes were cut short as Gil tried to finish before our 1am deadline.  Little did we know that the other late games ran over time, and we could have played longer.

Gil said he's not going to run this game again since he thinks the game teetered on disaster and the excellent quality of the players brought awesomeness to the game.  Gil knew us all and had trusted our ability as players.

My only small minor nit was the time spent on switching character sheets and us trying to figure out our skills.  There was some Metagaming as we tried various skills (sometimes for no reason at all) in order to figure out what we were good at.  One scene (with Mike) got cut short and I actually wanted the whole scene to play out and see how Mike's character would deal with the horror he had wrought.

Again, an excellent game and excellent players.

Just in case Gil changes his mind and runs this game again, I'm going to put spoilers in the spoiler section.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

The game started with us waking up in a crater with amnesia.  Most of us had weapons and some of us had blood on us.  Between us was a duffel bag with drugs in it -- drugs that wiped out our memory.

As we tried to figure out what was going on, we would roll dice and if we succeeded, we would find out our skill levels.  Most of us had high numbers in several specialties.  Once comfortable, we climbed out of the crater and found that we were in the Oakland hills.  A giant tidal wave, like that Japanese painting, The Great Wave off Kanagwa, was frozen behind a damaged Golden Gate bridge and most of the Bay Area was underwater and frozen solid.

My character wore a jet pilot's high-G suit.  At one point, I wanted to makeup a story about being abducted by aliens, but events progressed so that I didn't get to do that.  (In reality, I was wearing a Weyland Industries T-shirt, a reference to the Alien movie franchise).

We discovered that the Mayan end of the world had happened on 12/2012.  That the magnetic poles had shifted and that roving bands of infected humans were making pyramids of human heads.  Nice, huh?  An NPC had a satellite phone that rang and it told us to get to the Edwards Air Force Base and it told us to RUN -- a band of infected humans were heading our way -- the voice on the phone could see us and them on his spy satellite.

We ran.

In the next scene, we wound up outside a small town and Frank's character sneaked in and got a newspaper from a newspaper stand.  We found that the paper was dated Saturday, Dec 22, 2012, the day after the Mayan Apocalypse.  Apparently the world survived the 21st, but a strange virus was unleashed throughout the world that made people go mad.  We were able to scavenge some needed materials for our overland trek.

We then found a cave to spend the night in.  During that time, we had disturbing dreams and flashes of memory helped us remember things.  (New character sheets).  In the morning, a school bus drove up to a marsh and a priest starts dragging out children to sledge hammer them.  Mike's character rushes down there to save the children and kills the priest.  At this point, Gil cut the scene.  This is where I wanted to scene to continue.  It was apparent to some of the other characters that the children were chanting in unison to Cthulhu.  The priest and nun were giving them last rites and killing them.  I suspect, that Mike would have had to kill the nun and then he would slowly realize that what the priest and nun were doing was right.  I wanted to know what Mike would have done at that point.  Would he kill the children?  Let them go?  Kill herself?  (Mike was playing a female character).

More dreams/flashbacks and new character sheets.

I learned that I was abducted by aliens and an alien creature had been imbedded in my body (OMG, this is really funny, I wonder what Gil would have done if I told my alien abduction story several scenes earlier?  Also I was wearing that Weyland T-shirt, a reference to the movie Alien).  I didn't tell the other characters about my alien impregnation because I was afraid they'd kill me.  Other characters went through various horrors.  Out of character, we learned of each horror, but in character we were clueless.

Next scene.

We're in a helicopter heading towards Edwards Air Force Base.  A missile is getting ready to launch and we're supposed to get a NPC into the missile.  I'm piloting the copter and the other characters are in the back.  A fight breaks out in the helicopter and various NPCs are killed and thrown out of the copter.   I see Cthulhu rise from the waves and lose 52 sanity points.  At this point most of the players have exited the copter.  I fly the copter towards Cthulhu and pull out my pistol, switch it to full automatic, point it at the thing rising out of my belly and fill it and myself full of bullets.

Next scene, new character sheets.

We wake up in virtual reality chambers as test subjects.  We're tied down.  A mad scientist is monologuing about limits of reality, adjusting people's perception and their inner nature, etc.  A number of us breakout of our bonds and kill him.  One of the tied down NPCs is clearly affecting our reality and bringing to life Cthulhu.  I go and kill him as 3 of the players run for safety as Cthulhuesque creatures enter our chamber.  Frank's character quietly waits for the next simulation.  My character gets gang raped and impregnated by Cthulhuesque creatures as the the PCs try to kill each other after they escape the facility and windup in unknown waters in some unknown ocean.

The camera pans back as the three primates do their primate thing.

The End.

=== SPOILER SECTION END ===