Dead Meat: Vacation Cruise Style!

[Demonspahn]

Hi everyone, talking about Sean Wipfli's http://www.geocities.com/unodiablobrew/DEADMEAT.html> Dead Meat: Ultima Carneficina Dello Zombie here!

This post is ridiculously long, just so you know.  

OK, we had planned a session of Dead Meat for Halloween but then the host had a death in the family so we rescheduled the party for Friday night, hoping to bleed over into Saturday morning which also happened to be the Day of the Dead and fit the theme even better.  

First off, we decided to treat the party as if it were Halloween and still dressed up in costumes.  My wife and I came as Harry Potter and Hermione Granger if anyone cares.  The other couples were a dragon and a princess, Strider and Arwen, and. . . "Vince Neal" from Motley Crue.  Actually Vince (I'll call him Vince in this recap) stood out from the rest of us in more ways than just his costume---he was the only single person among us and he had never roleplayed before but was willing to give it a shot.  

"Strider" was our host, and as always, he did a good job of setting the mood with Halloween decorations, a spooky music CD on the radio and Jason, Michael and Freddie taking turns hacking up teenagers on TV in the background.  

We played some Halloween party games first: "Is There a Ghost Behind Me?", "Corpse Keeper", "Witch's Hat", a board games called "Vampire Hunter", our perennial game of "Pin the Penis on the Mummy" and a homebrew horror version of "Once Upon a Time".

Then it was time to break out Dead Meat.

I whipped out some premade "character sheets" for their Personas and gave everyone a quick rules refresher.  We had outlined the concept to Vince in advance and he seemed to get the idea.  I told them the basic setting for the film: a cruise to some place warm; trying to give away as little information as possible.  They speculated on this while they made their characters and for this game I decided to let everyone play one of their own Personas first.  

Vince had some problems adapting to the spirit of the game in the beginning.  I tried to explain to him that a Green Beret commando would not carry his assault rifle, flak jacket and hand grenades onto a cruise ship.  Finally, in an effort to speed things along, I allowed him to have a Glock 9mm which he "always carried in his waist band".  

The rest of the Personas were folded up and put into the bowl (more on all of them later).  My "plant" character was added to the bowl as well---a scientist and the head of a salvage team whose gear (including a radio and a small submersible) was stowed in the ship's cargo hold.

So the game started and I unveiled that the characters were booked on a cruise ship bound for several destinations in the Carribean.  They immediately made the Haiti/zombie connection and when they arrived there, some of the players refused to get off the boat, even for a minute.  It was actually the women players who lobbied the most for going ashore.  My friend's wife even said something to the effect of "what's the point of playing if we're just going to hang out on the ship?" which was cool because I could tell the women (all RPG civilians) were getting into the game.  

The ship itself was a huge, state-of-the-art cruise liner.  I made sure to describe a few of the techy things like electronic keys to doors that slid open as well as a few other automated things.  The characters played around with a few of the doodads (especially the automatic mixed drink maker) never realizing the significance of all this until much later.  

In Haiti, those that went ashore were just waiting for zombies to spring up.  I did a little build up to this to make them think something was going on, but mostly I wanted to show the political unrest and people being hauled off by the police for speaking out against the new regime.

On board the ship, the captain (who up until then I had painted as a really nice guy) invited one of the couples to dine at his table.  During the meal, he made several advances on one of women Personas who was married (and actually played by one of the women), so now they all thought he was a creep.    

They spent the night in Haiti (or on the ship) and then it was time to go.  Nothing had happened in Haiti, no zombie attacks or evil undead, and I think this just put everyone more on edge because now as they boarded the ship they were all waiting for me to spring the surprise.  And I did of course.  Not long after they sailed off, they were stopped by military boats.

A few of the Personas were in their cabin when a man came beating on their door and shouting for help.  They jumped to the conclusion that zombies were after him and let him in.  It turned out the Haitian government, not zombies, were chasing him.  The police and the ship's crew entered the cabin and found him hiding inside.  They dragged him off kicking and screaming, shouting curses and vowing revenge.  He seemed especially angry at the captain, but one of the captain's officer hit the man with the butt of a rifle just as he seemed about to say something incriminating.  

This made the players wary and by asking questions they found out the man was a voodoo priest and the leader of a failed rebellion.  What they didn't know was that he had paid the captain bricks of marijuana to smuggle him out of Haiti.  The captain took the drugs and then turned the man in for a sizable reward from the Haitian government.  

So the characters milled around and discussed the events and learned some more stuff over the course of the day (which I sped through).  Then night came and they split up---some went for drinks at the bar and others went to bed.  

As it got darker the captain came over the PA and said a storm was coming in and that everyone might want to prepare for a bit of rough water.  The tropical storm came with thunder and flashes of lightning.  About midnight the Personas started hearing some strange noises like muffled explosions and a few screams.  

Lightning struck the ship then and fried all of its neat little electronic gadgets and doodads.  The lights went out, but the red emergency lights cut on a few seconds later.  The doors also slid open and locked into place as part of the emergency procedure.  Heh, heh. :)  

Vince (who had been at the bar) went to investigate one the screams, looking around the deck with his trusty Glock.  He found the life boats either smashed to pieces or tossed over the side.  Then he saw the first zombies, half a dozen, dressed in crew uniforms, hunched over the body of a man and woman he had been talking with at the bar.  These zombies weren't shamblers, but the "intelligent" leader zombies that I like to throw in to deal with PCs who like to hide or climb to safety.  They are faster and more powerful than normal zombies so I was only going to have Vince face one or two of them before the others were distracted.  In the end it didn't matter.  

Vince failed his initial Guts roll, froze and got munched.  

Now, I don't normally take pleasure in the death of a character but the thought of that Glock lying useless on the deck in a pool of his Personas blood was just _so_ damn amusing.  

Needless to say, Vince wasn't happy.  His argument was that an ex-commando Green Beret would not have frozen like that to which I just shrugged and pointed at his dice (and it probably didn't help that we were all laughing).  Thankfully the others chimed in with their support and he gave in so we didn't have to waste too much time arguing about it.  

So anyway, the slaughter began throughout the ship.  The intelligent zombies (all dressed as crewmen) killed anyone they saw; their kills turned into mindless zombies and continued their work and in no time, the ship was nearly overrun.  

After a few brief zombie encounters, the Personas all teamed up and my regulars convinced everyone to barricade themselves in one of the cabins.  They waited a while and then started to have second thoughts as the number of screams dwindled and the number of zombies clawing at their barricade began to increase.  Finally, the thought of being trapped inside the room got to them and they decided to look for a way off the ship.  

They found the smashed up boats so they went for the radio on the bridge and found that smashed as well.  They discussed their chances of making a raft but the water looked too rough because of the storm.    

One Persona looked over the side of the ship and saw a group of people floating nearby, so he donned a life preserver and jumped over.  When he got down there, he realized the people were dead and that the water was swimming with sharks.  Chomp.  

The characters had pulled my "plant" character right off the bat.  They decided to go for his gear in the cargo hold so I had to ad-lib and reroute a few encounters to make the game interesting (something I enjoy doing on the fly).  They planned to either radio for help or try to escape in the min-sub.  The catch was that the sub could only hold two people.  I passed a note with this to the "plant" player and he kept it to himself.

They eventually made it to the cargo hold but by then the plant had bought it so they had to search for the mini-sub without his help.  While doing so, they came across the bricks of marijuana.  One of them was opened and there were pipes, lighters, rolling papers and other paraphernalia laying nearby.  Two Personas jumped on this and started getting high.  

It was pretty funny until the smoke filled the hold.  Then everyone started feeling lightheaded and the two smokers dropped dead.  Some zombies popped in about then, just long enough to distract everyone and by the time they had dealt with these zombies, the Personas had risen up as intelligent zombies.  

You see, this was all party of my wicked back story.  This was the marijuana the voodoo priest had paid the captain for his passage aboard the ship and when he was betrayed he cursed the weed so that anyone who smoked it became a zombie monster.  The crew members smoked the weed, turned into zombies and then started killing.  (OK guys, I know it's not Oscar material, but everyone there bought into it, so bleh!).  :)  

The characters held off the zombies long enough to use the crane to lift the submersible out of the hold and that's when they finally realized it was too small to hold them all.  I had already decided to let them escape if they could come up
with a decent plan, perhaps make a raft or some type of flotation device that the sub could pull, but they didn't even think about that. In fact, I was rather impressed at how, when presented with a sure means of escape, their survival instincts kicked in and they suddenly turned on one other.

Vince's Persona, went down first, whacked with a table leg, by my friend's wife's Persona.  All hell broke loose then as the others went at it.  One Persona (poor Rhinoceros Boy, see below) got pushed into the ocean and the others fought it out with knives and meat cleavers from the kitchen.  Only one Persona came away completely unhurt.  He and the bloodied survivor got into the sub, lowered it into the water and escaped.  

Or so they thought.  The film "faded to black" as the sub started slowly filling up with water.    

----

A few thoughts:

-The characters in a bowl idea worked well as usual and was a lot of fun.  The girls took it a little more seriously than the guys did however and when a new Persona entered the film, it wasn't hard to figure out which "group" it came from.  

Notable female created Personas included a horror movie producer (who was taking notes during the event for her next flick), a con-woman who latches onto rich older men/sugar daddies, a child skate-boarder (who ended up killing a zombie with a good whack of his board), a plastic surgeon who just had a patient die and was badly in need of vacation and several run of the mill male and female tourists of varying age.  

The guys on the other hand. . .well, it just never ceases to amaze me how my friends can so easily discard their "grown men" disguises when they sit down at the gaming table.  I kind of had a bad feeling about it during chargen when they started asking if the Personas _had_ to allocate all 7 points to their stats.  This time, they avoided using any of the gay biker, gay fireman or gay steel mill worker Personas that popped up in our last session and decided to be a little more creative, in a sick and twisted sort of way.  

Notables include Rhinoceros Boy (a deformed, sideshow carnival freak who idolized the Elephant Man), a 98 year old man with a walker who would make George Burns look healthy (Whomp 1, Zip 1 and Guts 1) a pot-head (Whomp and Zip 1, Guts 5 because he was "too stoned to be scared or feel pain"), the obese mother from "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" who couldn't even move and lasted all of about 5 seconds of game time after she was introduced, a blind guy (who I actually gave bonuses to because he could hear/smell the zombies in advance---incidentally, he was the one who survived unhurt), a psychopath based on Hannibal Lecter who was secretly being transported to a prison in Guantanamo Bay (they found him chained up on the dolly with mask and all) and several others that are barely worth mentioning.

-There were more than a few humorous moments in the game, which doesn't exactly fit in with the "overwhelming horror" theme.  It is impossible to set a dark tone when dealing with a grab bag of dysfunctional Personas so the best thing to do is to roll with it and add a few of your own touches (like the zombie chef in the galley, covering a pile of brains with decorative icing, or the drunk zombies staggering around the bar).  If you cant beat 'em. . .  :)

-All in all though, a great time.  I just cannot adequately describe how much enjoyment I get out of this game.  Funwise, we're batting a thousand so far and the biggest problem I have is avoiding the temptation to run it too much, especially because it seems like this is the only RPG my whole group can agree on right now.    

-It is so much fun gaming with your S.O., especially when they surprise you by doing something wild, like pushing someone over the side of the ship to save themselves!.    

-"Vince" was impressed ("so that's what you guys are always talking about") and wants to play again and learn more.  

-I still want to run a more Resident Evil-esque type game with the characters a bit better equipped/more powerful.  I have a neat scenario in mind that I was going to run on Halloween but decided against it because I thought the ladies would enjoy the cruise more.  

Anyway, gosh, this was a huge post.  Thanks for reading if you made it this far.  

Pete

[UnSub]

Good post!

I also found it very hard to build up a "scary" game. The players are into it, that's not the problem, but humour always injects itself into moments of tension. This isn't a big problem, as the players are still having fun, but it's very hard to get a true "terror" atmosphere with my group of players.

It could be that there are too many cliches to distract the players into the game. Most horror movies are full of cliched characters that the players love to emulate, but this takes away from the realism. A lot of zombie films are full of black humour, so maybe it doesn't detract from the game by making it funny amid the carnage (which could be Dead Meat's byline - "Laughter amongst the eating of brains!").

The best moment I had was giving a player only a torch to navigate a darkened floor, having a red herring appear (an injured security guard) then giving the player a moment's notice before the zombie launches out of the darkness ("I wasn't the only one to make it back," says the injured security guard. "Perhaps you should check on Johnson...").

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I don't want to derail the thread with theory, but I'm convinced that player-horror has an 0.0001% chance of occurring completelythrough a play session, when using familiar tropes of horror. By "completely," I mean for every player, at all moments of play. Due to this conviction, I don't especially treat this goal as desirable or interesting.

In which case - what you describe ranks among the highest form of role-playing. (1) Humor, squick, and fear arose as elements of play, when they worked, without "you oughta" being involved. (2) The source material was celebrated without being parodied (evidence: the blind guy surviving - perfect!). (3) The "rorschach" effect apparently arose in full - in that the personalities and values of the players were exposed to an intimate degree; I'll leave off commenting on the guys in the group, but we all sure know a lot more about them now, just from your post. (4) The new guy got it, liked it, and wants to do it again.

Fantastic.

Best,
Ron

[rabidchyld]

You really have something to celebrate here.  I agree with Ron...true horror almost never happens with gaming groups.  If you guys had fun then that's what's important.   You had some really great twists in there.

I used to get frustrated when I ran horror games (which are my personal favorite) because my players never really got scared.  Hilarity almost always ensued, but then I looked at their faces while we were playing.  They were on the edge of their seats, eyes wide, and huge grins on their faces.  They were having a blast.  What more can you really ask for?  

I can only speak for my group, but we are the ones who watch scary movies and crack up.  It's a release of tension for us.  Reality is what's frightening.  Why else do we go into gaming world?  

Oh, and gaming with the S.O. is the absolute best.  They come up with all kinds of surprises (don't ask me about the necrophiliac elven lesbian incident), and you always have a willing gamer.  How much better can life get?  

Melodie

[Demonspahn]

Thanks UnSub, Ron, Melodie,

Yeah, I know horror seldom works in an RPG and that's fine.  Actually, I've found it does work, and work well, in one on one sessions, with just one GM and one player.  Something about not having a group to back you up tends to make people a bit more edgy and less likely to go down into the cellar, enter the dilapidated old house to get out of the rain, draw back the curtain to see what is making that strange noise, etc.  

Yeah, we had a great time and that was what is important, as always.  And it's been a _long_ time since I've recruited "off the street", so I do feel like I'm doing my part for the sport.  

Pete

PS - Necrophiliac elven lesbian?  That's just wrong, Melodie.  But, it sounds like our groups would have fun together.  :)

[Alan]

-There were more than a few humorous moments in the game, which doesn't exactly fit in with the "overwhelming horror" theme.

I think humor pops up at tense moments for two reasons: one, the players really are feeling horrified; two, they're uncomfortable displaying deep emotion in a social situation.  I'm not sure that any rpg can offer powerful enough counter-incentive (short of real consequences like money or eating slugs).

On thepositive side, if your players are engaged in the game AND breaking into humor, you're causing tension and that's good.  

We might also consider the effect of selective memory.  While the actual experience of the game may include moments where the horror atmosphere was broken, I would bet that it's the horror that the players remember most afterwards.

- Alan