It's the season for Chill, and I have a problem.

I love running Chill, and I have a group of wonderful players.  Until I took a hiatus a month ago, we'd been running weekly for a couple of years.  I tend to long, involved scenarios deeply linked into the backgrounds of the characters.  That made for a lot of good play, but Real Life has reared its monstrous head.  Odds are good that no more than 3 of my six players will be able to make any given week night session, which ends up limiting my story options.  What do I do if I've centered the story around a character who can't make it that week - or for several weeks?

I don't want to replace the players who can't make it often - they're great players, they just have Real Life conflicts.  I want to make my game more "absence friendly" without losing the personal connection that I feel is so important in a horror game.

I'd like to go to a more episodic approach (a la Supernatural, Friday the 13th the Series or Poltergeist: the Legacy), but I'm kinda stalled.  I don't want to do tired old stuff - these folks are all pretty well mired in the horror genre.  I'd like to string the episodic events into arcs so that eventually they'd look at them an realize that this and this and OMG THAT all apply to their personal arcs, and it's time to batten down the hatches.

So I turn to you, my fellow evil geniuses, for a burst of ideas for short (3-4 hr) torture sessions...er... games.

Edit: Game blogs are available at: www.chillrpg.net/chilldetroit

There's nothing so sweet as fan mail from your players. I got this from Phil, one of the players in my weekly Chill game, after the big finale to a current story line, involving an NPC they all like who was infected with lycanthropy.

Also, just wanted to say again how absolutely great the game was Wednesday night. The imagery you put in my head was just great and the sound effects were cool as all get out. You really did have me thinking we were looking at a possible TPK or at least running for our lives. I was trying to figure out if CHILL had rules for chase sequences. (i.e.- Can a werewolf/ghul run fast enough to catch a V-8 Chevy pickup at full highway speeds? ) Got interrupted about halfway through relating the story to the Friday night crew and the GM was literally leaning across the table asking "what happened next?" when the interruption stopped. The imagery of the ghul melting off his own skeleton even as he attacked got lots of comments.

Again, way to go Ms. Chill Mistress. It's not easy to inspire people to acts of heroism (Tony sacrificing himself) and desperation (Justin one second away from shooting Aiden-wolf when he got loose) in the same game session within minutes of each other.

I love these guys. We make role playing magic together.

I run modern horror - it's my best thing.  As a result, I get inspiration from the oddest places, most of them on the web. In my opinion, horror is most effective when the world the characters inhabit is almost like the world the players inhabit. Characters are constructs -- there's no way to scare them.  Players, on the other hand, have nice little hot buttons all over them.  In my quest to provide an extra-scary experience, I find I am interested in the strangest things -- how far you can fall without dying, for example. (link courtesy of **Dave)

I'm running a playtest group for the newest version of the Chill game, and last night we finally began play.  (All of our sessions to this point have revolved around dissecting the rules.)  We're in Michigan, so I decided to locate them in Detroit (inspired, in part, by the excellent Mythic Detroit site).  Naturally, the playtest is under NDA, so I won't go into details, but I will say that one of the antagonists I have to work with (currently) is the zombie. Add to that my recent purchase of The Zombie Survival Guide (warning, site is Flash intensive and noisy) and it was a scenario just waiting to happen.

The characters each received a text message on their cell phones (or some other form of brief message) giving them an address in downtown Detroit on the Cass Corridor (bad, but recovering, neighborhood) and a time - 6 pm.  They arrived, introduced themselves and broke into the building, a burned out, boarded up store with a surprisingly sturdy set of iron bars on doors and windows.  Inside they found it bare-bones but clean and minimally repaired, and on the table a padded envelope containing a copy of The Zombie Survival Guide with a Post-it note(tm) on the cover and a map inside.  The note said: "Find out if there is any truth to this, and if there really is an infestation.  Tonight."  The map directs them to a nearby abandoned and burned-out area that may have at one time held a graveyard.

:: chuckle ::

Next time, it's ZOMBIE TIME!