For Italian speaking guys – This is my Urban Shadows #ActualPlay series 🙂 nine episodes so far, and counting.
For Italian speaking guys – This is my Urban Shadows #ActualPlay series 🙂 nine episodes so far, and counting.
Hey, all, if you love Masks and are interested in APs, tonight we’re streaming our third session of Masks: Just Us…
Hey, all, if you love Masks and are interested in APs, tonight we’re streaming our third session of Masks: Just Us #Heroes on #Twitch and #YouTube (Monday, 4/24, 8PDT). You can jump right in with Halcyon City’s newest teen team Just Us 4 but past APs are available, too. #2Just4U #Masks #streaming #actualplay Magpie Games Happy Jacks RPG Podcast happyjacks.org/live
MC’d a session of the Sprawl last Friday night.
MC’d a session of the Sprawl last Friday night. It was first time in a long time I’ve run any game and the first time I’ve ever MC’d any PBTA game. It went over really well and I thought I’d share my experience.
The team was rolling crazy high. The whole night there were only two 6- results. They stuck with their strengths and followed the plan the soldier laid out at the start of the mission. A large number of their rolls were made with plus threes, a couple at plus four. I had Legwork and Action clock threat progressions set up, but they never came into play.
Big thanks to all of you for the inspiration you’ve all been.
#actualplay
#Actualplay  of #tremulus  with #pcdeath
Originally shared by Peter G. Ghazarian
#Actualplay  of #tremulus  with #pcdeath Â
I’m going to try to use a much shorter format here with a link to the full history.
The party was trapped in some underground chambers below the ruined Chapel. The Captain may have found a way out, but the others poked around some more, finding a impossible window in the stone into an unearthly forest. Jason opened a door and entered a room filled with some kind of noxious gas. He closed himself in to save his companions and fell to the ground coughing up blood uncontrollably. He asphyxiated in a pool of his own blood.
The Captain, Amy, and Sebastian were split up and a broken lantern plunged them into darkness. The Captain climbed the fissure to escape above ground alone and sent for help, then went back down into darkness help his companions. Deceived by voices mimicking her companions in the darkness, Sebastian got lost and fell from a precipice. Though the Captain eventually did find her, she drowned, dying in the Captain’s arms as something unseen in the water yanked her body free, leaving the Captain holding only her disembodied arm.
Amy, knocked out from the gas, woke up naked and feeling exhausted in pitch darkness. A strange sense of calm settled over her and she knew, somehow, she had to fight that feeling as she sat alone there in the dark. The Captain found her and they were aided by Dr. Ash (who the Captain had earlier sent for help) and a reporter from the Washington Post, Frederic Sheratan, who led them back to the surface.
For the full (probably much more easy to understand) story — check out the link and go to the heading September 2nd (morning and afternoon)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dPyd9dHcEqRWpTelodfmWsVZrtOZbxbnXA8HDEHPZ4c/pub
#Actualplay  of #tremulus
Originally shared by Peter G. Ghazarian
#Actualplay  of #tremulus Â
Hazel Falls, episode #3
In the two weeks since the Chapel burned down and Preacher White disappeared, life appears to have quieted down a bit in Hazel Falls. The Captain had his gunshot looked at by a proper doctor from Gainesville, Doc Mull, and as he was a little short on funds, owes the Doc a favor. Feeling better, the Captain decided to do some investigating in his spare time into Lucy Kent and discovered she was a shy, unattractive shut-in who had been quite close with the missing McDaniels girl despite their age difference. Before her suicide, she had been spending a lot of time closed up in her room.Â
Amy spent the two weeks relaxing at her aunt’s home and carefully reading through Lucy’s diary. Though Amy can sense there is something important hidden in its pages detailing a budding first love, she is disturbed by the accompanying sense of dread and descriptions of what must be molestation and rape that pepper the text. Amy quietly shared this finding with Sebastian, but kept it from the men.
Traveling Jason Freely has taken the fortnight to ward off any police suspicions about his involvement with the suspected arson of the First Baptist Chapel. In fact, he managed to manipulate the Sheriff’s interrogations to learn about McCreely’s rocky relationship with his wife. Sheriff called of the arson investigation into Old Paul and Freely in exchange for promises of some future help in dealing with the Sheriff’s problems with the missus.
Meanwhile, Sebastian has been haunted by strange dreams and a horrible sense of guilt about the disappearance of Preacher White after she left him at the Chapel. She met with Jason to talk about her concerns over brunch at Louie’s Diner, and Jason urged Sebastian to let her worries go and simply enjoy the pancakes. As the Captain and Amy arrived to join them for the meal, the new waitress, Maryann, overheard their discussion as she poured their coffee and said she’d heard news of sightings of the Preacher out by the Nawauk Woods. After some fast talking on Jason’s part, Maryann let them know that Cletis Lowell had been the one to have seen him out there most.Â
Jason headed out at that point to take care of some business — and managed to get the keys to the Captain’s town car. He used the car to do ply his wares out in the tobacco fields to the sharecroppers, but didn’t manage to sell much. He did find a large, strange carving on a tree at the edge of the Nawauk Woods facing inward that matched a similar wordcut print in his strange Cyrillic book “Six Candles, Seven Shadows.” Then he headed to the ruins of the Chapel to look around.
Back at Louie’s, Amy was surprised when an out-of-towner wearing a fedora and a crumpled corduroy suit made eye contact, clearly recognized her, and then abruptly turned around to leave. Amy told the Captain and Sebastian she’d be right back and ran after the man. After a bit of chatting, he claimed to have seen her photograph before from an associate at his firm and Amy could tell the man would be investigating her. She shared this information with the Captain and Sebastian back at the restaurant. The three of them decided to drive up to Lowell’s plot to talk with him about seeing the Preacher up that way.
After getting ready, the trio took Sebastian’s car and came across Jason getting ready to poke around the ruins of the chapel. They stopped and talked a bit and the Captain decided he woudld drive his own vehicle up to the Lowell’s place. Jason told the women to go on ahead and that he and the Captain would join them shortly thereafter. Reluctantly, Amy and Sebastian had Sheffield drive them up to the Lowell place.
At the ruins of the chapel, Jason and the Captain poked around and found a tunnel of some kind under one of the dislodged flagstones. Using Jason’s flashlight, they could see a rickety old staircase descending to a very old door. They decided to go for more supplies before going further, and went to Joe Cole’s Pawn Shop to get them.
Sebastian and Amy arrived at the Lowell plot and struggled to make small talk with Cletis, who was curious about what they were doing out there. They pressed Cletis to speak with Tom, his son (and only family) about having seen the Preacher out in the woods naked and all covered in mud. Cletis reluctantly agreed and took them back into his house. They were surprised to see the windows had been nailed shut and the door had been barred to prevent the boy from leaving his room. As they approached the door, they all heard a strange gurgling sigh or gasp come from the room and Cletis rushed to get the door open. Tom was lying on the floor bleeding from a neck wound, and clasping a letter cutter in his hand. Two angry, red wounds marred his face where the boy’s eyes should be. Cletis panicked, pulled his boy out, wrapped him in a tablecloth and insisted Sebastian and Amy take him to see a doctor. They drove him to Tracy Alcott’s and she had her family veterinarian look after the boy. When Cletis couldn’t pay for the help, Tracy said she would waive the bill if Sebastian would help her to arrange a rendezvous between the Captain and his now-married high school sweetheart, Louisa Mae.Â
Jason and the Captain returned to the strange stairs beneath the Chapel now with a 30 foot length of rope, an oil lantern, and a crowbar in tow. On the way down, Jason managed to collapse the rickety old stairs, but the Captain caught him with the rope harness they had prepared and lowered Jason the rest of the way down. Freely set to smashing out the stuck door at the bottom of the stairs with the crowbar, hurting himself a little in the process. The door opened into a damp, packed dirt and gravel floored hallway with four doors. Jason checked the first door on the left only to find it was trapped with a guillotine-like blade. As he started to look around the hallway, he heard a strange sound just as the entrance into the hallway collapsed, trapping him inside. In the aftermath of the collapse, Jason heard a strange clicking and scratching sound come from behind one of the far doors.
Sebastian and Amy returned Cletis back to his home and when to go check on what was keeping the Captain and Jason. They arrived just as the Captain started trying to remove the stones trapping Freely. The effort seemed to be going well, until suddenly as the Captain was leaning against one of the side walls of the chamber, it collapsed outward and he fell 20 ft to a pool of shallow water and rubble, hitting his head and knocking him out cold. Sebastian and Amy panicked, unsure what to do.
Meanwhile, Jason heard the horrible, unearthly clicking and scratching sounds drawing closer, and tried to get away from it. He intentionally triggered the blade trap on the door and then rushed in to find a strange stone ritual room of some kind with a large font on one wall, a raised stone dais, and grooves of some kind in the floor. Looking around the room, Jason found an odd scroll, that upon closer inspection, seemed to be etched onto a leather made of a baby’s skin.
Sebastian and Amy descended down into the ruined starwell and looked through the collapsed side well down the well shaft the Captain had fallen down. They tried to determine how they could down to help him when they noticed Jason’s flashlight also shining into the basin of the well from another access shaft (through the font in the room Jason was in). Their conversation echoed and woke the Captain, who was confused. Jason decided to look around the room he was in further, and while doing so, the door to the room he was in opened to reveal an impossibly thin, white, mottled humanoid figure with a large, flaccid but disproportionate penis tinged slightly yellowish and a wrinkled grapefruit-sized head peering at him through the now-opened door. Jason began screaming uncontrollably and backed away into the corner of the room as the creature approached, caressed his cheek, and pulled the copy of “Six Candles, Seven Shadows” out of Jason’s pocket and took it with it as it left.
Frantic from Jason’s screams, the Captain tried to look for a good place to climb out of the well basin, but struggled to find one. Meanwhile, Sebastian and Amy set to work finishing the job of unblocking the collapsed passage from the entry room with the hallway further in. As they worked, neither paid very close attention to the rope dangling down into the hole that they had climbed down on. After clearing the passage, they were both shocked when they turned to find the rope was gone.Â
#Actualplay of #tremulus with #pcdeath
Originally shared by Peter G. Ghazarian
#Actualplay of #tremulus with #pcdeath
Hazel Falls episode #2:
A week has passed since the debacle at the McDaniel Homestead. Noah McDaniel, brother to Kendrick, came to town looking for his family reported missing. After seeing the damage to the house, he pressed charges against Preacher White, but settled out of court when the Preacher agreed to give him all of his wealth and promised to aid Noah in finding his brother and his family.
Meanwhile, Amy Hearst located the book with the details of the ritual to open a gateway. It involves burning black candles made from rendered pork lard while 7 people hold hands and dance naked in a circle, chanting. She immediately began considering who she could recruit to carry out the ritual.Over the course of the week, the Captain was contacted by Mary-Ann McAllister about getting some help at the general store. However, upon seeing that she wanted his help with guarding some goods she was shifting in and out of town with the aid of some Pinkertons, the Captain loudly declared that he wanted no part in such work, offending both Mary-Ann and the head Pinkerton Matthias Spade.
Upon arriving at Louie’s Diner on the Green to share some brunch, the group was a little surprised to see a police car driving off and a small crowd outside. Upon entering the Diner, Louie, in tears, insisted on keeping the place open as he worked through his grief. He had found his daughter, 13 year old Lucy, dead in the bathroom that morning, in an apparent suicide. As Louie explained the commotion with the police, most of the diners realized the shift in the mood, and left, leaving behind only Preacher White, Amy, the Captain, and the celebrity on retrrat, Sebastian Wood.
The Preacher White tried to comfort Louie and calm him down, telling him maybe it wouldn’t be the best idea to keep the place open on a day like this. Louie told the Preacher he’d feel a lot better if the Preacher took a look at the bathroom where Louie’d found his daughter — that Sheriff McCreedy was a little too brisk looking around and that maybe the Preacher would notice something with a religious man’s eye. Preacher White agreed and they headed to the back of the Diner, which connects directly to Louie’s house.
There, Preacher White was shocked to find a bathroom pooled with blood on filthy white tiles, with splatters and streaks of red blood all over the porcelain and the mirror on the medicine cabinet shattered on the floor. Noticing what looked like some writing on the bath tub, the Preacher leaned in close to have a better look, careful not to slip and fall in the blood. As he drew closer, he felt a hand on his body, and looking down was horrified to see a mottled grey-white hand and small arm reaching up out of a shard of glass. It snatched the bible out of the Preacher’s pocket and pulled the book back through the shard of class. With a scream, the Preacher hurried out of the bathroom and back into the diner, praying to himself out loud.
In light of this commotion, Louie decided that perhaps it would be best if he were to close up the Diner for the day. Preacher White asked if anyone had a car and if they could take him to his chapel to pick up the equipment he needed to sanctify the Diner and drive out evil spirits from Louie’s home. Sebastian Wood volunteered her car, and together with Louie and they headed off with her bodyguard Sheffield driving, leaving the diner in the care of Amy and the Captain.
Amy Hearst and the Captain decided to have a closer look at the bathroom. Carefully studying the filthy, bloody room, something about the scene struck them as odd — as if it were staged or somehow unreal. An examination of the blood on the bathtub clearly spelled out the letters “D-I-A-R-Y”. Amy wanted to think about what she’d seen and what it could mean, and went back out into the Diner to think it through. Just then, a man passed in the window and she and the Captain both realized he had the same face as a man in the paper on the counter top before them. Picking up the paper, they saw the title “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?” with a photo and details about Carlo Moretti, a man wanted for multiple homicide, boot legging, and other crimes in New York City. Amy tried to convince the Captain to stay behind while she investigated, but instead the Captain left her there to hold down the diner while he went after Carlo.
Sebastian’s car arrived at the First Baptist Chapel of Hazel Falls to find an angry blonde man out front leaning on his pickup with a shotgun in his hands. Undeterred, the Preacher hurried out of the car to get his things, but an argument broke out with Mitch and he broke into the church and told the Preacher he’d shoot anybody who tried to come in. Sebastian, seeing things were getting out of hand, stepped out of her car and knocked on the window of the chapel. She told the starstruck Mitch that she’d try to meet him that night when Mitch was meeting up with some friends if Mitch would calm down and leave. A little ashamed by his rash behavior in front of a celebrity, Mitch agreed and left after getting Sebastian to agree to come and see him that evening at dusk at the docks. The Preacher gathered up his supplies for the rite and they all headed back to the diner.
The Captain followed the suspicious man through the shanties of Hazel Falls, through winding dirt paths and alleys. He knocked his mark out with a single punch, catching the man unawares and reducing him to a heap on the path, and told Toothless Jim, a poor boy playing on the streets, to go fetch the Sheriff. Just as the boy left, a shot rang out and the Captain felt pain blossom in his side. Scanning the far side of the street while clutching his wound, it wasn’t clear which house the shot had come from when his back had been turned. The Captain took cover around the side of the house, leaving the knocked out man on the side of the road. Hearing a car starting up, the Captain hobbled between the buildings back to a main street. There, he ran into Tracy Alcott, who took him into her car and back to her house where her family vet would have a look at his wounds.
Back at the Diner, the Preacher, Sebastian, and Louie arrived back and Amy explained that the circumstances around the Captain’s departure and that she’d heard a gunshot since. Just then, Deputy Bud Linkley came around knocking to ask if they’d seen the Captain around. Amy tried to talk Bud into leaving, but he said he wouldn’t go unless Amy accompanied him in his search for the Captain. She reluctantly agreed. As they stopped people to ask about what had happened, Bud got Amy talking more than she usually does. She let him know that she’d think highly of him if he were helpful and reliable in the matters they faced and asked about rendering black pork lard candles and rituals. Amy said she’d really appreciate it if Bud didn’t repeat any of that to any of the other cops and he just nodded.
Back at the Diner, the Preacher attempted to carry out the ritual. Sebastian helped, using her finesse and sense of mood from performing as a stage magician to help build up the right setting for the rite to sanctify the Diner. As the incensed burned and Preacher White sprinkled the holy water over the bathroom tiles, he felt a strange, cold presence brush against his mind, pushing back. Undaunted, the Preacher pressed on chanting bible verse after bible verse to purify the place — and the cold weight pressed heavier and heavier on his mind until finally, he felt it take root. Just as the rite successfully finished, the Preacher broke down gibbering and foaming a bit from the mouth on the the broken glass and blood on the floor. He picked up shards of glass in his bare hand, smashing them down on one particular shard with fury while screaming as Sebastian looked on in horror. Finally, the Preacher started shaking and collapsed on the to floor, gibbering some more to himself. Unsure what to do, Sebastian went out to her car and called in Sheffield, who helped her carry the Preacher safely back to her car. In shock, she took him out to his Chapel and left him whispering feverishly on a pew before driving back into town.
At the Alcott House, Tracy told the Captain about his old sweet heart Louisa May’s unhappy life in Charleston and her desire to visit back home in Hazel Falls and maybe see the Captain. The Vet pulled out the slug from the Captain and stabilized him so he stopped losing blood. They fed him some broth to keep his constitution up. A servant came to inform them that Deputy Bud Linkley was there to ask some questions to the Captain about the firefight in town. Bud seemed to want to pin the problems on the Captain, but seeing the man had been shot, he eased up a bit. Amy convinced him to look into Moretti and in exchange she agreed to stayinside at Madison House for a day or too with the Captain just to keep the two of them out of trouble and hopefully to prevent further guns being discharged in town. They agreed.
Still torn about having left the preacher unattended at his chapel in such a state, Sebastian went to the Madison House to speak with the Preacher’s friends the Captain and Amy. As she knocked on the door, she was startled to see the traveling encyclopedia salesman Travelling Jason Freeley, a man she knew from her time touring for shows. In a patch of confusion, Old Jim brought them both into the parlor and called down Amy and the Captain to entertain the guests.
After some conversation, Old Jim and Travelling Jason Freeley went to go fetch the Preacher from his chapel. When they arrived, the place was smoking and something strange was painted no the fall behind the alter. Unsure what to do, Jason told Old Jim to drive them back into town so they could alert the authorities of the fire. The chapel birned.
Amy slipped out of the Madison place to go over to the Diner. She asked Louie if she could go into his house once more to have a look and see if Lucy had a diary. Louie was reluctant, not wanting to upset things now that he could feel the peace of the Preacher’s blessing settling on his home. Then a dark light glinted in his eye. He said he would let Amy look for Lucy’s diary if Amy promised to look into finding a way to… bring Lucy back. From the other side. Amy nodded, and quickly found the diary, taking it back to the Madison place.
Finally, dusk came and Sebastian decided to go meet Mitch on the docks. There, she was shocked to find a burning cross and many men standing around wearing pointed white hoods. Up on a raised platform, she heard Mitch’s unmistakable voice from behind a hood calling out that order had to be restored to the town after the suicide and firefight in town. He claimed the fire at the chapel was a sign from God, clearly calling for a punishment and a return to natural order. Riled up, the Klan members seemed like they were gearing up to go harass the sharecroppers. Sebastian rushed up through the crowd of men to try to get to Mitch and talk him down from his lunacy. But halfway through the crowd, she caught in elbow to the temple and passed out. Sheffield revived her as the men were leaving and she knew it was too late.