Them That Chase

I'm part of a small Discord community called The Spiral where people play and discus rules-light RPGs with a weird fiction bent. Posts tagged "The Spiral" are play reports from games I run there. If these sound like the kind of game you'd like to play, check us out ! I'm currently using  Liminal Horror to run the classic  Delta Green  scenario  Convergence . Once we finish, I'll post my conversion notes to this blog.   Image by Toby Hudson. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 au .   The Tape Somewhere in the American South, a young man in a Metallica t-shirt walked into a gas station. He hobbled to the counter, seemingly unwell, and approached the cashier. They talked. Then the conversation turned sour. The young man lashed out. The cashier's head separated from his shoulders, body slumping behind the counter. The young man stared at what he'd done... then he hopped the counter and started punching buttons on the register until it opened. He filled his pockets...

The mission is never over, but it has been on hiatus since my last update, and the stars are not yet right for its return. In the meantime, two background projects of mine have come to fruition. I'm a big fan of the Carved From Brindlewood framework developed by Jason Cordova and featured in several games published by The Gauntlet. If you're not familiar with them, Carved From Brindlewood games are emergent investigation games where mysteries don't have predetermined solutions. Instead, each scenario provides lists of NPCs, locations, potential dangers, and clues the GM can insert anywhere the players go looking. When the players gather enough clues, they form a theory of what's going on and roll dice to see if they're correct, which gets easier the more clues they incorporate. I wasn't sure I'd like it the first time I played it, but once we got to theorizing, my brain lit up just the same as when I figure out any trad mystery. Which is why I've been w...

Rex The lights flipped on in Rex's lab. The team started out cleaning a dead agent's home of evidence. This time the dead agent was one of their own. A spider sadly watched from a terrarium as Wren and Malachi bagged up Rex's souvenirs from his nights at the opera. Clyde Baughman's spray bottle of colorless fluid; Marlene Baughman's severed finger, the nerve endings grown and branching out to the walls of its jar; multiple vials of ai-apa's gray sludge; and Audrey III, the marijuana plant recovered from Dakota Knight's apartment. Malachi spoke first, suggesting they burn all of it. He flicked a lighter open and shut while he said it, but he didn't seem to know he was doing it. Wren, concerned, thanked him for saving her life right before Doug found them. Doug resisted understanding what they tried to tell him. They must be wrong; Rex couldn't possibly be dead. He tried to prove it by calling Rex's phone... which Malachi held out to him, the scree...

From the movie Smile .   (See the previous post, The Knight of the Round Table , for a map of Avalon Gardens.)   The fire engine pulled into the Avalon Gardens parking lot and plowed up the gravel drive alongside the building. Three firefighters jumped out, but a group of employees had already extinguished the brush fire they'd been called to deal with. Confusion abounded. Voices started rising.   And then the employees stopped, stupefied by a rustling only they could hear.   One of the gardeners smashed his fire extinguisher into a firefighter's head. A second firefighter screamed, but John Bellamy silenced them with a gunshot to the face. The third firefighter ran to grab a fire ax from the truck, but a second gardener tried to pull it away from him. They struggled on the ground, the firefighter raised it high, prepared to slam it down into the gardener's face... and then John Bellamy shot him twice in the back.   While the gardeners dismembered their victims,...

The full map of Avalon Gardens HQ. July 8 (con't) Wren and Danny had lunch at a cafe across town from the Avalon Gardens HQ. Danny was former SWAT with the Denver PD: all the guards with Instant Deterrent were either former cops or former military. Danny hesitated upon learning Wren was with the FBI, but he was too charmed to push back and relented with no more than a promise not to talk about his work at Avalon Gardens. Danny didn't relax, though, until he got up from the table and went to the curb to vape. Wren noted he was in a hurry, like he was rushing to the bathroom. There was an expectation of embarrassment, of pain, if he wasn't fast enough.   He'd left his phone case behind, and his case had a pouch with his credit cards and Avalon Gardens security badge, marked with the code K3. She lifted the badge and a few cards, hoping he wouldn't notice until later and mistake them as a random robbery. Sure enough Danny didn't notice when he got back to the table...

A map of the Avalon Gardens HQ as the Agents have scouted it. July 7 (con't) A clerk at Lindsey-Flanigan Courthouse set the team up in a conference room with the evidence in Radomir Reznik's now-shuttered case. Wren and Rex took note of a handbag and wallet with a driver's license, credit cards, and member card for the Missouri state teachers union in the name of "Suzanna Carmichael." That lined up with a receipt from Demver Greens Dispensary. with the memo line "Suzy." for a vape pen and four cartons of juice. A call to Ms. Carmichael quickly satisfied Wren that she wasn't a person of interest she had been visiting Denver over the holiday and, though she wouldn't admit it, had clearly bought some weed to take back home. Reznik must have been waiting outside the store and snatched her bag, and she was more worried about her employer learning about her weed habit than having her ID and credit cards stolen. Malachi took a closer look at the vape di...

Rex "It's a good thing we caught it when we did, while there's still time to do something about it." That was how Dr. Jones described the results of Rex's MRI scan. Worried about what Dr. Santorini might have cruelly forced him to do to his own brain, Rex wanted to be sure nothing had changed about him. But there it was, a nascent tumor in the center of his brain. Growing at a rapid clip. Full of unnatural vitality.   The MRI machine began to rumble. To shudder. To spit sparks.   Suddenly Rex was adrift in the primordial sea, the standing stones of Indian Rocks far across the water. The seaweed that wasn't seaweed ensnared him, tugging him towards the mountain that was his Mother. When he reached it, he melded with it and ceased to be Rex. He knew she was Shub-Niggurath, the source of all life. A source of great knowledge. An escape hatch from his mortality. Rex woke up on the floor in a pool of the extremely headless Dr. Jones's blood. Malachi Ash had giv...