Flexing Haunted House Muscles

I haven't been posting chronicles of the game sessions that I have ran since February. For that players, I apologize but I have been frantically working on my Spacers(TM) material. Material that will be published for the eyes of maybe a few dozen people or so, but I don't care. The stuff has been in the making since the 90s and I need to get it out. So the sessions and the project work are coming off a bit like a job. But hey, our sessions provide diversion in a time where folks need to remember how to have imagination and we're doing it together.

Last night though, 4.May.2020, I took a break with Crawlspace. Horror and the TACK system that comes soooo easy to me. The special treat of it was trying out my horrible fates for haunting hunters theme that has been going since the early Aughts anew, with a run of Bumps in the Night. The scenarios where the PCs are the bumps in the night. They're either ghosts or ghost hunters bumping into each other because of all the equipment that they're wearing. Now this was "Bumps Part Two" mostly because as a concept I've ran it before. A couple paranormal investigators come early to the game, look around the house and get dead, becoming ghosts, more ghosts, on the site. The other PCs arrive later and don't know the ghost PCs. As good as that session, with a different name, worked a few years ago, there were some things that needed some work. Specifically getting the ghost PCs to be more than imps or guardian angels, in short giving them a sense of drama beyond stage pranks or being life guards. 

The players that would arrive at last night's session, were the A-List. There's Iron Curtis, who is like the stunt man of role-players in my RPG endeavors these days. His flexibility in crafting a character persona is rather amazing, and just when he is about to outdo even me, he can pull back and swat a co-player on the ass, figuratively speaking, and get everyone involved. Then there was Peryton, my wife, who is like the Milla Jovovitch of Crawlspace as she has a PC that has been in eight different scenarios, and three other recurring PCs in other ones. Then JerryTel showed up. JerryTel, who is a very strong role-player to begin with, doing a reprise of his role as reality TV-host/Ghost hunter, Sven, the Torpedo from Toledo, from the very first The Horrible Fate of the Haunted House Hunters around a  decade and a half ago. Now I am no push over when it comes to narrative role-playing. My main NPC, the Delaney house, was there. And it means business these days.

The Delaney Estate in North Shorelands, MI

Now this work is being developed as a pretty random scenario, where players draw for their roles. It can be quite "ghost heavy" because of the way I did the generation tables. Well then except that JerryTel, showed up fashionably late in the video chatroom. He was there with the same "Actor" as the original paranormal shenanigans. Pery as Techie/Camera and Jerry as the Face? A soft reboot, no less. In any case, the Quick, the living, outweighed the dead. Stuntman Curtis, was ready to be the crash test ghost and he was more than enough.

Throughout the session we worked on rule concepts for the upcoming Crawlspace: 21 and Over concerning ghost hunting, possession, and some axioms for the afterlife. At the same time, I creeped everybody out with a few of my imagery tricks. Neither the Quick nor the Dead rest easy in the Delaney Mansion. At 10:30pm , JerryTel was fading, he had been doing low light camera sitting in his darkened study to get the bump-hunter feel just right, so the intrepid haunted house hunters fled with the footage that they had. Curtis's ghost character was back among his newly acquainted maybe-not-that-dead peers, with a mostly unformed hungry yearning gnawing at his insides drawing him towards homicidal dementia.

Oh they'll be back.