Casting Shadows

Don’t worry, your mind is not playing tricks on you. For most participants today’s prompt will be shade, but here we are exploring the map infographic (below) and it has allowed us to encounter prompts in a different order.

On a roll with some exciting action, and to spare the split group from predictably timed shifts of focus between them, we go with the momentum and engagement of following Dunhill’s escape from his captors.

His Ecto-Visor has negated any problems he might have had with running in the darkness, and I have not yet revealed if he is being pursued, so I do not call for a roll. Instead, I spend a little time playing up the traces of purple ectoplasm that he can see through the visor traversing the large rectangular room he has entered, and how that seems to indicate (to anyone, so no roll) that this room has seen a lot of otherworldly traffic of a pedestrian nature.

With is proton pack charged and with the nasty end in hand, Dunhill is feeling better about having a date with a ghost, but is still very uncomfortable about being the dinner plans of a giant mantis in heat named Linda so he decides to keep going, but he does say that he wants to start being quiet about his flight from amorous insect peril.

At this point, I call for a Moves roll, sending a strong signal that something is about to happen and Dunhill probably will not like it if he is unable to avoid it. This is exactly the sort of thing we discussed in Session 0 about being a fun part of ghostbusters, so the player smiles and gathers up his uninspiring number of Move dice, uncertain if he will be able to make a normal difficulty.

“I should have taken Sneak as my Talent,” Dunhill says thoughtfully.

“You brain would be pondering Linda’s attraction to you from her digestive tract were that the case, so perhaps Dodge was the better choice,” Diego’s player points out.

We all laugh and the sad clatter of too-few dice follows. With everyone leaning in to see the results, I am reminded of a myopia convention and that is doubly appropriate as this was a roll that the player likely would want to fail – and would have every right to expect to fail. The very fact that he seemed to forget about his Brownie Points for extra dice speaks to how low he feels the pool is. He was steeling himself to fail, but – succeeded. Shockingly, compared to how this night has gone, he also failed to roll a ghost.

“Eleven!” he shouts out, forgetting in the moment our decision to not state the numbers openly if it could be avoided, and he looks at me for a prompt for how to describe his successful sneak, but I pre-empt the usual restating of scene facts for a smile and a surprise.

“As you reach the other side of the room and decide to make less noise, your visor is being overwhelmed by all the trace residue from ghostly passage through this door into what is probably a hallway beyond. In the moment as you are slowing down to be stealthier and passing out of the room, something else is trying to come into the room, completely unware that you are coming – “

“Something else! Some THING?” Dunhill bursts out as the others crack up laughing.

“You touch the etheric plane in an ectoplasmically mouth and nostril filling way as you collide with a free-floating, full-roaming, full-torso, vaporous apparition.”

Its plasm has the feel of long hours of freely-donated, unpaid overtime that no one noticed. Impact slows both of you down, and causes it to momentarily burst as you pass through it – much more quietly than expected with those combat boots and all that other gear on.

“No running in the halls!” it shouts as it reforms into a bland, though purple, mostly amorphous suggestion of a bespectacled fellow in a lab coat.

In that moment, the lights come back on.

“Great…” says Dunhill.

“Actually, the plasm tastes more like grape, but really… sad grapes,” I share beatifically, describing the degree of sliming his stealthiness has allowed him to enjoy.

“It can never just be a hallway to freedom,” he says as he realizes that he would have avoided all the jello jokes that Lemmon will send his way as soon as the group gets back together.

“Agreed,” I say – because in this game with these people, it’s true.

Questions: What did the plasm taste like and what other sense impressions did it yield? How and why is this important to the scenario and our implementation of Ghostbusters?

Video Link: Later today, there will be a video added below which expands, with great restraint and brevity, contradictory as that might sound, on this entry.