Last time I answered this I dodged the answer, as being a perennial GM, not much came to mind. This time, however, I do have a better example. We’ve played a lot of The Esoterrorists, Pelgrane Press’ reality threatening modern day horror GUMSHOE game . In fact, we’ve played all the official campaigns and enjoyed them greatly (and I wish that they’d release another).
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| The best picture I could find, as my copy is at home. |
My example comes from playing Albion’s Ransom, a two part campaign set in the UK. As a group of UK based players, this was great fun especially when the plot took us to places like Manchester and North Yorkshire that I knew well. Rich - our perennial GUMSHOE gamesmaster - graciously rolled with the local (and Google) knowledge (for example, an ice-cream shop in the middle of a creepy park) and it made the game all the more fun for it.
The concluding part of the campaign saw us facing some kind of reality bending horror in a nuclear submarine, and my character - a grizzled agent - ended up sacrificing themselves to stop it. I can’t remember if it was to allow the other characters to do something, but what I wasn’t prepared for was the reactions of shock and despair from the other players. One of them was horrified that I’d lost my character as the game ended, but I was quite sanguine about it. I knew that was likely from the moment that I took the action, so I was more prepared for it than they were, I suspect.
Outside this, I’m going to give an honourable mention to Alexi the Vistani in our Curse of Strahd campaign. Alexei was a young rogue who got exiled from the camp for year and given to the party as an assistant. This was because he nearly lost the Vistani leader’s daughter to an untoward fate. He was run as a sidekick, and proved useful (as the party had a lack of rogue type skills). He died brutally to a Finger of Death spell from Baba Lysaga; partly me showing the party that the gloves were off, and partly due to the cheeky attack he’d just done. The party had to prevent him rising as a zombie as well, which was messy.
13 August 2023
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