A Quick 4-Pack of Mini-Reviews

This month, instead of our regularly scheduled Open Table Shadowdark game, we decided to change things up and – with the regular players’ consent – run 4 spooky adventures in the Cypher System. We’re huge fans of the system, but character creation and sheets are complex enough that using it for an Open Table game was more challenging than we were prepared to deal with, given our status a year ago with the venue. We chose Shadowdark instead to tie into a more D&D familiarity. However, in the past year the venue has showcased quite a few indie RPGs, and the community has come to expect, and be comfortable with, more than just D&D.

The obvious first choice for us, without hesitation, was to immediately pull up Underground Oracle’s Cypher Shorts – Horror Vol. 1. The Tomb of the Frostfire King immediately caught our eye, but having run Shadowdark for a year straight, we wanted to branch out in genre a bit first. We’ve also found that switching genres away from the familiar (in this case, fantasy) is a little smoother for introducing the Cypher System. Players don’t have as many baked-in assumptions. So instead we quickly turned to UO’s Sci-fi Shorts Vol 1. When we saw Pit Stop, we knew we had the right adventure.

Pit Stop, or Out of Gas

We retitled it to “Out of Gas” as a little Firefly nod, though it went unnoticed.
Pit Stop: The characters have docked at a remote spaceport and are far too low on resources to pass it up, no matter how concerned they might be about its eerie silence. Can the crew get refueled and get out alive before it’s too late?
This was a very fun and very well received riff on Aliens. We leaned in hard on the skittering in the walls, the body horror of the wormy larva, and the general unease of the nearly-empty space station. During the desperate escape, one character bravely sacrificed themselves (they were infected anyway), holding off a horde of aliens as the rest of the crew rocketed away…only to silently pound on the airlock screaming as they saw alien eggs clinging to the outside of the retreating ship. A perfect ending to a horror one-shot. Five thumbs up.

After this one, we thought about moving back to fantasy, but after a throwaway comment (“Who knows what I’ll run next, maybe more sci-fi, maybe cavemen! Anything is possible!”), our brain began to obsess a little on the cavemen idea. We stole (great artists steal) a simple concept and ran with it, creating…

The Desperate Hunt

We stuck with the Alien/Predator theme and had the party investigating a hunting camp that was strangely deserted. Were they tracking an animal? A rival tribe? Perhaps a supernatural demon? Eventually it becomes clear that their prey was an alien from a crashed spaceship – vastly superior in technology, but not in numbers. A desperate fight was had inside its biomechanical ship, and the characters prevailed. The players had a really good time with this one. We were hoping it would have been a little more challenging and dangerous, but the eerie sense of being watched, and hunted, came through.

If you like, we offer notes and pre-gen characters for The Desperate Hunt – free of charge, do with it what you will.

It was at this point we turned to…

Tomb of the Frostfire King

The Tomb of The Frostfire King: In this trad fantasy short, the characters explore the ruins of the legendary Frostfire King. Will they gain the treasure and glory they seek within his forgotten halls or fall prey to the same curse that befell the frozen monarch?
Let us say up front – we really love the work Underground Oracle puts out. We love the people, we love their attitude, we love their passion. It is unfortunate that this one fell a bit flat. Now, there are a number of reasons why – our GMing has to take the most blame, of course, but we did find some parts of this one a little tough to work out. The rooms/scenes did not have a logical flow that we could discern, and found it very confusing to try and map out for the players. Even a rudimentary chart-map would have helped. The adventure is very much an undead dungeon crawl, and the players were hoping for a little more investigation and negotiation opportunity. Treasure, being a one-shot, just wasn’t much of a draw. On our side, we were feeling a little low-energy that night, and the players may have been too. Our prep notes had become a tangled mess of spaghetti, and we spent too long trying to untangle them. As such, the pre-gen characters we created really didn’t have the right mix of abilities to truly interact with the adventure. A lot of useless words on the character sheet. In the end, it just didn’t go well. I feel bad about that – it’s not a bad adventure, it just didn’t do what we all wanted it to do – and our GM performance may have contributed to the dull thud. Three thumbs up.

After that, one player requested vampires. Normally, we’re not big vampire fans…but who are we to deny the people what they want? We really wanted a banger adventure to close out the month, so we sorta stirred the ol’ brain pot, thought about what we’d learned so far, and built out…

FEED

This started from trying to figure out a Last Man on Earth/I Am Legend vibe, but it ended up going down a different route. It ended up being a more Black Mirror meets Blade or The Strain. (Not being avid horror fans – we’ve never seen The Strain…but it sounds similar-ish?) The players are group investigating a series of serial murders, when it slowly becomes clear that the murder isn’t just some weirdo – but an actual vampire. And there’s a secret sub-society of them out there on a social media app called “FEED”. This was a fun one to run, the players really enjoyed it, but the biggest flaw was that we loaded up about 3 hours of content…and really only had about 2 hours for our session. There was a bit of a rush through the ending and the twist (learning from that great Pit Stop twist!), but overall a huge success. We may tweak some of the secrets and run it again with more time or different pacing.

If you like, we offer notes and pre-gen characters for FEED – free of charge, do with it what you will.

So there you have it – four spooky Cypher System adventures for your enjoyment. Hope your Halloween was as good as ours!