Beware of Hungry Teenagers
Beware of Hungry Teenagers
Halloween in The Lost Bay
Every year on the 31st of October, the streets of the Lost Bay become ravaged by little masked scoundrels, harassing anyone they can find for tricks and/or treats. These loud and playful creatures compete in a display of creative and often awkward costumes. At the sight of them one might wonder how young kids can conceive of such horrifying disguises. What do they know about life to come up with such blood-soaked costumes? Are they familiar with the dreadful events of the last Dry Death?
Before Halloween, before its branded products swarmed every strip mall and bodega; before plastic pumpkins, synthetic cobwebs, and fluorescent slime packaged in bottles, bayers celebrated the Dry Death. A word of warning: what I'm about to retell is not mere RPG lore nor fiction, but the real and sincere truth. It involves guns, monsters, and blood. Consider yourselves warned.
ONCE UPON A TIME
Once upon a time, long ago (up until the early 1970s), teenagers of the Lost Bay used to celebrate the Dry Death. They knife-carved pumpkins, planted them on long sticks, wore shapeless hoods made of discarded clothes, and knocked on every door of every house in the Sleep Country district. In guttural and distorted speech, they whispered a now-forgotten prayer, commanding adults to offer them food; crops, eggs, live chickens or cheese. Every neighborhood had its own gang of ritualized criminals. Once the loot was collected, the masked teens would walk up to the hills nearby, slaughter whatever needed to be killed, and cook the food above blinding embers. Everyone complied with the bribery, as refusing led to poor harvest, dying cattle, unlucky love, and even bankruptcy. The Dry Death was the tribute grown-ups had to pay to placate the Grim Reaper. Death was embodied in those jolly and loud youths, those who would soon push the aging elders off the cliff of life and take their place.
That was, until October 31st, 1972. Antoine S. was 73 years old, and a widower for 22 of those years. That night, as he was preparing his evening tea, he heard a bang at his door, followed by the muttered, hellish speech that demanded payment. Later, cast in the early light of morning, he was seized by a Cattleya Security team and taken to the prison island that is the Eye. As he was dragged away he screamed that actual flesh-hungry monsters had knocked on his door, that it wasn’t just masked teenagers, that he had feared for his life! That was why he had grabbed his triple barrel shotgun, always loaded, that hung next to that heavy chestnut door. He had shot, wounded, and killed the four teens who had stood at his doorstep.
In addition to slaughtering innocents, Antoine had killed the Dry Death itself. That was the last year this millennia-old tradition was celebrated. A few years passed until it reappeared in the sugar-infused modern fashion we're all familiar with: Halloween.
It's a little-known fact, but those dead and wounded teenagers who were left splayed upon the ground disappeared. Once the crowd had delivered Antoine S. to the Cattleya Security dispatch, the young victims were gone, and with them, any trace of blood or gore. It's not clear if the celebration of the Dry Death fell into oblivion because of the murders or because of the primal fear that the corpses vanishing had induced.
Many claim that the members of BOHT (Beware of Hungry Teenagers), the electro-punk band that has been releasing a seemingly endless series of bangers, are in fact the victims of the last Dry Death. For my money, I've always believed that those poor souls have ever since wandered into a limbo between life and death, not rotting, but not breathing either... Just like the main character of A Night on Rose Hill! (how’s that for a segue?)
MEMORY CRAWL
A Night on Rose Hill is a graveyard crawl for one player for The Lost Bay and designed by
. Yes, I'm well aware that I've already talked about it, you don’t need to point it out. It’s just such a cool module, the kind of open-and-play, no-sweat type of adventure that I like! We carry the physical version in the store, and we've released an actual play of it with . I've read it countless times, and I've even kind of re-engineered it (with author’s permission, of course!).In it you play as a recently dead (zombified? resurrected? ghostly??) character who has one night to escape the graveyard they've found themselves in, recover their memories, and get back to the land of the living. The lightweight mechanics are a mix between a point-crawl and a depth-crawl (I really like both those gaming options; I've spoken about them here and here). The depth-crawl part is actually a memory crawl, written in a solo-friendly fashion that’s based on a fantastic prompt table.
Allen's module, which features an ancient immortal, The Gardener, cursing a young adult with undeath, is perfectly Bayish. It takes classical gothic fiction tropes and adapts them to 199X. That's what The Lost Bay RPG is all about. The beliefs and hidden rules of the Bay are those of a grim, low-fantasy world, except instead of being set in a vaguely medieval environment, they are set in 199X, between malls and arcade cabinets. In my opinion, the clash between those two spheres, ancient and modern, makes for interesting narrative opportunities.
LOW-FI DIGITAL MAGIC
I'm particularly intrigued by analog and early digital technologies being seen as portals to the supernatural world. The Scanner Vibe (a playable class in TLB) is the embodiment of that. Hopefully, someone will write a module about digital magic (I promise I won't... go ahead, do it!)
With all my (re)reading of the module, as well as the editing I did for the actual play, I’ve found myself inspired to create my own memory crawl, using A Night of Rose Hill’s format. I aim to have a text-only version of it released by the end of the AFIS jam, so look forward to that!
This module, tentatively titled The Mass, is also highly influenced by guided solo modules by
like the excellent Return to Star Station, or the upcoming Orgy of the Blood Leeches, a body horror-filled, investigative adventure, with a Twin Peaks flavored version of Mothership. Yep, that's exactly my jam.While I was working on this new module of mine, I was binging Master Boot Recordz’s YouTube channel (big up to Poet117 for sharing it in our lovely server), which features a series of computer metal tracks and ciphers. If you can crack the code below, which appears in the YT description text, please hit me up, I haven't and that's haunting me
5tR85ErS/uoAPDG+RVtnu+GYHKYSBcoKqeJpdEseywgwKkX8jdKv7RZ5j0nWKuWTPTntXfTw9ARG5hVErCmjjO43fcrF/FIoI3gN2XCZJn8O9UoFlGfOflMfiaTQ5nJ9
This Discord has Ghosts in it, a game by Adam Vass and Will Jobst that we now carry in the store hits the same vibe (yes, we do love games by Good Luck Press). It's a one-of-a-kind live-action game you play in Discord! It's beautiful and has a unique design that has granted it the "Most Innovative” award at the 2021 Indie Game Developer Network’s Indie Groundbreakers. It's deliciously spooky, and I'm mustering up the courage to actually play it!
MALLS
Remember that viral blogpost by Prismatic Wasteland? The one about malls as dungeons?
Without much surprise, malls have become a common trope within the TLB community. From small decrepit strip malls to neighborhood-sized monsters of metal and glass, I've already run and played countless games set in such places.
And so has the jolly team of one of the coolest actual play podcasts: Undercommon Taste. The hosts, Ian Woodworth and James Daley, have released a special Halloween episode, powered by the Lost Bay! Kris, the excellent facilitator, will take you on a hallucinated trip through a cursed half-sunken mall. Trying not to spoil too much here, but it's really tempting. Both the GM and the players, which also includes the natural-born storyteller Danny Mendoza, have poured their magic into this episode. Listening to it felt like watching a slow-burn, tension-building Hallowing movie. Give it a listen, it's highly addictive (in a good way).
(And then come and say hi to those same folks in The Lost Bay Discord server! )
I'm always hungry for tools that can speed up and facilitate dungeon building, and I'm particularly proud of two of them that I've contributed to: the Dungeon Dice Drop Generator and the Campaign Notebook Redux, an OSR fantasy note-taking and dungeon-building zine designed by Perplexing Ruins and (re)published in collaboration with The Lost Bay Studio.
A PERFECT WIFE
Besides being a cool hobby for having fun and getting scared, RPGs can blend with other forms of narration, including commentary on contemporary issues.
Zedeck Siew, the writer behind A Thousand Thousand Islands and To Put Away a Sword (an adventure for EcoMOFOS!!) has blessed us with an amazingly evocative blogpost/draft adventure. While not directly made for The Lost Bay, the vibes match up quite well.
A Perfect Wife, released for Vampire Weekend, is a system-neutral urban horror adventure inspired by Southeast Asian mythology, particularly the legend of the Pontianak. It is also a commentary on refugee policies and patriarchy. It sparks vivid and deep emotions. Just like everything Zedeck writes.
In addition to a disturbing uncanniness, A Perfect Wife has an almost realistic touch— not dissimilar from some of Francisco Lemos's most recent drawings...
Francisco is the illustrator behind FACES, one of the two community-powered zines that are being developed by the TLB crowd right now. They're like mini jams inside the AFIS game jam, and are shaping up to be AWESOME!
With FACES we're building an emergent mini-setting (I just made this up) through a collection of interconnected NPCs. It features a collection of witches, sailors, journalists, and occultists, all dwelling in the humid and salt-coated Waterfront district. I'll talk more about this in a future All Flesh is Surplus recap issue (as a reminder, the jam deadline has been postponed, you still have time to submit something!) For today, I'd like to share one of the portraits. Meet Grace, the witch queen of the Waterfront. She unbelievably looks like a real witch I know, a good friend of my mother. How did Francisco know that?
The other collective project is BLADES (yes, one-word titles are the new hot thing!) The zine will act as an in-game artifact, a notebook of an unknown investigator trying to uncover the secrets behind the Knife Eater, an immortal serial killer, and his blades. It’s illustrated by Scragend and is written by a gang of talented scribes.
To conclude this giant section, here's an excerpt, the Boxcutter, written by Poet117...
Hail Nishtar, Lady of the Endless Hall.
Blessed are the blood-dried corridors of the Hall,
and blessed be the Containers you allow, within each of us.
Avaricious Rathsin, Keeper of Self-storage,
clean our open wounds,
and let that which is stored within be available in our need. Let it be.
GIMME THE GOOD STUFF
Zines mentioned in this issue
This Discord has Ghosts in It
Have you ever wanted to play as a digital ghost, haunting a decrepit discord server? Or maybe you’d rather be an investigator, trying their hardest to unravel the mysteries of this possessed chatroom. In This Discord has Ghosts in It you can do both. Investigators can only communicate over voice chat, as if through walkie-talkies, while ghosts can only text, filling channels with fearsome words, images, audio, and video.
Investigators explore the rooms of a haunted house, gathering clues and encountering hints of the supernatural. Ghosts track these interlopers as they progress, creating more rooms and transforming the space into a labyrinthine maze.
It all culminates in a tense seance, where all players reveal their character’s closest held secrets, both living and dead alike...
Check out This Discord Has Ghosts in It now, newly added to The Lost Bay Store!
A Night on Rose Hill
A one player (duet or solo) post-mortem adventure. You’ve been given a second life, but can you get out of the graveyard without losing it again? Start this graveyard adventure after a PC dies or as an intro adventure for a new character. Get your chance to resurrect A Night on Rose Hill.
EcoMOFOS!! adventure bundle
A collection of booklets for ECO MOFOS!!
To Put Away A Sword is a stellar offering for 12 pages of point crawl. Absolute bang for your buck, and you get to see Siew writing sci fi with a post-apocalyptic religious undertone. - Idle Cartulary on the Playful Void blog
Campaign Notebook Redux
Check out the reprints of Perplexing Ruins’ system-agnostic Campaign Notebook on the Lost Bay Studio webstore, printed on recycled paper for all your fantasy adventure needs. This zine is front- and back-loaded with d8 tables of encounters, loot, terrain, NPCs, settlements, wilderness locations, dungeon themes, dungeon tiles and more. Why? To fill hex maps, dungeon grids, Settlements, NPCs and build a whole fantasy adventure campaign. Perfect for GMs, solo gamers and adventure writing inspiration, grab yours now!
That's all we’ve got for today!
(TBH, I can’t write any longer cuz I’m smelling the shroom risotto that my flatmate is cooking, it’s so distracting)
Have a great Sunday,
Iko, Wren the Forrester, Chris Airiau