RPGaDay 2023, Day 17

Funny thing is, I don't remember laughing ...

There was a game I ran, once. It was modern.

The player characters were all investigators. It was one of those cosmic horror stories. An old friend of theirs had died in his apartment under mysterious circumstances. The party leader’s friend had sent the party leader a bunch of letters, indicating something weird going down, but he never replied after his final letter.

So here’s what went down.

The party leader went on his own, tried to climb up the fire escape, fumbled, fell into the dumpster below. He fumbled his Stealth check, and that caught the attention of a cop outside the brownstone.

The cop sees the party leader trying to run away. He gives the leader one warning, aims a shotgun. It’s loaded with salt, but he doesn’t tell the leader.

The party leader makes one more fumble, for Evade.

The cop opens fire. I roll the dice right in front of the screen, in plain sight. Critical success. Maximum damage. I roll his hit location - his legs.

Good news was, this damage was not enough to create a serious wound. Bad news was, the shock knocked the party leader over, and the cop made an arrest.

So, the party leader is in the hospital, face down on a hospital bed, cuffs, bare backside up in the air.

The cops go to the party leader’s house, and there is where they meet all of his friends.

And their weapons.

They didn’t buy their explanation that they were hunting sanity-shredding cosmic horrors from beyond space and time, let’s just put it at that.

So, party leader heading for a trial with his butt in a sling, his friends being committed to a psychiatric hospital … and the bad guys walked in and out of the dead Prof’s offices and took what they needed. They finished their ritual and the good guys never even got off their starting blocks.

I told the players that the bad guys had brought forward the beginning of the end of the world to some point in the early 21st century.

I rolled the dice at random, and the date of the start of Armageddon was September 11, 2001. I kid you not. That was the day that the dice told me that things would start to go to shit …