New Investigative Horror Scenario

I finished the text for Alpha Blue last week.  Glynn is almost finished doing the layout.  [Get your interview questions submitted now, before it's released!]

I had last Saturday free for roleplaying but didn't know what to run.  These days I only get to GM about twice a month.  So, it makes sense that I would come up with a little something and use my upcoming session as a sort of preliminary playtest.

There were so many different genres, products, systems, and worlds to choose from, but I ended up deciding on The Outer Presence.  Partly due to a conversation I had with +Brandon Watkins months ago about reptile people within the hollow earth and my desire for a humorous ripoff of Delta Green.

The system for The Outer Presence takes place in our modern world around the 1970's, investigating weird and horrifying stuff.  However, I envision the game to be more like The Tomorrow People or Jon Pertwee era Doctor Who than Call of Cthulhu - even though Lovecraft will always be a huge influence on my writing.

Character creation was short and sweet, providing a balanced group of a-holes, wack-jobs, and addicts.

The scenario I concocted contains reptoids disguised as humans (did some research on David Icke and his conspiracy theories), time travel to the far future, shoggoth-like nastiness, and an agency that monitors all the crazy stuff influencing our world, its people and culture.

All I had was a couple dozen bullet points.  So, it was short, and there was quite a bit of improvisation on my part.  Some things didn't fit as neatly into the scenario box as I had anticipated.  But the players were excellent, driving the play forward and occasionally making cool suggestions - like the translucent strands hanging from the ceiling - having them worm their way into the pilot's orifices was a stroke of genius.  I believe my friend, +Tim Virnig came up with that one.

Anyways, it was a good time.  TheRPGpundit recently reviewed How to Game Master like a Fucking Boss.  In my opinion, he was dead wrong about the d100 table of colors.  That happened to be the only random table I rolled on all session.  The non-human PC (I sort of pictured him looking like 70's David Bowie) was shot during the adventure and his blood turned out to be mauve.  Mauve, damn it!  That's an important detail.

All ended well.  The PCs were even asked to join a secret organization who watches the watchers, none other than Theta Chartreuse!

When I'm finished with the scenario, it should have enough meat on its bones to support about 6 hours of play.  If it's somewhere between 10 - 20 pages, it'll probably just be a PDF.  If it spirals out of control into something larger, there will be a print version available this Spring.

Thanks for reading!

VS

p.s.  Almost forgot... here's my favorite quote of the session, "As you manhandle her through the portal, her heaving reptoid bosom is exposed."