This episode, Keepers Murph & Bridgett riff on single location horror scenario ideas!

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Bridgett’s Pet Pick Shout Out

“Okay, listen. It’s worth going to our show notes to see Jasper, doggo of friend and fan of the show, FredKiesche. I recognize that it’s not winter, but you gotta see the look on this dog’s face as it launches itself through the snow. It’s the pick me up you need today, promise!”

Main Topic — Single location horror scenarios

• Persons in house/apartment/room
• Persons in vehicle
• Locked-Room Mysteries

1. Class struggle in the vein of Upstairs, Downstairs but downstairs hears the prep, staging, production, fallout, and eventual aftermath of the event upstairs. The event could be the KiY or a ritual, mass murder, etc. Might be a staff only game of Regency, set entirely within the kitchens. (Sort of inspired by Miss Julie.) Players would have to defend against their mutated “Betters” who are storming downstairs to eat, pray, and be merry.

2. Guests are invited to a house party in a friend of a friend’s apartment. Their friend never shows up, and a few guests seemingly go missing. There could be some fatally locked room, akin to Bluebeard, but their friend is actually within the trunk/coffee table at the center of the living room (a la Hitchcock’s Rope). 

3. A group of friends witness something horrible and are seen by the perpetrator, take a spin on Rear Window and have it based across the street from the original crime, with a single bad guy hell bent on murder, but a Charm skill that is astronomical. 

4. Take a page from Coherence and have a group of friends get together while Miller’s Comet streaks by overhead. There is an exact replica of their house next door, populated with an exact replica of themselves as well. Unbeknownst to the players, one of the guests arrives late and stumbles into the wrong house, their house. Things go even further sideways when a third house is revealed to have been there in the opposite direction the entire time.. By the end no one should be able to determine which house is real nor who is the original version of themselves.

5. A one-shot maybe solo game, where the player(s) are part of a boiler room, akin to Glengarry Glen Ross even with a sadistic Alec Baldwin-esque boss. But the player(s) have to cold call a list of senior citizens and get them to send you money, in order to stay alive. Every dollar you gain is another second to live. After the first few calls, they find out that they can exchange a life for a life, giving the player(s) a moral quandary of whether they can help cause an old person’s death in order for them to live.

6. A pastiche of various scenarios done for a single or pair of players that is similar to Four Rooms. Each room would be a small self-contained scene that puts the player(s), the hotel staff, in dangerous and morally fraught situations. Could just mine other scenarios for single good scenes. But they are entirely separate from one another, once the hotel room door opens, it starts, and doesn’t stop until they leave the room. So it would have to be punchy and fast.

7. Paranormal investigators arrive to investigate the goings on in room 1408 of a downtown hotel. From the moment that they enter the room they are presented with an alternate reality. Everytime they attempt to leave the room, the scene within changes and they are just entering it again. Could actually merge with above…
8. Much like the film Exam, the players are all set in a closed room to take a test to see who will become the next CEO of a global corp. They are given three rules:
   1. not talk to the invigilator or the armed guard
   2. not spoil their paper 
   3. and stay in the room

The paper they are given is blank. They are given some tasks that allow them to work together at first, but then it is a free-for-all of violence as it turns into Thunderdome for the office-set.

9. Solo game, or maybe a GM +1, on a small spaceship where the player is alone floating in space amidst the shipwreck. They have one sealed chamber and a Jenga tower’s worth of Oxygen. Every action requires a brick to be moved in addition to skill checks with dice. Think of the beginning of The Stars My Destination by Bester mixed with Bissette’s The Wretched. Roll a 1d6 to see how many actions you have to do to stay alive today, each action requires a pull on the tower. They start with 10 tokens, each time they roll a nat 6 for the day, they remove a token, when they are out of tokens, they are rescued. A nat 6 also means that they don’t have to pull from the tower. (Could be modified to a single person on a sailboat a lá All is Lost, etc. where the tower = energy) I realize now that I am just bastardizing The Wretched, so maybe just play that instead?

The Wretched by Chris Bissette

Dockside Dogs by Paul Fricker

Full Fathom Five by Paul Fricker