[Warning: Potential spoilers for the Savage Worlds Horror adventure, The Mutator]
The next session was going to be the day before Halloween and I wasn’t going to have enough time (or motivation) to finish up a prop I wanted for our next Freeport session. So what’s a GM to do? The answer seems pretty obvious…run a one-shot for Halloween. I grabbed a horror one-shot from Pinnacle, made some modifications to it, and set up the room to be a bit more conducive to a horror/slasher flick type game.
I started with a sign to announce what we’d be doing that night. The red paint turned a little too pinkish against the black…oh well.
I then cut up a black pillow case to hang on the table light to help darken the room (gotta love these new, eco-friendly light bulbs…they hardly put off any heat). I figured I’d go ahead and put bloody hand prints on this too.
The paint, of course, seeped through the fabric and got all over the table. It turned out okay though so I left the bloody handprints on the table too.
And, lastly, I had already printed out one envelope for each character with a separate card suit but I figured that I’d bloody them up a bit too.
Cards were dealt to determine who played which character and away we went.
The last thing each character could remember was being in a hospital and being asked, just before succumbing to an anesthesia-induced loss of consciousness, if they had any friends or next of kin to be notified. Each answered no. The four PCs awoke to a horrified scream to find themselves strapped down to hospital beds in a dark, dirty room whose windows had been boarded up. A fifth bed contained the screamer, also strapped down to a bed, and in some sort of seizure. As the PCs went about freeing themselves from their bounds, it was noticed that the fifth individual had strange puncture wounds on her neck. More disturbing, her face was completely bandaged but something was slithering around under the bandages.
Before the last PC was freed, someone (or something) could be heard walking down the hallway and dragging something heavy. A psychopathic nurse/orderly (i.e., cultist) came in and attacked, with a fire axe, the freed PCs. She was dropped pretty damn quick by a solid punch to the jaw. And, unfortunately, the rest of the night struck me as being pretty much a total flop…at least as far as horror goes. When the fifth patient’s bandages burst forth revealing a mass of barbed tentacles, not only did everyone succeed on their Guts checks but the primary response was more along the lines of kill it than holy crap run!
There were a number of things that made it flop for me. It didn’t help that almost every Guts check was a success…let alone with multiple Aces. It didn’t help that the players didn’t really embrace the “weaknesses” of their characters (broken legs, arms, Doubting Thomas, heroin withdrawal). And it most certainly didn’t help that I should have placed more emphasis on this being a horror game with the characters being “normal,” everyday people instead of the fantasy hero-types that we usually play.
The other problem (probably the biggest) was too much of wimpy mish mash of action horror and greater evil/supernatural horror. The trappings of the adventure screamed supernatural horror. The “glass jaw” of the supernatural baddies, however, begged for the PCs to kill them. Dropping a cultist easily with a punch to the jaw is one thing but doing the same to a supernatural baddie…well, that didn’t work for me and is essentially what happened with the former patient/tentacled horror in the bed next to the PCs. I think it encouraged more of a Army of Darkness than Cthulhu approach to play. It wasn’t because the supernatural baddies were all extras but that they were really quite wimpy extras. They should have been much more difficult to drop…maybe even difficult enough that the best option was to run! At least until the PCs could potentially learn of a way to defeat them as they explored the supernatural labyrinth in which they found themselves.
Oh well, lesson learned. I think folks still had fun more or less but it wasn’t what I was envisioning. I know exactly how I would set this up differently if I were to do something similar again. Not that I probably will…at least not until Halloween next year if even then. I’m not sure horror is really the right genre for this group anyways. Sure, there’s going to be some supernatural nastiness in the Freeport campaign…it is Freeport after all…but not straight up horror.
And I swear, the players must have rolled more Aces in this short session than they have in all the sessions of Savage Worlds that we’ve played so far combined! đŸ™‚
I thought the session was quite fun, and a real change of pace from our typical fantasy worlds. Having the gaming space all blacked out really did give a creepy feel, and the bloody envelopes containing the characters made for a nice entry point to the game.
I did not realize how wimpy the extras were until I was playing one (in part due to having rolled two one’s on a spirit check and not thinking quickly enough to throw in a bennie) and the “bookworm” PC took down my extra and another one in a single round…
Still, a fun evening–thanks for putting it together, Tim!
I really should have noticed the stats on the supernatural baddies and modified them. As it was, they were fine for an Action horror type thing (Zombies!!!) but, in that case, there should have been more of them probably. I also totally forgot that a certain “one-legged” character should have also gotten a -2 to any skills that require mobility (e.g., Fighting). That would have helped enforce some of the mutual co-dependency groupiness and oh crap feeling that should have been more in the forefront.