Mayday Plays - 🕳️The Dead Drop | "IL: The Night Floors" | Episode 2
Episode Date: August 25, 2023The Journey into the Night Floors begins with Sergio (Doomed To Repeat) and Vince (Black Project Gaming) discussing the first scenario from Impossible Landscapes. Learn the tips and tricks of making t...his a memorable scenario for your table. Want more of The Dead Drop? We offer over 30 minutes of bonus discussion from each episode on our Patreon. Subscribe at any level to hear the secrets we removed from this public version; patreon.com/maydayrp Make sure to leave your comments and questions in the chat below or message us directly on X (twitter) @surgettrpg and @suddenlyvince A soundtrack for The Night Floors by Black Project Gaming: https://blackprojectgaming.bandcamp.com/album/songs-from-the-night-floors Listen to Black Project Gaming's playthrough of the Night Floors; https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/black-project-gaming/id1448971789?i=1000512497834 We've got merch! https://ko-fi.com/maydayrp (t-shirts and stickers) We started as a podcast! Listen to us @: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mayday-plays/id1537347277 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5vdTgXoqpSpMssSP9Vka3Z?si=73ec867215744a01 Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/mayday-roleplay Here are some of our other socials; Twitter: https://twitter.com/maydayroleplay Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maydayrp/ Website: https://maydayroleplay.com/ Thanks for your support! 00:00 Intro 02:06 Part 1: The Night Floors 03:41 The Briefing 05:53 Meeting Agent Marcus 06:47 The McCallister Building 07:30 How DG Got Involved 08:11 Abigail's Shrine 09:03 Back up NPCs 09:36 Cataloguing clues 10:30 Prioritizing Clues 11:46 The Hidden Microphone 13:00 Thomas Manuel 13:44 Day vs. Night 14:37 Roger Carun 16:44 Michelle Vanfitz 19:45 Louis Post 21:46 Finding the Night Floors 22:17 The Smoking Lounge 22:41 Mark Roark 23:22 Exploring The Night Floors 24:25 The Author JC Linz 25:33 The Night Manager 27:11 No Limits 28:10 Failure = Success 28:33 Have You Seen It? 30:00 A Satisfying Resolution 31:50 +30 minutes of extras available on our patreon 32:05 Tell us about your night floors 32:47 Outro
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hello and welcome back.
My name is Sergio and I am the handler for Mayday's Delta Green campaign doomed to repeat.
With me again is my friend and the handler for Black Project Gaming.
Vince, what's going on, buddy?
Hey, man.
Hey, good to be here.
Glad to have you tuning in, everybody.
If this is your first time on our channel, welcome to you.
We're a part of May Day roleplay.
We play tabletop role playing games like Delta Green, Vampire the Mass Grade,
the 5th edition specifically, Orpheus and a whole lot more.
a lot of great one-shots, a lot of great mini-campaigns, and even more stuff.
Coming at you in the very near future.
Something for everyone.
All of it available in podcast or video format on YouTube and completely free.
So please check it out.
With that being said, we also have a Patreon that is doing very well.
We have accrued such a great little community.
Not to speak for you, Serge, but I love chatting with those folks on our Discord.
No, I hate chatting with those folks.
They're a pleasure.
They're awful.
Yeah, no, they're great.
Yeah, so signing up for as little as what?
I think the lowest tier is like a dollar or is it?
Two dollars.
Two dollars, yep.
For as little as $2, you sign up, you get access to our Discord.
You get to ask us questions, engage with us on a, on a as frequent basis as you'd like.
It's a good time.
A lot of behind the scenes content, too, like some of the videos we're doing here.
Some great behind the scenes content for Caleb's vampire campaign, some one-on-one sessions.
A lot of good stuff.
And for Tales from the Loop, there's a bunch of cool stuff there, too.
And Tales from the Loop, which was absolutely phenomenal.
Great job.
And shout out to Lev on that one.
For those of you who are here, it's probably because you've seen the yellow sign.
Or maybe your case officer has brought you to us.
But I want you to tune in, buckle up, because regardless, you have found the Dead Drop,
a guide to running impossible landscapes.
Vince, in our first episode, you laid out for us what to expect, how to prepare to run this
campaign, but today we are waiting till the sunsets and venturing up into the night floors
with you.
We're discussing for this episode everything a handler needs to know about prepping and running
the first chapter of impossible landscapes, otherwise known as the night floors.
Now, to help generate questions for Vince from the perspective of a handler new to this
campaign, I am reading along for the first time.
So I just finished reading this scenario, and I do have to say I already love it.
It's full of intrigue, paranoia, thrills, everything you want out of a Delta Green scenario, let alone a campaign.
So it's really a great way to start this story.
Now, for those of you watching, if you have questions about the campaign, please submit them to us, and we will try to answer them in the next episode.
We've already got some great questions from our patrons, which we will be reading and replying to in the appropriate episodes.
You can reply in the comments of this video.
You can DM us.
If you want, you could join our Patreon and talk to us in the Discord.
Wink, wink, wink, nudge, however you like.
But finally, as a warning, there are some big time spoilers for this campaign ahead.
So if you are a player in an Impossible Landscapes campaign, you need to go somewhere else.
But if you are interested in running or currently running this campaign, welcome.
Okay, so now that we've got all the big.
business out of the way. Let's get to it.
Absolutely. Vince, set us up.
What is the premise for the night floors and what can we expect?
So just some background, way back in the day, before we had an impossible landscapes campaign
to even discuss, before Delta Green came out with its own version and it was still a supplement
for a call of Cthulhu, the night floors was a standalone scenario. There was no follow-up.
There was no continuation of the story. It was very much its own scenario. But for this,
campaign. As part of Impossible Landscapes, it is very much a brutal, surreal, terrifying introduction
to what you can expect for the whole of the campaign and really a way to hook the players in early
and get them invested and kind of set up a lot of the dominoes that will fall throughout the
course of the rest of the campaign. We start off in the summer of 1995 and August specifically
in New York City, the agents or the players will take on the role of agents assigned to M-cell.
The thing to note is that this is considered a outlaws campaign when we move to the modern era,
but it starts off obviously in the cowboy area of Delta Green.
So we're still in that cell-based conspiracy kind of set up.
I like that they chose the outlaws instead of focusing on the program.
Yeah, so there's a very specific reason for that.
lot of it has to do with essentially a lack of institutional knowledge or regarding the
king and yellow, the yellow sign, all that good stuff. Yeah, I remember reading that in the opening
pages of this campaign, that the program does not have as much operational knowledge. That's what
the static protocol is all about. Yes. The static protocol is more related to the outlaws and in this
in this instance, the Cowboys.
Exactly, yeah.
So that's why what I meant to say is like the Cowboys and the Outlaws have that institutional
knowledge, whereas the program does not.
So that's where it differs.
But yeah, long story short, the players and the agents of MSL are summoned to New York
City to meet with their case officer, Agent Marcus, in Washington Square Park in New York City.
And while there, they are giving the task of looking into the disappearance of
local artist named Abigail Wright. The whole thing that brought her disappearance to Delta
Green's attention was, according to Agent Markets, the appearance of an occult symbol associated
with the unnatural. And so the players are given the task of essentially going and looking
into the disappearance of Abigail, determining if there's some kind of unnatural vector or
incursion and of course containing it, destroying it, neutralizing it, what have you.
A classic start to any Delta Green campaign?
Yeah.
What's the next step after that?
They've been given the briefing.
Yep.
So the bulk of their introduction to the world of the King in Yellow comes as a result of looking into Abigail's apartment.
So Abigail lives in a building known as the McAllister building in the Kipps Bay neighborhood of Manhattan.
and it sort of functions like an artist co-op.
It's a low-rent sort of area where various local artists can live on the cheap
and devote themselves to their art.
There's a lot of other little things that start cropping up with the other tenants,
of course, that we'll get into.
Since this Abigail Wright thing is really just scratching the surface,
it's really not even all that the players can expect to encounter.
So would you expect that usually players, the first thing they'll do is go to
Abigail's apartment? Yeah, so that's the big hook is they are there under the guise of federal
agents brought in to further look into the disappearance. And the whole thing that necessitates
the FBI's involvement, or at least provides a good cover, is that Abigail's credit card
was found in some trash outside the McAllister building. Homeless woman picked it up, sold it for
drugs, and it ended up in Maryland. And so that was the nexus for a possible interstate
kidnapping, which is how the FBI was able to get involved. And of course, that that makes it
easier for Delta Green to poke its head in. But regardless, one of the big components of this is that
the agents are tasked to go and essentially inventory the contents of Abigail's apartment.
Since she has set up some sort of strange shrine art project, no one really knows how to describe
it. The way I've always sold it to my players is that it is a manifestation of reverence
and a shrine to unbridled, unrestrained creativity.
Pretty good description.
Yeah, thank you.
And so they'll go and they'll meet with their NYPD point of contact, Detective Gerdanda,
who was essentially just there to give them keys and let them in.
He doesn't really have a whole lot of information beyond what the players have already got from Agent Marcus.
But if you happen to lose a player along the way or lose an agent due to, you know, poor dice rolls and everything else that may happen,
he's a great avenue to have, like, as a backup character.
And what's really great about the scenario as I read it is they really made sure to point out all the other possible NPCs that would also make good players or good PCs in case you lose one along the way.
I appreciated that about the scenario layout.
Yeah, same.
It really, it helped a lot because I lost two players in my playthrough or two agents in my playthrough.
So having not necessarily ready-made NPCs ready to kind of step into.
But it definitely helps what kind of keeping the ball rolling with the game.
But so essentially the players go in and they inventory the contents of Abigail's apartment.
And that's where a great deal of those proverbial dominoes I've mentioned are set up that end up popping up in other parts of the campaign.
Gotcha.
It's a lot.
Yeah, not only the clues, but also it seems like a big way that the narrative continues is that the more time they see.
spend cataloging this, the closer and closer to the night floors they get, even gaining corruption
and stuff after a certain amount of time, right?
Yes, absolutely.
Yeah.
So the more they dig in and the more they kind of devote themselves, obviously, the more
corruption they're going to rack up.
And then, of course, the longer they spend in the room itself, there are various effects
they could fall under based on, there's even a table in the campaign book for what to happen
based on how much time they spend in there,
whether it's alone or with others, typically alone.
So would you say then that it's about,
do you front load the things they see with these clues in particular,
or do you do throw in a couple of random nonsensical things just to break it up?
So for me, I front load the ones I absolutely want them to find.
You know, so for me it was really the diagrams,
the letterhead with the map for the whisper labyrinth.
and then those are really the main two.
Everything else is kind of a bonus.
Because I had a feeling that once they, you know,
caught wind of something else being in the building,
you know, the microphone,
that those were leads that they could potentially, you know,
be pulled down and focus on.
So, yeah, it definitely take the opportunity to front load
because the whole thing to remember also is that by the time they reach Abigail's
apartments, it's pushing mid to late afternoon.
So they only have a few hours of daylight left.
And your players may very well get to the point where it's like, okay, we're going to call it at night.
And that's typically when, you know, for me, I would call for like an alertness or a search roll to like spot the microphone wire.
And then from there, it's gone off to the races.
Gotcha.
So you're saying the yellow sign.
It's not a big deal if they see it in the beginning because it's going to come up, I assume, multiple times.
Oh, yeah, 100%.
Right.
So, okay, so let's talk about the microphone.
So you're saying, you know, before they're about to leave or if somebody asks for a let me search the route.
let me toss the apartment beyond these trinkets, they find a little microphone in the carpet.
Yep, so they notice, so all the carpet and rugs have been pulled up from the floor in Abigail's apartment,
but what they notice is that there is the butt of a microphone sticking out from under the door,
and when they open the door, they see it the wire leads under the carpet in the hallway.
And if they are to follow it, it leads to the apartment of another tenant, a Thomas Manuel.
Have you always interpreted it as Abigail being paranoid at a certain point and like tearing up the rugs
because she thought she was being listened to?
Or what was the reasoning for Abigail to do that?
That's a good question.
If she did it.
Yeah.
So I always interpreted it as a means to get access to more surfaces for which she can attach things.
I see.
I see.
That makes sense.
That makes a total sense.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, because she got rid of all furniture.
Like, it's, there's shit on the ceilings.
There's shit on the carpet.
They're on the floor.
The walls.
It's everywhere.
So that's kind of how I interpreted that.
So when they find this microphone,
it's obvious to assume the first person they're going to interact with is, I forget his name.
Lewis is his name?
Thomas Manuel.
Thomas Manuel.
I was completely and totally off.
There we go, Thomas Manuel.
There's a lot of them.
There's a lot of tenants.
Just real quick, if you were to cast this in a movie, who do you think Thomas Manuel reminds you of his personality, stuff like that?
Just to throw it out there because I was thinking about it.
You know, I like John Lik Wazamo, maybe a 90s version of John Likwazamo.
That's the first one that came to mind.
Oh, that's funny.
First one came to mind.
Just because Lego's almost funny, he's charismatic,
but he can also be not very trustworthy.
And I assume the players are going to immediately think this guy's up to something.
Oh, 100%.
Like, hey, we've got a missing person and you've got a microphone sticking out from under her door.
Like, yeah, dude, you've just made the suspect list.
Yeah.
I guess this is now the time to talk about how each tenant that our players can explore
have two versions of themselves, a day and a night version.
Why is this and what is Thomas like during the day versus night?
Man, great.
This is really where we start getting into the weeds on some of the finer details.
So like my first recommendation to handlers running this is consolidate all the information,
like in whatever note format you decide to take.
So make sure you've got one page dedicated to Thomas divided into night and day.
So you've got a quick reference right there.
You're not having to flip through multiple pages to get everything.
because there is a lot of information scattered in different sections,
and so it's helpful to get it all compiled in one spot.
Do that for all the tenants that come up,
because each one not only has two different versions,
but there's a lot of information to go through,
especially if you've got players who actually do the agent thing
and start looking into these people.
So then there is Roger Caroon, Karen.
How do you pronounce his name?
I pronounced it Caroon.
He's a science fiction author who's written some pretty,
in the universe
big name
books moderately successful
but by day he's kind of unassuming
he's homely obsessed with neat
fit you know with neatness
kind of just
you know a typical like a centric
shut in author type
again the common thread
is by day nobody's going to have anything
of value which is
which is why the NYPD and the FBI's inquiry is kind of
dead ended because nobody knows anything
and nobody's seen anything and that's pretty much
you know, the name of the game.
So really the daytime investigation should just be filled with eccentric characters,
interesting characters, but ultimately ignorant characters that don't have any information.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
The way to the way to kind of look at it is that their knowledge of the night floors and what
really happened with Abigail is not unlocked until the sun goes down.
And then they recall.
And then like that's when the corruption that they've, you know, endured from the King
in Yellow.
and his presence has, it really kind of takes hold.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
At night, typically, so at night, he's up in the night floors hanging out with Mark Rourke
in the smoking lounge, smoking and drinking.
He always reeks of cigars and brandy.
You know, if he's asked about Laura right after dark, he claims that she never left.
He acts confused if the agents, you know, confront him about her disappearance.
And he says that she lives on.
the sixth floor and apartment 12A.
Yeah.
If he's asked about the night floors,
it's like, oh, it's always been this way.
Everyone knows it.
All right.
So Roger sounds interesting.
Then there's his editor,
who will just give you more clues about him not doing his job, right?
Right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So there's other little leads the players could follow up on,
like for Thomas Manuel as its parents.
For Roger, it's his editor.
And then we've got Michelle Van Fitz.
who at night probably presents the most clear and present threat to the players.
Probably the only one that they can reasonably expect to engage in combat with,
depending on how things on the night for us go.
Sure, sure.
But she's kind of like your typical hippie-dippy, anti-establishment type, you know, in the 1990s.
She's a feminist author, a real firebrand, withdrawn and dire are the words.
Seems to be all she wants to talk about is her writings and just feminism.
you know, theory in general.
Absolutely. Yeah, fuck the pigs.
A-Cab, you know, doesn't want to cooperate.
Just, yeah.
She kind of reminds me of a younger log lady.
There is the actress's name.
Yes.
I wrote it down here.
Catherine Colson, the log lady from Twin Peaks,
it kind of gives me that vibe.
Yeah, and if I had to cast her,
I'd probably cast like a young Janine Garofalo as her.
Oh, that's good.
As her type.
Yeah, that's the one that came to mind for me.
That might even be a better one.
I like that.
Yeah, yeah.
just a real kind of fuck you attitude, which is, which is, it's fun to play with as a handler.
Right, right.
So by day, of course, totally uncooperative, totally unhelpful.
By night, what's crazy is that if the players see her apartment by day and then her apartment by night,
it's clear that her apartment has expanded in size, impossibly, at night.
There's, you know, a mahogany room full of books and tables and couches that leads directly to
the night floors itself.
there's tables and shelves holding, you know, crystal tumblers, cigars, cigarettes as if, like, a party had just wrapped up.
There's no one in there, but you can hear sounds of, like, conversations and, like, you know, partying just out of sight.
Yeah.
Which is a cool little, just like atmospheric thing.
I like to, you know, that's pretty neat.
The one thing with her is that she will attack the agents if she thinks she's going to be taken into.
into custody. She has an antique tomahawk with her. And yeah, she will attack the agents if she
feels, yeah. If she feels like she's going to be taken into custody, I guess obviously threatened as
well, what might that situation look like? Like if they are being real aggressive with her,
like how is your apartment able to be, you know, this impossibly large? What about if they
try to venture further into her apartment into the night floors, would she attack them then or no?
So the way the book describes it is if she thinks she'll be taken into custody,
custody, if she thinks that the agents have stolen any of the books that she has in her apartment,
or if she thinks that they are going to impede the progress of the night floor.
So I think exploration in and of itself is not necessarily a trigger for that,
but if she thinks the agents pose some kind of threat.
So again, if they have this really, like, aggressive demeanor with her,
and then they're like, we're going to go check this shit out because we've got to contain this
or neutralize it or whatever.
And if they see that with a near shot, I think that'll trigger that defensive, you know,
mechanism. Oh yeah. I believe there's two other or one other
tenant. Yeah, that's Lewis Post. He's another artist type.
His, he's got a dumpy-ass apartment. Very sloppy, of course,
during the day has nothing to add. He's polite and he's kind of funny. So like
play him up as kind of like a more friendly and affable kind of type versus
like an eccentric or non-cooperative type. But at night,
he doesn't have much of say about Abigail
other than he heard that she moved in
with someone from quote unquote upstairs
he does have a mirror that he keeps under his bed
that he uses to, you know, his inspiration
for when he does his art, that you could, you know,
it's more creepy, you know, creep factor.
Like, you know, is there something specifically
that happens with the mirror that you can play with?
Potentially, yeah.
So I know for, like, if you look in the mirror
for more than 10 minutes,
the reflection of a vague figure is seen, disappears and looked at directly.
It's essentially like they're dancing and it's going to add corruption.
It's going to add result of the sanity loss.
The big thing is that he, you know, he's got a sketchbook filled with images of drowned children.
There's the angle to Asa Deribandi.
What's crazy, though, is that you can actually, if the agents like mess with his drawings,
they can, especially representations of the drowning room in the hotel Brattle bin.
if they draw like a gun in there,
when they eventually find the drowning room,
if they do, the gun will be there.
So they can actually directly influence what they find.
Post does, can be a threat.
I think he does pull out a knife at some point if he's threatened.
Yeah, if Post finds the agents in his room at night,
he will ruthlessly attack with a steak knife.
He keeps in his pocket.
Gotcha.
All right, cool.
So we've covered Lewis.
He has an agent, which might be.
give you more information.
Yep.
You know, obviously at this point, really the only thing left for the agents to do is to venture up to the fourth floor and see what's waiting for them.
That's it.
Yep.
Absolutely.
And that's when that's when Shicken's wild, as if it hasn't already.
So the first, if they do decide to take the stairs, there are stairs that lead up to the roof during the day.
You know, and so if they go up there during the day, they're just going to walk out onto a normal roof.
perfectly plain, perfectly simple,
nothing to find, nothing suspicious.
But at night,
when they go up, they enter into the smoking lounge.
And that's where,
you know, I'll
kick in the music cue, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
You know, so it just really kind of
start screwing with them a little bit.
But with the smoking lounge,
there is, you know,
it's set up exactly like it sounds.
There's like a bar cart, there's cigars,
there's Florida ceiling,
bookcases and then there's mark rourke who's the first like night like true night floor resident
that they meet he's kind of like stuck in the 1920s 1930s uses all the slang of the era
you know i'd be sure to one thing i did was i i looked up 1930s slang to try to incorporate
into how we talked and then also look up some 1930s facts in case the agents ask them off the
wall shit like who's the president um that's a great idea
Yeah, so, like, you know, who's the president?
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who the fuck you think it is?
Like, you know, like, so yeah, he's got some, he's got some general information,
and I've used him as an avenue to provide additional information on the other tenants,
like the other people that come up and hang out.
But really from there, it's more about getting the players to explore the night floors themselves.
So going further past the smoking.
Going further in.
Yeah.
Now, is it every new space is a, is heading upstairs, or,
are, can you set it up where there are other rooms and things on the same floor as the
smoking lounge?
Yeah.
So the way I really do have it set up to where, or at least in my play-thru, I had it
set up to where it is very much structured like a hotel or like an apartment building.
There's, you know, multiple apartments on each floor, multiple hallways.
It's easy to get lost.
And then, of course, stairs leading up and down.
The, where the difficulty cut comes into play is that in order to successfully navigate the
night floors and make your way back to the smoking lounge to leave, the players have to fail
sanity rolls.
So once they leave the smoking lounge,
if they turn around, it's gone.
It's gone. It's gone.
They are suddenly, you know, they've found they've
wandered down hallways that they didn't even
know they were walking down and they are no longer
inside of the smoking lounge. Gotcha.
We've got the author, who is
J.C. Linz, but he has never
seen. He's kind of a mystery. If they find
the room, they'll find like the typewriter,
which is a 1929 Remington remet,
you know, where he's working on
the play.
So that's, but that's an area where they don't necessarily meet or interact with this individual.
Now, I remember you saying JCL, JL were initials that come up a lot.
Yes.
J.L, I am assuming, now, is it the same person, Linz, that ends up writing the King in Yellow, you know, to start this whole recursive thing?
It is.
I see.
So eventually we will come up, we will meet Linz again.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Eventually, the whole point of the campaign is to find,
J.C. Lenz's soul bottle, which we'll talk about in future, future episodes, and return it to him,
and that will be the impetus for him to begin writing The King in Yellow.
Gotcha. Yeah, I would definitely find ways to feature either those initials or the author himself
in some way as soon as possible to lay those seeds. Yeah, without a doubt. The big one for me
that I spent a lot of time on was the night manager. So Henry Dillel, Henry D. Henry D.
Calvedos Castate, who is the knight, the, you know, known as the night manager and is essentially
the, for all intents purposes, the manager of the night floor.
The night floors.
He works directly for who he calls the superintendent, which is a euphemism for the king
in yellow.
Right.
So for him, I used him as an avenue to really just talk about, you know, the superintendent
himself, give more information on what happened with Abigail.
You know, she lives on the sixth floor with the salesman confirming with all the other
tenants have said he does not know much about them except they're quiet they pay in cash and he
says the other tenants probably know a lot more a lot of the areas that will get seated with him is
is really like you know the nature of the uh the nature of the superintendent and you know
accessing the night floors like hey can we move in or you know how do you get and it's all about
playing up the fact that the superintendent decides who gets to who gets to stay and who gets to live
there. So the night manager is kind of a source of authority where if they feel like they need to ask
somebody who's in charge questions, they might go to him. Yep. Yeah. So the night manager obviously
important. The superintendent, we can assume, is the king in yellow. Oh yeah. Anything vital to
know about that or is that, you know, obviously going to come up in a later time? Yeah. If the players ask,
well, hey, can we meet the superintendent? He'll say the superintendent, it lives upstairs and is having a
party tonight. He has a party every night, so, which is, you know, Carcosa. Is there a limit in those
first early sessions how high up into the night floors they can go? Or, uh, so yeah, I, I, I, the way I had
it set up and it's never really, uh, kind of limited in the book, but the way I had it set up was
that you could go as far up as you seemingly want. What's, but you don't know how far up you
actually are. Like, have you really gone anywhere? Are you just,
you know, moving up a floor when you think you've been moving up several,
how far up does this go?
Like, so if they decide they want to keep going up the stairs until they reach the top,
they're going to keep walking is the way I had it.
Well, what if they wanted to stop at 12A on a part, in on floor six?
Would they be able to reach Abigail's new apartment?
Or would you kind of throw them a loop?
I would, uh, you could play it either way.
Like, I would throw them a loop.
I would throw them in a loop and it also depends on if they manage to succeed or fail.
those sanity rolls to navigate if they're trying to go someplace specific.
I guess that's a big mechanic that needs to be reminded is that if they are trying to move to
different floors or different sections, they have to keep making those sanity rolls.
Right. Yep. And failure is a success. Failure is a success. It's a success. Yeah.
Yeah, 100%. That is, and if they decide to check the apartment, I can't recall, I think you can find
it, but there's nothing in there. Like, nobody's around. Yeah. In case you don't see the sign
in the earlier parts of the scenario,
it does seem like there is a moment
where you can find a small piece of paper
with the yellow sign on it.
Can we talk a little bit about the yellow sign
and how it works kind of mechanically?
Absolutely.
So with the yellow sign itself
is seeing it
will cost you zero
if you succeed,
1D4 if you fail from helplessness
the first time you see it.
If you lose sanity from seeing it,
you gain one corruption
and you become,
compelled to share it. So you've got to like spread it. You've got to keep sharing it with others.
If you don't, I believe you can't sleep. How would you handle that with players? Do you message them?
Do you just say to them and you feel compelled to share it?
I'm like you're your soul, you are you are compelled at this point to share this symbol.
Other people need to see it. If it's the last thing they do, like they need to see it.
And just to really just kind of push at that like strong urge, like you need to see this.
sense as agents, you know, you want to share information with the other agents, so it's a completely
innocent, or it can be played off, is completely innocent. Absolutely. Yep. If they attempt to sleep
without having shared it, they suffer from nightmares, and they essentially suffer the effects
of sleep deprivation. But once they share it, the compulsion ceases, they can sleep again. Everything
is back to norm. I see. Gotcha. Okay, good to know. Getting back to what we were saying just a moment
earlier, all of this great stuff can happen on the night floors. They can go up as high as they want.
The problem is, is that the scenario very clearly states, or at least it doesn't give us a very
clear resolution, maybe suggests some things, but nothing really stood out to me as like a solid
idea. I'd love to talk to you about what would be a good way to resolve this, knowing that
it's really just a precursor to the rest of the campaign. Yeah, it's, um, as we,
both know players can be dogs with bones.
And getting them to leave a loose end is next to impossible sometimes.
So after a certain point, you've really got to beat them over the head with the fact that they are not fighting Abigail.
Abigail's gone.
Doesn't matter how much time you spend in the night floor is like she is no longer here.
And how would you recommend doing that short of saying it?
I mean, of course, we can always roll an intelligence role and then beat them over the head.
But are there other indications with the NPCs, things they say, things like that?
Yeah, like, for example, like you can use Henry Castain, the night manager.
You can use the other tenants, especially at night, just saying, you know, she's no longer here.
She's moved on.
She's not upstairs.
She's not anywhere.
She's, you know, you'll find her when you're meant to.
Like little seeds like that.
What I ended up doing was I, like, because with my players, they ended up becoming increasingly
desperate.
And that was coming through and how they were treating some of the other folks and how they
were kind of running around the night floors. And so eventually I had Henry Castain confront them
and say, you know, you have to leave now. You can't stay here. You've got to go. And then once they
leave, the doors to the night floors are sealed to them. They can no longer come back. I see.
Okay. So any other tidbits or things that maybe we haven't discussed that we think we need to
go over about this scenario? Man, I think I think we covered it. If they're, yeah, we, this
was a good one. I think if I'd be curious to see what questions the, the community has.
Yeah, I would like to know also from the community, what was the, what was the players' interpretations of what was going on?
You mentioned earlier, a guy that walks by and kind of turns into a ghost. I wonder how long they wonder, is this some kind of ghost plane?
You know, are these ghosts, you know, the misinterpretation of what's going on. I'm very curious to hear what other folks, what their experiences are in this.
Absolutely. That would be cool. That's a fun part of seeing how this turned out for other people.
Well, definitely, folks, if you have questions, if you have comments, if you have funny anecdotes about running the scenario, please let us know. Let us know in the comments or message us. I want to thank you, Vince, for going over this. This has been incredibly helpful.
As railroady, as some might say that it is, and, you know, if people are not satisfied with dead ends, man, I mean, you just talk about creep factor.
just an overall, like, great experiences is a great way to kick this campaign off.
Yeah, definitely has it in spades.
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