A Steerpunk Halloween - All-Hallows IRC

[Steerpike]

Hey guys.  So this year, while I'm doing Halloween stuff around Halloween, my Halloween itself is going to be a bit quiet.  I could spend the day eating candy and playing a marathon Amnesia/Dead Space/F.E.A.R. session, but I had an alternate idea... a day of IRC horror gaming one-shots.  I'd run one in the morning (PST/PDT), break for a class and my office hour around midday and into the early afternoon, and run another one in the late afternoon/evening (quite late by EST/EDT standards, like from 8PM onwards), perhaps with a brief meal intermission.  Players could show up whenever (though be prepared to be handed a random character, or play a monster, or something) and leave whenever (be prepared to die a sudden, gory death or go abruptly insane).  I probably would use a No Stats Theatre format, or else use minimal stats.

1) Would anyone be into this?  If there are a handful of people who can commit to probably making it, it's worth a shot.  To be clear: you don't have to commit to an entire day of play, just post if it's at all likely you could show up for a couple hours here and there.  I'll assign/remove characters in a totally ad-hoc fashion, or you can make your own.  Fun, easy, casual gaming.

2) Is one time a lot better than another?  If people are up for both, I can run both.  Again, i just need a rough idea if it's worth attempting - if everyone's super busy on Halloween, there's no point in me preparing games, but if a solid handful can make it and/or drift in and out, it might be really fun to try.

3) Any preference for a world/setting/plot?  A few ideas, some from my old settings/projects/games: a CE (Cadaverous Earth) one-shot (unrelated to the main campaign); Age of Madness (18th century Call of Cthulhu, basically); some variant of a zombie apocalypse, probably with a twist (not sure what yet); Tempter (you're demons on an infernal mission to corrupt humanity and wage war vs. an autocratic, tyrannical Heaven); Sixguns & Cyclopean Horrors (Call of Cthulhu... IN SPACE! meets Firefly); fairytale gone wrong (players as children, lost in the woods); hunt-the-teenager (think Slasher movies i.e. Nightmare on Elm Street/Friday the 13th/Halloween/Scream, but you're the monsters/psychopaths, not the victims, playing out some twisted rivalry, or whatnot; I'd invent my own monsters/killers for this one, or you could invent your own).

More suggestions/requests are very welcome.

Cheers,

Steerpike

[LordVreeg]

I will be busy with the Boy, but I just wanted to say that Steerpike has been having some Awesome and great ideas lately, and an ALL-HALLOWS IRC is another great idea.

[Weave]

This sounds awesome and totally festive! I'm not sure I'll be able to attend, but I'd love to if I could.

Hunt-the-Teenager made me laugh out loud pretty hard. They all sound very fun, but I'd be most interested in seeing what you could do with CE.

[LD]

Good idea. I'll know if I have any halloween commitments in a week or so. Assuming that the halloween parties will be on Sat/Sun, I should be available on Mon night.

>>3) Any preference for a world/setting/plot?  A few ideas, some from my old settings/projects/games: a CE (Cadaverous Earth) one-shot (unrelated to the main campaign); Age of Madness (18th century Call of Cthulhu, basically); some variant of a zombie apocalypse, probably with a twist (not sure what yet); Tempter (you're demons on an infernal mission to corrupt humanity and wage war vs. an autocratic, tyrannical Heaven); Sixguns & Cyclopean Horrors (Call of Cthulhu... IN SPACE! meets Firefly); fairytale gone wrong (players as children, lost in the woods); hunt-the-teenager (think Slasher movies i.e. Nightmare on Elm Street/Friday the 13th/Halloween/Scream, but you're the monsters/psychopaths, not the victims, playing out some twisted rivalry, or whatnot; I'd invent my own monsters/killers for this one, or you could invent your own).

Of those I am NOT interested in zombies, or the fairytale.
I am most interested in Tempter and the Sixguns one :)

[TheMeanestGuest]

I WILL PLAY ANY AND ALL OF THE ABOVE

Technically that's a lie, I'd be most interested in seeing Sixguns, or CE, or Age of Madness, or Tempter.

[Kindling]

I'm totally in for this, and mine would be another vote for Sixguns and Cyclopean Horrors, although I'd happily play any of the others (except maybe Tempter... I mean, I'd probably still enjoy Tempter, just not as much as the others)

I've already been invited to a Halloween party but seeing as Halloween's a Monday it probably won't be on the day itself, and even if it is it won't be all day so I could do some IRCing beforehand :)

[Superfluous Crow]

I'll keep an eye on this for now. Will have to figure out whether it makes sense in relation to my time difference issues.

[Steerpike]

Sounds like people might enjoy Sixguns.  If a couple more players bite I think I can expect a decent enough turnout to make it worth a try.

Here's some info on the setting for those who didn't catch it the first time round - it came out of a genre mixing thread (I chose to mix Lovecraftian Horror with the Space Western).  Short story in the spoiler at the bottom.

[ic=Spaceships, Sixguns, and Cyclopean Horrors]For centuries humanity wallowed in its blissful ignorance, fighting its idiotic and futile little wars, until under the auspices of illumination and science they took to the stars and the Great Beyond and made the ends of the universe their frontier. Out in the black abyss of space they found whole star systems of planets, asteroid belts and clouds of stellar gas rich in the elements they'd squabbled over so wretchedly on their insignificant Earth. Feverish with excitement and swollen in hubris with their own technological magnificence and the promise of spoils beyond their wildest dream, humankind began its great Diaspora, scattering itself across the galaxy. Mining colonies and thriving boomtowns spread to the systems of Arcturus, Baalbo, Xoth, Betelgeuse, and Hydra. Blood was still spilt, spattered across the dusty, cratered plains of distant moons in showdowns beneath the high noons of binary suns.

But ore and gas was not all that humanity found amongst the stars.

Something else was waiting.

As they dug into the depths of ancient and alien worlds, humanity found traces - ruins, the husk-cities of departed civilizations, inhuman and unfathomable. Still they delved; ever their reach exceeded their grasp. Until, plundering some tenebrous little world beneath the dying light of seven ebbing suns, the Crawling Chaos emerged from his prison...

Face down a shoggoth in a crumbling temple of Lrogg on the fourth moon of L'gh'yx (Uranus). Saddle up your worm-mount and hijack a Shantak-drawn caravan on the fiery plains of Haddath. Converse with the Insects of Shaggai in one of their phantastic hive-cities. Fight rangewars over herds of crustacean cattle. Uncover the secrets of the Yith with the Necronomicon in one hand and a six-shooter in the other. Brawl in the saloons of New Arkham City. Blip into hyperspace to escape the unthinkable jaws of the Great Old Ones themselves.[/ic][ic=Systems]Betelgeuse (Glyu-Uho)

The ancient battleground in which the Elder Gods and the Great Old Ones fought their apocalyptic and unfathomable war, the system of Betelgeuse - rendered 'Glyu-Uho' in Naacal - contains innumerable worlds pocked with the scabrous remnants of ancient and often non-Euclidean cities scarred with the uncanny wounds of primordial conflict.  The principle inhabited world of the Betelgeuse System is Yarnak, a shattered world rebuilt by initially optimistic if perhaps foolhardy settlers.  The recent revelation that the red giant of Betelgeuse may nova in less than two hundred years has dampened the original fervor with which the system was settled.  Now, the great arcologies of Yarnak are already being evacuated, leaving behind hollow hives as the inhabitants flee to the Miskatonic System or beyond, to Xoth or Arcturus or even back to the dilapidated homeland of humanity, the decaying Sol System.  Apart from these emptying super-cities the ruin of Bel Yarnak, or Dis, is the planet's central feature: a once resplendent place of silvery towers with streets lit by moon-opals and flaming purple gemstones, transformed into dull iron by some ancient eldritch cataclysm.  Still, however, looters comb the catacombs beneath the city, especially in the Black Minaret at its heart: the ragtag scavenger-scum ubiquitous to the frontiers of the Great Beyond, searching for alien artefacts to pawn in the enormous shanty-towns outside the burgeoning colonial settlements.

Hyperspace in this region is disfigured with terrible reality-fissures (especially around the Gray Gulf), making the system difficult to navigate.  In real-space, the corpses of slaughtered cosmic beings provide a different hazard, although many of these primeval cadavers have formed the foundations for outposts and even cities, as in the case of Godseye, a domed settlement with tunnels burrowed into the ancient flesh of its dead host, dedicated primarily to occult study: a city of scholars and researchers.  Common belief holds that these great corpses are the remnants of those Great Old Ones the Elder Gods destroyed during their apocalyptic battle, before exiling the remaining beings into the trance-like state in which they currently slumber.

Fomalhaut

A dread system shunned by explorers, merchants, travelers, and indeed all humans, Fomalhaut, the 'Mouth of the Fish,' is the home of several Great Old Ones and other powerful cosmic entities, including the nefarious Crawling Chaos and the elemental Cthugha.  It is from this sinister system that the reaver-comet Ktynga hails, the rocky vessel of the ravenous fire-vampires currently preying on the Arcturus System.  Those few human settlements found on the fringes of the system were quickly abandoned once an avatar of the nightmarish Nyarlathotep was discovered.

The Hydra Constellation

The largest Ptolemaic constellation, Hydra is a snaking series of systems principally inhabited by the burrowing, squid-like chthonians on the planet of Haddath.  A troglodytic and monstrous breed, the chthonians nonetheless share the Eye of the Hydra (the center of the serpentine constellation) with human civilization, predominantly the Neo-Atlantean merchants who maintain substantial commercial outposts on Haddath and elsewhere in the Hydra constellation.  An order of ascetics who seclude themselves in needle-like monasteries on the tiny planet of Titus are also notable: eccentric monks who allow their muscles to slowly atrophy as they float through the low-gravity cells and sanctums of their baroque hermitages.

The Miskatonic System

One of the central systems of colonized space, the Miskatonic System consists of nine planets orbiting around a single Class G star not dissimilar to Sol; four of these planets boast major settlements and three of the remaining planets have partially settled moons or man-made satellites.  Along with the Sol, Arcturus, Xoth, and Betelgeuse Systems, the Miskatonic System is one of the most densely populated star systems of the Great Beyond.

The largest bastion of civilization in the Miskatonic System is located on planet Dunwich, where the cities of New Arkham, Kingsport, Moloch City, and Innsmouth can be found: rough, vice-ridden places thronged with a mongrel populace, unwashed and uncouth.  These cities rise in bulbous conglomerations of concrete and steal, smeared with blood and dirt, wreathed in spectral blasts of steam from the seething factories.  A hundred thousand little gangs bicker violently in the labyrinthine depths of the undercities, below the smog-lines, slowing degenerating into pallid, almost subhuman creatures with protruding brows and black, beady eyes.  Above the wraiths of industrial effluvium lie the relatively pristine dwellings of the artists, scholars, occultists, and corporate overlords, the intellectual and financial elite of Dunwich whose world is one of domed gardens, art galleries, esoteric and beautifully illuminated books in resplendent libraries, opulent temples, and luxurious pleasure-houses that rival the Cytheran fleshpots on Venus.

Three other planets, their names culled from near-forgotten mythologies, sustain thriving societies.  On Sarnath, the Ulthari - or Catfolk, a race of powerful psychics native to Cykranosh and L'gy'hx - keep humans as food, slaves, pets, and soldiers, clans of the ruthless felines warring with one another for territory or sending bands of cat marauders into the ether, piratical reavers with human fodder.  On Ib, a species of moon-dwelling savages raise dour grey fortress-cities and temples to their god Bokrug, the Great Water Lizard.  The cold ocean planet of Lomar seems superficially uninhabited, but beneath the seafloor underground societies squabble, the Serpent Men and the fascistic K'n-yan battling over resources and territory.

Sol

Decadent, excessive, overripe, and largely abandoned, the Sol system is humanity's home territory and includes the moldering ghost-planet of Earth as well as twelve other planetoids.  Earth itself has become a wasteland, a glassy netherworld punctuated by the husk-cities of dead civilizations, the sky palled with ash, the seas boiling with the inhuman rage of the slumbering entities therein awakened.  Cythera, or Venus, is more lively, its foppish and hedonistic citizenry living out their debauched lives in the flying crystal palace-cities of that world, great transparent edifices like huge jewels drifting across the unwholesome and noxious plains below.  On Mars, prospectors of the whitish platinum-gold of that world pan the desiccated river-beds or caverns and return to ragtag shanties, swathed in furs and goggles, toting clunky revolvers and cruel, serrated knives, riding horny-plated and quasi-saurian vortlups and guided by the lanky and skeletal four-armed giants known as the Aihais.  Mercury remains too hot to colonize, although occasional explorers delve into the long-abandoned Yithian cities that can still be found on the scorched surface: though not nearly as comprehensive as the Great Library of Pnakotus of Earth the archives of these ruins still contain some of the Yithian scroll-tubes, etched with cosmic secrets and occult mysteries.

Humans are not the only inhabitants of this decaying system.  On Uranus, commonly known as L'gy'hx, the insectile Shan and the scuttling indigenous cube-folk fight bloody religious wars in the name of Azathoth and Lrogg (rumored to be an aspect of the Crawling Chaos Nyarlathotep).  On the frigid dwarf planet of Yoggoth, or Pluto, a colony of the membranous fungoid-crustacean Mi-go lead a precarious existence on the lip of the Pit, abandoning their black and many-terraced cities with their canals of pitch liquid when the horror within periodically emerges only to return, tentative, after the beast's retreat.  In the tempestuous skies of Saturn, or Cykranosh, the black-quicksilver servitors of the toad-like Great Old One Tsathoggua, the sinister Formless Spawn, molest the floating hydrogen-mines and atomic refineries that bob like bulbous iron gnats in that planet's sanguineous empyrean.  Beneath the crimson surface of Mars the hideous entity Vulthoom and his blind, flesh-eating cultists glut themselves on captive settlers snatched from the cold, red savannah above.  On distant Tond and blue Yaksh, or Neptune, the amorphous flying polyps linger still, brooding in their windowless basalt towers.[/ic][spoiler][ic=The Last Voyage of The Unnameable]The ether-craft The Unnameable squirmed through the tenebrous nether-dimensions of hyperspace, boring through the interstitial membranes of reality like some gigantic worm, its cannonry dangling from its bulk like ganglia, the black globule of its cockpit staring into the abyss like some huge and monstrous eye. Deep within the ship, past layers of hull and shielding, Captain James Howard was cleaning his guns meticulously with an oil-rag. They lay disassembled on the scarred wooden table, each component carefully positioned, gleaming in the sputtering light overhead. Suddenly The Unnameable shifted, lurching in hyperspace: probably the eldritch resonance of some massive object in real space, radiating into the twilight abysses of the ether. The vessel bucked; the precisely laid-out bits and pieces Howard had so painstakingly arrayed rolled off the table and clattered to the dull iron floor. An alarm blared discordantly over the ship's speaker-system.

"Mnahn' hlirgh hupadgh n'ghft!" He swore. "Bloody ether-winds..." He clutched at his vociferator-cube and radioed the bridge. "Pnoth, what's it doin' out there?"

"Spot of turbulence, Captain," the ghoul pilot croaked back. The troglodytic folk made ideal crew out in the blackness of space, even if their diet was off-putting to their human comrades. "Probably a brown dwarf. Right as R'lyeh now, though." The alarm had cut out.

"Good. How far are we from Whateley's World?"

"Ether-currents are blowin' us into some ugly lw'nafh-shogg... been a bit delayed. We should be pulling into the Miskatonic System in four or five hours. Pnoth out."

Howard muttered an oath to Nodens. In five hours the half-life of their cargo might have decayed significantly. He stared at the pieces of his guns scattered across the floor and scowled. No sense in laying them out for another patch of turbulence to interrupt him again. Still mumbling curses he stalked from the armory and down the hall to the engine room, ignoring the gibbering shrieks of the Byakhee cattle they'd picked up from some Tcho-Tcho nyth-shogg back in the Thyoph Chain.

The engine room was a mess. Shaalba and Zo were scrabbling amidst a jumble of detritus, the sleek Ulthari woman and her bumbling apprentice mired in a forest of black cables, wreathed in sepia steam.

"What in all of the Great Beyond is going on here then?" Howard demanded, staring at the chaos with wide-eyed horror.

"Just reassembling the secondary drive, Captain," Shaalba purred, her feline tail twitching round a wrench. "There were some problems with the M-filter. Thought you'd want us to be thorough."

"Forget that for now. We need some more speed. You still have some of that ichor we snatched out in the Gray Gulf?"

"A couple tubes. You want me to pump that fm'latggh-'bthnk into the primary drive?"

"Yar. We need to get to New Arkham before those crystals die on us. Lucretia won't pay for a bunch of black rocks, even if we did fight off a swarm of Nagaae to get hold of them."

"Aye, sir. We're going to have to replace our diffuser coils, though. I've been telling you..."

"I know, I know, they're three months old. We'll get new ones from Kelley in Red Hook."

"That swindling lamprey? Unnameable'll be lucky to get off the ground with any of his parts in her entrails..."

"I know he's a thievin' Martian con-man but his prices are the best. We gotta eat, Shaal."

"Well I'm testing them out before we install them. Things'll probably rupture once we enter hyperspace anyway, but Dagon knows I'll have warned you. Now get out of my engine room, we've got enough clutter in here without a gormless mnahn'-gof'n putting his nose where it doesn't belong!"

He chuckled despite himself, his amusement outweighing his vexation. He turned to head back towards the armory when the ship lurched again, nearly knocking him off his feet. The alarm kindled back to life. Howard grabbed the voxiferator.

"Pnoth, what the hell am I paying you for you mangy maggot-ridden--"

"It's not just turbulence Captain.  Something just hit the ship, pushed us into a Dislocation eddy; we got shunted somewhere into hyperspace. I think you'd better come up here and take a look at thi--"

The radio went dead: no screams, no garbled raving, just a burst of static and then silence. Howard banged the voxiferator against the wall, snarled Pnoth's name. No response. The rest of the ship was equally silent.

He reached down to his belt to draw a gun that wasn't there, swore when he realized that all his weapons were lying in pieces on the armory floor. He crept down the corridor, staring at the hexagonal door at the far end that led to the cockpit.

He made it halfway down the passage when the door hissed open. The creature that stood framed in the doorway was a thing out of a nightmare: gaunt and leathery, glowing with sallow, hideous light. How it had gotten into the ship he had no idea. In one clawed hand it clutched a gnawed limb; its maw dripped blood and black spittle on the floor.  Its face was eyeless, its jaw unhinged, serpentine.  The horror made a wet, guttural sound that might have been some form of speech, threw down the dismembered arm, and began to lope towards him with preternatural rapidity.

With a wordless shout Howard slammed the lock control on the door, sealing the hexagonal portal shut.  Half a moment later a loud thud resounded against the steel, followed by the sound of scraping talons and a low, sibilant snarl.

Howard turned and ran down the hall, towards the armory, boots pounding against the metal grating.  Down the corridor he caught a glimpse of some disturbance, of reality curdling as something began to manifest.  He didn't wait to see what it was, ducking through the open armory doorway.

Madly he began to reassemble one of his weapons, scrambling to find the right pieces and fit them together.  The ship shook again and pieces rolled and clattered.  In the hall, he could hear the click of clawed footsteps and the hoarse, moist exhalations of inhuman breath.

At last he managed to piece one of the pistols together.  A shadowy figure blocked the doorway, vague and menacing, as Howard desperately fumbled with a glyph-etched bullet.  His hands shook as he slotted the ammunition into his weapon.  The thing in the doorway bent its head low and lumbered inside, stooped, eyeless face turning this way and that, nostrils flaring.

Howard cocked back the hammer of his pistol.  The abomination's head swiveled towards the sound and it let out an obscene gasp of glee and ravenous hunger, preparing to pounce towards him.
The monstrosity's head exploded in a shower of yellowish fluid and foetid brains, spattering the walls with gobs of malodorous, inhuman gore.  Howard's pistol leaked bluish smoke.

He nearly vomited at the stench of the thing's charred remains.  The inside of the creature's head looked more like fungus than grey-matter.  The sickly, yellowish aura that had surrounded the monstrosity had gone out.

Shakily he got to his feet, just as a shrill shriek like an infant screaming echoed down the corridor, followed by spitting, hissing sounds.  Shaal!

Howard sprinted down the corridor to the engine room, loading his weapon with more ammunition snatched from the floor.  He found Zo's body sprawled across the threshold, her abdomen split neatly open, entrails and viscera spilling out in a steaming gush.  Shaalba was backed into a corner, hair bristling, waving a welding torch in front of her, keeping another of the eyeless horrors at bay.  Howard pumped three shots into its back, wrenching its malformed body around and around in a grotesque pirouette.  The creature stumbled against the wall and collapsed, screaming horribly, its elongated limbs flailing.  Howard emptied a fourth shot into its skull, snuffing out its glow like a candle.

"Iä!  Iä!  Bast damn me!"  The Ulthari woman hissed, her fur still standing on end.  "Dimensional Shamblers!"

"What in R'lyeh are they?"

"Inter-dimensional creatures... they lurk in the Outer Realms, latch onto any psychic energy they can find.  But you don't usually find them just wandering through hyperspace alone...

"Captain, we need to get to the cockpit.  Now."

Howard gulped and nodded.  He had two bullets left.  The pair stepped over Zo's corpse and back into the hall.

The air stank horrendously.  The chittering screams of the Byakhee down in the cargo bay emanated upwards.  Slowly they made their way up to the door at the end of the hall that Howard had sealed before.  Howard listened, but heard nothing but the ambient hum of The Unnameable – and, distantly, a rhythmic thrum, as of some distant, unimaginable drum.

"There was one beyond that door," he whispered to Shaalba.  "You unlock it—-I'll cover you."

Shaalba looked for a moment as if she would protest, but something in Howard's face must have defeated her trepidation, and she moved to the side of the door, ready to disengage the lock.  Howard aimed his pistol towards the door using both hands, legs wide apart, reading to shoot anything that lay beyond.

Shaalba input the door code and the portal slid open.  Howard tensed, ready to fire, but there was nothing beyond—-the creature was gone.

Together Shaalba and Howard entered the hall past the door, climbing the stair up to the cockpit, the Captain ahead, the Ulthari mechanic behind.

The pulsing thrum was louder here, an insistent throbbing beat accompanied by a high, lunatic piping like a diabolical flute.

"What is that?"  Howard asked, but Shaalba only shook her head and stared ahead.  They reached the top of the stairs.

Pnoth was sprawled in his chair, his cadaverous throat ripped out, eyes shocked and protuberant, blood trickling from his elbow where the Shambler had ripped off his arm.  A headset dangled from his patched leather chair.  The void beyond was obscured – the ghoul had put up the ship's blinders, blocking out the view of hyperspace outside.

"Where'd that Shambler-thing go?"  Howard wondered aloud, as he flicked at the dashboard console.  There appeared to be something wrong with the navigation system; none of the controls seemed to be working, save the switch to put down the blinders.

He handed Shaalba his weapon.  "Shaal, cover me while I get the override working, it'll take some--"

He stopped when he saw the expression on Shaalba's face.  She was staring, transfixed, out of the cockpit windows into the amorphous depths of hyperspace beyond.  Howard could see the blinders coming up in the reflection of her huge, slitted green eyes, and something past the blinders, out in hyperspace – something difficult to see.

Howard turned.

It filled the windows, filled the space beyond, incomprehensibly vast, bigger than the mind could hold.  A thousand mouths gnawed at the endless, eldritch dark with imbecilic hunger.  A million polypous limbs grasped at the tempestuous ether.  It went on forever.

It couldn't be.

It was the ravenous maw that gnashed inconceivably in the unlighted infinities between universes, in the illimitable abysses Outside of normal space, surrounded by a vile beat as of colossal drums, and an eternal shrill whistling as of fiendish pipes, and by the strange, terrifying dancers who swayed to the thing's incomprehensible rhythms.  And The Unnameable was heading ineluctably, unswervingly towards it.

It wasn't possible.

"Fm'latggh-'bthnk," Howard swore quietly.  "By the Elder Gods..."

More powerful than the Great Old Ones themselves.  The being to whom Nyarlathotep himself was a mere servitor.  Foremost of the Outer Gods.  The Nuclear Chaos.  The Daemon Sultan.  The Idiot God.
The infernal drumbeat made The Unnameable shake, made its reinforced and glyph-etched hull shudder and buckle.  The shrill, demoniacal melody of the flutes veined the cockpit windows with fine cracks.

The being reached out with one of its million multitudinous limbs.  It opened a gargantuan, slavering maw, a suckered orifice larger in breadth than a gas giant.  Enormous folds of alien flesh shifted and puckered, folding back to expose something huge and glistening beneath.

Inside, as the cracks propagated in the cockpit glass and the seething energies of uncanny dimensions began to leak into the ship, searing mundane reality like a corrosive acid, Howard stared out into a cyclopean eye the size of a star.

And Azathoth stared back.[/ic][/spoiler]

[CoyoteCamouflage]

I could probably make this, yes. As LD said, the Monday is much more open to me than the weekend itself. So assuming my family doesn't try to drag me into chaperoning my cousins for trick-or-treating (Which is tempting, because I do demand a cut of the goods. I'm evil like that :D ) there shouldn't be a problem.

1. I would be able to make it all day or not at all. Most likely all day. I have so many relatives that it's unlikely I'll get dragged into the boring stuff without volunteering.

2. Nah. I'll just cancel Violin class, since I was probably going to cancel it anyway.

3. Age of Madness, Sixguns, and the Teen Slasher settings got me the most interested. The former two because they genuinely seem interesting, the last because it sounds absurdly entertaining and campy (in a good way).

[Steerpike]

Awesome.  I was only planning on running this on the Monday, so that works out.

I'm definitely going to run Sixguns.  Tempter I think I'm going to reserve for another time.

Debating whether to do CE, Age of Madness, or something else for the other session, or just to do a  huge Sixguns "double feature," as rereading my old stuff I have a ton of ideas for scenarios in that setting.

If I find the time I may prepare multiple options, and we can choose what we want to do on the day itself...

[Ghostman]

Looks like it'd be awesome fun. I would be tempted to drop in for any of those listed games.

[Steerpike]

Cool.  Definitely enough interest to give this a shot!

...the last because it sounds absurdly entertaining and campy (in a good way).

I'm very tempted to run this one, thought it might get... disturbing.  I was thinking there would be a running total/body count, with "bonus points" being given for certain types of kills (teenagers having sex or doing drugs, killing two people simultaneously, killing the prom queen, killing bullies, obtaining your specific Revenge conditions, etc.).  There would probably also be a Final Girl in each house, or whatnot, who, upon the death of all the other characters, takes a level in badass and gains effective plot immunity.

The key would be to keep the game utterly over-the-top and slapstick, otherwise it might become a little too warped.  Any more opinions on this one?

EDIT: Another idea might be to start the players as victims but let them switch to killers once they get gorily murdered, or vice versa.

[CoyoteCamouflage]

Feasibly, it could be interesting to have some of the PCs as 'helpless victims', which is to say, Killers waiting to don the mask and wield the knife. Either to make sure that they get who they want in particular, or just to generally assist the killer by making sure certain doors or windows are unlocked, or the escape vehicle's spark-plug has been removed... and essentially functioning as "extra lives" in case the victims ever successfully turn the tables on the killer.

Bonus points sound hilarious, and would definitely make it even more over-the-top. Naturally, I expect to see a lot of fourth-wall breaking and genre-savviness to emphasize the point further. If you ever feel you need more camp, just go trope digging. You're bound to find a few that suit your purposes.

I think the biggest question is what kind of killers are we talking about? Friday the 13th, Freddy Krueger, Jeepers Creepers, Scream?

Also? Plot Immunity + 4th Wall Breakage = Hilarity.

[Steerpike]

Friday the 13th, Freddy Krueger, Jeepers Creepers, Scream?

I was thinking characters inspired by all of the above, but even "mundane" killers would be larger-than-life and virtually invincible, or at least damage-resistant.  Each character would have a gimmick and powers, probably similar to the way I handled powers in Tempter.  Each would probably also have a key weakness of some kind.

Some potential killers:

- A witch out to harvest souls for a dark ritual.  Special abilities would include various gruesome spells.  Weakness would be to fire (or, if we're feeling really silly, water).
- A zombie clown killed when a heckler threw a glass bottle at him, killing him instantly; perhaps reanimated by the carnival's resident fortune-teller/voodoo queen.  Laughter keeps him at bay.
- An animated scarecrow who wants to replace his stuffing with organs.  Likewise has a fire weakness, though pretty much immune to most other weapons.
- A succubus which possesses mortal women at the moment of orgasm during defloration, killing with the old energy draining kiss, able to seduce members of either sex, so long as they aren't virginal.  Obvious weakness: virgins.  General Jennifer's Body sort of vibe.
- A nightmare which has escaped the dreamworld and now stalks the waking world, killing through fear.  The creature could telepathically intuit the worst fears of a given victim and then assume the requisite shape.  If victims close their eyes, though (or otherwise cannot see the nightmare), the creature cannot kill them, and sunlight strips the creature of its powers.  Sort of an uberboggart meets Freddy.

Some more:

- A twisted version of Puck, whose pranks have taken a sinister turn.   Powers would include various mind-control juices/powders, poisons, and the like (probably would make characters murder each other rather than killing himself), as well as preternatural stealthiness. Weakness: iron.
- A deranged PETA activist (possibly a Lettuce Lady) obsessed with killing pet-owners and freeing their pets from "slavery."  Also targets anyone wearing fur or leather, or eating meat.  Won't kill obvious animal lovers, vegans, etc.
- A psychotic librarian coming to collect overdue fines... in blood!  Leaves the foreheads of her victims stamped with the word "WITHDRAWN."  Quoting classic works of literature temporarily soothes her.
- An unhinged fanboy who believes he's Wolverine and that his peers are all "Sentinels."  Kills with self-fashioned claws.  Ignores terrible wounds, since he's convinced his "healing factor" will take care of them.  Weakness: he's convinced that magnets will have an effect on his "adamantium skeleton" and will be "pulled" towards them.

[sparkletwist]

This sounds like it could be fun. I'll certainly hop in for part of it!

Also, if you would like some help with the GMing parts of it (or if people want to play during some time you're not available but I am) I think that the "Grindhouse Grimdark" Asura game I have been intermittently wanting to run would probably fit perfectly into a one-shot like this, and doing it as a no-stats would allow me to avoid a lot of the system angst I've been having lately. So I'll put that out there too. :)