Three Horror Game Scenarios

Pen and paper horror is ideally made in one-shots. Two of these I have GMd before, using my crad-drafting little pnp-system. It's possible I'll make some of these into one page dungeons or something similar at some point. For now:

The Drillhole Trilogy

1. Oilfield

• You are the survivors of a plane crash. The engine of the passenger jet just cut out.
• Clinging to floating seat cushions the high waves carry you towards a darkened oil rigg.
• Inside, everyone is dead. There are weird symbols scratched into the walls.
• There is a shoggoth in the main tank. It's angry.
  
• Twist ending: The world has ended. You are among the few survivors.
• You must stop a second event. The source of the mass death is on this oil rigg.
  

2. Abyssal Entrance

• You are a group of urban explorers somewhere in the Russian hinterland.
• An old research installation is legendary among your ilk. It is completely abandoned.
• Radio picks up scratched transmitions. They turn out to be coded christian prayers.
• The bore hole that was used to explore the depths is at the bottom of a strip mine.
• Down there there is a record of a prayer powered by a radionuclear battery.
• In the 60s, the Soviets accidentally drilled a hole into hell.
  
• The record needs to be replaced. If it isn't or if it is turned off, hell will invade earth.

3. Icy Prison

• You are political prisoners in a penal outpost all the way out on Pluto.
• Every day you get to suit up and do geological exploratory digs.
• One of your fellow inmates catches something from the hole and goes insane.
• He infects some staff. They start killing people.
• You team up and try to survive.
• Can you fix up a space craft? Wait for help in several months time?
• Or do you stop the transmission of this mimetic disease before it spreads to other worlds?

10 Sapient Aliens

Dan over at Throne of Salt posted 10 sapient aliens for Mothership. I figured, I'd join the fun. Some of these I have actually used in roleplaying, others are brand new.

Note that in my games, the word "alien" is derogatory when talking about a sentient being. Aliens are animals. People are Xenos.

Technology and Magic

I like my fantasy more medieval than the mainstream these days does it. Outside having an aristocracy, most fantasy authors basically seem to transfer ideas of old-west frontiersmanship into a medieval setting. Lone farmsteads, guarded by farmers with shotguns crossbows. While this does make a murderhobo-fantasy more plausible, it really irks me. So do ginormous fortresses a la World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings. Like - who would have built this? With what manpower? Why?

I really dislike false modernisms in my fantasy. If you want street lamps and cell phones, please, by all means, use a modern setting. Urban fantasy is great in allowing you to do magic and swords while having all conveniances of modern civilization. If you can't think without smartphones, then don't. Fuck speaking stones. Fuck eternal lights. Let me state it here:

ANY SUFFICIENTLY MUNDANE MAGIC IS INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM TECHNOLOGY.

There, I said it. If every other dude can cast light/bread/whatever, there is no medieval society. Nope.

So magic better be rare, hard, opaque, weird, dangerous. Have the supernatural as a hint, not an everyday thing. And don't forget: If you can actually feel your god's power via visible and undeniable miracles they work through your or someone else's hands – please don't call it fucking faith.

My son as a game master

As a gift for Easter, I produced a Heroica Fanfiction Audioplay for my older son. Fifty minutes of fantasy-action, just for him, including the bosses and monsters he and I made up. I even gave his favorite characters the best moments. This, after repeated listenings over the holidays, inspired a creative frenzy in my son. While I was doing things like household chores, he was upstairs in his room, labouring away with the boxes of Legos that he inherited from me. Then he presented me with an adventure of his own making. He'd play the bad guys, I'd play the heroes. He was going to be my game master (although he doesn't know the term, this has happened totally organically).

His idea of a great adventure was that the Goblin Kings (The Twins, we usually call them, as we have two of them and they together form a boss encounter) have gathered all the monsters in their keep. Except for the Spitting Snake and the Giant Spider, all bosses are there as well. The goblin fortress is seperated from the human village by the bridge. In it there is the main hall full of horrors and troops, as well as three side wings. In one there is first the Kraken, then the Hydra, its den serving as a treasure chamber full of gold, potions, and a key. One is the throne room with the two Goblin Kings. The last one is another side wing. It features two hidden keys and a secret door that leads to another land.

That other land is the goal of the quest, as my son informed me. The kidnapped king of Heroica, father to Prince Alrik, leader of the heroes, is held there – but the heroes don't know that yet. I was allowed to have four active heroes at the time, the other four waiting as backup at the village tavern.

Mathematically, my team was very unlikely to defeat the massed foes in the main hall. My first strike team consisted of the Prince, the Knight, the Priest and the Thief. I had a plan: The team would head straight for the treasure chamber, where the Knight would hold the monsters from the hall off while the other three dealt with the Kraken and the Hydra. Then everyone would retreat with the loot to the village, where the treasure would allow them to heal and gear up.

The plan went reasonably well. While I lost the Knight and the Thief, the Priest and the Prince got out with the treasures. I filled the ranks with the Archer and the Druid and started back to the Goblin Fortress. That's when things got even more RPGish.

My son had used the turns I had spent buying stuff in the village: He had set an ambush with werewolves on the bridge. That failed to stop my heroes. When a single Level 1 goblin came out of the fortress, I decided to negotiate. I told it/my son that he didn't have a chance as a single goblin against four heavily armed heroes. My son conceided. The goblin decided to become a good citizen and went onto the big ship to take a nap. Later, while my heroes were entering the fortress again, he would go to the village oak to nibble on its big branch. As my son explained, goblins love meat and wood. He was the smartest of the goblins and thus decided to be a good guy.

Inside the fortress, my heroes encountered another wave of enemies in the form of miscelaneous smallish monsters and the Dark Druid. Then the remaining goblin forces surrendered – under the condition that my heroes leave the throne room and their kings alone. I decided that these were acceptable terms for Prince Alrik, after he had learned that the goblins didn't have his dad. The heroes went into the wing with the magic door undisturbed and we decided to call it a night and continue the adventure/campaign in my son's other land another day.

It was only half way through that game of Heroica that I realized that I was in fact playing a roleplaying campaign designed by my son. He is only five and can't read or write but the graspable little character sheets made from Lego combined with the simple tactics of the dice rolls and loot system enabled him to become a game master. I am astonished and proud that he put thought into things.

He even heeded my advice from an earlier game and gave me a good reason to go into a dead end full of boss monsters (all the treasure and a mission-relevant key). During my last assault he even realized that his guys should try to kill my healer (the Priest) but after that failed, he figured the smart thing for the goblins would be to give up. I'm glad he isn't one of the bloodthirsty kids that assume that murder is the only way to play this. And I'm very very curious what the land beyond the magical door has in store for my quartet of heroes.

More Heroica Bosses

My older son and I made some more boss enemies for Heroica. It's basically a continuation of this post. It's easier to make boss enemies than regular foes. The regular beasties require tiny figurines and are, rules-wise, rather boring. So, here's three new bosses and their rules:

The Chained Snake: My son made this boss and its rules. It has 3 HP and can not only fight in close combat, but also attack a specific field in the corridor leading up to it by spitting acid there. If a character ends on that squre, you roll a combat die but cannot harm the snake. Shield: You deal one damage to the snake. Sword or sword/skull: You lose one HP. Skull: You lose three HP. A tough monster to fight.

The Sewer Kraken: This boss has a setpiece. You gotta get past its tentacles before attacking it from a square behind it. On the dark grey squares, it can attempt to grab you with an attack roll. If it hits, you get into the appropriate tentacle. On your next turn it hands you over to the next tentacle and you roll another combat roll. On sword or shield, you get free, on skull, you lose another HP. That way, the Kraken will make you run the parcours again. Once you're behind it, you can actually hurt it. It has 3 HP.

The Hydra: With as much as 6 HP, the Hydra is very hard to kill. For every two HP you take off of it, it loses one of its three heads. Combat rolls function normally, the Hydra deals damage equal to its remaining heads. So it's basically a more defensive version of the Giant Bat.

So our new bosses include our first experiments with bosses that have ranged attacks. Also, the Kraken can, like the Giant Spider, manipulate the heroes and their positioning. This makes for a far more dynamic battle and is balanced out with the low damage output of this boss. The Hydra is, in my opinion, the coolest looking of the trio but also mechanically the most boring one as it is just a straight-up fight.

In the future I will likely design more set-piece-fights like the one against the Kraken. That one is, by the way, ideal to be placed in the sewers, reinfocing the Monsters in the depths.

Instant Dungeon

So, these days I (and all my co-workers) work from home. The virus is threatening public life where I am, although it has yet to spread wide enough to cause panic. No one wears masks in public (yet). Because we're a society that has forgotten that threats beyond vague promises of terrorism can and do exist. And our state agencies are failing where they can. So better stay home with the family.

As I save time of my regular bycicle commute every day, I've had not just more time to spend with the family but also to do creative stuff. My older son and I have been playing a lot of Heroica and I was thinking about how to make a modular dungeony board game (once again). I have a writing block that I use to doodle during calls for work - and I decided to use said doodling for a useful cause. A new game is in the making. What's special about this one is that I am doing a lot of artwork.

16 Pages thus far, each one representing a business meeting over remote work. They can be rearranged in whatever order, most combinations allow for every part of the labyrinth to be traversed in some way.

Even if it doesn't become an actual playable game it will probably look decent enough when spread out together as a labyrinth on a table. But the idea is that everyone gets a character to play and that chests mean loot, monsters mean fighting, big monsters mean big fights. Keys open doors, obviously. Loot will come in the form of equipment cards that each have different benefits, from giving you extra HP to better fighting to lockpicking and all that. Have yet to think of actual rules but it will be a fun, kid-friendly labyrinth/dungeoncrawl once done.

The cool thing is that it inspired my older son to make his own version of the game. It's even bigger than mine.

Megaman

Lately I've been, for the first time in ever, dabbling in something one might consider to be fan fiction. I've always despised using other people's characters but my son made a wish for Easter: Dad, make me a megaman Tonie. Tonies are, for those without a young child in their life, figurines with an rfid-chip that can access cloud-based audio when placed on the appropriate speaker box. The makers offer some figures with ready-made audio plays (my son is listening the The Little Prince right now as I am typing this). And ones you can freely upload stuff for.

My son never played a Megaman game. My son never saw the 90s cartoon with its terrible soundtrack. His peers have no idea who or what Megaman is. He only knows what he heard then I explained to him that I was going to a concert by the Protomen this fall. And what he saw in fan-made music videos to their work. That was enough for him to wish for a Megaman action figure for christmas, which he likes to play with in conjunction with landscapes made out of Lego Duplo.

And now he wanted a Tonie. There is no Megaman Tonie. There isn't even an audio play I could use. And the cartoon show is terrible. I needed to improvise and create stuff myself, just like when he asked me to make a PJ Masks Tonie. At least he accepted that I'd drill into his Megaman action figure to install the chip from a butchered Tonie.

So the main reason why I haven't been blogging during the past weeks hasn't been the virus or a lack of creativity. It's rather that for three weeks, every minute of my free time was consumed by creating an audio play about Megaman. 32 Minutes of it, with music in the background, robot voices and lots of Pew-Pew-soundeffekts and explosions. One hell of a lot of work that the public will never know because I have no rights to any of the stuff in the play except my text.

It's magnificient. It's epic. It's just for one little boy who, I know that, will religiously listen to it five times back to back this Easter.