I always thought that horror works better with fewer PCs as lone PCs are more isolated and tied into their own personal horror. But as a game, it's best to bounce off at least another PC. The great thing about this online convention is that there are games with fewer headcount than the standard 5 to 6 Players.
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May 15, Friday 10am-2pm
Midnight Descent
System: Kult Divinity Lost
GM: Bitburg_Chef (David)
2 Players: Warshtub (Simmons), Morgan Hua (Walker)
You and your partner find yourselves as rookie police officers thrust into an eerie assignment. Due to some events you prefer to keep silent about in your first week of training, you’ve been delegated to take over the last shift at the soon-to-be-closed police precinct.
As you step into the dimly lit station, the air is thick with an otherworldly tension. The veteran officers have hastily left, leaving you alone with the weight of their unspoken fears. The flickering lights cast long shadows on the worn-out walls, and strange noises echo through the empty corridors.
Armed only with their rookie training and an uneasy alliance, you must confront the unknown. As the night progresses, you’ll grapple with your own fears, face darkness, and uncover the secrets hidden within the precinct’s haunted history. Your decisions will determine your survival and may unveil a deeper, cosmic truth that challenges the very fabric of your reality.
Players will receive a set of questions prior to the game to personalise their pre-generated characters.
Two rookie police officers stuck late night at the last shift of a shuttered police station. The new precinct is open and everyone's been notified of the change, but some people still show up at the police station, so we're there, just in case. Phone calls go to the new dispatch station, but some calls still get routed to the old station. The place has mostly been emptied out. Locals have already vandalized the station. Strange sounds and apparitions haunt the station.
I loved this. It's basically a haunted police station where the PCs are forced to stay inside.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
When we enter, we find the reception desk is empty, so we use the intercom to call whoever is on shift to tell them we're here to relieve them. A cop shows up, has problem getting the card reader to unlock the door, and tells us that the Health and Safety crew hasn't shown up to take the last of the drugs out of the secure safe in the evidence locker. He also looks a bit uneasy. He tells us there are some odd sounds that he's investigated, but found nothing. He's happy to leave and tosses us the keys.
I brought an Igloo with cans of non-alcoholic beer, to help pass the time. We first open up the drug safe and do an inventory. It's all there.
There's some dead case files still in the evidence locker, so I start perusing them. There's a phone call, a little girl's voice on the line pleading for help, I get her name, but not her location, and she says they're coming back and hangs up. I call dispatch to try to trace the calls and tell dispatch that Health and Safety hasn't shown up yet.
One great bit is Simmons's father's portrait is still in the old station and it gets abused by unseen forces and a homeless man who pees on it, Simmons's trys to throw the bum out, but gets vomit all over himself. Which leads to a creepy shower scene in the station's locker room. Ghostly writing on mirrors, children's laughter, locker doors which open themselves, found items like an old photo.
I keep on getting ghostly phone calls from dead children asking for help. I go through the case files and google old newspaper stories and find that a series of children were murdered 40 years ago. A cult was caught by 3 police officers: my father, Simmons's father, and a third cop, the homeless man who peed on the portrait. While going through the case files, the homeless man had broken in and took a knife from the evidence locker and tried to attack us. We subdued him and took him to the holding cells. When I put him in, the holding cell door closes itself and locks me in with him. Simmons is on the other side of the door. We can't open the door. During the commotion, the homeless man takes my service pistol and shoots himself. I blame Simmons for closing the door on me. Simmons blames me for the death of the homeless man.
In the end, Simmons and I hear sounds in the holding cell area. We both go down there, but suddenly all the holding cell doors fly open. I noped out of there. Simmons continues forward and finds his father in a hellscape and has a conversation. He learns he was groomed by his father to be a serial killer and he had killed other people under his father's directions. I got out the station and sat at the station steps, drinking some non-alcoholic beer. I see my dead father beckoning me in, but I just toast him, and pour the rest on the ground for him. That's when I hear gunshots, so I run back inside. Simmons had shot his father. We both shoot a few strange ghouls and we flee the station. We agree to burn the station down to the ground. Simmons steals the contents of the drug locker. I siphon gas out of our cars and use some road flares.
Simmons leaves town. I don't.
My PC:
Officer Walker, M, 32 single
Officer Walker, born and raised in Ravenswood, comes from a legacy of law enforcement. Their father was a former Police officer at Ravenswood PD, as his father was before him. However, growing up, Officer Walker witnessed a change in their father. The reclusive and easily shaken demeanour was accompanied by haunted eyes that seemed to hold secrets. Officer Walker's father, grappling with inner demons, succumbed to the clutches of addiction and ultimately took their own life when Officer Walker was just 11 years old.
What did you do to be demoted to the night shift? Unauthorized discharge of firearm (while drunk).
Who else knows about what you did? Everybody in the precinct.
How did they find out, or are they blackmailing you? I shot a power transformer and blacked out 10 blocks of Ravenswood.
What are the other repercussions for your actions? I have to go to counseling.
How do you usually spend your spare time? Drinking at local cop bar, but now I can't.
Choose 3 memories you guys remember from your past - ideally one when you were 8-10, 11-15, 16-19 years of age. 8-10: Father gifting Walker with his first bike on xmas. 11-15: Finding father's body after he shot himself in the bathroom. 16-19: Losing virginity to Peggy Sue.
Content Warnings: Body Horror, Violent Death/Gore, Psychological Horror, Claustrophobia/Isolation, Themes of Exploitation
Life at Hadley’s Hope hasn’t been the paradise that Weyland-Yutani promised when you signed on the dotted line, but you still showed up and put in the work. W-Y found ways to take most of your paycheck back before you could spend it, let alone save it. But that’s about to change, as you and a couple like-minded colonists have hatched a plan to rob the Company-run casino. All you need to do is wait for the right time...
I personally wanted to come up with a way to tell other stories about Hadley's Hope, but one issue is how to have a cohesive group at the colony without PCs spread all over the place. This GM was able to come up with 3 scenarios. I played in this one. I had also wanted to try out the new Evolved edition.
The Evolved edition worked well with the Foundry VTT which took care of a lot of the extra die rolls needed for this edition. I still don't like the extra required rolls.
GM repurposed Hope's Last Day with 3 new scenarios. This scenario is about PCs planning a heist of the local casino. A nice way to tie random PCs to a group goal. I had a lot of fun. I got the full Alien experience.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
The goal is to sneak out of housing, get a torch from the mechanics bay, get to the casino, get into the safe, steal a vehicle, then hide out at a processing unit until we can catch a shuttle off planet.
That's the plan.
There's an announcement about staying in our quarters, the lights go out, and off we go. We sight something as we leave the housing area, but we don't care. It goes into an air duct. We get our giant canister of acetylene and head outside to the casino. Then a Xeno spots us. Then it all goes to hell.
There's a lot of running and dying. In the end, all the PCs were dead except for Willems who got facehugged.
Highlights: One of the PCs is gripped by a Xeno and he uses his flamethrower anyway. I have a pistol, but I'm not sure about using it. The other PCs tell me to shoot, including the PC with the flamethrower, so I fire and hit the Xeno, acid sprays and kills the guy with the flamethrower.
I'm almost dead in the casino, I climb up a ladder out of danger to the 2nd floor, upstairs is another Xeno. The Xeno chasing me, stabs me with it's tail, slicing off an ear, breaking the me (no more dice rolls, I can only crawl). I'm in the middle of a Xeno sandwich, so I decide to slide (fall) down the ladder past the Xeno. I fall on a PC chasing the Xeno. I mutter that there's two of them upstairs. He decides to use his fireman's ax on it. As he swings, I yell out that it has acid for blood. The spray of acid burns both of us to death.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===
May 16, Sat 10am-2pm
From the Womb
System: Kult Divinity Lost
GM: rocinante_on_focus (Robert / Roci)
3 Players: penny676 (Martin, Sandy - fails to get GPS signal), sam.ius (Sam, Bob - searching for something), Morgan Hua (Roy - trying to quit smoking)
Content Warnings: Harm to animals, harm to children, violence, gore, religion, natural disasters, torture, sexism.
Unsuspecting social workers are sent to investigate a girl’s mysterious absence from school. While they think they are following up on a simple truancy case, they find themselves cast in a decades-long family drama full of monsters both human and otherwise. Will they flee, or will they allow themselves to be drawn into the unmerciful truth?
Another great spooky game. This one was more investigative. GM did a great job juggling events, split parties, and our backstories.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
My PC customized by various available choices:
Roy, 34, loudly chewing nicotine gum. Why did you stop smoking? Stopped smoking because wife is pregnant.
Your partner handed you the divorce papers this morning. You haven’t even begun to process it yet, and you haven’t told anybody. [Starting Stability: Shaken]
• What is your partner's name? Renee
• What did you do to make them leave you? Right now in denial as to why she'd divorce me, so many reasons and so many reasons not to. My bad driving? My addiction to sports betting? She says she's a weekend widow during sports seasons: basketball, football, baseball, and hockey. That's a joke, sort of.
Gym Rat (+3 Fortitude), all other stats +1.
The Players in agreement picked (out of 3 choices each):
Location: Without warning, sheets of rain fall from the sky. Everything is overgrown and wet. In the distance, thunder rumbles. Abandoned houses covered with graffiti sink slowly into the bayou. It feels like you’re driving into the end of the world.
House: The house sits on top of a wide but low hill. Surrounding the hill is a cemetery. Nearby sits a run-down wooden church with someone standing in the doorway. The road stops at the bottom of the hill, leaving you to walk the rest of the way.
Knowles Family: Overdressed for the environment. The men wear starched white shirts, freshly-pressed trousers, neat coats, and suspenders. The women wear short veils and long, unpatterned dresses. They try to look at you kindly, but you feel the anxiety thrumming beneath their limpid eyes. A young woman exits through the front door as the PCs arrive.
---
Of course, nothing is quite right when we look around and interview people. The Knowles family seem a bit autistic, a bit paranoid, a bit simplistic. After snooping around, we find the girl being held in the barn. We break in and get restrained. The girl involved in a ritual involving a pregnant cow.
The big secret is that the cow will birth a baby with three umbilical cords. The three PCs are each to cut an umbilical cord, the girl will drop the baby into a metal coffin. The Knowles family will bury the coffin. The PCs will then be released.
Of course, we have PCs and everything goes to hell, literally.
Bob cuts one of the umbilical cords. I look through the illusion and see my wife holding our baby in one hand, the divorce papers in the other. I decide to cut up the divorce papers. Sandy sees me trying to attack the girl and tries to intervene with pepper spray, but I muscle through it and cut up what I think are the papers. I actually cut the girl and she drops the baby. Sandy stands in the way and convinces me to back off. In my head, I see my wife ask me to leave, I tell her I'll do it if she doesn't go through with the divorce. She agrees, so I leave the barn.
After that, Mr. Langdon erupts from the body of the baby. The veil lifts and the barn is a Hellraiser torture chamber. Mr. Langdon is a demon. "I am finally free." The Knowles family panics. Sandy pepper sprays Mr. Langdon. He screams in pain and banishes her, she vanishes. Bob takes the shear he used to cut the umbilical chord and stabs himself in the heart.
Sandy shows up outside of the house of a man who has been stalking her for taking his child away to protective services. He bashes her head in with a baseball bat. She wakes up in bed, and he hunts her and kills her, forever.
Bob wakes up in the car with Sandy and Roy, heading to the house. Ad infinitum.
I take one of the Knowles trucks and finally stop when I'm past the rain. Beside me is my wife, who's holding on to our baby. She asks me what to name the baby. I say, "Langdon." She says that's a strange name. Anybody else would only see me alone in the truck.
I wait to see if Bob and Sandy show up for work the next day. They don't. I report that I had escaped from a Branch Davidian cult and they had murdered both Bob and Sandy. ATF is sent to raid the compound. Bob and Sandy's bodies are found.
Roy lives happily ever after with his phantom wife and child.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===
May 16, Sat 4-8pm (2 hrs, game ended early with 2 Players)
the terrifying Nature of things
System: Kult Divinity Lost
GM: willberratte (Will Barrett)
3 Players (one missing): mal6666 (Sarah - Elias Boone - Senior Trooper), Morgan Hua (Don Fife - Junior Trooper), Jane Doe (missing).
Content Warnings: gore, violence, assault, torture, pvp abuse, trauma, police, Texas, guns, yellow, this is imprvo so thing may come up
a lot of people have gone missing in a small town in Texas but good new we found a survivor. while the state and local raid the mansion two trooper go the pick up the one and only survivor to take her back to the seen.
This game was the weakest as it was very railroady as we just went through various rooms and there was really no choice of path. It was mainly a gallery of horrors. GM admitted it would have been a much better game with 3 Players.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
We're told to take a woman, Jane Doe, with amnesia to a house. The tactical team would breach the house and clear it and we'll take her in and see if she remembers anything. Inside it's bigger on the inside than the outside. There's 3 doors with signs that specifically point to each of the PCs. Art for Jane Doe, Sculpture for Elias, For Mom's Favorite Boy for Don.
I wanted to go into my gallery, but mannequins flood the entrance hall and block every door except the Art door. So we go to the Art door. Inside is a gallery of our own personal backstory horrors and a progressive display of the tactical team being killed and destroyed. A woman addresses us and tells us to enjoy the art. Someone who Elias recognizes attacks us, but I see it as a mannequin, so I shoot it and take it down. Beyond is a door.
The door takes us to For Mom's Favorite Boy. There's paintings of the abuse my PC went through. And finally Mother shows up, I try to arrest her, but fail. Elias sees Mother as a Demon, shoots her for no effect. I still try to arrest her, she stabs me, so I shoot her with an assault rifle for no effect. We finally flee through another door.
This leads to Sculpture where human body parts are made into chimeric art. Elias kills the sculptor who tells us that they make him make the art. That the black stone summons them. The woman from the Art gallery tells us that one of us would replace the sculptor. Elias shoots her and she dies and turns into Jane Doe. Then she shows up again as the Art gallery demon.
Through another door is a library, inside is the black rock. I smash it to pieces. We hear the woman's mocking laugh.
Through another door and we're finally outside. We go to the hospital. Elias quits the police force. I recuperate from the stab wound. Both of us, separately, hear the voice of the Art gallery demon, urging us to make art.
An online free convention. I only signed up for two slots on Friday because a friend decided to run a small invite only RPG convention on the same weekend. I got into one game.
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Friday Dec 5, 10am-2pm
Jamais Vu
System: Kult: Divinity Lost
GM: Dave - gmdave78
2 Players: a.pseudonym (Eric), Morgan Hua (Sophia)
Pre-generated characters provided.
Content Warnings: Disassociation, Depersonalization, Mundane horror, Dissociative amnesia, Acute mental illness, Hallucination, Breakdown of social order, PVP, Death, Violence, Loss of identity.
Eric and Sophie wake up in their suburban home and find that the familiar has become unfamiliar. They remember everything about their life but find themselves unable to attach any emotion to it. Even everyday objects become terrifying aberrations as the couple slowly drifts into insanity.
Before the sun sets that day one of them will be dead.
It was an interesting play test. We did mess with the GM's head a little. I (male) played Sophia (female). And a.pseudonum (female) played Eric (male). GM kept on mixing us up because our voices didn't match the PC and we had to correct him. Heh. GM will still tweak the game to improve it, but I enjoyed it.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
First we created backstories:
Sophie:
Profession: Etsy seller of handmade bad sweaters, custom knit to buyers specifications. Will knit double-necked sweaters as per Addams Family on request. Physical Appearance: Velma from Scooby-Doo, but maybe more scruffy.
What I'm good at: Organizing the house. I know where everything is and can tell Eric where his car keys are. Where the flashlight is. Where the tarragon is on the spice rack.
Collection: Cows. Figurines, plates, refrigerator magnets, Got Milk?, plastic toys, etc. Favorite is a standing cow displaying udders with the phrase "Udderly Fantastic!" Other is a complete collection of Animal Sound Makers with every version of a cow's moo. She has one of the original 1904 Moo Boxes made in Germany.
Eric:
Profession: Works in a local sporting goods store, maybe as manager or at least trying to become manager.
Physical appearance: Pretty average height / build. Dark hair, clean shaven, probably needs glasses but refuses to wear them so when he gets tired he starts squinting a little.
Good at: computers. the only one at work who understands how the ordering system actually works.
Collection: Comic books. Not so much collecting the ones that actually are worth money but the ones he likes. Reads them but puts them back in the mylar bag after.
Each PC had 4 blank sections to be filled out throughout the game: Thoughts, Values, Truths, and Beyond the Veil.
Thoughts are things your PC may think, it could be true or untrue. Values are things your PC values. Truths are things that are true and might affect game play. Beyond the Veil are creepy things you've seen.
During game play, as we rolled partial successes and failures, we mainly got Thoughts added and a number were choices given by the GM and we had to pick between generally 2 bad choices (for dramatic reasons). In some instances, we got new Values or Thoughts which became Truths.
At the end of the game these were my 4 sections:
Thoughts:
There's poison in the food.
I put the poison in the food. If I turn on the TV, I'll die. (got removed)
Eric doesn't know about the danger.
I'm in danger.
I would feel safer if I had a weapon. I love my husband. (got promoted to a Truth)
If Eric touches the rose bush, he dies.
Something is causing this.
I must not look at mirrors.
If stab him now, it'll be all over.
Eric sabotaged the lights.
Eric tried to electrocute me.
The police will kill me. As soon as I leave the driveway, I'm going to die.
I have a few moments to live.
Values:
It's ok to lie if there's a good reason.
Guns are dangerous.
Truths:
I didn't put something in the wine.
I love my husband.
The rose bush is important to me.
Beyond the veil:
There's something divine in me.
There was genuinely creepy moments as you had to choose between thinking you're loved one was going to lock you in the basement or stab you in the back (two Thought choices). Various thoughts were just unsettling. Some thoughts were prescient and foreshadowed what was going to happen.
The best scenes was the start where I'm making breakfast and realize I poisoned the omelets. I dump it in the trash, but pull them back out and put them on a plate to feed my husband. I mean if I was going to poison him, what harm would a bit of dirt do? Of course, he sees me pulling the omelets out of the trash and put them on the plate. He refuses to eat it, so I dump it back in the trash. A pretty funny scene.
Going down into the basement and finding the lights don't work is a standard trope, but it works especially if the husband is carrying an axe and the wife behind him has a chef's knife -- and is given the choice of thinking: lock him in the basement or stab him.
Waiting for the police (we called 911) after I had stabbed an intruder, hoping things would turn out ok, but also thinking, the police will kill me. And of course when they show up, they start opening fire.
In the end Eric lived (he avoided harm from the cops), but I had to dive out of a window, landing on the rose bushes, and stole the police car. Since my glasses were broken and it was raining heavily, I crashed the car and died.
I also liked how the emotional rollercoaster works in this game. We start of very suspicious of each other. During play, we started to trust each other. Then more bad things happened and suspicion came back in. An interesting game.
The free online horror convention. They have raffles of physical and digital prizes. The raffle money goes to various charities.
I bought several Kult books, but I can't get my weekly gaming group interested in playing, so this time, I signed up for all the Kult games possible. And ... I got into no Kult games. But later, I got into two Kult games via the wait list.
After playing more Kult. I think the 2d10 PbtA system is a neutral system for Kult. What I mean is, if you play Alien RPG, the Stress & Panic system adds greatly to the game and supports it very well. Kult's PbtA system doesn't add nor subtract from the game play. It's just there. The system is serviceable, but what differentiates Kult from other horror games is the setting.
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12/6/24 Fri 10am-2pm (4 hrs)
The Blizzard's Teeth
System: Kult: Divinity Lost
GM: SpoJino (Joseph)
4 Players: manbeartroll (Lucie the teenager - Brian), yashtruna (Fergus the muscle - Dominika), rocinate_on_focus (Eve the hunter - Robert), Morgan Hua (Jacob the leader)
Pregens: provided
Content Warnings: Body horror, Loss of agency, possible PvP
Strangers eye each other across the frosty courtyard of the mountain compound. Outside the blizzard howls. The horrific storm has seemingly claimed some of your companions already who had sought a way back to rugged mountain roads. Communication with the village below has been spotty at best, and only getting worse as the blizzard gets stronger. Everyone has their own reasons for being here, as the CEO’s mountain retreat offers more than shelter from the raging storm. You have not all arrived here together, nor are you all known to each other. What you do know is that this place should have had, at most, a minimal staff presence to maintain the compound during the harsh winter months. At the moment, it’s unclear if the greater threat is the growing storm outside or the suspicious faces around you.
This game wasn't designed for Kult, nor really used the Kult mythos, so even though the game was good, it wasn't a Kult game in my mind.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
There's 3 groups of PCs. The gang of kidnappers (Jacob and Fergus), the "kidnapped" girl (Lucie) who's working with the kidnappers, and a group of "lost" hikers (Eve).
The kidnapped girl is in on the kidnap plot and suggested the scheme to the kidnappers, also suggested her dad's mountain retreat as a hideout. The kidnappers know each other, but are strangers to the girl. The lost hikers aren't lost, but are looking for evidence of Satanism at the mountain retreat.
Something "out there" is killing the kidnappers in a grisly fashion, but they're all trapped in there by the raging storm. The something has also killed some of the hikers.
Jacob is waiting for the money to be transferred into a Swiss bank account. In the basement, Fergus murdered the staff and hid their bodies. Tina, the tech person monitoring the money transfer is dead, frozen in a bedroom. A little girl shows up, afraid of Fergus as she had witnessed the murder of her parents. Jacob finds the bodies, but locks her in the basement anyway.
The hikers search the resort and find a ritual room. Eve connects with the altar and murders the other hikers, hoping to take the power for herself. She must also kill Lucie to take her power.
Fergus is convinced that this was all a setup and trap by Lucie and that she must die.
In the end, there's PvP as Jacob tries to escape the retreat with Lucie (who has supernatural powers and had healed Jacob). Fergus and Eve shoot at the car Jacob is driving. He crashes open the front gate, but bullets take out his tires and the truck goes off the road. The camera pulls out as we see a helicopter veer towards a helicopter landing pad at the back of the resort. Jacob screams to Fergus that this isn't necessary, that they've got the money. The screen fades to black and the credits roll.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===
12/6/24 Fri 4-8pm (4 hrs)
Bad Apple
System: CoC
GM: J. Michael Arons (jarons20)
4 Players: JohnLapoint (Dennis the laborer - John), JustinLapoint (Evelyn the doctor and Arthur's daughter - Justin), Morgan Hua (Arthur Ashmore the Scientist)
Pregens: provided.
Content Warnings: Infertility, Sexual Violence
1920s, England. A Town suffering a bad harvest. Can the Investigators find the cause and end the corruption?
This was a play test and an interesting scenario, but I felt the pacing was a bit too slow for my tastes.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
What's interesting about this scenario is that it's Mythos-tinged, but the PCs approach this via the scientific method and in the end, the PCs solved this via science!
The trees aren't bearing fruit, the cows and sheep aren't conceiving, nor are the women in the township. There's a taint in the soil and water. This is found through investigation.
PCs enter through the old growth forest and found a pile of rocks created when the farmers cleared the land hundreds of years ago. This area seemed heavily contaminated. There, Arthur spots a Dark Young, and tells everyone to run. They flee, hearing something large stalking them, finally escaping by putting a river between them and the Dark Young.
Research brought up that the current lord's family had accused another family of witchcraft and the witch was hung and the land taken by the lord's family. The land taken was closest to the old growth forest.
Soil samples and water samples point to a fungal contaminate. The only thing that would kill it is uprooting all the orchards, adding a fungicide to the soil, and burning the old growth (in a controlled burn) that is the source of the fungus. This is reported to Lord Heatherton, the land owner. The lord precedes to eradicate the fungus as advised.
The burning wood emits a harsh black smoke, affecting the health of the town. 12 women claimed they were raped by a devil and gave births to malformed children. The land never recovered and was turned into an airfield in WW2. Unknown to the PCs, a descendant of a witch had returned to the town and summoned dark forces. The lure of a cure to infertility was used to create her new coven. Those women lost their minds when they saw Pan (an aspect of one of the Elder Gods) and were raped by him.
The PCs (Arthur and Evelyn) left after the controlled burns were started. Dennis worked the controlled burns and plowed up the land. Other than Arthur seeing the Dark Young (other PCs didn't see it), there was no other indication of anything supernatural. Stories of witches 300 years ago was just folktales, greed, and superstition.
I liked how the scenario tied in the Mythos to aspects of witchcraft.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===
12/7/24 Sat 11am-1pm (2 hrs, game was in a full 4 hr slot, but GM told us it was a short game)
Getting the Band Back Together
System: CoC
GM: Scott Dorward
4 Players: EerieLunarose (Perry St James - guitarist), ghost_crystal (Moxie Mutter - manager), automeris_io (Robin St James - bassist), Morgan Hua (Aubrey St James - singer)
Pregens: provided.
Content Warnings: Body horror, violence, harm to animals, possible PvP
Massachusetts, 1928. This latest tour has not been going well for your band. Interpersonal tensions are running high and the band is on the verge of splitting up. Maybe a nice stay in the country is just the thing you need to rebuild your sense of togetherness.
This was a very fun game, but it's more of an incident than a full scenario. Thus the 2 hour run time.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
Scott gave us a list of grievances PCs had against each other. We were supposed to pick and choose and confer and agree. I said, can we just wing it, and use those things as we see fit, then let the other Player decide if the accusations are true or false? We can just play it out. Everyone agreed.
I wound up having an alcohol problem. Another PC smelled and used too much cologne. Etc.
PCs start off arguing in their van, then a tree shows up in the middle of the road and we have an accident. The PCs wake up in a single bed. Wearing only a simple nightshirt, covered in ointment.
We discover the all so helpful Agnes and Frank. They had rescued us, but Agnes had to cut off our clothes to tend to us. Agnes gives us tea and soup. Moxie has a rash, maybe an allergic reaction to the ointment. While outside, trying to wash off the ointment in the rain, there's some odd tortured animal sounds that Moxie hears. Moxie finds something growing in the pustules on her flesh and screams. Aubrey goes to help Moxie and sees a multi-goat-blob in the animal pen during a lightning flash. All the PCs eventually see this.
Aubrey and Robin start to merge via ropey flesh that burst out of their boils. Agnes explains it's a good thing for the Mother. Our flesh will heal her. There's a fight and eventually, all the PCs start merging, but they had surrounded Frank and their merging flesh crushed Frank to death. Also using music and rhythm, the PCs were able to corner Agnes and murder her. Both Agnes and Frank were "woody."
The PCs leave and run into a walking-talking tree that asked us to follow it. The PCs comply and find a clearing surrounded by Dark Young chanting a ritual. Aubrey uses his singing skill to subvert their song and take it over. After a very lucky Luck roll, the ritual energy, instead of entering and transforming the PCs, enter the Dark Young and unprepared for this, they explode.
The Audrey St James Band, now a Siamese Quadruplet oddity, performs hidden behind a white bedsheet. If you're in Dunwich, drop by the venue they're playing in. It's a hoot.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===
12/8/24 Sun 10am-2pm (4 hrs)
The Twins
System: Kult: Divinity Lost
GM: mrtnj (Martin)
2 Players: deviliciouz (Sam-antha Anderson, mom and programmer - Setheus), Morgan Hua (Ian, boyfriend and drug councilor)
Pregens: In-game character creation.
Content Warnings: harm to children, losing family members, self-harm, drugs, drowning, puberty, parenthood
The twins were, as one might expect, inseparable until that night. You are their parent and the new partner of their parent. Will you literally tear reality apart to get your kid back? One-shot game for two players. Character creation in game, aided by a questionnaire.
Characters are created in-game. We have a few questions to answer about the twins, ourselves, and our relationship.
Wow. Excellent Player and GM. When there's only 2 Players, everyone including the GM has to bring their A-game. No one slept on the job. A very, very enjoyable game.
This game definitely used the Kult mythos. We rarely rolled dice which was good as we mainly roleplayed. I think the system neither added nor subtracted from the game, it was neutral.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
Here are the first 3 questions from character creation:
The Parent (Sam):
What are the twins’ names, and why did you choose them? Eva & Lilly
Which twin do you love the most, even though you know you should love them equally? Lilly
What is the one thing you can admit is concerning about the twins, even if you love them more than anything? They have this look of pitying sorrow when they look at you.
The Partner (Ian):
What do you think is worrying about the twins’ behavior? They bury things in the backyard.
What is the worst thing you have done to a child? Accidentally broke my nephew's arm while discipling him.
What is the reason you don’t want any children of your own? Fear of loss of freedom.
Sam has twin girls, aged 6. Ian is the new boyfriend of 6 months. Game starts in 2014 with everyday life and then Ian having a nightmare. Sam wakes up and finds Eva upset and Lilly missing. Elements of what Eva witnessed were also in Ian's nightmare, a specific song, glowing green lights. Lilly is never found. There is no sign of abduction.
2022. The girls are now 14. Lilly is still missing. Ian has dreams of Lilly. She is growing up like Eva, but emaciated, wearing tatters of what she wore when she disappeared. Eva goes to a nearby woods and does a ritual to rescue Lilly, but it looks like a suicide attempt. Ian snoops around and finds Eva's journal which also describes her dreams of Lilly and a ritual that requires something of Lilly's, drugs, and sudden physical shock.
In the end, Sam goes to the woods (where Eva was found) and downs alcohol with sleeping pills. Ian goes to the living room (where Lilly disappeared) and takes a measured amount of sleeping pills and teaches Eva how to hit him with an anti-overdose drug. Sam and Ian arrive on an oil platform. They find kids hiding from a monster. Ian faces the monster and gets grabbed. Sam tries to hamstring the monster, but in doing so, all three of them (Ian, Sam, and the Monster) fall off the oil platform. (Ian and Sam both failed their die rolls).
Sam's body is found in the woods. Eva failed to bring Ian back. Eva is put in a foster home. Six months later, Lilly returns and so are a number of lost children around the world, all this relatively unnoticed.
There were a lot of cool moments. I think one was Ian having installed a GPS app on Eva's phone (Sam was against this, but he did it anyway), so he was able to find Eva in the woods (he lied and said that he's seen her go there before, so he'll go and see if he can find her there). Another time, again, he wanted to go through Eva's stuff after the suicide attempt and Sam was against it. He did it anyway and brought Eva's journal (and her hidden knife) downstairs to show it to Sam. He wanted to talk to Eva about the similar dreams, but Sam didn't want it, so Ian snuck a note into the journal telling Eva that he had similar dreams and to not tell Mom that he told her this. Of course, at one point, when Sam wanted the ritual, she found Ian's note in the journal. The nightmare Ian initially had was quite good, using various elements we had made up during character creation, going into the backyard, following footprints weaving between snow mounds that looked like graves, taking the shovels from the girls, chasing Lilly and accidentally breaking her arm.
Pippi Longstocking doll as an introductory gift to the girls for the win! (Yeah, totally uncool and I only brought one for the two girls).
After watching a few videos by Seth Skorkowsky on Kult and playing a game of it and talking to people who've played it, I bought a copy during a Black Friday sale. I also got a few supporting products such as Kult: Beyond Darkness and Madness (GM guide) and Kult: Labyrinths & Secret Chambers (100 location maps with suggested creepy setting contents).
Kult is a combination of Dark City and Hellraiser. It is definitely a hard R-rated horror game, and can venture into X-rated (due to sex, violence, subject matter). The original KS book cover for Kult 4e showed the angel's nipples dripping blood. The rivulets of blood on her armor came from her breasts as if it were mother's milk. The art got changed for general publication. The original art was more striking, but bad for marketing reasons.
What I found odd was the game of Kult I played in and description of games from friends who tried it didn't delve into the core precepts of the game.
The idea is that humans are divine souls. That Earth is a prison built to contain us with the grinding banality of everyday life. Angels and Demons are tasked with keeping us on the hamster wheel of life. If we die, our experiences are stripped from our souls, and we are reincarnated in prison. The jailers (Angels and Demons) sometimes dutifully do their jobs and sometimes act out. If you're a jailer for millennia, you get bored and act out. The jailers all look like they came out of a Hellraiser movie. PCs are humans who have finally gotten a glimpse past the illusion of everyday life and momentarily saw the Truth. The game is about the PC's journey to enlightenment through a landscape of horror.
A PC's Dark Secret is not a dump score, but something a Player wants to explore because that is the lever used to propel the PC to enlightenment. So, only pick Dark Secrets you want to see in play.
The Demiurge (God) is missing or dead, so the fallout is civil war and power struggles between various powers. The jailers have their own domains and preferences. For instance, the Archon Tiphareth's domain is beauty and affirmation. Celebrity worship, beauty products, TV shows, TikTok, YouTube, etc. are traps created by Tiphareth. Each type of excess falls into a separate Archon's domain, some overlap, some cooperate, some compete for dominion. The Archon Malkuth is tired of it all and wants to awaken all the humans.
Outside of Elysium (Earth) are the Metropolis (a combination of Amber from the Nine Princes of Amber and Heaven), Inferno (Hell), the Underworld (underground labyrinthian complexes, a subway to other places), Limbo (dream worlds), and Gaia (savage nature, Earth was created from a slice of Gaia). These other places can be visited from Elysium where the boundary is thin. All these places are vast and contain various creatures and cults.
This version of Kult 4e uses a modified version of Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA). It uses 2d10 instead of 2d6. In PbtA, a +1 or +2 is significant because in PbtA: a 6- is a failure, 7-9 partial success, 10+ complete success. On average 2d6 = 7. And PCs have up to -3 to +3 based on their stats. But in Kult, with 2d10, the average is 11. 9- is a failure, 10-14 success with complication, 15+ complete success. So, a +1 or +2 is less significant. PC stats are -2 to +3, so on average almost all Moves (when a PC does an action and rolls dice, it's a Move) are partial successes.
That said, Kult is more about a series of partial successes (which creates drama) until you succeed. If you view Kult as this type of game, versus a I-wanna-play-to-win game, then it all works out.
What I love about the books, which are well written, are the numerous suggestions for complications when a Move doesn't completely succeed. Lots of options and suggestions are planted throughout the book.
I don't know when I can find the right group who wants to try this out, but I highly recommend this for an adult audience that's not squeamish about adult content.
KULT: Beyond Darkness & Madness (GM Guide) is well written and I didn't find any advice I disagreed with. Lots of good examples. Some of the last couple of chapters started getting a bit repetitive though.
KULT: Labyrinths & Secret Chambers has 100 loose leaf maps with a clean generic layout on one side and on the other side, a version with furniture and objects, sometimes a rundown version of a location. A 64 page booklet describes each layout and what it can be used for (3 possibilities) and 4 to 6 creepy details that the GM can use as inspiration. There's also 18 pages of lists of locations, random names, and such for the GM.
I got unlucky and didn't get into any games through the shuffler, but was able to get into A Chill in Abishiri through the waitlist and A Dish Best Served Cold through an announced opening on Discord.
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12/2 Sat, 10am-2pm (game took 3.5 hrs)
A Dish Best Served Cold
System: Kult: Divinity Lost
GM: Cameron Smith (cameronthetall)
3 Players: Yashtruna (Aiden Burnham - assassin), Automeris_io (Dean Lithian - hacker), Morgan Hua (General T - soldier)
In-game character creation.
Content Warnings: Violence, language, drug abuse, mental illness, possible child harm
No VTT - Theater of the Mind only.
You awaken in darkness sprawled out on a cold, plastic floor. As you push yourself onto your knees, you see red text on a terminal. “Emergency alert! Multiple system failure. Power and life support at critical levels. Shield systems down. Radiation will reach lethal limits in 30 minutes.” This improv-heavy scenario is set up by initial choices made by the players, with conversation driving the development of the characters and the story that unfolds.
I wanted to try Kult because I had watched some of the videos on it by Seth Skorkowsky and he was really positive on it. I also just bought a few Kult books from Mödiphius during the Black Friday sale a few weeks ago. But the default Kult setting is modern urban.
1-1/4 hrs character creation. The scenario took 2-1/4 hrs.
Kult's system is PbtA, but uses 2d10 instead of 2d6. In our game, as a quick generation method, we were given a +3 and -1 in two Attributes and a +1 in all remaining Attributes. Setting these Attributes took 10 seconds. I noticed that a +1 on 2d10 really didn't move the needle that much compared to 2d6. A 15+ is needed for a success. 10-14 a partial success with generally a minor set back. 9- a failure with a major setback. I spoke to someone afterwards and he told me that Kult's philosophy is really fail forward and set backs is how the GM adds intrusions and tension. Ok, this makes more sense then.
I thought the scenario was ok, but we spent a lot of time making the characters for a short one-shot. The Players were asked a lot of questions to flesh out our characters' backstories. The GM took our answers and wove it into the scenario.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
Automeris said this was a space version of the scenario: The Driver. The GM confirmed this.
The long Q&A and the pacing for the rest of the game was too slow for me. I'm glad we had only 3 Players. If we had 6, it could have taken 3 hrs to just create the characters.
We're out in a small spaceship and it's failing. The GM then asks a lot of background questions to flesh out our backstories and the situation. I wound up being a failed coup leader. Aiden a student environmentalist that tried to assassinate a person in power. Dean a hacker who modified his commanding officer's AI. We escaped from a labor camp on a mining asteroid. On our ship is the warden's daughter (NPC), Sina. We crash land on a mining planet.
We found the mining colony is in cold storage and there's only one maintenance guy, Dyson, who gets drops of supplies every 6 months. He's repairing the facility and keeping out marauders, who he first mistook us for.
We make friends and drop the injured and unconscious (from the crash) Sina into a stasis medical pod.
In order to try to make a call off planet, we get Dyson to shunt power to Central Command. Dyson disappears and when power comes back on, the computer restarts and the console says Dyson 3.0. Then Dyson reappears. He's a hologram of some sort. (Which explained why when I shot him earlier, I destroyed the wall behind him. -- I thought I might have missed.) The comms failed to go online.
The marauders show up and they're the natives of the planet whose ecosystem was destroyed by mining. The marauders periodically take what's valuable from the facility. Dyson protects it.
We try to cut a deal with the marauders.
A fleet of arresting ships show up for us, ready to bombard the facility.
The marauders flee, we think with Sina. Dyson offers to save us if we give him Sina. We accept the deal and he disappears in a flash of light. We go after the marauders, I shoot down their craft and Sina isn't on their craft. We return to Dyson and find that Dyson is now possessing the body of Sina. Dyson had also vanished the fleet as fulfillment of our deal. He also let us call off planet, so I can contact my people, so we can leave. We think Dyson is either some sort of hyperintelligent computer program or an alien superbeing.
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12/3 Sun, 10am-2pm (4 hrs)
A Chill in Abashiri - A 1920s Taisho-Era Japan Scenario
System: CoC 7e
GM: Michael Reid (mjrrpg)
4 Players:
Will - sirponcenby377 (Gen Kiyoshi - Tokko - Special Police),
Andy - RandomAnswer (Yoshioka Masao - Doctor of Medicine),
Fab - sweet_fhtagns (Kitamura Chiyoko - Journalist),
Morgan Hua (Ishihara Aiko - Zaibatsu Exec).
Pregens Provided.
Content Warnings: Political/Colonial Oppression
December 1922, Abashiri, Northern Japan. Abashiri Prison, located on the northern shore of Hokkaido, houses ‘dangerous’ criminals and political dissidents, and is no stranger to death and cold. But when a guard dies under suspicious circumstances, and amidst an unprecedented cold snap, a team of mixed professionals is sent to investigate the facility and its occupants, both staff and imprisoned. Amidst the Taisho-era empire’s political maelstrom, the investigators must navigate suspicious guards and uncooperative prisoners to uncover a plot that threatens not just Abashiri Prison, but the future of their changing nation.
At MRCon, I played in Unseasonal Blooming and Minuet run by Michael and I knew this would be a good game and it was. Michael GMed the scenario he wrote and we also had a fantastic table of Players.
I highly recommend the scenario (and GM).
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
An odd group of PCs get called to investigate the death of a prison guard. All the PCs have secondary secret agendas, though not necessarily in conflict with each other. So it's not PvP, it's just that we have plot B side quests.
GM did admit that the scenario is longer than our 4 hour time slot and he'll try to do a speed run through it. At the end, GM had to hand wave a few things and we ended about 7 mins over time. Still, I really enjoyed this game and recommend the scenario. Though I wouldn't run it in 4 hours.
Though the dead guard was covered in soot, he was actually frozen to death, supernaturally so. His still frozen body continued to emanate cold. Icicles of blood had burst through his body. Where the body lay, a snowflake design etched in ice fractured stone, marked the ground.
Our investigation uncovered a cult in the prison consisting of prison guards and prisoners. They were sacrificing prisoners for rituals.
In the end, Gen faced the cult leaders, killed them and was overwhelmed by cultists. Kitamura led a prison escape. Yoshioka and Ishihara fled the area in a car. Bitter cold descended everywhere.
I did complete my side quest. I faked the death certificate for my uncle and left clothing and supplies for him under a bridge for him to get. And he had escaped the prison with Kitamura.
