The Recap #

Session 1: The Night Crew #

(This part of the recap was written by Dave’s player).
“We are hired by a theater to basically run security. Apparently there have been some pranks going on, and the sounds of rats in the night. Some of the staff believe it is a haunting. As the night begins, things start moving about without us seeing it. Doors are sticking, locking by themselves. A music box is found playing in a clothing rack in the elevator. This clothing rack and other objects begin to change locations, but no one is seeing moving them, or seen at all.
At one point, the clothing rack downstairs appears to be moving on its own. And after some time, we come to realize that there don’t appear to be any rats in the building whatsoever. There is a janitor in the building at this time we haven’t spoken to yet, and ended our session before talking with them.”

(My added notes:)

• That was a CD player, not a music box
• The clothing rack went down from the elevator (holding a cd player), before somehow becoming a different clothing rack with an orange muppet
• Jeff found the panels in the orchestra pit had been glued down. Inside were an assortment of tools
• Gina (head of the stage crew) thinks the Baron Montichello is responsible for the haunting. He runs a parade on the autumn solstice that people only care about because of the free food/booze
• also, Irene got locked in a dressing room and Jeff had to break the door down. This was after Blair (barely) stopped him from destroying the door to the concessions storage via donkey kick
• the theater has cameras, but they’ve been broken for a while (added note: they record onto VCR tapes, for some reason)

Session 2: The Corpse, the Camera, and the Junkie #

In this session:

• The corpse of the original night guard was found,
• They discovered the cameras were sabotaged, and managed to fix one,
• Dave had a word with the janitor (Dustin Prior),
• And they all talked to a homeless guy who seemed really high. Maybe he knew stuff, maybe he was just reading everyone’s names off their shirts, it’s a little hard to tell. He called Blair, Jeff, and Dave (who were all present this session) “friends of Goldfish”.

Additionally, they discovered a camera that was sucessfully recording audio. I used this as an excuse to tell them their “ghost”’s movements during session 1. In order:

1. Exited stage, closer door to elevator
2. Entered (and exited) Production: J. Ericsson
3. Entered (and removed something from) Dressing Room #2
4. Elevator ding
5. Entered (and exited) Production: G. Caine
6. Entered (and exited) Stage from the doors farther from the elevator
7. Went down stairs (retconning to the steps closer to the loading bay)
8. Pause. Power outage
9. Mad dash from the stairs closer to the elevator through to the stage (Door closer to elevator).

The audio became unusable after this.

Session 3: Who Lives, who Dies, who gets Eaten by the Muppet #

This was another session where I was the only one to record it. I mean, there’s an audio recording, but it’s just not the same. For one, some things (like exactly what that one guy said) aren’t recorded and won’t be repeated…

“Since no recap has been written yet:

• y’all had a nice drive over on the night of September 21st (yes the calendar is fucky) wherein Damien criticized Irene smoking a cigarette in his car. Apparently buttons were okay though.
• after Damien went for snacks, he walked into a standoff between Jeff and the culprit (a neon orange muppet), the latter having canonically stood in the classic Bigfoot pose. Damien then proceeded to perform a 5 star flying tackle.
• After a monologue worthy of a James Bond villain (and the arrival of Dave and Blair to the lower floor), it was revealed she was working with the baron’s parade when Mr Fox (an animatronic of 3 foxes in a trench coat) bust down the stairs, barreling straight into Dave.
• While Damien and Jeff tag teamed the muppet, Dave got the attention of Banbha (a tall animatronic with a dancer’s form, long black hair, and long silver chains wrapped around it which it used as weapons) as Blair went on the offense: first by throwing a very suggestively shaped prop sword at Banbha, then by swinging at Mr Owl (a guy in a suit with an owl head) with a giant plastic lava lamp.
• Damien asked the mupper more about what was going on, to which she ranted about how “the old world” would return, and she worked for “Her, the Lady”. as the players dwindled and the choice was made to speed things up, Captain Bells (Resident creepy nutcracker who everyone agrees should not be smiling) came out of the elevator as Banbha (who had technically been shot at) snagged Damien in her chains and threw him at the group that had clustered in the narrow hallway in pursuit of the Muppet (read: Jeff and Dave). Mr Owl started shoving Blair down the hall.
• Dave fired, a shot that was blocked by part of Mr. Fox and deflected into the ceiling. Dustin Prior (the janitor), having heard the scuffle, went down the steps and asked everyone what the hells was going on, which made everyone stop and which the muppet took as an opportunity to flee.

I ended up using the Pulp “Look out Master” skill to help the muppet get away, because seriously, they fixated really hard on her! It’s probably the fact that they’re D&D veterans – all of their problems have been solvable by hitting things. I’m going to change that.
Ominous foreshadowing aside, the fact that everyone tires out after 3 hours means that I had to accelerate the fight. For the next adventure, I’m planning on using a specific time system to help get this under control, but this time I got caught off guard.

Post-Adventure notes #

What was King of the City of Wine? #

“I’ll cross post this in the recaps channel once this session’s recap is written, BUT: You all had the chance to see King of the City of Wine.
The best way to describe the play is as a pitch black comedy. The play starts when the king of an unnamed land is cursed by a crone: His son will die this week, by the hands of a somewhat popular man named Thujase, ensuring the demise of his legacy. Naturally, he panics and orders the man killed by his chief assassin… via poison. This is problematic, as Thujase is one of the snake-folk, who are notoriously resilient to poison. This leaves the chief assassin to grumble, grab every single poison they have access to, and decide to get poison out of the way so she can at least prove this fact to the king so she can do something that is Actually Reasonable.
Cut to Thujase, who is planning a man’s wake. Naturally, the chief assassin (knowing he has a reputation for using a lot of drugs during these sorts of parties) participates in a drug handoff, during which she discovers this is her cousin’s wake and elects to help in secret. Of course, the body goes missing shortly after the party starts, starting a farce wherein the actual corpse, somebody else’s corpse, Thujase, one of Thujase’s friends, and the chief assassin all alternate between party duties, personal duties, and pretending to be the corpse. The first act ends with Thujase (and the chief assassin by extension) discovering the snake-folk can, in fact, be fatally poisoned if you try hard enough, leading to the famous line “Whelp, at least we’ve found a weight for the casket”.”

“The second act starts with Thujase (who is distinctively dead) being judged by Hades and told to guide the king’s son to the underworld when the time is right. Initially intending to torment the boy (due to the combination of the world’s worst hangover and being salty about his gruesome death), Thujase quickly changes course upon discovering the king’s son is chronically ill and relieved at the possibility of not hurting anymore. Thus begins the inverse quest to the first half, in which Thujase gets tangled up in the business of everyone else in the castle in his attempt to comfort the boy during his final day. The B-plot for this act is the realization of the kingdom that the king totally murdered Thujase (after all, snake-folk usually don’t die from poison), and his desperate attempts to get things back under control.
This act (which includes multiple encounters with people who appeared in the first, including the chief assassin) ends with the king attempting to kill Thujase (whose cries that he’s already dead are ignored) with a sword. A desperate swing to cut Thujase’s hands off in an attempt to circumvent the prophecy goes straight through the ghost, striking the king’s son and mortally wounding him. After enabling a final conversation between the king and his son, Thujase leaves for the underworld, leaving the king to his fate as the army begins to mobilize against him.”

Other Things #

“ALSO: After things resolved with the police or whomever, you met up with Irene (who had a LOT of blood on her coat, as well as a latte). She said she just had this sudden urge to get coffee, and it was a really warm night so she ended up taking her coat off to retrieve later, and when she got back there was someone else wearing it who got their face smashed in while wearing it.
“It’s fine,” she said. “Everyone knows French people invented the laundromat.””

Thus, the play (scheduled for the autumn equinox on the 22nd of September (Yes the calendar is screwy, I’m just declaring the planet isn’t technically Earth, the mythos lets me do that)) went off without the hitch, and the parade… didn’t.