I attended the first Dead of Winter in 2009, an invite only horror convention. It was held at the Brookdale Lodge in the Santa Cruz mountains. It was an epic event. The hotel was rundown, the weather was bad, the gaming was great. This convention happened before I started blogging about the convention games I played in. I started blogging about the games because at a certain Mini-Con, I played with a very terrible GM and I forgot his name and I wound up signing up for another game of his. So, this was a way for me to remember the good games and the bad games (and bad GMs).
I decided to write up the experience because one day, I'm going to forget...
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The Brookdale is in Santa Cruz and after several hours of driving through winding mountain roads during a storm, Shannon M. and I arrived. We had booked one of the "improved" rooms. The price was some outrageous $107/night. The room wasn't up to code. The mattresses were saggy, wall plugs didn't work, electrical plates were missing, lamps in the room didn't work, the toilet handle didn't flush, and the bathroom window was permanently painted open with no bug screen to keep the bugs out and it let the cold air in.
In the morning, I took a tour of the grounds. Crows feasted on overflowing garbage from a dumpster, an adjoining building had burned down. The Brook Room was still beautiful (with a brook running through the middle of the room), but rundown and deathly cold. Dust covered the stained glass chandeliers and the facing bar area had stained glass with missing panes of glass. Rain entered through the holes and the carpets were wet and soggy. Buckets were on the floor catching any rainwater that dripped from the ceiling.
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| Mermaid Room (picture I found on the internet) |
Portions of the building were off limits and sealed off, but at night Ralph W. and I took a flashlight tour. In the off limits area, past two sheets of plastic, hung up as a barrier, was the mermaid room. A glass window looked into an algae infested swimming pool. The glass was dirty and moisture streamed down its face. Clumsily drawn murals of a man in a diving suit and Humphrey Bogart decorated the walls. There's supposed to be an entrance to the Gangster Tunnels, but bricked up and hidden inside a cabinet. Something like a playhouse was to the side of the Mermaid room and we went up the creaky rotten stairs, afraid that the floor would collapse beneath us, we left quickly.
The only thing still open was the full bar where pictures of famous people decorated the walls. President Herbert Hoover, movie stars like Marilyn Monroe, and gangsters like Al Capone used to frequent the Brookdale Lodge. Across the hall from the bar was the public restroom; one of the urinals was missing, there's just some plumbing sticking out of the wall and missing tile, but no urinal. Next to it, was a functioning urinal. I think in one of the stalls, the toilet was missing or disconnected and on it's side.
During our lunch break, sandwiches were provided in the bar area (not the full bar) that overlooked the Brook Room. Buckets captured water dripping down from the ceiling and water blown in through the missing panes of the stained glass window. The carpet was squishy.
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| Tree Trunk in Hallway to Cabin |
To get to the cabin, you have to traverse some stairs and in the hallway, there's a tree trunk growing through part of the building.
The cabin has a "cold" spot and if you sit over it, it's definitely chilly, much more chilly than the unheated cabin. We started a fire in the giant fireplace, something out of Orson Well's Citizen Kane (it's actually a bit smaller, but you get my drift), but someone forgot to open up the flue and smoked out the cabin. That evening, the power went out. When we returned from dinner for our evening session, we wound up playing by candle light.
The Brookdale Lodge has several ghost stories associated with it. I eventually constructed a Dread game using our experiences and the Lodge's history as a setting. Link to game here. I was going to run it at the Brookdale, but it had been shut down by the fire department just that year and DoW was moved to the Oakland Airport Hilton instead.
I think only Badger experienced some ghostly apparition. Ask Badger about the visitor in his room.
I played in great games run by great GMs. It's been so many years since then that I'm not going to bother about creating a spoiler section. Assume minor spoilers below.
Saturday, Dec 12 10am-4pm
Title: Silent Night
GM: Gil Trevizo
This game was based on the movie: Bad Santa. I got to play Billy Bob Thornton and Shannon got to play Bernie Mac. Lots of high jinks ensued. In addition to trying to rip off the mall, there were zombies, penguins, doberman pinschers, Delta Green, disintegrations, sex with animals, and STDs.
Saturday Dec 12, 6pm - 1am
Title: Partners
GM: Badger McIness
I got to be a cop that was a serial killer. I only killed lowlifes and prostitutes. We investigated a construction site and the other PCs decided to kill my character instead of the alien infected PC -- go figure. I actually got out of the construction site first, disabled their vehicle, and fled back to my townhouse to get some stuff (serial killer victim trophies) before leaving town. They actually called a cab, hunted me down, and shot me to death as I clutched the trophies to my chest. And the alien got away.
Sunday, Dec 13 10:30am - 4:30pm
Title: Communicable
GM: Kristin Hayworth
My introduction the Dread. OMG. Kristin thought the game was a disaster (her words, years later), but it was the most amazing game ever. The first mistake she made was to announce before the game started that there are no lines in this game, that this is a horror game and anything goes. In this game was Mike M, Matt G, Matt A, Matt D, Shannon M, and Morgan H. (I think Mike G might have been in the game too, but I'm not sure.) Well for those who don't know, when you get Mike M and Matt G in the same game, the combination is a bit explosive, um, nuclear. So, during character creation, Mike M rolls 1d6 and says his character's had 4 abortions and asked how many I've had. Then I pick up a 1d20 and roll a 12. On our character sheets, we write down various character backgrounds. When I handed mine in, Kristin crossed a line out on my character sheet and shouted, "NO!" So much for no lines cannot be crossed. Then of course everyone wanted to know what was on my character sheet. I wrote down that I have so many abortions because my boyfriend liked to make me pregnant and collect the aborted fetuses in jars.
Matt D accidentally kicked the table early in the game, knocking down the Jenga tower, and Kristin let him live until the alien burst out from his body.
At one point, one PC repeatedly slammed a car door into another to make her spontaneously abort.
Another time a PC put mattresses to block a doorway to keep alien infected humans out and also leaving other PCs stuck outside.
We had to choose between running over a little girl in the middle of the street or crashing our car. We would have run the girl over except Kristin added that the girl would cure cancer in the future.
At one point, if we reveal a dark deep secret, we would get a bennie, a small skull which you can turn in instead of pulling from the Jenga tower. I think we were, as a group, watching aliens crawl out of the ground and the Jenga tower was very unstable, so that was when I decided to tell everyone that my character had AIDS. There was deep silence as all the PCs did the relationship math and realized they all had been exposed to AIDS.
In this game, we were the most horrible people and we all deserved to die. I think Matt A and Matt G made it out alive.
Sunday, Dec 13 6pm - 1am
Title: Northwest Passage
GM: Matt Steele
Up in Alaska, there's coldness and darkness, and strange things that Eskimos are afraid to talk about. Very strange things started happening like dinosaurs rampaging in the snow, so we holed up at a ranger station. I think my character was the town's dog catcher. At the end, some PCs ignited a big tank of propane and I jumped to cover Matt G's character (or maybe Mike M's? I don't remember now. See? My memory is going.) and saved him from the explosion. My character was a big guy and was able to protect him from the blast, but alas, my dog catcher died.
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