InSpectres Saturday

[wyrdlyng]

One of our regular players wasn't going to be able to make it to our biweekly D&D game so I got them to try InSpectres.

We created a small start-up down in Miami funded indirectly by some Columbian Cartels looking for a way to help launder their money. Their office was a small building on the Miami river (best known in the news for numerous drug smuggling and immigrant smuggling raids) with a beat up car, a small boat (one of the characters was an ex-boat captain), and a good security system.

The group consisted of an ex-boat captain in his late 40's with a good net of connections, an ex-New York cop in his early 40's, a computer guru on the edge and a college student seeking some direction.

We ran the entry interview for the college student. The players slipped easily into their characters and got them warmed up. We then ran through their meeting with potential investors. My favorite part of this was the ex-boat captain hooking the Cartel representatives by offering them potential blackmail information on local Miami officials.

Finally we got started on their first case. They were approached by a nurse from the nearby hospital and asked to investigate some strange sightings in the morgue at night. I gave them their hook and they ran with it.

They did a lot of investigation before even getting to the hospital. Once there they started interrogating orderlies, the director, going over records and video tapes and basically making up the story (it was a beautiful thing).

Two of the 4 players took to this style of game immediately. Another came along quickly once he realized that I (as GM) was only throwing in events when the story slowed. The last player had some trouble adapting. In most games he tends to be the quiet one who follows rather than leads so being put in the spotlight and having to come up with something on the spot (as he did a good portion of the interrogation) was new to him. I think with some more practice he can start flowing as easily as the others.

The mystery followed an odd thread leading to the ghost of an orderly that had committed suicide after being spurned by both a surgeon and the director after coming down with HIV. It was more serious than what I had expected but this is what they chose it to be. As an aside they really liked the investigation procedure in InSpectres.

So they returned to their office after fixing their car which mysteriously lost most of its fluids and after the college student was chased by a street gang while he was looking for an auto parts store. They returned with some gear and a ritual the computer programmer had found. They dragged the director to the morgue at the time the ghost was most often spotted and began a ritual to banish him.

Taking a cue from their description of the spirit I guided it manifesting into a pool of blood which possessed the director that it was angry towards. It lunged at the ex-cop who suddenly suffered from a string of bad rolls and took a lot of stress. The group overcame the director and faced the reanimated corpses (they did decide to face it in a morgue) and managed to banish the ghost. The ex-boat captain even managed to get the director attacking the ex-cop on film which he then turned over to the cops.

It was probably closer to "classic" horror than comedic horror but everyone enjoyed it so why complain? The group even made good use of confessionals (though no one dared assigning characteristics) and it became one of their favorite parts (we even used a separate chair for the confessional seat).

My only concern was the heavy stress the ex-cop got. He was down by 7 dice at the end of the session (his luck had been good for the 1st part of the game but he just kept rolling one after one on stress tests in the second half) but this seems to just have been a string of bad luck on his part. His vacation time ate heavily into their Franchise dice at the end.

But to sum up everyone greatly enjoyed the game and would probably play again or even try another game like it. I'm thinking Elfs next time we're down a player, though I should have a copy of octaNe by then so who knows. The only problem now is that my wife enjoyed the game so much that she said that she's going to have a hard time going back to D&D.