Session Report - Silent Street Station for Liminal Horror

  

2 Players, 5 Characters per player.

One of them traded her utility belt for a set of lockpicks interpreting her background as a locksmith.

Opened with a cutscene of the outbreak, cells ring and people go crazy while mutating etc. 

Session begins in the Station proper. The two groups split up to cover more ground so we alternate locations and actions between my two players. They check the news stand and convince the cashier to open the door and join them for safety in numbers. 

They alert the zombie security guard and notice there's interesting stuff inside.

They check out the McDonald's (sorry, McDarrow) and notice one zombie has the magnetic card; they barricade one of the entrances then use a flashlight to alert the zombie, but it communicates with the others to everyone's surprise and the group ends up trying to run away towards the northwest exit but the door's locked with a pad! 

Here the game slowed down a LOT cause I treated each of the fourteen zombies individually. Should have made it a Horde instead, possibly only giving them D4 or d6 damage instead of D8 Blast to allow the players a bit of time to figure out how they want to strategize. Alternatively going harder on them would have only cost a handful of PCs, there's places to find new ones to replenish the group later on too. The best parts were characters flashing their lights in the zombies faces to stun them (making some of them skip their turn) and the stakes of the fight not being just fighting, cause one character was trying to get the padlock open and everyone else was protecting her and gaining time. The fight took 2 rounds and one PC got bit and turned a round later, spooky! 

I allowed a variant of Shields Shall be Splintered where you can smash any one item if you can justify it in fiction. That was not a good idea with the funnel on top, and saved like 3 characters where their deaths would have added some weight and tension and pushed the horror into a more desperate and less pulpy tone. 

After that they locked the door behind them and went down to the second level where the metro car was waiting for them. At that point the zombies phones rang again. They answered and burst out into more monstrous junji ito like shapes which the PCs found terrifying. They also decided between that scare and how much time it took us to resolve the big fight they'd rather avoid threats for now.

They saw some funny / weird ritual happening between three semi harmless zombies in one bathroom. In the other they grabbed the gun from the dead pig.

They decided they would cause a distraction to get closer to the metro train, using a magnetophone from their equipment and a mixtape we mentioned a bit earlier. It worked and they got near the metro train without fighting. The one PC who had to start the song had a scary little saving throw where he hid as a crawling centipede abomination with a distorted human face slithered right next to him.

We were running out of time so we had a quick negotiation and figured they could break the metro train's front window and shot the driver zombie in the head and stacking together in the tiny cabin to escape the area~.

Short epilogue and we went for tacos to debrief. Both players had a lot of fun and were happy with the game, though we all agreed there were too many moving parts in the fight scene and I definitely should have made it one big swarm monster using the horde stats.