Session Report - Stopover at the Shelterwood Inn

Ran a duet for one of my partners <3.

 

   

 

Elia Wood is a washed-up horror writer obsessed with the occult and supernatural. With her greyhound Levy, she set out on a trip to the state of Washington to go meet up with an old eccentric friend of hers. She wakes up late after a drunken bender and packs up in a hurry, and ends up having to drive late at night on a sinuous forested road in the middle of nowhere. To add insult to injury, rain picks up and makes the road extra slippery. Suddenly, some large beast jumps in front of her car! She tries to avoid it (DEX 4 Save, Fail) and ends up crashing in a ditch, taking a point of Stress and breaking her nose. Dog's fine, car's fine-ish but won't move, so after grabbing her gear she sets out on the road, remembering she saw a sign earlier advertising a roadside motel and gas station - maybe she can find help there. Her phone's battery is at (d100=77%) but there's no signal.

All is quiet at the motel, short of two cars it seems deserted and in poor condition, almost like it's been abandoned. She knocks on the front door and hears muffled talk inside - after a little while a big man with a huge moustache and apologetic demeanor opens and lets her in, says he's Otis, the owner, but that the motel is technically closed off-season. Inside is a priest mopping a red stain on the carpet and a silent corporate lady staring at her laptop. Introductions are made and the Sheriff shows up mumbling about something before seizing Elia up and down and looking at the others suspicious like. After some more talk and dinner consisting of terribly cooked hamburger and fries, Otis leads Elia to the Honeymoon Suite, suggesting she gets some sleep since the mechanic won't show up until morning to tow her car. 

As soon as she steps in, Otis locks her in! Elia then notices the key she was given is for another, adjacent room, but quickly figures she can get out through a tight window in the back of the room. At which point she decided to go to Room 3...and go to sleep. Because this was her first duet and she had mentioned wanting to see how she'd fare alone, I didn't question her move and simply rolled with it, fast-forwarding the Doom Clock until something would happen assuming she just. Refused to engage with the suspicious imposters. She said later she thought they might be a cult and expected them to come back to the room to mess with her at which point she figured she would have heard them coming into the adjacent room.

Looking at my prep, I figured the next interesting event if she stayed in the room would be the Toys (mold-infected fear-fuelled Zeds) closing in on her. So this creepy looking man I described like the Camera Man in Lynch's Lost Highway shows up at her door, asking for a light with an eery monotone. After he bangs on the door a few times, the man jimmies the door open somehow and she hides under the bed. After a very spooky improv scene, a fight ensues. With the help of her dog she makes short work of him, stabbing him a few times with her trusty pocket knife, before investigating another room. There she finds the keys to a car parked in front and gets inside but the battery's drained. At that point she sees another monster lady looking like Sadako from Ringu pleading "help me" as she draws nearer, and gets jumpscared by the man she stabbed, who's walking again like the injuries were nothing!

She runs back inside a room, jumps out the window and goes all the way around before locking the door on them, and decides she won't get out of there if she just stays there so she goes west to explore the nearby 7/11 and gas station. Inside she faces the beast she almost ran over, feasting over a corpse - it pounces away into the night, startled. She gets the garage keys from the dead mechanic before he rises too - but this time she's expecting it and bashes his head in with a heavy blunt object. She tries the tow truck by the garage and the engine's flooded, and goes back to the motel, going through a large ditch with a mysterious grate leading into Spooky Territory.

Back at the motel Lobby she finds everybody's gone and checks out the back - there's a creaky wooden stairway to a basement so she goes to check it out, figuring if anything weird is left to investigate it's gonna be in there. It leads into a cistern which she jumps down to and then walks through an impossibly long tunnel with water up to her knees. At the end of it she finds the four suspicious people from the beginning, all zombified, and a shoggoth with a teddy bear at its core. She immediately rushes for the teddy bear and stabs it with her knife, dealing enhanced damage and making all of the zeds scream in unison. 

The fight goes incredibly well for her - she tries to run at some point but gets cornered by the beast at the other end of the tunnel, then figuring all is lost, she might as well try and inflict as much damage as it can to the big monster. Through the magic of RNG she actually kills it right after making two insanely lucky Critical Damage saves (plus her dog is still helping, ferociously loyal to the bitter end), and the four weirdoes turn back to normal but pass out from exhaustion. She gets their bodies out of the water so they won't drown, steals the "Sheriff"'s keys and takes off in their black SUV, rifling through their stuff and finding a manilla folder for Bureau agents (NotDeltaGreen) hinting at the origins of the black mold infestation and monsters.

Success!

Afterwards we had a conversation about player expectations and how to approach scenarios I run, as well as how horror scenarios are structured with Difficult boundaries so you can't just run away or refuse to interface with it, but that, at least in my favored design ethos, it's not Impossible either. Then we looked at a Cosmic Dark scenario she played through recently and compared notes with the Liminal Horror scenario we just played through to showcase how different gaming schools frame adventures and facilitate different styles of play. She said she prefers the open-ended, problem-solving focused design of Liminal Horror and would like to run something like that soon.