The crew of an experimental deep sea mining facility has awakened something... or is it somethings? Think "the Abyss" meets cthuloid Deep Ones.

Scream all you want -- no one can hear you in THE SILENT DEEP!





One of our players even had a good luck charm for the table:



Details later...

Man, now I'm pondering getting a handful of old civil defense geiger counters, stripping the electronics from the inside, filling them with dice, counters, bonus maps, and a copy of the rules... and BOOM, Super Deluxe Edition Geiger Counter.

Me too.

LOVE that map, Ben.

Okay, this is hella long, but once I got started I felt I had to do the game justice.

Just like last time, three of the players were new to Geiger Counter (Mike, Jem & Kevin) with Ping and I the old hands. We took our time with this game (about 6 hrs if you factor out the dinner break) so we had lots of opportunities to explore relationships before the trouble started. We also took care to make sure we were on the same page before we started, which is why the map and the monster concept were so nicely focused.

To make things interesting we brainstormed our basic character types ("scrupulous scientist, alcoholic doctor") and then passed them out randomly and then made characters from there.

Potential Survivors:

Dr. Allison Sawyer - stubborn, determined, scrupulous and entirely hot scientist who turns out to be _everyone's_ love interest (casting: Teri Polo from Sports Night, player: me)

Paul Goldman - pessimistic engineer and voice of doom, ex-husband of Dr. Sawyer as it turns out (casting: a nerdy Jeff Goldblum a la Into the Night, player: Ping)

Dr. Jeffrey Kutner - ambitious scientist later turned murderous, unscrupulous scientist. Another past suitor of Dr. Sawyer -- never date a guy who takes "sacrifice others" as a survival trait. (casting: a young Brian Dennehy, charming yet physically imposing, player: Jem)

Sam - cute & perky young engineer with a guy's name (casting: "that woman who plays Kaylee in Serenity", player: Mike)

Bud - red-neck engineer with a lucky wrench that's not quite lucky enough to get him to the end credits (casting: Jeff Foxworthy, player: Kevin)


Everyone else:

Capt Jonas - inauspiciously named conscientious captain (sometimes Capt Gloval from Robotech, sometimes not)

Bulldog - cowardly comm guy with an ironic nickname (later unanimously promoted to survivor after a narrow escape from the fish-men and recast as Tobey Maguire)

Johnnie - the incomprehensible techie (no casting)

Doc - alcoholic base physician (the doctor from Battlestar Galactica, less smoking more drinking and guilt)

Jake - smart ass hotshot sub pilot, not so charming with the ladies as he'd like (Matt LeBlanc from Lost in Space)

Hudson - veteran driller and scuba guy (Bruce Willis from Armageddon)

and finally...

Lyle - Aussie he-man daredevil and broad stereotype. A threat to sheilas and sea-beasts all the world over. He's got flowing man-locks, a swaggering accent, and a huge... knife. Diver / driller along with Hudson.

As you can see, an all-star cast. Clearly we're going to need a big box office return to afford this cavalcade of stars.


ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE...

By complete coincidence the majority of the secret goals had people trying to get back together with old flames, confessing their true love, etc. This led to a tangled love triangle (really a love quadrangle we found out later).

The action starts with the arrival of the new scientist (Dr. Allison Sawyer) at the undersea drilling station. Dr. Kutner is jealously protecting his domain and doesn't want any interference in his work, and we learn pretty quickly that there may be some discrepancies in the results he's been sending back to headquarters, which have prompted them to send a second researcher to audit his work.

He doesn't know until she steps off the sub that it's Allison, an old flame that turned out badly. We find out later she now loathes the man and his ambitions, and is suspicious of what he's really up to. When she reviewed the data he was sending topside she pushed to get sent down to examine his work first-hand. She thinks he found something and is covering it up.

What _she_ didn't know was that another of the crew was her ex-husband from ten years ago, engineer Paul Goldman. There's some surprise and bitterness and bickering as old wounds are opened up, but it's clear there are still feelings between the two of them. But will Allison let love distract her from her vendetta to find the truth?

As if that's not enough there was also a fourth part of the love maze that didn't really emerge in play: perky Sam had a mad crush on Paul and wanted to confess her true love, but sadly once Dr. Sawyer arrived (and sea monsters started terrorizing the base) she never got the chance. Take home lesson: never procrastinate in waving your character flags.

We also started out with specific people playing the non-survivors, but because of scene framing they got passed around so much that there wasn't that much ownership -- lots of them got played by more than one person. This was probably a mistake: it's hard enough to nail down your character without swapping who is playing who every other scene. It didn't hurt us too much but if the central story hadn't turned out so strong it might have been more of a problem.

continued...

LURKING TERROR

The base has rapidly gone from "blissful ignorance" to "overrun" and anyone still alive is hiding, creeping through utility tunnels, or looking around every shadowy corner in terror of a webbed hand or cold lifeless eyes

- Bud gets back inside the base via an utility hatch into the power plant, where he bumps into a clueless Bulldog. When a shadowy figure approaches them out of the darkness Bud lashes out with his lucky wrench... only to crack the skull of the unfortunate captain. Oops.

- Dr. Kutner finds and soothes the hysterical Sam. On the surface he's calm -- almost too calm -- but something about him gives her the creeps and she gives him the slip, but not before she is unwittingly infected.

- Bud improvises a flame thrower from the blow torch in the machine shop and has an ill-fated stand-off with the fish men. Scratch Bud. [We hand Kevin the now promoted Bulldog to keep him in the game]

- Paul and Allison find each other, find critical research clues that Kutner hid in his room, lose each other, then find each other again back in the lab just in time for the big finale. Allison admits that the whole reason she took this job was because she knew there was something, err, fishy about the findings Kutner was sending to the surface and wanted to find out what he was really up to (secret goal, check). Paul confesses that he's still carrying a torch for Allison and wants to give it another try, the big lug. (secret goal, check)

- Dr. Kutner walks in on a room full of fish-men... and they don't attack him. They just stare at him with those big lifeless eyes. Clearly the "things" in his blood is making him one of them. [At this point Dr. Kutner is now batting entirely for the visiting team, the bastard!]

- A terrified Sam and Bulldog huddle together in a maintenance duct as fish-men stomp around overhead. Perhaps driven by the strange alien passions rising in her blood, Sam puts the moves on the innocent Bulldog. It's hot girl / creepy fish-monster "fertilize my many eggs" sex in the utility tunnels. [Mike fesses up at this point that Sam's goal was to confess her love for Paul, which is now moot, so he consoles himself with mothering a new brood of inhuman monsters]


THE FINALE

Other than the young lovers Sam & Bulldog, the only people left are Paul, Allison, and the traitorous Kutner.

Kutner walks in as Allison and Paul are frantically piecing together his lab data with the hidden files she found in his room, and in the face of his chilling nonchalance we have the "J'accuse!" moment as she reveals that his findings are wrong -- the organic samples he uncovered aren't a previously undiscovered DNA type, that was just an error in the testing. The DNA of the sample and in fact the DNA of the fish-men is actually almost entirely... human!

Yep, they're not some alien race or superhuman species, they're the horrible offspring of some man-fish interbreeding, Shadow Over Innsmouth style.

This scene was a little odd mechanically. We had two cooperating characters (Allison and Paul) and 4 dice worth of research data (8 dice total) vs the menace at 5 dice. Technically we were just talking to Dr. Kutner, but the idea was that defeating the menace is beating the plot, not just frying a bunch of fish men with a flame thrower (which was how we lost Bud). It was a little strange since it was not a fight per se but it seemed to work quite nicely for a horror ending instead of an action ending.

The good guys win, which we interpreted as Dr. Kutner stunned by the revelation and the heroes beating feet for the escape sub -- but not before Paul fails his infection roll...

Kutner is still alone in the dark when the deep ones come to take him to his new home as one of them.

We didn't play it out (it was 2 am) but we agreed there was clearly a "several months later" epilogue. On one hand we have Paul and Allison on their second honeymoon, the infected Paul standing out on the balcony, looking with a strange longing at the churning surf and the moonlit ocean. On the other we have Sam and her terrifying pregnancy...

Wow, that sounds pretty terrific. Thanks for the really detailed write-up. It's always interesting when one character ends up being an out-and-out villain instead of someone whose goals just put them at cross-purposes. We had a robot in one game which was infected by an malevolent alien rune-virus. So very chilling. Sometimes it can really make it hard for the heroes to win, especially if the villain grabbed a bunch of advantage dice before or after turning, but it makes for great drama.

It's totally fine to have non-fight-based conflicts, by the way. Conflicts are really all about gaining an advantage over another character or the menace, which is exactly what it sounds like you did, stunning them long enough for you to escape.

Great epilogue too. Evil fish-people spawn!

That's an interesting point, Ping. Part of the hard thing about goals is, since they're assigned randomly, they have to be pretty general, just to be applicable to all the players. So, if you can't base them on specific characters, basing them on the setting is probably the way to go. Otherwise, yeah, you end up with takes on universal themes, which may be less grabby.

Yeah, I mean, you could have the player to your left write a secret goal for you, or something, once characters had been discussed. I just think the goals work better when they're not something you invent for yourself. But knowing who has the goal you wrote is also not ideal. Hmm...

I like it! It's more.. um... Sign in Stranger-like, which has to be a good thing. Honestly, that would also allow people to brainstorm keywords for both goals and trailer shots at the same time. Then you could draw several and figure out which one is your goal and which ones are shots for the trailer. Like, I could draw "mad science," "trash compactor," and "last man standing," or something like that. Seems like it would work.

I've spun off another thread re locations getting overrun by the menace:

http://www.story-games.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=6773

For trailers we've had everyone write down the exact text, then put them in a the pile and draw randomly. Then we let people kind of guess who should go in what order ("mine sounds like a peaceful intro scene, so I'll read first"). Each person generally reads it straight as written, but of course interpreting vague areas, improvising the voices & the booming narrator, etc. Pretty much straight as written in the rules I think.

Trailers never seem to be a problem (probably because what the player is reading has nothing to do with the specifics of their character, it's all director level stuff), it's only secret goals that get sticky.

Also keep in mind that a lot of the brainstorming that the keyword thing would generate really should be happening earlier when the group is agreeing on the setting and/or the menace. It seems like it's much more critical to get on the same page at that stage.

Also with that in mind, I'd move sections 9-16 (explain conflicts thru offer basic survival advice, aka the explaining the rules part) somewhere else -- once you have the trailer reading and the title picked you have the momentum and want to jump straight into play.