Chapter 3 of Eternal Lies

Eternal Lies - gaming over Zoom...

We continued our run of Eternal Lies tonight, and it very nearly saw the sudden ending of our investigation when a supernatural threat erupted out of nowhere and a few bad dice rolls left my character perilously close to death and Dr Mitch's character close to insanity.  The acronym 'TPK' went across the chat window. Somehow, we escaped.

The outcomes reflected the dualism of the way that Gumshoe games build characters. Between the two of us, we tend to cover most of the core skills, which means the spotlight shifts from one to the other. Ironically, the character skilled in First Aid was the one injured, and the character skilled in Psychoanalysis was the one who suffered most mentally from what we faced.

This is probably the third time that the campaign has suddenly flipped this way towards the threat of extinction; I felt it when we tried to escape from Savannah, and when my character walked into a hotel room and was confronted by a man with a gun (and if you know how brutal Trail of Cthulhu's point blank rules are, you'll understand the level of threat). This time we were expecting a mundane threat, but it wasn't.

Eternal Lies runs in a very purist manner; the threats are real and present and the characters are fragile. Part of me wants them to be able to survive more, to be more pulp, but then I remember that the notes that make this unique all stem from different shades of noir. We've had noir in the swamp, noir in the city (LA, its archetypal home) and now noir in the lazy sun of Mexico City. Death, fragility and flaws are all part of the tropes that the scenario embraces.

Richard continues to run a masterclass in horror investigative games in general and Gumshoe engined ones in particular; we're fortunate to have him as a GM. Our final game of the session (but not the Chapter) is next week.

7 March 2022