TWBWDH: The Florida Incident & Leeches in West Virginia

Two blog posts in a day!?  Ludicrous!  But I have a session backlog from the Colt Regan game that Eric is running for Brandie, Robert, and I, an I've decided I want to chronicle it, because it's really fun and pulpy, and I need to write more.  I might eventually, given the mental fortitude, chronicle some of the other games we've been playing too, but no promises.

When we last left,..those guys, Mark the Telepath, Lenny the Vampire, and Anne the Cryokinetic wer in a bunker underground accepting a job offer to investigate really weird supernatural stuff from a blonde dude who Mark found out was a were-lizard, two incubi, and a dead gun.  Think more X-files, less Supernatural.  We'd said yes, and started the episode with Mark and Lenny getting to know Anne a bit more by them snarking about her with telepathy, forgetting about telepathy and mouthing things to each other in her plain view, then remembering and switching back to telepathy.  The incubus doctor then proceeded to hit on all of us, but especially the boys, Anne to mention that they were a couple, then the boys to break that notion by saying they were just bros.  The incubus doctor left it completely clear that he'd sleep with either of them, and we let it slide.

This is the combined home, fratpad, and means of transportation for two of our intrepid heroes.

The boys retired to the Winnebago for the night, and Brandie (playing Anne) missed perfect moments for Frozen references when Apocalypse Creed asked her if she wanted a blanket.  She said she doesn't get cold.  A real cryokinetic would have said that "the cold doesn't bother me anyways."  I reminded her of this.  The next morning, Anne got thirsty watching our host in a pair of form revealing sweatpants, microwaved her coffee after it got cold, and got a job for us delivering a package to a recluse in West Virginia.  Whether the person just didn't like people or was a were-spider was left unclear in the instructions.  This is an important distinction in Colt Reagan.  

Also of note, there was a first reference to what Lenny and Mark refer to only as "the Florida Incident."  We have no clue what happened in Florida, but it's fun to refer to then tell Anne "it's too long a story right now," every time something really random happens.  At this stage, the mention was about giant tarantulas.  

Less traumatizing than the Florida Incident, evidently...

Mark put on pants, Lenny hopped into the driver's seat of the Winnebago, and we set off to West Virginia.  Lenny played Top 40 radio to make Anne think he was normal and cover up the goth dweeb-ness that is integral to his soul and died a little more inside.  Then we got hideously lost in the back woods of West Virginia.  Then we started running low on gas.  Y'know, classic horror stuff.  Eric was coming through in spades.  

As we reached a point where we couldn't even turn back and make it to the last gas station any more, we found a "town."  By "town," Eric meant a few buildings around the road that began and ended within a few blocks of each other.  Luckily, there was a building that had a gas pump out front, and we pulled in.  Since it was daylight, Mark hopped out to discover that even though it was only 6PM, the gas station was closed.  There was a light on in the attached house, and Mark started knocking annoyedly on the door.  Anne hopped out and mentioned that worst case scenario we could just sleep in the Winnebago and wait for them to open.  An old woman in a bathrobe yelled from across the street that the whole town closes at 5PM and that the station owner sleeps in "one of them sensory deprivation tanks 'cause he got a nasty temper on him and it calms him down."  Y'know, because that's not creepy as fuck.  Also, Mark noticed that there were leeches all over the walls of the building and accepted that he was going to die here.

The old lady also said that there was a diner down the road that was open "real late until abouts nine o'clock."  Anne and Mark left Lenny to his videogames and walked down the road to the diner.  Anne mentioned that she was worried about leaving the Winnebago to which Mark replied, "why?  There's a fucking vampire in it."  Lenny complained about lack of cellular signal to himself.  

More or less what we were in front of.

The bar had three patrons and a creepy proprietor who hit on Anne.  Mark ordered a "cheez brgr with fixns" off the menu and Anne ordered some "frys" and a shot of whiskey.  We sat in a booth, and Mark decided to try to use his telepathy and psychokinesis on the place to figure out why it all felt so wrong.  Again, I thanked my fore-planning that I had a high focus check.  The room was full of non-sentient or maybe sentient psychometric static and might have had seven walls where there should have been four, and he turned his spidey senses off before he overloaded.  We decided to get the food to go and high tailed it back to the Winnebago.  

Meanwhile, Lenny had found a leech on his foot.  When throwing it outside, he felt something watching him, and decided to ignore it and do laundry and listen to VNV Nation to drown out his sudden fear of being alone.  We came back to the Winnebago to Lenny panicking slightly, and decided to just drive as far as we could, hope we could get cell service, call AAA, hope they sent enough cars to satiate the evil town and let one get through to us in a couple weeks.  

However, because the Colt Regan RPG is built to encourage fun, Robert had taken the "lemon" flaw when he had purchased the Winnebago, and it decided to not start.  Panick started setting in, and even though it was dusk, Lenny decided to go outside and pop the hood to fix the engine so that we didn't have to die by spending a night in the creeptastic town.  Anne shut herself in the Winnebago, Lenny discovered that the engine was covered in leeches, and Mark held a rainbow beach umbrella (the cool black one met its end in The Florida Incident) so that Lenny didn't get sunburn and chainsmoked.  

I did make the comment that leeches suck a few times during this session...

About the time Lenny had figured out the engine, he felt that he was being watched again, bundled us all into the Winnebago again, and we took off.  Mark heated up a plastic travel mug of AB+ for Lenny to calm him down (the mug had a picture of a puppy and a kitten and said "best buds"). As the gas gauge started reading completely empty, we saw the lights of a town up ahead, and coasted up to an all too familiar gas station.  After a brief argument over whether we had turned enough to go in a big circle (we hadn't), we coasted about a mile out of town and hunkered down to wait for daylight.  

Out solitude didn't last long.  Something slammed into the side of the Winnebago and started trying to flip it, knocking Mark over, and causing Lenny to go full on game face and shooting out of the bus in a blink, fangs and teeth out and full of vampiric rage.  This impressive fury was undermined, however, as his voice cracked when he screamed "Stop hurting my Winnebago!"  Outside was a creepy, super strong redneck doing his damndest to flip our vehicle.  The man took a swing at Lenny, and Lenny, tired of this shit, eviscerated him with one claw swipe.

Now, Vampires in Colt Regan, especially with many of the traits that Lenny has, are murder machines.  However, all the claws and vampiric strength that Lenny could muster don't do much against a meat sack full of leeches.  Luckily, Anne used her cryokinesis to freeze it in a block of ice, buying us a few minutes.  

Cryokinetics: keeping a cool head since forever.

We tried texting our employer, but signal was not awesome, and he was really far away, and at the rate we were going, we weren't going to survive the night.  In our rearview, we saw the lights of a truck approaching, and settled in for another fight.  Two more rednecks (one being the bartender from earlier) got out, one had an axe, and they started pounding on the door of the Winnebago.  This is when Mark yet again proved that he is the kind of white person who dies in horror movies and decided to use his telepathy on the man.  

After being mentally blasted with non-euclydian geometry and managing to pull away with a splitting headache and his sanity still intact, one of the men smashed through the window.  Lenny full on vamp raged and ripped the man's throat out with his teeth.  He ate a mouthful of leeches and got blood back, which was gross, and then Anne went full on Bobby Drake and shredded both of our assailants with razor sharp icy wind.  Cryokinetics are useful and stuff.  

Lenny, still pissed that his Winnebago was damaged, decided that he was going to take the fight to the town.  There was a touching broment where he handed the keys to the truck the leech people had driven up in to Mark and told him to get as far away as possible and Mark flailed to try to find a way to take his best bro with him.  "The second the sun comes up, I'll be ash," Lenny said.  "UV rays go right through a blanket."  Mark decided to go with his friend.  Anne was already in for the ride.  Like movie badasses, they loaded up the pickup with gas cans and drove into town just in time to see a yellow robed figure standing in the middle of the street in front of the gas station.

Minus tentacles.  Plus leeches.

We tried to run it over, but it disappeared then reappeared behind us.  Mark grabbed lighter fluid and a grill lighter, we pulled up to the pump, and all hopped out.  Mark was on gas duty, Anne froze the parking lot and broke into the gas station to find the "on" switch for the pump, and Lenny, still vamped out, stood between us and the yellow robed...thing shuffling at us.  Anne found that the inside of the gas station was full of leeches and turned the place into a snow globe.  Mark started pumping when she found the on switch, and Lenny realized that the thing in yellow was literally a pile of leeches underneath a yellow robe.  We all accepted death.

As Mark filled the first gas can, the thing held a giant leech out to Lenny.  Luckily, Robert rolled well and shook off the compulsion to accept the gift.  He started spraying lighter fluid on the thing then lit it on fire, uttering the suitable awful one liner, "I may not be Mark, but that's a sick burn."  We all groaned.  Brandie felt bad for the leeches, marking the first time ever that someone has felt bad for lighting an avatar of Hastur on fire. 

Driving back to the Winnebago, we saw a person standing next to our ride.  It was a Native American looking portal demon named Mr. Crow who our boss had called in a favor to get us out of dodge.  He opened up a portal to his garage in Wyoming.  We spent the night, his wife fed us, and Mr. Crow fixed the Winnebago up.  The next day, we wished Mr. Crow farewell and drove back to West Virginia using normal roads to finish our task.

We dropped off the package for a reclusive were-mosquito on the run from Los Chupacabras, a Mexican gang of were-mosquitos, and returned back to home base for our next mission ending that night's session.  

The World's Best Worst Demon Hunters

Hi everyone.  It's been a hot minute since I updated.  Truth is, I've been busy, unmotivated, and lazy, but I have been playing some cool games with a bunch of fantastic people, and decided to at least somewhat revive the old blog so that I could share neat shit on the internet again.  I've been lucky enough to have a steady group with three other fantastic people who share much of the same opinions on what makes roleplaying awesome as i do.  They also have a homebrew system created by the excellent Eric J. Chucci and The Boy (Robert to the uninitiated). It is called Colt Regan which is based on the books that Eric J. Chucci wrote.  Those books are incidentally the Colt Reagan series, which can be found on Amazon.  If you like pulpy modern horror/fantasy, then they're a good read. They're the book version of if Die Hard crossed over to True Blood with some of Buffy: the Vampire Slayer's pithy fun added in and a mythology that rivals White Wolf's Old World of Darkness.

 /shamelessfriendplug.

Hypnoblogger says buy now and give a cool dude enough money to buy some Taco Bell or something.

Now, when I started playing with Eric, Robert, and Eric's lovely wife and my good friend, Brandie, Eric and Robert were testing the system limits to eventually release it as a book.  We played a bunch of not Colt Reganverse stuff, like in space and a parallel Colt Reganverse and D&D 5th edition.  Additionally, Eric had DM (Demon Master, suck it Wizards)-ed himself out of Colt for a while, but recently, he decided to run a game in the Colt-verse for us.  I was excited.  Mostly because Eric is a great DM, and I love modern supernatural horror/fantasy.  He also promised cryptids and horror stuff which are my faves.

The Colt-verse is basically the modern world, but there's supernatural stuff that is widely known.  Vampires have public representation, Therianthropes are widely known about and walk among us, many humans have developed kinesises (so they can like throw things with their mind and raise the dead), and demons travel back and forth from the various outside places they live and chill on Earth for a while.  It's not beyond uncommon for the bartender to have horns and a tail and the server to have fangs.  People can get "hunting licenses" to be bounty hunters and kill rouge supernatural things, but a lot of the hunters are supernaturals as well.  It's a blast.  I'm not 100% sure on everything, because I'm a bad friend and haven't read all of the books yet because of craziness at work, but I've gotten a lot of the down low from Eric and Robert.

Incidentally, their homebrew system is D12 based and is actually really good and easy to use.

I made a character named Mark.  Mark is a nice upper middle class guy from upstate New York who happens to be a Telepath.  He can read surface thoughts, talk in people's brains, and also has a bunch of psychometric powers so that when he touches stuff he can tell the item/person's history.  He also can share sensations, so he can make people feel like they've been shot and stuff.  It's cool, he wears gloves so that he doesn't get TMI.  Mark went to medical school and turned to stealing pain meds to deaden the psychometric sensations he got from patients.  Then he was found out, barred from practicing medicine, went to rehab, was disowned by his waspish family, and currently lives in a Winnebago with his friend, Lenny.

Lenny is a vampire played by Robert.  He and Mark were roommates in college back when Lenny was a human and an unbearable little whiny goth kid.  Despite this, Lenny and Mark became (un)lifelong bros. When Mark was doing his internships, Lenny met a vampire chick named Selina (or something like that), convinced her to turn him, then she dumped him causing (un)lifelong emotional damage.  Mostly now he lives in his Winnebago, drinks blood bags, and plays videogames, and pretends he doesn't secretly still wish Tripp pants were cool again.  He's also a sincerely good friend and has taken a broken and flailing Mark under his wing, despite the fact that Mark's a bit of a cocky, snarky asshole.

The two of them decided that to get Lenny off the couch and give Mark something to do, they'd become paranormal investigators and do demon hunting shit.  The story begins with their Winnebago pulling up to what the DM (Eric) described as "do you remember the cabin from Evil Dead?" after answering a Craig's List add that said that "My cabin is evil.  I'll pay you $1000 to make it not evil."

Also, it was night, so it looked more evil.

There was a car that had pulled in a little ahead of them, and a tall, blonde, severe looking woman in a suitjacket had gotten out.  Brandie introduced her character as Annabelle (Anne), a cryokinetic who had started her own supernatural investigation business after her husband left her destitute and living on her parents' couch in the divorce.  Mark finished his cigarette, they decided to split the $1000, because secretly none of them really wanted to go into the house, Anne produced a bundle of sage from her trunk, and Mark, cocksure of his abilities, took off his glove and touched the house to find out how evil it really was.

Fortunately, my Focus check (Colt's version of both Concentration and Will save) is extremely high, because the house was, in fact, evil.  And possibly dead.  Mark decided to keep the gloves on after this.  There had also been a man with wings on his head, a blonde man, and a deer with a human face in the house recently, although they seemed to have left.  Mark conveyed this information, Anne calmly walked through the door.  Mark and Lenny followed, although Lenny was vocal about not liking any of this like the dweeb he is.  Having the lowest willpower, the...house...immediately started screwing with Lenny.  Dark ichor dripped down the walls, although only he could see it, and he decided to go back outside and find the generator to turn on the lights in the house.  As he left, the house whispered to him that he was going to die there.

While Lenny was finding the generator and figuring out how to get it running, Mark and Anne were poking around in every nook and cranny like the white people that always die in horror movies that they are.  Mark decided that there has to be a basement, because there's always a basement and that's where the evil always is, so he started stomping around trying to find a trap door.  Pragmatically, Anne raided the closets, found a cute, old Dr. Pepper t-shirt, and stuffed it into her purse.  By the time Lenny had figured out how to get the generator working and come back inside by tumbling ungracefully through the window, because he'd decided that the door was evil, we'd become certain there was no basement.  Mark announced that the evil must be in the attic, because that was the most logical place left.

To Lenny, and only Lenny, the walls were still bleeding.

They found the hatch to the attic, and Lenny, using his vampire muscles, boosted Mark up to pry it open.  Mark said a brotastic, "thanks, babe."  Their banter and comfortability manhandling each other prompted Anne to ask how long they've been a couple.  Lenny responded that, "they've been together since college," and they left things at that since Mark had gotten the attic door open.  This caused confusion for Anne in the second session, since nobody disillusioned her of her assumption that she was working with a cute, gay, demon hunting couple.  

There was nothing but a creepy mannequin in the attic.  Getting bored of the house, they decided to just purify it by sprinkling around McDonalds salt packets, burning sage, and Lenny performing his goth purifying ritual which basically involved praying under his breath to the power of Bahaus, Siouxie Sioux, and Maynard James Keenan and hoping nobody heard him (in Colt, a big part of exorcisms is just believing something will work hard enough).  Mark felt the spirit roll it's incorporeal eyes and leave the house out of sheer annoyance that these fucking n00bs had managed to stave off it's evil, and he declared it clean.  

Robert Smith, driving out evil spirits for angsty goth kids since we clapped to believe in him.

Anne called the number from the Craigslist add, which was answered by a man saying to meet his associate outside.  We walked outside to find a deer with a human face and backwards knees that started mentally screaming wordless noise at us then introduced herself telepathically as Wishes the Stalker.  Understandably, Anne had her gun drawn, and Lenny had fangs bared.  She then explained that this was a test to find new investigators to be hired for a bigger supernatural investigations group, and she would love it if we went to their home base and accepted the job.  Also, we had to go to the home base to get paid.  She mentally implanted the address in our brains before skipping off into the woods.

Incidentally, the address was in Centralia, Pennsylvania (yes, that Centralia), and we were in Michigan.  One road trip later, and Anne beat the boys to the town by about an hour, because her car is better than Lenny's shitty Winnebago.  She was stopped by the road guard, told that she had to leave her car and walk in and she had to be out by sundown.  She skated off on a path of ice she made with her cryokinetic powers.  An hour later, the boys pulled up, and got to drive in, because Mark told the guard he was dying of cancer and seeing Centralia was on his bucket list.  

Welcome to Centralia, population:our adventurers, like 10 people, and maybe Pyramid Head.

Since it was daylight, Lenny stayed in the Winnebago, and Mark set off into the address, which was an abandoned hotel.  He met Anne in the lobby, where she had waited for them, and a voice came over the intercom for them to get into the elevator and go to the bottom floor.  Because they're the kind of white people that die in horror movies, they hopped into the elevator and pushed the button for the sub-basement.  Luckily, this is a roleplaying game and not a horror movie, because they entered into a nice bunker and met the blonde man that Mark had seen with his psychokinesis at the cabin. He explained that he was forming a supernatural investigation's firm that looked into and cataloged and looked into the weirder aspects of the supernatural world.  He'd pay them pretty well.

They also met an eccentric and brilliant incubus doctor (incubi and succubi have small head wings, so Mark had seen him at the cabin too) who worked with the group.  A second, very manly incubus with chest hair named Apocalypse Creed opened a secret entrance hatch for Lenny so that he could get inside without burning up while Mark snagged a maple creamstick from the office box of doughnuts, and the three decided to join up.  Mark discovered that their new boss had a gun that was actually dead...somehow (thanks telepathy), and we wrapped up the session.