On Saturday, November 22nd I was invited to run a StoryCards event at Gamer's Haven in Hibbing, Minnesota. The players selected the Dramatic mood. We drew three genre cards and selected Show Biz and Ancient Evil. We decided that the game was centered around a vaudeville theater (the Bijou) in the bad part of an unspecified town in the early 20th century, at about the time that movies were coming in and depriving such places of business. Under the circumstances a realistic power level seemed appropriate. I gave a quick description of the basic StoryCards feat mechanics and went to another table to come up with something suitably dramatic. By the time I'd finished, the players had come up with the following characters:

* Martin (played by my buddy Lawrence), who had inherited the Bijou theater after his time as a war vet, and sunk all his money into it.
* Bertram (played by Pastor Doug, who organized the event), the stage manager, who was concerned about his brother who had disappeared on an archaeological dig in Egypt.
* Thomas James VanHassen (played by Doug's son Josh), a professional stage magician who, under stress, would involuntarily perform a little bit of real magic: he'd make objects vanish.
* Vinny (played by Spike, the manager of Gamer's Haven), a patron of the Bijou who was also a con man with a soft spot for downtrodden kids.
* Alequetous Ravensworth (played by Adam), a puppeteer applying for a job at the Bijou, who was only 28 but appeared to be an old man, because he had channeled his life force into attempts to reanimate the body of his dead fiancee, which he kept in the bottom drawer of his puppet theater cart.
* The Sexy Mark, the Bijou's sword-dancing sword-swallower and resident ladies' man.
* Fred (played by someone who walked in just as we were starting the adventure), a random theater patron whose only distinction from a typical resident of the nameless town was his ability to draw two fortune cards at the beginning of each scene.

The adventure began with Fred and Vinny in the audience, Mark on stage, Aleq waiting in the wings for his chance to audition before Martin and/or Bertram, Thomas waiting his turn to go on, Bertram back stage, and Martin fixing a toilet. Mark was in the middle of his sword-swallowing act when an earthquake shook the theater. Vinny and his teenage friends Bob and Tom ran for the lobby exit, but the balcony collapsed. Vinny was spared because he tripped over a boot in the aisle, and a cleverly played fortune card preserved the support beam directly over his head, but we never determined if Bob or Tom made it out alive or not: the players had their own troubles. While Mark and Fred and Vinny argued over who owned the boot, Martin discovered that the only other exit, backstage, was blocked with rubble from the building next door. The only way out was a hole in the backstage floor. Armed with two hurricane lamps and a pistol from Martin's office and Mark's sword, they descended into the dark.

The hole led into a tunnel that extended in two directions: toward the street above and toward the overgrown lot behind the Bijou. The walls looked as if they had been burrowed through rubble, and the floor was of mosaic tile. Martin remembered that there had been a church on the site before the Bijou was built, and the back lot used to be the churchyard. They set off in that direction through the narrow tunnel, Aleq wheeling the cart that he refused to leave behind. The tunnel went through an archway, where it turned to hardpacked earth and branched into three directions. Martin and Thomas started toward the left branch when a thing leaped at them, a thing with gray skin, batlike ears, fangs, dirty claws, and huge black eyes that glittered red in the lamplight. The thing fell short when another clever fortune card indicated that it had a chain around its neck. Bertram recognized the creature as a ghoul, a foul creature that fed on human flesh. Martin shot the thing and it fled down the left tunnel to the end of its tether. Martin and Thomas pursued.

While this was going on, Vinny looked back to see that another ghoul was standing under the hole they'd descended, tugging at the rope. He advanced upon it with his St. Christopher medal held high, chanting the Lord's Prayer, and it fell back, confused. The Sexy Mark attacked with his sword and lopped off its left arm, but it raked him with the filthy claws on its right hand and he fell to the ground. Fred whacked it with a cane, and Mark eventually killed it. They were very concerned about what Mark's wound might do to him, so Vinny climbed back up the rope to get a bottle of whisky from Martin's office, and used this as an excuse to grab the Bijou's cash box and hide it out in the theater seats so he could recover it himself. He was using the whisky to treat Mark's wounds when Marin and Thomas returned from the lefthand branch.

Bertram and Aleq meanwhile investigated the middle branch and soon found the remains of a smashed coffin on the floor. Continuing on with difficulty, as Aleq wrestled his cart past the obstacle, they found a crypt-like room with stairs leading up. In the center of the room was a golden, jewel-encrusted goblet, filled with some dark fluid and surrounded by five lit black candles. A cloud of mist rose from the cup as the rest of the party caught up, and coallesced into a goatlike demon.

While the others pondered how to banish the thing, Aleq tried negotiating with the demon to bring his fiancee back to life. At this point, due to Thomas's increasing nervousness, one of the five candles vanished. "Free at last!" the creature roared. There was a flurry of activity involving throwing a lamp at the thing and firing Martin's pistol, until Martin said a prayer and struck the edge of the goblet with his St. Christopher medal. The goblet rang like a bell and then vaporized, and the demon vanished. The party climbed up the stairs and emerged through a hidden trap door into an overgrown tomb, where a single black candle burned. They had escaped.

This was the darkest StoryCards adventure I'd ever run, and I had some concerns about that, but it went fine. Everyone had a good time as far as I could tell, and each of them contributed something to the story. I had something of a backstory in which the mayor of Nameless City had summoned the demon a century ago to give him power and longevity, and he did this in the crypt of the church to seek protection from the holy ground, but instead defiled the place and ensured its downfall. Further investigation would have revealed that the altar was cracked, and the party would have found a bell and a prayer book to help them banish the demon. But the party took the tunnel out of the church instead of further in, and time pressure required me to rearrange things a bit. It didn't really matter; I think the encounters with the ghouls and the demon were engaging enough in their own right that the players didn't really much care how they came to be in the place, and they were concerned only with getting out alive: something worth remembering for future adventures.

Excellent summary of our wonderful game session. This was truly a delight with my only regret being that I had to bow out and work on other stuff near the end. Well run. Thanks.

BTW, Mark was played by Allen, a newcomer to Gamers Haven, and Fred by Dan, an 'oldtimer' who is slowing learning how to play rpgs in character! They did well.