Transcriber: @lu_____u (bijibu#3769)
Live at the Table 46: June 2021 Something is Wrong With This House (audio) 1
Ali: Hello everybody. Welcome to Live at the Table, an actual-play livestream where we live stream some games together. Uh, [laughs], my name is Alicia Acampora. I'm joined by Janine Hawkins.
Janine: Hi, you can find me at @bleatingheart on Twitter.
Ali: Keith J. Carberry.
Keith: Hi, my name is Keith Carberry. You can find me on Twitter at @keithjcarberry and you can find the Let's Plays that I do at youtube.com/runbutton. We're about to finish our Metal Gear Solid 2 Let's Play. Probably this week. I think we have one more session left and that will be up soon so we'll have the first two on YouTube.
Ali: Cool, and Sylvi Clare.
Sylvia: Hi, I'm Sylvi. You can find me on Twitter at @sylvibullet. Don't know why I'm promo-ing that. I'm off there right now but it's fine. Um, and you can listen to my other show Emojidrome wherever you get your podcasts. It's a fun time. That's it for me.
Ali: [laughs] Okay, hi.
Sylvia: Hi, everyone. Have a good night.
Ali: [continues laughing] Thanks for joining us. See you later, Sylvi. [Sylvia laughs] Um, yeah. So tonight we're playing Something Is Wrong With This House by Jonah Baumann and Anna Landin. It looks really good. [laughs] Um, as stated in the Patreon post, I guess, this is going to be a game tonight where we're going to be embodying some ghoulish spirits. Trying to kick a family out of the house. And, let's—[laughs] let's get to it!
Keith: Well, you're—you’re burying the lead that this is our extremely timely entry into the yearly Friends at the Table Halloween spectacular.
[everybody laughs]
Ali: Uh-huh. I—I, y'know… There's something about doing this immediately after Thanksgiving that's, like… you've been around the [laughs] quintessential family, maybe. You're in your feelings about that. About being in a house.
Keith: [cross] I'm gonna say that it's true for a large portion of our audience but it's only true for fifty percent of the cast today [Ali laughs] 'cause Thanksgiving was over a month ago.
[Sylvia laughs]
Ali: Fair. Fair. You know. But.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Ali: They saw tweets.
[Sylvia laughs]
Keith: Yeah, they remember.
Ali: [laughing] They were, like, getting pictures of turkeys all day.
Keith: [cross] You two remember Thanksgiving?!
[Ali laughs]
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And all that it sucks?
[Ali and Sylvia continue to laugh]
Ali: So yeah.
Keith: Thanksgiving food wasn't even that good this year. No one put enough salt on the food.
Ali: [laughs] Sure.
Keith: I was at three different—I do the world's worst Thanksgiving which is that—[Ali and Sylvia laugh] because I don't ever make any/take out the time to see any of my family at any time of the year besides holidays, it means that during the holidays I can't tell anyone that I won't see them. So, I had to go to my mother's house and then my grandfather's house and then had to go to Isaac's parent's house. So, I was—I went to three different places and it's just miserable. Don't do that. [Ali laughs] Don't be like me.
Ali: Yeah, well.
Keith: Visit your mom more often so you can tell her that you won't see her on Thanksgiving.
[everyone laughs]
Ali: This is—yeah. This is what balance is. Um. [Sylvia laughs] Anyway. [Ali and Sylvia laugh] You all got the game open? You ready to—
Sylvia: Speaking of family gatherings!
[Ali and Sylvia laugh]
Janine: Good good. Smooth. Excellent.
Sylvia: Thank you. Thank you. I'm a professional.
Ali: [laughs] Yeah, let's just go through reading this. I—[softly] Sorry.
Janine: Uh-huh.
Ali: [laughing] My PDF looked weird for a second and I couldn't read it. I couldn't just start reading it.
Janine: I was zoomed in on the playing field was what I was gonna say. But board's—whatever table and I thought it said, "Father, mother, son, and Douglas."
[everyone laughs]
Sylvia: Well, that's her name.
[laughing continues]
Janine: It just, it was—it struck me as quite funny.
Ali: [laughs] Okay, yeah. I'm just gonna—[begins reading] Something Is Wrong With This House is a short horror game for three to six players about the haunting of a house from the perspective of its dark denizens. It is played with three six-sided dice. [laughs after a short pause] Some of you will play the creatures that inhabit the house defending the grounds that have been your game—been your home for years and years. One of you will pull the strings of the background—in the background as the facilitator. Set the scene and play the encroaching family that moves in ignoring—[laughs] ignorant of whose domain they're really trespassing in. [reading ends]
I feel like we should just kinda jump into it.
Janine: Yeah.
Ali: Does anyone want to start reading the game structure bit and we can go in to, like—
Keith: Sure.
Ali: —who the family is and the stuff there.
Keith: Yeah, I could do that.
Ali: Cool.
Keith: [begins reading] Taking place over the course of one long haunted night, Something Is Wrong With This House is a game about the tug of war between the creatures who call this haunted place home and the picture perfect middle-class family who thinks they can claim it for their own. Before the game begins, decide among yourselves which of you will play the creatures and who will be the facilitator—the one who plays the family. If you play as a creature, you win the game if you have scared the family out of the house by the end of the fifth and final phase: dawn. If you play as the facilitator, you win if even one of the family holds out until then. It is a battle of wills. Putting the creatures haunting terror against the resistance of the family. Only the lucky and determined will make it through the night and emerge victorious. [reading ends] Um. [pause] And then do we want to hit these little bullet points here or...
Ali: Sure, yeah.
Keith: So. [begins reading] Playing a creature. Choose one of six creatures you work towards frightening the family. Describe your actions and create a haunting cinematic tale. Overcome the facilitator's clever challenges together and collaborate with your fellow players and fill the house with life or un-life. And then the facilitator/family. Take on the role of the family. Challenge your fellow players. Embody aspects of the house. Frame scenes and ask leading questions. Help decide the outcome of dice rolls and keep the game moving. [reading ends]
Ali: Perfect. So the game recommends, because this is a horror game, to start by talking about lines and veils. Having an x card. Um, I think a big one that we always say is no suicide stuff.
Janine: Yeah.
Ali: We're going to talk about death and horror. The history of this house. Stuff like that doesn't have to be there.
Keith: Mm, yeah.
Janine: Eyeballs? Who here is someone who—
Ali: [cross] Oh, I'm a big eyeball guy.
Sylvia: Yeah, thought you were.
[Ali laughs softly]
Janine: You're that guy we couldn't think of the name of!
Sylvia: Oh!
[Ali laughs]
Janine: Eyeball with the bat wings!
Sylvia: I love your bat wings, Ali.
Ali: I love—yeah.
Keith: I love how little de—how little detail you have.
[everyone laughs]
Ali: Yeah. True.
Sylvia: Yeah, I don't think I have—I might want to make a small request to avoid any, like, drowning stuff but I don't think that would come up.
Ali: Oh, sure.
Janine: Okay.
Ali: Yeah.
Sylvia: But other than that, yeah.
Janine: Do you want to write these down... somewhere?
Ali: Yeah. [mouse clicking]
Janine: In the big boy [unintelligible] maybe?
Ali: I—[laughs]
Janine: Oh, that is. Okay. I thought that was the edge of the thing and I was mis-seeing something.
Ali: Yeah, I essentially—
Sylvia: [cross] Otherwise we, like—oh, sorry.
Ali: Oh, no, no. I was just saying I—
Sylvia: I was just—
Ali: —put, like, a big piece of paper on Roll20. [laughs]
Janine: No, it's good. It's good.
Sylvia: Could have a scratch area.
Janine: Yeah.
Sylvia: Um, I was just gonna say, I'm assuming we're going with our usual sort of, like, attitude towards lines and veils we've been using with some of the other seasons and stuff? Which is, like, we don't need to get too into the nitty-gritty if things get really gross.
Ali: Yeah. Uh... [mumbling while typing, some mouse clicking] non-descriptive… if they come up… Okay, cool. Anything else come to mind?
Keith: Nope.
Ali: Okay, cool.
Sylvia: This is kind of related actually, I guess. If—it could come up more when we talk about the family so this might be a way in. Do we know what the—are we going for straight horror or are we trying to do something that's a little more like Beetlejuice-y?
[Ali laughs]
Janine: Ooh.
Sylvia: Cartoonish but they're still trying to scare them out of the house? ‘Cause that's what I went to when I heard the concept of this game and then I read it and was, like, "Oh, no. This—is more, like, Insidious." But. [Ali laughs] You know.
Janine: I mean. Beetlejuice is Insidious in its way right?
Sylvia: Oh, for sure.
Janine: Like, if you look into the deep Beetlejuice lore.
Keith: So, I have not watched Beetlejuice. I don't—I don't really—so, I have a vague understanding that the Beetlejuice is the poltergeist, basically, where his whole job is to scare the people in a house to death?
Sylvia: It's basically—I actually haven't seen it either but I do have a barebones summary just because, y'know, you hear this when you're a fucking Hot Topic kid. [Ali laughs] Basically, there's two ghosts who are living there in a house when this family moves in and they want to get the family that moved in out of there but I think they're, like, bad at haunting? Is kind of the general conceit. So they bring in Beetlejuice to do it.
Keith: He's a haunting mercenary.
Sylvia: Yeah, he's like—he's like what if Bloody Mary but for hauntings, I guess? 'Cause you have to say his name a bunch.
Ali: Ooh.
Sylvia: But, yeah, it's just, like—
Keith: How many times? Like eighty?
[Ali laughs]
Sylvia: [cross] Three.
Janine: [cross] Also his methods are too hardcore and they're, like, "Wait, actually. We don't want this. They seem—the people seem nice, right?" Like, that's, I think, the—
Sylvia: I'm pretty sure? I'm pretty sure.
Janine: There's also a bunch of stuff about the waiting room to hell or whatever, is a whole bureaucracy full of people who died horribly. I think?
[Ali laughs]
Sylvia: I do. I have seen that scene. That scene is good.
Janine: Yep.
Sylvia: That is a fun scene.
Janine: Also worms that will eat you?
Ali: I'm learning so much about Beetlejuice.
Janine: And also a dude who wants a child bride. Which is always a little bit… dark.
Ali: Huh.
Keith: Mm-hm.
Janine: You know.
[Ali laughs]
Keith: It's not Beetlejuice that wants that, right? It's someone that's already—
Sylvia: [cross] Unfortunately, it's Beetlejuice who wants that.
Janine: [cross] Beetlejuice wants to marry— Yeah. Yeah.
Keith: Oh, it is.
Sylvia: Yeah, he's—we'll avoid that part. But.
[Ali and Janine laugh]
Keith: Michael Keaton?!
Ali: Add it to the lines and veils list.
Janine: Does not age well.
Ali: [laughs] Sure.
Janine: I do like my Michael Keaton. But, no.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Presumably he didn't write it. He just said, "Yes, I'll do it."
Sylvia: No, I—
Janine: I think he did. I think he wrote it. I think he invented it.
Keith: Yeah.
Janine: Beetlejuice came to him in a dream and then he got all method about it for a couple of years.
Sylvia: Beetlejuice literally possessed him. [Ali and Janine laugh] But, yeah, I just wanted to see if we were thinking of—I feel we tend to get light with shit even when it is kind of dark so I don't know if it needs to be a conversation? I figured I'd ask.
Keith: Okay. Yeah, I—I think it will end up being more, like, just by because of who we are.
Sylvia: Mm-hm.
Keith: Um, if you—if the three of you really want—really try to be really scary, I'll roll with it.
[Ali and Sylvia laughs]
Janine: Here's—okay. Here's the question. Here's a way to frame this. Do we want to play a game where a bone saw gets used for effect? Or a bone saw gets used.
Ali: Wait.
Sylvia: Oh, yeah, I know what you mean. Is it like—
Janine: Is a bone saw like a prop or an action?
Ali: Oh, sure, sure sure.
Janine: You know?
Ali: Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Keith: Sure.
[Ali laughs]
Janine: 'Cause to me that's the big distin—a big line between lighter horror and spooky—spookier horror.
Keith: Mm-hm.
Janine: For me, I'm kind of leaning towards the bone saw gets used for effect but I don't know that I necessarily want to mangle a family.
Sylvia: [cross] Yeah?
Ali: [cross] Right, yeah. [pause] Yeah.
Keith: But a ghost would!
[Ali and Sylvia laugh]
Janine: Well. We can get into that when we get into character.
Keith: Yep, uh—
Ali: Are we a PG-13 Scooby Doo? Is that what we're doing?
Sylvia: [softly] Oh, man. [Ali laughs] Aw, jeez.
Keith: Everything that we do is a hard R just based on how many swears.
[Ali laughs]
Sylvia: That is true, yeah.
Janine: This is why I think Beetlejuice was a brilliant example. It’s because, like, Beetlejuice is not Scooby Doo but it's also not Saw.
Ali: Okay, yeah.
Janine: Right? Like, it's—it occupies a space that is mature despite the fact that it got [laughing] a cartoon show. [Ali laughs] But, you know, it's a little bit of—maybe they shouldn't have made a lot of cartoons out of the stuff they made cartoons out of in that time.
Keith: Yeah. And not just because the market was way over saturated.
Janine: Yeah. [Ali and Sylvia laugh] That too. Okay. So.
Ali: I think we can be, like, unsettling. I think, yeah, what Janine was saying about the effect thing. I think that the threat of that sort of violence is on the table. But not so much, like, the follow through, I guess?
Sylvia: Yeah.
Ali: Yes. Okay.
Keith: So, yeah. Since we're already talking about how we're going to play the game, I might as well bring this part of it up because I wanted to talk about, um—I read this in Game Structures and it was... It mentions it more later on. Um. [pause] Let me find it. Oh, I missed—nah. Let me find it then I'll get back to you.
Janine: You remember what the subject was? 'Cause we might know.
Ali: Yeah.
Janine: Like, what you're looking at.
Keith: Yeah, I'll just paraphrase it. I was just gonna read the quote 'cause I thought it was just literally right in front of me but I guess I can't find it. Anyway, the game is basically, like, the family is gonna set up challenges. And, the ghosts and the scaries are going to try and, y'know, overcome those challenges in order to scare the family to kick them out. But the game is really vague about what sort of things the family actually does beyond—each family member has, like, basically a single-use action and a handful of other smaller actions and, as the facilitator, you're gonna set up scenes. But it doesn't—it's very vague about what the family—what the facilitator literally does. Um. I actually tried to find some examples of play on a YouTube or another podcast and I couldn't find anything.
Janine: It's still very new.
Ali: Yeah.
Janine: It's tricky for that stuff.
Ali: Um, I guess...
Keith: So, I guess the, really—the question is, like, do we want to be doing scene-scenes where I'm asking someone to be in a scene with me out of their ghoul character to set up something? Or, is it more vague and, like, implied?
Sylvia: They do have a small list of actions—like example actions—on the ‘How to play to the family’ page?
Keith: Yes.
Ali: Uh-huh.
Sylvia: Which might help with this question a little?
Keith: Yeah, the actions are: [begins reading] hide, move around the house, support each other, use reason and logic to explain the hauntings, and attempt counter-measures against the supernatural. [reading ends] And the rules of that are basically that—that we can sort of collaboratively decide how effective that stuff is. There's no rolls on those.
Ali: Right, yeah, so. The way that I read sort of the quote-unquote "challenges" in this game is that, like, in each phase each member of the family is going to have a turn and that's sort of your opportunity to set up the chess board, so to speak. So that, like, if I was playing one of the ghouls, I would know if I wanna attack the daughter, she's in the kitchen doing this thing, right?
Keith: Mm-hm.
Ali: And it's less, like, oh we're playing out this whole scene of the father calling his friend and, like, seeing if he can help or whatever. 'Cause I think some of the spirit of the game is, like—
Janine: Action and reaction.
Ali: Right, yeah. And also, these people stuck in this house without having contact to the "outside" quote-unquote. We were talking about bottle episodes last Live at the Table and this is sort of that same sort of thing. Um, so, I mean, if you want to just set up a proper scene where you were, like, "Oh, I'm going to be the father talking to the mother about this strategy. Can somebody be the mother for me?" I think that—
Keith: Yep.
Ali: —makes sense?
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: And would—
Keith: Okay.
Ali: —flesh them out a little bit? But I don't know if you feel like you have to, like—
Keith: As long as people are willing to do that for me then that's great.
Ali: Sure.
Keith: The thing that I was looking for by the way was that under the ‘Playing the creature’ bullets, one of the things is: overcome the facilitator's clever challenges. [Ali laughs] I, sort of—as I'm reading the book I'm, like, "Everything in this book makes sense except how—where is it say how I do a clever challenge?” I mean, do I just have to invent what a clever challenge is? [Ali laughs] And I get that—
Janine: I think—
Keith: —the answer to that is a yes? [chuckling] Right?
Janine: I think there's a—where was the, uh... [pause] Uh, shit. Now I'm having the thing where it’s, like, I read a thing that—oh here it is. [begins reading] While your fellow players will take on the roles of things that go bump in the night, you will embody a different sort of horror. The threat of the outside world. The bleak light of reason. The invasion of mundanity and logic. The soft and creeping comfort of the nightmare. [reading ends] So to me the challenge—the challenging—clever challenges is, like, well, this person's a skeptic and they have an excuse for everything. Or, this person, y'know, is really into ouija boards and stuff—
Keith: Yeah.
Janine: —and they think that they can get it—they can control this. Or, like, they can communicate or whatever. Or, like—I think it's things like that.
Keith: Yeah.
Janine: I don't think it's like a puzzle room necessarily or anything like that.
Keith: I guess the challenge is sort of then is that, like, Janine if your ghoul was trying to haunt me—
Janine: [amused] Yeah.
Keith: —as a family member I can use reason and logic to explain the haunting. And then for all those—it says here. This is under the heading ‘How to play the family’. Actions. [begins reading] For all these actions we use theatre of the mind and rule of cool instead of dice rolls. You decide how capable this family is and how their actions play out. Feel free to improvise. This game can be played in many different ways and narrative creativity is what makes it fun and exciting. [reading ends] I guess it's sort of, like, you have—you have to give a good enough case of why you should get to roll your 3d6 to haunt me.
Ali: Mm-hm.
Janine: Well I think—I think the action—I think what that saying is that the actions that the family takes, you don't roll.
Keith: Right.
Janine: It's plausible. I think we still—if I say, like, "The doll's head explodes," then I get to roll on that and if I succeed then it's an effect thing 'cause we're still rolling 3d6 and then if you succeed on that you get to roll an extra dice to take it away from their resistances or whatever.
Ali: Mm-hm.
Janine: But, yeah—so yeah. For all these actions we use—so, like, hiding, moving—
Keith: Yeah.
Janine: —supporting.
Keith: Well, that's what I mean is that when you're, like, "Oh, I'm trying to haunt you," and then I'm like, "Oh, I have come up with this reason and logic reason to explain why this is happening." And what does that do me besides me saying, "You gotta then convince me that this is a roll for you."
Janine: I mean I think—I think this is for those actions at the start of the turn, right? Where you're setting up the thing.
Keith: Oh, okay.
Janine: You don't have to say—you don't have to say, "The daughter rolls to build a fort. Is she successful or not?" You can say, like, "She builds a fort." So then, for us, it's: how do we deal with the fort? Um, that's—that's my read on it, I guess? It's less, like—it's about plausibility of storytelling.
Keith: Yeah.
Janine: I think? And not you having to worry, like, "Well, does the daughter know how to build a fort?", "Is it structurally sound?", "Does she have the materials she needs?" Like all that stuff we don’t have to worry about that.
Sylvia: [cross] What's her engineering stat? [Ali laughs]
Keith: It's high. Oh, I specced Engineering.
Ali: [amused] Oh wow. [Janine laughs] Okay.
Sylvia: [softly] God.
[pause]
Keith: Do we wanna skip to a relevant part of the game to continue reading?
Ali: Yeah. I feel like we've established at this point, Keith, your intention is to play the family.
Keith: Yes.
Ali: I, on the Roll20 here, I've written all of the family's, like—oh. [laughing] Family's like, uh, goals and stuff. But we can read through their descriptions on the game itself if we wanna do that. Just to establish—
Keith: To me it's the family who are the ones who are spooky.
[Ali laughs]
Janine: Portrait's certainly, yeah...
Ali: Yeah.
Janine: The glowing eyes and the scratched up tops? Yeah, it's kinda spooky.
Ali: Ugh...
Keith: Yeah. Why did they commission these portraits?
[Ali laughs]
Ali: Um.
Keith: Do you want me to—
Ali: I can start with ‘Father’. Then we can just go down. [begins reading] This house—haunted? That's absurd. [laughs] Ghosts are just symptoms of an overactive imagination. Besides, there are much more important things to worry about right now. There are promotions to pursue and new home renovations to finish. So, the father's move is Rational Thought. Once per game, the father can use his unshakable belief in rational explanations to help another family member. Roll 1d6 and add the resulting number to the resistance track of another family member. [reading ends] And then what you can see here on the bottom of the family is their HP essentially. As Janine noted, the basic, sort of, creature move-set is: you'll try to scare someone, roll 3d6, based on the determination of that you roll a 1d6 to, sort of, do a damage roll against them. Heart has this, I guess? And then based on what that number is, is how much you take off. Unless—
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: —like, the Father—you have this sort of, like, I'm adding—
Keith: It's funny. It really is basically just the Heart.
[Ali and Sylvia laugh]
Keith: We're just totalled by chance.
Ali: I set this for easy. Just because I felt like it. So.
Keith: Yeah, I've been nerfed. Family's been nerfed. [Ali laughs] Ali really wanted to make this little girl extremely easy to kill.
Ali: I guess, yeah...
Keith: Or scared to death.
Janine: Oh yeah, wow. Why is her's—she's—everyone else… well I guess the son is lower on hard mode.
Ali: [cross] Ooh. I did not realise that.
Janine: [cross] It's the same on everything else.
Keith: I think the idea of it is that the girl is, like, seven, but the son is, like, seventeen.
[Ali laughs]
Janine: Sure, yeah.
Keith: And so, harder to kill.
Ali: Sure.
Keith: Or harder to scare? [Ali laughs] I keep saying kill but it's scare.
Ali: Keith, if we get through the first phase and easy seems way too crazy easy we can switch to damage roll of 1d4. And then it will be [laughs] sort of opposite-ly balanced. But, a little better.
Keith: 'Cause if you take it away. If you take—if you strip out—if you strip out the, y'know, the narrative layers, essentially it is the three of you make a total of fifteen 3d6 rolls against me.
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: Which is—that’s a lot.
Janine: Yeah.
Keith: So we'll see.
Ali: [cross] But you have—
Janine: [cross] You have a limited amount of time to succeed at that.
Ali: Yeah.
Janine: And success isn't guaranteed ‘cause we're doing a dice roll to see if we even get to make that hit.
Ali: So. There you go.
Sylvia: I like the idea that we can bump the number down if it turns out—
Ali: Yeah.
Sylvia: —if we, like, kill dad immediately somehow.
Ali: [laughs] So does anyone want to move onto the ‘Mother’?
Sylvia: [cross] Sure.
Janine: [cross] Sure.
Sylvia: It always happens.
Keith: Yep.
Sylvia: Do you wanna go ahead?
Janine: Sure. [begins reading] Keeping up appearances is a challenge and some people are champions. Never a hair out of place, never a sour look, and not a single crack in the facade can be permitted. What would the neighbours think? She has absolute denial as her power. If you keep things together well enough no-one will ever know. Once per game, the mother—the Mother bolded, a spooky way to say that—can ignore one instance of fear entirely. This ability can not be used if the creature who caused the fear rolled more than one six. [reading ends]
Sylvia: Alright. I'll read the ‘Son’ then?
Ali: Sure.
Sylvia: [begins reading] Star athlete or future valedictorian? Or perhaps a little bit of both. So what if local legend has it that your new house is a little bit haunted? You don't believe in that stuff anyway. The advantage of youth is that you think you're invincible. Or, at least you want others to think you're invincible. And, uh, his ability is—
Janine: Hell yeah.
Sylvia: —shoddy facts. You have seen worse monsters in your video games.
Janine: Gamer!
Sylvia: Once per game, the son can have the amount of fear caused by a successful roll against him. [reading ends] Never let anyone tell you that gaming doesn't help [Ali laughs] in emergencies.
Janine: Yeah, gamer power 'cause he's played so much Bloodborne.
[Sylvia laughs]
Ali: True.
Keith: Hey, monster, I'm only half scared of you. [Ali laughs] The last one is ‘Daughter’. [begins reading] The teddy bear toting youngest child and the baby of the family is spoiled as she is adored. But childhood can be a time of fears and nightmares writ large. So the ability to make yourself small and unnoticed comes in handy. This is the best move. This is extremely wild. Once per game, the daughter can hide to escape from the creatures. To find her again, the creature must roll a 3d6 and get 5 or higher on at least—
Janine: Wow.
Keith: —two dice.
Ali: Jesus.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: This ability beats even the Spectre's Fantasmo Motion. [reading ends] Which I haven't read but I assume that's a Find Someone move?
Ali: Oh, sure.
Sylvia: Yeah, you can move through walls unhindered and find any family member is what that sounds to be.
Ali: Ooh.
Keith: Okay. Yeah.
Janine: Sick.
Sylvia: So that's why—they actually did daughter's balance [unintelligible] is what we’ve decided.
Ali: [laughing] Yeah.
Keith: Yeah, yeah.
Ali: Yeah. We might have to nerf the daughter—no. That's a really good move. Um, okay, yeah. So, that's the family. And then, um, there's spooky monsters in this game as well. I think we've set up the mechanic stuff so we can just jump in to who the monsters are and go through selection of them. But, yeah, basically, so when we get to it, the game has five phases. In each of the phases, each of the family members takes a turn, each of the creatures takes a turn. And then, we can go through each part of the night and see if we can defeat Keith. Basically.
[everyone laughs]
Keith: Uh, but you can't.
[laughter continues]
Ali: Um, yeah. Does anyone have dibs on any creatures to start?
Janine: I have very strong feelings about Haunted Doll.
Ali: Okay, sure.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Janine: Unless someone else also has strong feelings about Haunted Doll.
Ali: [simultaneously] No.
Sylvia: [simultaneously] No.
Janine: Okay, I'll go with Haunted Doll.
Ali: [chuckling] Perfect. Do you want to read through Haunted Doll and then answer some of the questions?
Janine: Yeah. I think it’s just the one question, right?
Ali: Yeah, yeah.
Janine: The ‘why were you here’? Um, okay, so who are you? [begins reading] A chaotic spirit trapped in a physical object. You are trapped in the body of a harmless little doll. Left to yourself with nothing to do other than to think your awful thoughts. There is a lot of pent up energy stuck in this dusty porcelain. Luckily, you've found a new target. Um, and the doll's ability is False Sense of Security. You are just a sweet little dolly. Add another 1d6 to your pool whenever you attack a family member for the first time. [reading ends] Which is pretty good.
Ali: Ooh.
Janine: Uh, and why are you here? [begins reading] You were free once long ago. Now you lurk behind a painted face. [reading ends] Um, I think for this I want to pick ‘c’. A clueless mother brought you home from a strange store to her family's dismay.
[Ali laughs]
Keith: Hey… I'm that clueless mother.
Ali: Uh…
[everyone laughs]
Janine: Listen, sometimes you go antique-ing and you make bad choices.
Ali: Yeah.
Janine: Happens to everyone.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Did you have any sort of preference, Ali?
Ali: Not really. Let me go through these and...
Sylvia: Yeah, I'm still kinda narrowing mine down.
Ali: Okay.
Sylvia: Um, but I can talk through it a little.
Ali: Okay, sure.
Sylvia: I was looking at the Creature in the Walls.
Ali: Oh, sure.
Sylvia: One, 'cause it's a cool concept. But also because that is a genre of horror movie that I really like. [Ali laughs] Um, and then also, the Spectre was cool just 'cause, like, we should have a ghost.
Ali: Oh, sure.
Sylvia: But, I think just saying it made me want to do the Thing in the Wall so I’ll read that.
[everyone laughs]
Sylvia: [begins reading] Who are you? A twisted being who lives in the walls of the house crawling through hidden spaces. You live your life behind rats and gurgling pipes. Watching with interest through cracks and holes as the other beings here wander around. What is this? It seems some new entertainment has entered. [reading ends] And, uh, why are you here? Um, hm... Deciding between two, sorry.
Ali: Yeah, take your time.
Sylvia: Thrilling audio. Um… I think I'm gonna go with the last one. [begins reading] You woke from your slumber from the earth, a house is now here. [Ali laughs] Um, and then, the ability is Omnipresence. You know every corner of this house. Every hidden shortcut. Two times a night, you can choose to scare two different family members in a single round. [reading ends]
Ali: Wow.
Janine: Nice.
Ali: That's not bad. Okay, so the remaining creatures are the Hellhound, the Demon, the Spectre, and the Poltergeist. Um, oh boy...
Sylvia: Worth saying—all the art for these kicks ass.
Ali: It's so good.
Keith: Yeah, the art is really good. The colours are really good.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: Like, really nice consistent colouring through the whole book.
Ali: It's—yeah, really well designed. Shout-out to John and Anna. Sorry, I'm just looking at the abilities just so I make the right choice.
Sylvia: Yeah, no worries.
Janine: Yeah.
Janine: I have to find a doll name so I appreciate the time. [Ali laughs] It's important.
Ali: I think I'm gonna go Demon.
Sylvia: Hell yeah.
Ali: I'm feeling Demon tonight! [begins reading] Who are you? In human presence, dark, malevolent, and not from this realm, partially visible, you work through frightening visions and afflictions. And you are so terribly hungry, no human has been here in years, but that has just changed. And my ability will be, possession. Your wicked will takes hold of a malleable mind. Once per night, you can force a family member to aid you. This is two times as effective as any other aid. Add 2d6 to your pool. [reading ends]
Keith: That's pretty good.
Ali: It's not bad! [Ali and Sylvia laugh] [reading begins] Why are you here? You do not belong to this world but to some other darker realm. [reading ends]
Sylvia: That's a—oh, I made that too big. Sorry. So sorry. Oh jeez.
Ali: I'm going to say I'm here because I am contained to this house by holy measures.
Janine: Mm.
Sylvia: Hell yeah.
[pause]
Keith: Some priest did a half-ass job. Left my house all haunted!
[Ali laughs]
Ali: I just went to Roll20 and saw the doll name. Great.
Sylvia: Yeah, it’s a really good one.
Janine: I feel like we don't all that necessarily need names unless we want them.
Ali: Sure.
Janine: But my vibe is specifically, like, a weird doll that—I think that the mom was like, "Oh, I saw that on my—on my, um, fuckin'—" What's that, the website when people, like—I saw that on a restoration YouTube, those dolls are worth a lot of money if you clean them up. It's a vintage 1919 baby pearl doll. You know?
Ali: True.
Janine: I also have—I have a look for the doll. [Ali laughs] There's a specific—[laughs]. There's a specific kind of doll, or doll material called composite or composition. Because porcelain was kind of expensive—the sort of Edwardian/1920s/1930s classic baby doll with the really shiny face—before plastic became more popular and available and affordable, you would get composition dolls which are made of sawdust and glue shined up real nice.
Keith: Mm.
Ali: Oh, like how they make Ikea tables?
Janine: Kinda, yeah. [everyone laughs] So, if you Google—well, I Googled, like, "composition baby doll" or whatever. But there's a specific screenshot from antiquechild.com. It's called Composition Baby Face Before Restoration. And I'm just gonna—I'm just gonna copy this and put this in... I guess just in this schedule chat, huh.
Sylvia: Antique child—
Keith: Wow, very real.
Sylvia: Woah! That really got me!
[Janine laughs]
Ali: Oh my god. Okay.
Janine: You can see, like, the—you can kinda see the wood underneath, right? Like, the sawdust-y, glue-y stuff. And then there's, like, a layer of paint and shit on top. So I imagine this is kinda my vibe but with a cloth body and some limbs that are held on really loosely by twine at the joints. It's very floppy and then maybe, like, old—like a plaid dress and apron that looks really homemade and was probably made for the doll in the thirties or something like that. Out of, like, scraps. Selling scraps.
Ali: [laughing] Sure. Sorry, I'm just—
Janine: No shoe. No wait. One shoe. One shoe.
Ali: One shoe. Smart socks? Stockings?
Janine: Uh... hm... Shit. No? But you can see the discolouration on the feet where the socks were.
Ali: Okay, sure.
Janine: 'Cause of, like, sunlight or whatever. UV damage.
Ali: I'm just watching everyone in the chat react to the full size image that is on their YouTube now.
[Ali and Janine laugh]
Sylvia: Now they know how I felt! And you get to scream!
Janine: Good.
Keith: I don't see what the big deal is. It almost has a complete face.
[everyone laughs]
Ali: True? Demons have names right? But they have, like, bizarro names. I don't know if I have a Demon name in me tonight.
Janine: Stars? A lot of demons just have names that are stars.
Ali: [laughing] Sure.
Janine: Beetlejuice for example. That's a thing. That's a—
Ali: Uh-huh.
Janine: —astrology—astronomy. Astronomy.
Ali: [laughs] Yeah, I think my third moon is in Beetlejuice.
[Janine laughs]
Keith: You gotta spell it though, the real way.
Ali: [laughs] Sure, yeah.
Keith: The 'g'.
Ali: Mm.
Janine: The e's are in different spots. I think there's one less of them? Or...
Keith: There is one fewer ‘e’.
Janine: I think there's actually—'cause one of the e's gets moved into... I think—
Keith: I think one gets—
Janine: —it's the same number of e's. It just gets moved around.
Keith: [cross] One gets robbed and one gets—I think it's b-e-t-e-l. Instead of b-e-....
Janine: Betel... glaze.
Ali: ...What?
Keith: Yeah. B-e-t-e-l-g-e-u-n-s-e. G-e-u-s-e.
Ali: Okay. I'm just gonna create a...
Janine: Don’t name yourself Beetlejuice.
Ali: [laughs] No. No.
Janine: We might get sued. Actually, we might not but who knows.
Keith: You can't copyright the name of a star.
Janine: That's true.
Keith: The tenth brightest star in the night sky and after Rigel, the second brightest star, in the constellation of Orion.
[pause]
Ali: Sorry, I'm just setting up a ‘setback’ area so we know what they are and they're written in front of us.
Janine: We didn't clap.
Ali: Uh...
[everyone laughs]
Janine: Okay, wow. Nevermind.
Keith: So that was a conspiracy to waste time.
[Ali and Janine laughs]
Ali: We're—
Janine: This whole time we've been clapping because it gives you a sense of power.
Ali: Mm! Um. I guess that's it. If a demon name comes to me—if I feel out this demon in an hour into this I'm like, "I'm Smorgasbord" or whatever then... [everyone laughs]. But...
Janine: [cross] Well that's—now that's a haunted Ikea product.
Sylvia: [cross] You sure you don't want that name?
Ali: [laughs] Um. I think unless anybody has rules—oh, well we have to go through the whole making of the house thing.
Keith: Yup.
Ali: So we've set up who we are. Back to the game. [begins reading] This is our home. [laughs] You never know what you'll find in an old house and those who care to go looking around in this very particular building had best do so in daylight. Recently, sold to a bright young family, it is a home to many sinister secrets. Go around in the group, answer the questions below together, and establish a few facts about the house. Optionally, you can spend time to draw out a map of the house together. Make yourself at home in these old walls. So, the first question is: what kind of house is it? [reading ends]
Sylvia: Should we go through the preset ones they've got here?
Ali: Oh, so the—our options here are: a suburban home, cramped townhouse, sprawling estate, small cottage, or dusty manor, or something else.
Sylvia: Have we got anything not on here?
Ali: Hm.
Keith: Well I—where I live there are a lot of suburban homes. [Ali laughs] Grew up in suburban homes. That's what I know and I also think that's where a lot of haunted house movies take place—in suburban homes.
Janine: Yeah.
Keith: I have a—I have a minor vote for suburban homes based on, you know, familiarity in real-life and in genre.
Ali: [laughing] Genre.
Sylvia: Yeah, I mean, I personally believe the suburbs are one of the scariest things in existence.
Ali: I think it also sort of fits the vibe that I think I'm interested in this of, like, the neighbourhood house. Instead of doing a dusty manor where it's this big mansion or, like, a cottage—
Janine: Yeah.
Ali: —that's in the middle of the woods.
Janine: It could be like one of those post-war suburban homes that popped up. So it still maybe feels—has a bit of oldness to it. It's not, like, completely brand new because that might be a little weird. But, I have a really strong suggestion for what is wrong here.
Ali: Sure.
Janine: If we're happy with suburban home.
Ali: Yeah, I think the vote is set.
Janine: So, I am very interested in ‘built with cursed materials’ for a really specific reason.
[Ali laughs]
Keith: The house is made of dolls!
Janine: [amused] Yes, the house is made of doll. It's made of doll meat.
Keith: Ugh!
Ali: Ugh.
Janine: [laughing] Uh, no. So, this is—this is, like, a thing. My grandmother at one point where she lived, they tore up an old railroad. And they were giving away the railway ties, like the wood that goes between the rails.
Ali: [softly] What!
Janine: And she built a bunch of garden beds out of it and I vaguely remember, because I was quite little when this happened—I don't even remember what the garden was like before those—but I remember conversation around the family at the time was very much like, "Do you think it's a good idea to grow vegetables between railway ties that have been soaked in god knows what for, like, a hundred years?" And, everyone kind of agreed that, no, maybe it wasn't a good idea but they did it anyway. Uh.
Ali: ...Sure.
Janine: And I kind of like the idea of just, like, reclaimed industrial materials, especially, like, y'know nineteenth century or turn of the century industrial materials that have a lot of baggage in terms of bad shit that's happened on or around them for sure, being used to build this wave of suburban homes in the fifties.
Sylvia: [cross] Hell yeah, I like that.
Keith: [cross] I like that.
Ali: [cross] I'm with it.
Keith: Just, like, nine other cursed houses around here.
Janine: It's a bad street.
Sylvia: It's a cursed cul-de-sac.
Keith: Cul-de-suck.
Sylvia: Got 'em.
Ali: [laughing] Wow.
Sylvia: So, ‘name one feature’ is the last one. Um, we've got: peeling wallpaper, overgrown yard, secret crawl spaces, many windows, winding staircase, or something else. Does anybody have anything they're leaning towards?
Ali: [softly] Uh, y'know…
Keith: I'm not buying a house that's got peeling wallpaper.
Ali: [cross] This isn't a fixer-upper for you.
Keith: [cross] Just not up to that project right now.
Ali: Yeah, okay. You were like, "I really just want a lock-and-key house. I'm not dealing with the—"
Keith: Yup.
Ali: "—the upkeep. I just want to move in."
Keith: Yeah. Give me—I want a house with a few years before I’ve got to start maintaining.
[Ali laughs]
Janine: I have a question: are the windows many from both sides or just many on the interior or exterior?
Keith: You mean, like, are they real windows?
Janine: I mean if you're inside and you're in front of a window, it's like, "I can see outside" but then you go outside and it's like, "Where was that window I was just looking out of? I don't know?"
Ali: Ooh.
Janine: That feels like a haunted mansion thing though.
Ali: Yeah.
Janine: Yeah, that doesn't feel suburban.
Keith: Yeah, it just—to me it's just this was, like, not very well designed. There's just obviously too many windows and it makes the house look weird.
[Ali and Janine laugh]
Ali: Sure.
Janine: Yeah...
Ali: Um, as a—as a… I feel, as a Demon creature here, I'm leaning towards crawl spaces. It seems like—
Janine: Yeah.
Ali: —a clear win for us. There's something about ‘winding staircase’ that isn't passing the vibe check for me. I don't know what it is.
Janine: It also feels ‘dusty manor’, right? Or ‘sprawling estate’.
Ali: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Keith: I will say, one of my free actions is to hide. Secret crawl spaces might not be that big of a win for you.
Ali: Oh, true. Well, yeah. This is going to even the playing field.
Janine: I mean, you get to hide no matter what. If we take away crawl spaces, you still get to hide.
Ali: [cross] Right.
Keith: [cross] Yeah.
Janine: Right? Like, it's—we still have to defeat you in the same way.
Keith: This is a feature that doesn't exactly fit but one thing that I always thought was really creepy about my grandparents house, which is really stupid big, is that they had murder tunnels. This was how it was told to me.
Ali: Huh?
Keith: Sorry, it's not as big of a deal as it sounds. But if you were—this house was built in, like, the mid-eighteen hundreds? And, um... It's a big house and it was sort of just, like, “Yeah someone might come and rob you with a gun and whatever and now we have cops that you call, I guess? Or you’d, y'know, deal with this some other way?” But, the way that they used to deal with it is that they just had, like, weird cabinets that actually were tunnels to other rooms in the house in case there were home invaders, like, to kidnap and ransom your child.
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: So that's what I think of when I hear ‘secret crawl spaces’. I think of the, uh, the cabinet in a library that actually is a tunnel to the computer room.
Ali: [laughs] I love this thing of, like, "What if I was a Red Dead Redemption NPC and I just needed to—I needed a way out whenever. Just in case."
Janine: Now that I'm thinking about it, there were a lot of weird little doors in the walls of my grandmother's house. She lived in a sort of late-Victorian townhouse? And had a bat problem I remember because the bats got into the weird—there was a cellar but then there was, like, a weird slanted ceiling part in the basement with a hatch on it that was connected to the cellar in some way? It might have something to do with coal at some point? And then, like, weird spaces under the stairs and all kinds of weird bullshit. Also, just legit spaces under houses creep me out.
Ali: Okay.
Janine: Just, when you have, like, a half floor with a little—and you have to get on your hands and knees under there to get out your Christmas tree or whatever the fuck?
Ali: Oof.
Keith: Mm.
Ali: So it seems like we're leaning ‘crawl spaces’.
Keith: Yeah. I have one more in the house I grew up in—in the basement. It wasn't a finished basement it was just sort of, like, the concrete foundation. And the way that it was built, you’d go outside, down the steps in the carport, and half of the foundation was easily accessible and there were lights and it’d be used for storage but then the other half there were, like, these concrete, like, half walls? They were four feet tall and the ceiling also came down a little bit and you literally couldn't see what was on the other side of those half walls. It was just the rest of the foundation but the lights—the light didn't reach there. And so, growing up, it was always terrifying going down into the basement because half of the basement was, like, not really accessible but you couldn't see into it and it was terrifying to look into the darkness of the second half of the foundation.
Janine: Hate that.
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: Yeah. Nah, don't love it. Houses are scary. I think, just—
Keith: Yeah, houses are really scary.
Janine: Yeah.
Ali: Alright.
Keith: In my young memory of this—it is the darkest dark that ever was—was looking into the other half of the foundation to be, like—
Ali: Oh my...
Keith: "Why can't I—" It didn't make sense. I was, like, "Why doesn't the light that's right here, and is bright, go over there enough for me to see in there? Why is it so dark?"
Ali: [laughs] We might be able to answer that tonight.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: It was the haunted doll.
Ali: Yeah. I guess, so, I... We should establish some things about the house more in this session. I feel like I really want to know how many floors there are, for instance, before we start. We don't have to draw out a blueprint unless we're down to do that? But, like, house things.
Keith: Yes or no to attic or basement?
Sylvia: Yeah, I'm down.
Ali: Sure.
Sylvia: Like, attic being separate from, like… When you say attic you mean in addition to being a floor with bedrooms and shit on it? Or is this a three-storey thing where it's basement, one floor, and then the attic?
Ali: Oh.
Sylvia: [cross] That's kinda—
Keith: [cross] I was thinking basement, first and second floor, attic.
Sylvia: Okay, yeah. That's kinda what I picture when you say that too. Just wanted to be clear.
Ali: Yeah, that works. That's a house.
Keith: So, play to find out why Keith's grandparent's basement is so dark. So, that was actually my basement. My grandparent's basement was scary for other reasons, and it was because it was filled with really weird stuff and because there was this blue door that my cousins told me that, um, they went in there and they thought it was haunted there. And I, for the entire, I—it's been thirty years. I've never been behind that blue door.
Ali: Wow.
Janine: You should do it.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: What Patreon tier do we get for Keith to go through the blue door?
[Ali laughs]
Keith: Uh, if you want to hear the most haunted thing that I know in my life, though, you could go and watch the season—you can watch, I would say, probably, Silent Hill 4: The Room? We recorded the last part of that in the barn that was on our property and the barn is extremely scary and there's a horrible chair upstairs, and there's a weird murder closet. So, you can hear about that. On Run Button.
Ali: Sure.
Keith: It's a pit. There's a pit. You can go to the second floor of the barn and there's a pit looking down on, like—there's a pillow down there and then a bunch of straw. And you can see it from the second floor but if you go down the first floor there's no door to it.
Ali: Oh my god. So it's just, like, there's a wall covering whatever that area is. And there's no access.
Keith: Yes, yes. But if you go to the second floor, you could look down and see a pillow. It's like—it's, like, a ten-fifteen foot drop to a pillow, a blanket, and a bunch of straw.
Sylvia: What the fuck?
Keith: Yeah. [laughing] Yeah, it's fucking weird! It's—it is in a room with a chair that is—that is a solitary chair. That’s the only thing, and a window. And the light shines perfectly in on this dusty horrible chair that has been there since my dad was a kid. No one's moved it ever.
Janine: I'd burn that thing.
Keith: Yeah.
Janine: The whole thing.
Keith: I think they—they already knocked it down. So, it's whoever's problem is—whoever built all the stupid fucking condos that are covering the place where I grew up now. It's whoever is in on that condo's problem.
Janine: Should’ve done a haunted condo.
[Ali laughs]
Keith: Well, there—it was, I mean, they’re condos but they're basically the exact thing you were describing except they were just built instead of built in the fifties. They're single family condos for old people.
Ali: Mm.
Keith: It's a—my grandparents owned a lot of land and instead of doing anything useful for it, the people who bought it decided to build a, you know, sixty plus community for extremely rich people in shoddily built houses.
Ali: It happens.
Keith: Yeah. Well, it's the only thing worse than one rich guy owning a bunch of forests. Is that now it's all gone and there's poorly built condos for rich old people. Less rich old people.
Ali: Fair. Any other—[laughs] any other strong house feelings? Anyone out there, like, “I need this house this to have an office, for some reason.” Or do we just want to come to that organically?
Sylvia: Yeah, I feel... [unintelligible 00:56:04].
Ali: In that case...
Keith: It’s not an office. It’s called a study?
Ali: My bad.
Keith: And I do have one. [Ali laughs] So yeah, there's a study.
Ali: Okay. Before we start playing in earnest, let's just go over the haunting phases real quick and then the phase rules. I can run through this. But yes, we have these five turns essentially. [begins reading] With all the pieces in place, the time has now come to reclaim your space and drive the family out. Here's a quick overview of the general gameplay. The haunting is a series of scenes taking over the course of a single night divided into five distinct phases. So we have… Dusk: the last dying light as the sun falls upon the house, the shadows grow long and the creatures awaken. Night fall: darkness shrouds the house and cuts it off from the world. Midnight: the dead of night is upon you. Devil's hour—which is true, this is true—[everyone laughs]. Three to four AM, true evil is unleashed. The long—
Keith: I do that hour every day.
Ali: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yup.
Keith: Every day I do devil's hour.
Ali: [laughing] It's somehow there. The long grey hours of the night between and the morning. Uh…The long grey hours between midnight and morning, sending screams echoing throughout the hallways— [reading ends]
Keith: I call it Satan Sixty.
[Ali and Sylvia laughs]
Ali: Yeah, true.
Janine: It sounds like a—like that shit you get at a smoke shop that's not quite—that's not illegal yet. [everyone laughs] And the name for it changes every five years.
Keith: [cross] “Yeah, yeah, we got some Satan Sixty.”
Sylvia: [cross] Oh my god!
Ali: True.
Keith: Yeah, they call it—it's called Satan Sixty but what it actually is is it gets you less high than marijuana does. That's what it does.
Janine: Yeah, and they steep it out of old railway ties like tea. Anyway.
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: It's called Beelzebubbly.
Ali: [begins reading] And then we have… Dawn: sunlight breaks across the horizon and the long night turns towards its end. And hopefully, or maybe not hopefully, our family will survive until then. [reading ends] We did—
Keith: I hope so.
Ali: Yeah, well, we'll see. We'll see who people are rooting for. And then just the basic phase rules. We've spoken about this a little bit but. A creature can either scare a family member or aid another creature. I think the 'or' is important there. It's, like, if you aid someone you're essentially giving up your turn for that phase. Um, then we have our scare roll which is: a creature rolls 3d6 plus any additional that they get from their move. On a successful roll, your fear die, 1d6, which is the damage roll you mentioned, the number gets subtracted from the scared family's resistance in that 10-10-10-8 number is what the family's resistance is. Aid, again, is: we add a d6 to the creature's dice pool. Every creature gets a turn. Every family member gets a turn. And then we go to the next phase. Well, okay.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Ali: Let's go, go, go. [pause] Keith.
Keith: Hi.
Ali: What's going on with this family?
Keith: Well, it's dusk.
Ali: True.
Keith: It's dusk. I think—I think, so, nothing spooky has happened yet. Presumably I've been here a while and—
Janine: Brought home a doll.
Keith: There's been some—brought home a doll. There's been some signs, obviously. This is not—we're stressed. But right now we're sitting down for a family dinner. Altogether. It's Taco Saturday.
Ali: Ooh!
Keith: There's no other better day to do it on.
Ali: Yeah, tacos take a long time to do and you have to make all the sides and all the stuff you put in there. You don't always want to do that on a Tuesday.
Keith: No. Or whatever other day you might say.
Ali: True. [laughs] I guess it's—that's the one thing. How long do you think that you've lived here? So far.
Keith: Uh, I'm gonna—under, I'm gonna say we're in the months phase. Or maybe, like, four months.
Ali: Wow. Okay. So for the demons who are not specifically demons—I should say creatures I guess.
Sylvia: That's fine.
Keith: Demons, always assuming every ghoul's a demon.
Ali: Well, you know. With the creatures, do we feel on our end we've been aware of this the whole four months and this is just the time that we're really making the strike? Have we been making smaller moves?
Keith: I won't—I won't say who. I have guesses. If I had to guess someone that has not haunted me yet, I would say that it is Sylvi's character—who, at some point, is waking up. I don't know if that's already happened or not.
Ali: [laughing] Oh, sure.
Sylvia: I—
Keith: That's sort of the plausible thing to me is if someone hasn't noticed, it's gonna be Sylvi.
Sylvia: I think there's also a part of the—they mention that the creature who lives in the walls is observing them for a period of time before that so I think that might have been watching them for a bit but not doing anything active, yeah.
Keith: Has—have—how many of us have seen Poltergeist?
Sylvia: Yeah, I've seen Poltergeist.
Ali: I haven't.
Janine: Nope.
Keith: So, one of the—one of the key things about Poltergeist to me was always how harmless the hauntings seemed at first and it just got worse and worse and worse. And there's this really steady escalation to all of a sudden, like, the people in the house realise what the viewer has known the whole time which is that, “Oh, this is dangerous. This isn't just bad or annoying.” It’s, like, actually, “We’re in danger.” So I think we’re in that, to this point, in that early level of, like, "Uh, like… something. The salt fell off the table again! Well, that sucks and is weird but we're all fine." I think that's the sort of level. The—you know, how cats play with their food to death? Just bat around a mouse until it slowly dies? I think we're in that phase where the cat has not really hurt the mouse yet but is, sort of, tapping at it with his paw.
Janine: I wonder if this is a thing where the demon has been, kind of, messing with people but the Thing in the Walls has been asleep and the babydoll has only just shown up? And it's a thing of, like, oh, suddenly the demon isn't alone at this anymore. Or, like—
Ali: Oh, right.
Janine: —the demon senses there's this other thing now and the Thing in the Walls can also be, like, “Oh, this is the moment. This is—we gotta do it tonight.” Like, it's that kind of—suddenly there are three of us aware—
Keith: Right.
Janine: —and let's just fucking—let's go.
Keith: As the demon, Ali, is there any sort of—is there a competitiveness to that? To being, like, “Oh, there's another thing haunting my turf?” Or is this just, like—
Janine: [cross] Listen, he's trying to divide and conquer. He's trying to set us against each other.
Ali: [laughs] I mean, I guess this is an interesting question ‘cause of the establishment of the why of the demon. Like, this is my house. I've been contained here. I can't go. All I can do is be in this house and get people out of it.
Keith: Right. There's the sleeping one but who cares.
Ali: [laughs] Right. But I don't think that I mind having a little bit of, y'know, community here. Of years and years and years of being, like, "Damn, another family's here. I gotta get these people out of here because I fucking hate them." To be, like, "Oh, there's this cool haunted doll," is a different vibe. Just welcome to be, like, "Yeah, I can have some roommates."
Keith: Okay, so this is a, "Oh, I'm not alone anymore."
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: "This could be nice."
Ali: Yeah, for a little while. [laughs] We'll see how territorial the demon ends up being in the span of, y'know, their life.
Keith: What about the doll? Is the doll conscious yet? Haunting yet? Does the doll have to wake up or is the doll, like, "Someone better buy me from this store so I can wreck some havoc."
Janine: I think the doll is always awake. I think that's the curse of being the doll—is that you are always conscious for your entire life trapped in this doll body. Every second is a minute, every minute is an hour.
Keith: I'd haunt the fuck out of some normies if I was—
[Ali laughs]
Janine: Yeah.
Ali: Yeah.
Janine: Also, she's probably spent the last few years getting picked up by people and being, like—and they're all, like, "Ew, this is so creepy. Ugh, it's all broken. Why not just throw it in the garbage?"
Ali: Oh yeah.
Janine: And now finally someone bought her but is, like, "Okay, it's fine. I'll just dip it in paint thinner and then sand it all off. Start fresh,” and that’s not nice either.
Keith: [cross] That's a DIY project for the mom.
Ali: [cross] Oh yeah.
Janine: [cross] Yeah, yeah. Totally.
Keith: I'm gonna clean this up and give this to my daughter or keep it on the shelf. My grandparents had all these old, old dolls. Kind of all over the place. There was one in the bathroom. They had to have been really expensive or maybe dolls aren't just as expensive as they think they are. But they looked like well made dolls and they were wearing extremely ornate dresses.
[Ali laughs]
Janine: Yeah, you're basically describing Ashton Drake dolls and stuff, right? Collectable.
Keith: Ashton Drake dolls.
Janine: This collectable doll—it's a whole—my grandma—
Keith: No, no. These are not baby dolls. These are dolls of, like, little girls.
Janine: Yeah, yeah.
Keith: Okay. So it is more like this. I'll—it's more like this but not quite. They look older than this. I mean, these dolls have been here for decades. But it is an older style of dress than that and also older dolls than those are.
Janine: Mm-hm.
Ali: Sure.
Keith: Carter says his grandparents seem to be the most haunted people. I think they're old people. I think that there's a line that you can cross between just, like, normal behaviour of eighty-year-old people and stuff that is—stuff that seems haunted. Um.
Ali: [laughing] Oh, sure.
Keith: And you have a big house and you have a lot of haunted shit to fill it with. Yeah. I wish I knew exactly what kind of dolls these were. But these look friendlier. I think that these dolls were from, like, the fifties. I think that these are dolls—fancy dolls—from the fifties. Anyway.
Ali: Sure. I didn't want to interrupt during the doll figuring. People in chat said, kinda freaked out 'cause they heard a weird noise. I forgot to close my Line client. And I also didn't have it on mute like I usually do. So there was a tiny—
Janine: I was wondering before, like, "What’s that doll sound?"
Ali: There was a tiny place that went, "Mine!" [laughs] And that's what Line notifications sound like. No more of that tonight, I don't think. Unless Keith adds it to his fucking—[laughs]
Keith: I'll add it.
Ali: Yeah.
Janine: So, do we wanna establish what the family is doing at dusk and then start making moves?
Keith: Uh, Taco Saturday.
[Ali laughs]
Janine: Right.
Keith: [cross] We're all together, same room.
Janine: [cross] Taco Saturday. Dining table.
Keith: Talking about their day.
Janine: Mm-hm.
Keith: Yeah.
Janine: Ta-king. Taco-ing.
[Ali laughs]
Keith: [cross] Yeah, that's what you do. You catch up on the week. You talk at Taco Tuesday where you eat tacos and talk about your week.
Janine: [cross] They only talk about eating tacos. Dinner is silent otherwise. Yeah.
Ali: Sure.
Keith: And that's why it's—it's the other reason why it has to be Saturday and not some other day.
Janine: Mm.
Ali: Yeah, okay.
Janine: That beats Sunday ‘cause that’s the Sabbath. No talking… [pause] or tacos.
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: Or, they're Jewish and it is the Sabbath but they're just not very religious.
Janine: Mm. Or Seventh Day Adventists? Yeah, sorry.
Ali: So, we're establishing during this phase all of the family is gonna be in this room at least for right now. I guess you have individual moves so if somebody goes somewhere else, that's fine. But, everyone's strategically—everybody is here.
Keith: Yeah, strategically, everyone is there in that room together.
Ali: Okay.
Janine: Okay.
Ali: Um.
Janine: Um. I don't know if anyone else has an idea for—I have an idea for a move that might be a good gentle ease in.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Janine: I, as Baby Pearl, the haunted ass doll, somehow I got—
Sylvia: [cross] That's the name of the movie. Sorry.
Janine: I don't know how I've ended up on—no one has noticed this and it's a mystery. Somehow I've ended up on the floor under the dining table. And, I am going to—I wanna, like—hang on. What are our actual move-ass moves? For this?
Keith: I think it's just a 3d6, right?
Janine: Yeah, I'm just making sure that I'm—that it's scary. So the thing I'm going to do—I'm gonna scare the mom by being under the table mysteriously and grabbing her ankle.
Ali: Ooh.
Janine: And because it's my first time attacking the mom, it is 4d6. It's a roll of 4d6.
Keith: Oh, is that your move?
Janine: Yeah. First time I go after someone I get a little—a little bonus. A little cherry on top.
Ali: Oof!
Janine: Go by the best one?
Ali: So the way that it works, you roll a dice pool and you go by whatever's highest. You ignore everything else. Unless—except for the special move where if you get two 6s or three 6s. Um—
Janine: And that's fine.
Ali: The chart that we have here is: 1-2, you fail in your attempt to cause fear and suffer a major setback. 3-4, you succeed to cause fear—uh, you succeed and cause fear but suffer a minor setback. 5 and 6—which is what you got—is you succeed in causing fear. And the 6-6 move is, you succeeded and the result of your fear die is doubled. And 6-6-6 is, you are terror incarnate. Your target loses all of its will to remain and it is removed from the game. So.
Janine: That sounds fun. The odds of rolling three sixes are so overwhelming that you really gotta do—
Ali: Uh-huh.
Keith: Yeah. I think it's a really nice touch.
Ali: So that was a success.
Janine: [cross] I’ll roll my—
Ali: [cross] Yeah, roll your d6 here.
Janine: Damage? Fear? Fear die.
Keith: Fear damage.
Janine: 2.
Keith: 2. Just a little. Just a little fear for the mother. I—so, okay. Is this a grab or is this a brush or, like...
Janine: I mean, if it were another character I think my answer would be different. But the mother's whole thing is being kind of—denial, right? You just kinda keep it together. It's all fine. Whatever. Don't worry about it.
Keith: Yeah.
Janine: So, yeah, y'know. If it was the son or daughter, it might be harder to be, like, well it was a grab but it was only 2. But I think in this case, it could be maybe a grab and then it's like, "Oh, I left the doll.” Like some sort of—
Keith: I could even—I could even intentionally not look and be, like, "It was the cat. It was the cat."
Janine: That sounds like the move though. Maybe. Is that the move?
Keith: The move? Well, only if I didn't take the damage.
Janine: Yeah.
Keith: No, 'cause it's a little hand, right? It's, like, knowing it's the—knowing that it's not the cat but saying at least in your head it's, "Oh, it must have been the cat."
Janine: Yeah, totally, totally.
Keith: Meanwhile, I've gone down from 10 to 8 fear track.
Janine: 'Cause it was a tiny little—
Keith: Yeah, tiny little wooden hand.
Janine: Sawdust and glue. Technically. I don't know if that counts as wood.
Keith: Sawdust is the dust of wood.
Ali: Yeah, it's wood composite.
Janine: That's like saying that dust in your house is skin though. You don't say "There's some skin on the TV. Wipe it off."
Keith: I do say that. [Janine and Ali laugh] I say that because it's gross and I think it's funny to be gross. Cards on the table.
[everyone laughs]
Janine: Alright, who's next?
Ali: Yeah, um, I—if we just want to go around here. I feel like the turn order is going to be weird here unless Keith feels really compelled to be, like, "The mother gets up and starts washing the dishes," or whatever, right? But I'm willing to keep scaring. I think I have a good idea. Which is—I don't know if I can do this as a demon. Wait a minute. I was gonna have, like, the lights flicker. Do demons have, like—
Keith: You can do that.
Ali: —have, like electrolysis powers? I think I should.
Janine: Electrolysis is the one where you get the hair zapped so the hair's not on you anymore. That's different.
Ali: [laughing] Wait what?
Janine: Electrolysis is permanent hair removal.
[Ali laughs]
Sylvia: Need me an electrolysis Demon, honestly.
Janine: Laser’s fine. I don’t know.
Ali: Anyway, yeah. I think [laughs] in this moment of tension, already.
Keith: Who are you fearing? Who are you specifically…?
Ali: Oh, I guess this might be—this is probably targeted towards the father?
Keith: Okay.
Ali: Um, I guess we'll see how well the roll does and we can see how, like, effect—'cause I feel like it'll either be the thing of, like, "Will the friggin yada yada..." or it could be, like... [everyone laughs] you know—
Keith: These gosh darn lights!
Ali: Or it can be a thing of, like, y'know. We'll see. It could be more scarier than that. So I'm going to roll my 3d6. That's a 4. That's a 4! You succeed and cause fear but suffer a minor setback. Wuh-oh. Okay. So this—
Janine: You got three 4s. That should also be special.
Ali: No... [everyone laughs] The minor setback options are: you take -1 to the result of your next roll, you can accept aid on your next roll, or next time you cause fear your result is halved. Damn!
Janine: Wow.
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: That's a big-time setback.
Keith: That is a big-time setback. I think all these are pretty big-time set—you take -1 to the result of your next roll? Like, that's pretty...
Ali: Oh sure.
Sylvia: The major ones are a lot worse.
Keith: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Ali: Oh... yeah.
Keith: And I get to decide this because I'm the facilitator.
Ali: Mm-hm...!
Keith: But this is—I'm gonna say this is a pretty—I think this is a minor attempt. This is not—you're not really trying to... like, you didn't just pop up in front of me and go, "Boogetty, boogetty."
Ali: True. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a very passive… [laughs] scaring.
Keith: What would it look like for the demon to not be able to accept aid on the next roll? Is this, like—is it an embarrassment thing? Like a pride thing of, like, "I couldn't really get it done perfect and all I was doing was flickering the lights. The doll's here. Y'know. She's new. She saw."
[everyone laughs]
Ali: Yeah, I guess the doll really got a win over me here. Yeah, I think that works either of just being, like, "Damn, I really—this was my opportunity to make a first impression and I fucked that up." [laughs] But also being, like, "Okay, I have to really be in the game here and I'm acting separately from the other two on my next action."
Keith: Okay.
Ali: I retreated into my demonic basement or whereever the fuck my, like, home base is.
[everyone laughs]
Janine: We have gamers on this game I see.
Sylvia: The son's a gamer and the demon also goes and plays sometimes. "Why is my save getting fucked up?" It's haunted. That's why you can't beat that level.
Keith: [cross] Haunted saves. Um.
Ali: Who beat Knights at the Round Table for me?
Keith: Who keeps deleting my Doom save? [Ali and Sylvia laugh] Demons hate Doom because you kill demons in Doom.
Ali: True! That is true.
Sylvia: Okay. I think I have a scare.
Ali: Yeah?
Keith: I'm gonna say that at this point—at this point I think we're—the lights—oh, Ali, you didn't do your fear damage roll to the father.
Ali: Oh, I succeed and cause fear. That's right.
Keith: Yes.
Ali: Roll 1d6. Nice catch. Jesus!
Janine: [cross] Nice! Okay! Worth it, right?
Keith: [cross] What was that?
Ali: It's a—
Keith: Oh, holy moly. Okay.
Janine: He's very concerned about the electricity.
Keith: Yeah.
Janine: I could be expensive.
Keith: Okay, so this is—this is what this is. This is, like, um… dinner's ending. I'm getting up to start clearing my dishes and the lights go off as I'm moving out of the chair. The lights go off at the exact right moment to actually mess up my balance and I drop a plate. It's like, "Ah!" And it’s: I drop the plate and the fork and there's a big loud noise and, uh, in the way that someone walking up to you and you don't hear them because you have headphones in can actually startle you. It's, like, actually startling.
Ali: [laughing] Oh, sure. Yeah, my suggestion was maybe if you look up at that light in the moment you see a demon face or a weird symbol, and you're like, "Damn."
Keith: Oh, like an after-image? Like when you stare at the light and when you blink you see—okay.
Ali: Yeah. And afterwards it says, "Get out."
Keith: Well, the dad's half dead.
Ali: [laughs] Yeah, we might be switching to 1d4s in a minute. [laughing] But we'll see how... I mean, that's—yeah, we'll see. We'll see how it goes.
Keith: If it starts going even worse or if it continues at this clip, we'll just pretend that it was at medium the whole time.
Ali: Sure. Yeah. [laughs] Maybe we'll give you a healing ground in between midnight. [Sylvia and Janine laugh] We can find some spots you can go to. You can figure out what resources you can trade. Okay, that's all the creature turns for this round so do you have specific—
Sylvia: Ah—
Keith: Hold on. Not quite all.
Ali: Oh, sorry! Fuck!
Sylvia: I know I'm in the walls but come on now!
Keith: Wow. The demon really does not respect the Creature in the Wall. Nothing else here can scare, so.
Sylvia: I'm actually very glad that you mentioned the—I'm assuming the thing with the plate dropping and stuff still happens?
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Even though—yeah, 'kay, cool. I'm gonna go and scare the son, I think. It's kinda... spread it out. And I think what happens is, like—just to talk about this. I think a piece of some food or something just rolls somewhere in the kitchen and the kid looks over at it and sees a spindly arm pop out of a floorboard really quick and grab the piece of food. And then—
Janine: You have to say what the food is. The tacos are a whole taco or...?
Sylvia: What's the filling? What's in the filling?
Keith: Oh, this is American family taco night. This is ground beef with powder taco seasoning in hard shell corn tortillas.
Sylvia: Okay cool.
Keith: Shredded lettuce. Shitty tomatoes.
Janine: Tomatoes, yeah.
Sylvia: Exactly what I was picturing honestly.
Keith: [cross] Bad hot sauce.
Sylvia: [cross I think it's—
Keith: And the dad has sour cream and no one else does.
Sylvia: It's like a clump of the ground beef that got some sour cream on it.
Ali: Oh, is there a streak of sour cream on the floor now because...?
Sylvia: Yeah, it drags down to the little floorboard that opened up for a second there. So, I'm going to roll my dice and see how this works. That's three 6s. I killed it.
Keith: Oh my god!
Janine: Woah!
Keith: Oh my god!
[everybody laughs]
Janine: That's—okay, so that's not even a balance thing. Balancing it would not have changed that at all! That's just pure luck.
Keith: Okay. Alright! Here it is. Sorry! Everybody get ready! ... [in hysterics] "What!"
Janine: He goes early.
Keith: "What was that!" [uproarious laughter] "Oh my god!"
Sylvia: Oh my god!
Keith: "I'm leaving, I'm leaving, I'm leaving, I'm leaving, I'm leaving!"
Sylvia: I was trying to go so mild with it too!
Keith: "There's something in the walls I'm going to Jonah’s!"
Janine: This is what happens when you store up all your haunting energy for a few decades! And then unleash it in one fistful of beef and sour cream.
[laughter continues]
Sylvia: Oh, that kid is never going to get a taco ever again. Oh my god! [laughs] So, I don't need to roll damage on that.
Ali: [laughing] I don't think so.
Sylvia: Um, incredible. I'm terror incarnate.
[Ali and Sylvia laugh]
Janine: Jesus!
Ali: I love this for you.
Sylvia: Thank you. Oh my god, okay, I need a sec. Someone else go. [laughter continues]
Keith: Well, it's night now, right?
Ali: [laughing] I was gonna—I mean, you still have turns in this phase if you wanna do the phases? I was gonna suggest a mid-phase break but if you want to think through what your actions are going to be, take the break now. It's up to you.
Keith: Sure, so. So… So, I guess my—the way that we're interpreting it, I guess, the last turn would be the daughter's turn. I think there's gotta be some confusion about what happened with the son. There was someone in the walls? And, I think that's gotta mean something to everyone at this point. Like, I think that the straw breaking the camel's back for the son is sort of, like, everyone goes, "Oh, I—yeah, there's something wrong with the house. The house is haunted, like—okay. Number one. Ghosts or whatever are real and they're here and they're actually here, and we have to figure out what we're doing." The daughter goes to hide. I'm hiding the daughter immediately. Once per game the daughter can hide to escape from the creatures. To find her again the creature must roll 3d6 and get a 5 or higher on at least two of the dice. She's hiding straight away. Uh, and I think that is my final move for this phase.
Ali: I like that. I think that makes sense. Okay. So.
Keith: She's gonna go to the crawl spaces—
Ali: Ooh.
Keith: —and move around.
Ali: [laughs] Let's take a short mid-phase break and then we'll come back to nightfall.
Janine: Sounds good.
Ali: Three remaining— [laughs]
Keith: I left my gamer—my gamer’s skull here! Who did that?
Janine: I did. I hope everyone likes it.
Keith: It’s really good.
Ali: So good. Is that his, fucking, Xbox avatar?
Janine: Yeah.
Sylvia: I literally do have that avatar.
Keith: My Xbox avatar is a skull.
Ali: Okay. Be right back, everybody. [slight pause, mid-phase break] Hi everybody! We're back. We're in phase two. This is nightfall. Darkness shrouds the house and cuts it off from the world. Um, our family [laughs] right now is... Dear father is at 5 HP. The mother is at 8 HP. The son has gone to a friend's house ‘cause he's not fucking dealing with this shit anymore. And the daughter—full HP—I guess I'm just gonna—just gonna right 8 here so everybody knows. Full HP and is currently hiding and we need a successful roll to go find her so the daughter's in a great place at the moment. This is post-taco dinner. Dishes have been brought to the sink. Sour cream has presumably been wiped up from the floor but who knows.
Keith: Cat's licking it up.
Ali: Ooh. Is that good for cats? I guess sour cream is probably fine…
Keith: Dairy is not great for cats. But in a small enough amount it's not a big deal.
Janine: Yeah, it's all about volume.
Keith: Unless it's onions and garlic. Not about volume, just don't give that to your cats.
Ali: Oh true.
Janine: Yeah. Yeah.
Ali: The active setbacks we're going to have for this phase is that I'm not going to be able to accept aid. And with that established, what's going on with our family?
Keith: I think that they are in the study together. Not the daughter. She's hiding. But the mother and father are in the study. And, I think that they're in the middle of rationalising what happened. I think that they're maybe even upset with their son for running out on the family dinner. That's not okay. I don't care if you saw a monster. You thought you saw a monster, you clear your plate after dinner! Y'know. If I told you once, I told you a thousand times! And I think that they're content to let the daughter be wherever she is, y'know.
Ali: Oh, is this maybe a—not to step on your toes but is this a maybe they put the daughter to bed and she was, like, defence mode.
Keith: Oh, yeah. Sure. Yeah. Like a kids movie montage of putting on your spy gloves and you got your mom's thing and you got your walkie-talkie set to your neighbour best friend's—your neighbour/bestfriend—frequency. Be, like, "Ghosts are out. I'm going underground!"
[Ali laughs]
Sylvia: Hell yeah.
Ali: Yeah. Because the next phase is midnight I think it makes sense at this point for the father/mother to be, like, "Okay, we're gonna put the daughter to bed. We're not going to worry about her. We're gonna regroup and—"
Keith: Yeah. They're focusing on the reality of what the son did and less on the—on what he said was true in order to not have—not acknowledge it.
Ali: Oh, the back and forth of, like, "Maybe he doesn't like tacos!"
Keith: Yeah. [Ali and Keith laugh] “Or, y'know, he's been staying up late playing those games!”
Ali: [cross] Ooh, those games! They get into his head.
Keith: [cross] “They get into his sleep! He's got god knows how many hours of homework every afternoon.” He's got—what season is it?
Ali: What season is it? Oh. That's a great question. Fall, I guess?
Keith: Football practice.
Ali: True.
Keith: “And he's coming home and he's doing god knows how many hours of homework and then he stays up til two-three AM! You know, the devil's hour! Playing these games! We're setting screen limits.”
Ali: [softly] Yeah. Yeah.
Janine: Parents.
[Ali and Keith laugh]
Ali: Are we establishing here that the father/mother are still together at this point? They're in the same room at the start of the phase?
Keith: Yes. Yeah, yeah.
Ali: Okay, cool. Maybe that changes but… [laughs]
Keith: Yeah, maybe it changes but we're doing same room.
Ali: Okay.
Keith: So. Okay. I do have a question.
Ali: Uh-huh.
Keith: When I hide, you have to roll to find me? Right? Is that true?
Ali: I think that's only for the daughter.
Keith: Okay.
Ali: But—
Keith: So otherwise when I hide it's just something that I say that I'm doing.
Ali: Yeah, 'cause it's hide, move around the house, support each other. Yeah.
Janine: Supporting has a real material effect in that you can heal though, right?
Ali: Is that true for the family?
Janine: Yeah. If the family rolls support then they get the thing added to their health or whatever? I think that's a specific thing.
Ali: Ooh.
Janine: Right?
Keith: Yeah, it just says support each other which is what I'm doing right now but it is the only instance of the word ‘support’ in the entire book. The father has the move Rational Thought once per game. The father can use his unshakeable belief and rational explanations to help another family member roll—help another family member roll 1d6 and add the resulting number to the resistance number.
Janine: Ah, that was what I was thinking of.
Ali: [cross] Okay.
Keith: [cross] Yeah, so that is the only heal move that I have.
Ali: Okay, yeah.
Keith: Uh, so. I think support each other. And I think, again—I think there's feeding into each other's preconceived conception of reality as a ghost-free haunt-free zone and that is the way in which they're supporting each other.
Ali Yeah, that's a way to support your partner with it. But, yeah, I think these moves are more establishing the setting or whatever. To hide, you could be, like, "I'm going to go into the closet. I'm going to lock the door." And then we would figure out the locked door. But not, like, "Roll 1d6 to see if you hide or whatever." Right? So, where is our—where is our scare opening here for this couple discussing their weird son? Their scared son I should say. Their gamer son. There's nothing weird about being a gamer.
Keith: “He is weird. I've said this since he was fourteen. He’s weird. He's turning weird! He's turning out like your side.”
Sylvia: Oh my god!
Ali: Okay, wow. If you keep going this is going to stop being supporting each other.
[Ali and Keith laugh]
Keith: No, it's still supporting each other because even though it is concretely a bad thing to say to your spouse, it still is more important to not think about the ghosts.
Ali: Oh, right. It's a distraction. I'm not going to think about the ghost right now. I'm gonna get into this weird fight.
Keith: I'm gonna be thinking about how much I hate your parents.
Ali: Yeah, I've been there. Hm, huh…
Sylvia: I have a move that isn't scare related that we could do really quick. Just trying to find where the kid is. Um, 'cause that's just another 3d6 roll and to find her, right? I don't think I can scare her on the same roll.
Ali: [cross] Oh, yeah.
Keith: [cross] Right. You have to roll to find.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And it is a 3d6, yeah.
Sylvia: 'Cause I feel like that makes sense for what I am as well.
Ali: Right, yeah.
Sylvia: So let's see what happens here.
Keith: I bet there's—oh my god.
Ali: Oh my god!
Keith: Found her!
Sylvia: I guess I did, yeah!
Ali: That is 5 or higher.
Keith: You rolled a 6, 5, and a 3. Just—just to lay it all out there. Sylvi's last six dice have been a 6, 6, a 6, a 6, a 5, and a 3.
Sylvia: So it's trending downward is what you're saying.
Keith: [cross] You are about to roll—
Janine: [cross] Do you think we could talk Austin into making a season out of this game? And then just make Sylvi do everything?
[Sylvia laughs]
Ali: Yeah, we could talk about it.
Janine: I'll put together a package.
Sylvia: Every week it's just a new house.
[Ali and Janine laugh]
Ali: Okay. I'm gonna darken your move here so we know you can't use it, unfortunately.
Sylvia: Um, where was she? I guess, is the only thing I have to do now 'cause I'm not using my move yet.
Keith: She is in a crawl space. So, in my aunt's house in the bathroom, if you walked towards a normal shaped bathroom, like half bath, where if you walk in there's a sink and then past the sink on the same side is a toilet. But, if you keep walking there's an extra couple feet and then it turns right and there's a really long hallway that goes to a cubby. And, it's, like, this really huge kind of storage closet that is down a hallway in the bathroom. And I think that in this house, it leads to the—like, the upstairs there's a spare room that used to be the playroom when both kids were young enough to have a room where all their toys could be without ruining the rest of the house. But, now it's not used because it's weird to have a playroom that's just your room. And so, it's sort of a disused toy room—toy storage room.
Ali: Oh sure.
Keith: She's in between these rooms in this cubby hole.
Ali: I guess if they've only been here for four months though it might be the thing of, like, there's still unpacked boxes in there.
Keith: Oh, they've only been there for four months. Shit.
Ali: I mean, I feel like—
Keith: So—
Ali: —that still, like, works but it might be the thing of they haven't decided what this room is yet.
Keith: Right. Everything that I said is true. Except that it's full of boxes—still packed boxes of mostly the children's things. Like, toys and stuff.
Ali: Okay, yeah.
Keith: That they don't really use anymore, like very young kid toys for her and then slightly older toys—oh! She's taken one of those. She's got a nerf gun. She's got one of those new nerf guns that fire really hard. So, she's in the closet with a headset and a walkie-talkie and a nerf gun.
Sylvia: Fuck yeah.
Ali: Yeah. This daughter might win this whole thing. [laughs]
Keith: I don't know. It sounds like she's about to die!
Sylvia: I just found her. I didn’t do anything.
Keith: Now do you—you use move to find me.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: That's your move for the whole...?
Sylvia: I assumed as much, yeah.
Ali: Yeah.
Sylvia: That would make sense to me, right?
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: It feels like the purpose of that move is to get one of the creatures to expend one of their turns to find her or multiple if I didn't roll a 6 and a 5.
Ali: Yeah, that makes sense to me. That seems to be the way that we should play it.
Keith: Well, if I do see you then it's [tongue click] right in the forehead with a dart.
Ali: Ooh.
Sylvia: I want that to—let's have that happen.
Keith: Okay, so your wall face shows up in the closet and I screech and fire and [tongue click] right in the forehead.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And then—
Sylvia: You just hear a bunch of skittering away in the walls.
[Ali and Keith laugh]
Ali: Um. Great to have found the daughter. Great roll.
Sylvia: Thank you.
Keith: Alright. Who else is doing the scare?
Ali: I'm thinking about what sort of demon thing I want to do. [softly chuckles] I feel like I could do some sort of weird thing with the cat? But, like, having the cat walk around in circles or whatever seems to be a different stress than ghost stress but I don't know.
Keith: “We have to leave the house now and take the cat to the vet! Something's wrong! I told you she was too old and she couldn't handle the stress of a move!”
Ali: Maybe—maybe in—maybe in the room that the parents are arguing in currently, the cat is in the corner pawing at a shelf or whatever, and the cat knocks down a book and it falls off the shelf and opens to the diary of the person who, like, locked me into this house. And it's their journal about the demonic fucking shit that happened in this house when they were in it. So…
Keith: Are you saying that the parents find this journal?
Ali: Yeah. I think it's, like, cat knocks it over and then let's say, I'm targeting the mother here, and depending on how this goes she can walk over and flip through be, like, “Damn.” [laughs] So, I'm going to roll 3d6 to see how successful this revealing the history—
Keith: Oh my—okay. I looked up and I saw Sylvi's roll and I was, like, another?
[Ali and Sylvia laugh]
Janine: Ah.
Ali: Okay, this is another 4. So, I'm gonna succeed but I'm going to suffer a minor setback and so I don't forget I'm going to roll my damage. Which is the same. Which is the same.
[everyone laughs]
Keith: The most successful haunting of all time!
Sylvia: We're so good at this!
Ali: So good!
Keith: Brutal! Oh my god! I—I honestly—I, sort of, at this point feel like it might help the game to include 5 as a partial success and make you need a 6 to get an unconditional success.
Janine: Uh, hm.
Sylvia: Mm.
Janine: I feel like in doing that we should just bump their health up.
Keith: Oh, I don't mean literally now. I mean in general for this game.
Ali: Wait. Oh, I see what you mean.
Sylvia: The design.
Keith: Right. It is change to the way the book works.
Ali: Well, no. I feel like it's evenly spread 'cause it's, like, two successes, two mixed successes, two successes. You know what I mean?
Keith: Yeah. We just haven't had one failure.
Ali: I know. I know. I apologise for that. But, y'know, we're haunting! And I've done a terrifying thing 'cause where did this book even come from? “Why is this book talking about my house and demons and that this demon was sealed into these walls and these walls are demonic and this is a demon's house?”
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: “And we sacrificed our house to the demons?”
Janine: How did they even get a demon in here?
Keith: So, I'm actually going to use my move—
Ali: Okay.
Keith: —for this. The mother's move is Absolute Denial. If you keep things together well enough no one will ever know. Once per game, the mother can ignore one instance of fear entirely. This ability cannot be used if the creature who caused the fear rolled more than one 6.
Ali: Which I did.
Keith: So, perfect move to use it on. I couldn't have taken any more damage if I wanted to. And you didn't roll a 6. So.
Ali: Yep.
Keith: Everything that you have said about it is true except I'm going to put the book back where I found it and the father's going to be like, "What is it? What did you find?" And, the mother's gonna just say, "It was just an old photo album. It was just an old photo album."
Ali: Yeah, don't worry about it.
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: [softly] I think a little...
Keith: Oops. Augh.
Ali: Okay, well. Great—great offence there or defence, I don't know. [laughs] But now you can't use that move anymore. Once per game. Oh, and I'm losing my—oh wait, I need a new setback.
Sylvia: Oh yeah.
Ali: Minor setbacks, again, are either: you take -1 on the result of your next roll, you can't accept aid on your next roll, or the next time you cause fear your result is halved.
Sylvia: Is Keith still with us? I think I might have heard him spill something and have to deal with it. Oh god. Or something along those lines.
Keith: Ah, sorry. I spilt something so I'm listening but I'm—
Ali: Okay, yeah, take your time.
Keith: Hold on.
Ali: This is all good. Actual play.
Sylvia: Live shows too.
Keith: Okay. Sorry. I'm back. I'm good.
Ali: Yeah, okay, you’re sure? You don't want us to—
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: Okay.
Keith: I did not spill a lot but I did spill about a hundred millilitres of boiling hot water.
Ali: Mm!
Sylvia: Ah!
Janine: Ah…
Ali: A hundred!
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: Okay.
Keith: I'm good. I'm not burned. I got my legs but I didn't burn them. But I just needed to wipe my table and the floor.
Ali: I bet.
Keith: Sorry, I wasn't sitting in hot water which would eventually become cold water which is the worst kind of water to be standing in. Okay, what's happening?
Ali: I need a new minor setback.
Keith: Okay. So, we already gave you that first—that first one where you weren't allowed to get help. I'm having a lot of trouble with dice here so I'm just gonna selfishly say that you take -1 to the result of your next roll.
Ali: I love that. Yeah, that's fine. I was looking at these and I was, like, "Some of these are better than 'can't accept aid.'" So.
Sylvia: Yeah, I feel like I've never, like, obviously—we haven't really needed to aid because we are systematically destroying.
Keith: I was living in a world where someone might fail and so might want help to not fail.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And then in not receiving help would fail but that's, like—that's not the game we're playing.
[Ali laughs]
Sylvia: Someone in the chat—Carter Richmond in the chat. Sorry if I said their full name—I probably—whatever.
Keith: I go through the same thing every time, yeah.
Sylvia: If you are rolling 3d6, you only have a four percent chance to fail in this game, apparently. I haven't done the numbers myself but I'm trusting—I'm trusting one of our fine patrons. And a seventy percent chance of a complete success. So, it does seem a little skewed.
Ali: But it's skewed towards the 6s which is, like, getting a jackpot.
Keith: Because if you get two 1s and a 5 then you succeed.
Ali: [cross] Oh sure.
Keith: [cross] Because you always get the highest one. So, it doesn't matter how bad you roll as long as one of them is at least a 3.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Ali: Sure. Well. Whose move is it?
Janine: I think it's mine? Where's the dad at right now? What's he up to?
Keith: In the study with the mom.
Janine: Right.
Keith: Let's say that they've finished their discussion and he is in there alone sort of sitting at the desk. Not really doing anything—looking like he's about to do something but mostly just sitting there.
Janine: Okay. I had, like, an idea and it—I kinda lost it. Uh. For how to mess with the dad. Let's see. I'm a tiny little doll. My face is all peely and open and weird. My limbs are very loose. And there's an adult man the study that I want to upset. Does he—what—okay. Can you describe the study a little bit to me? In terms of like—
Keith: Uh, yeah. Books to the wall. An old encyclopaedia set that no one's ever looked through. A lot of books about military history. We've got a few collections of American classics. Like, it'll be... y'know. Sets like—here's, like, five different things from Mark Twain that all have the same binding and the same colour. Y'know, stuff like that. And there's a big wooden desk with an old-ish computer. But it's sort of pushed to the side like it doesn't really get used. Mostly there's, like, stacks of papers and pens on the desk. A couple chairs in the corners but no chair close enough so you could sit near the desk chair. Like, they're decorative chairs not guest chairs.
Janine: Okay.
Keith: And a big plush faux oriental rug.
Janine: Alright. It's still also fairly early in the night too so I don't want to get too rowdy. Or too extreme, I guess. Okay. I think the thing that I'm going to do as the little doll, um... does he have slippers nearby? Or could he have a pair of slippers?
Keith: Yeah, sure. Totally.
Janine: That he's been slipping on and off or whatever.
Keith: How about—do loafers work?
Janine: Oh, yeah, loafers work.
Keith: Yeah. Then, yes, definitely.
Janine: Okay. This thing I want to do is that one of his loafers disappears and the toe is poking out from underneath. Maybe like a… I mean, if one of the chairs that people don't sit in is padded or has a low—is more like an armchair or some sort of piece of furniture like a table with a drape over it or something. I want the shoe to be peeking out from there. And, like, I think the thing I'm—well.
Keith: [cross] There's someone behind the curtain, maybe?
Janine: [cross] I'm going for is, well—hm. Maybe. I'm a tiny doll so I can't be a whole ass person behind a curtain. 'Cause it'd be a little anticlimactic when you open the curtain and have to look down.
Ali: That would be so scary, are you kidding? If I saw a—oh my god. If— [laughs] If the light somehow hit the curtain in a certain way that it looked like there was a full person behind a curtain with a whole shoe and it was my shoe and then I go over there and I'm, like, "Who's wearing my shoe?" And it was just a doll? That would be fucking so terrifying. [Keith chuckles] That would be so scary.
Sylvia: Yeah, no, that's freaky.
Janine: Yeah, I guess that's pretty scary.
Sylvia: It's better than someone just grabbing some ground beef. I'll at least tell you that.
[Ali laughs]
Janine: Actually, I'm going to up this a little more. So, that basically happens when there's a curtain and both of the shoes are not where he thought they were and they end up—they're by the curtain as if there is a person standing behind the curtain and maybe there was a gentle draft and it kind of looks like the curtain is contouring around a person. But. If/when pulls the curtain back, based on my success I guess or failure, it's not even the doll? It's just the doll's legs in the shoes. With loose bits of twine hanging off as if the rest of the doll is elsewhere.
Ali: That's scary.
Janine: That's my pitch for that move. It's my first time scaring the dad which means I get 4d6. Because that's not a once again thing, that's an anytime I attack anyone thing. This is my first—yeah, right, I've talked about it before. Right. Got two 6s.
Ali: [laughing] Yowza!
Keith: Double damage.
Janine: Do we want to goose their health just a little bit? To the medium maybe?
Keith: I think we should keep going.
Janine: Okay. Alright. So, two 6s you succeed and the result of your fear die is doubled. So. I'll run my fear die. That's 10.
Ali: Yowza.
Keith: Oh, the result is doubled, not the dice rolls are doubled!
Janine: Yeah, the result is doubled. 10 is a lot.
Keith: So, he's dead. He's done.
Janine: He's done. He's gone. He's out door.
Ali: Yowza... unless you want to move—oh, oh... You can't do that. That's not how your move works.
Keith: No. I can only do it for someone else.
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: And also I wouldn't be hurt until I was dead. This was a one hit kill. This is a headshot.
[Ali laughs]
Sylvia: Oh no, the doll has the nerf gun!
Keith: I'm trying to—I'm trying to even conceptualise how, like, how this—no offence Janine, this is scary—this is just—how do you go from literally 0 to 60 on this.
Ali: Oh, well, okay. So the—
Keith: Oh, the dad was not at 0. He was at—
Ali: He was at half. So, he was already feeling like—
Keith: Okay, you're right.
Ali: —this is a little much.
Keith: Yeah.
Janine: Like the mum with the lights.
Ali: Right. I saw the lights and then I closed my eyes and then I had an after image which said ‘get out’ and now the set-up with this doll makes me think that my legs are going to get cut off and I don't want that to happen to me.
Keith: Okay. Here's the thing. If we—if we bumped up—so basically, I think that we're two turns away from—I think we're three turns away from the game being over.
Ali: Uh-huh.
Keith: And the only thing that I can think of is if we added health to the remaining three players to prolong it, it would just go from there's three turns left to there's five or six turns left.
Ali: Well, it's three no matter what. The win state is: are there people with HP at the end of this.
Keith: Not phases, turns. Like individual—
Ali: Oh, yeah, yeah, I get what you mean. I feel like the better way to balance it right now would be to do 1d4 damage rolls? So at least when you're taking those hits... it's not going to wipe you out or whatever.
Janine: I mean, so even if we had put the father at medium health or whatever, this would have taken him out. I'm wondering if, I think—I'm wondering if maybe the way to frame this is that the father and the son are gone. The mother and daughter rally. They're, like, "We just have to have each other's backs." Or whatever. And then we just bump them up to hard or whatever.
Ali: Oh, sure.
Janine: And then focus on them. Would that—do you think that would balance things out a little for the rest of it?
Keith: Explain it one more time?
Janine: If we say that, y'know, the father and the son are off the map but the mother and the daughter we bump their health up to the hard health so 20 and 15.
Keith: Okay.
Janine: And then say that they've basically, kind of, rallied and are digging their heels in a little bit.
Keith: Their resolve has been steeled.
Janine: Yeah.
Ali: [laughs] Yeah, that makes sense.
Keith: Yep.
Ali: It also helps with turns and stuff. It'll still be balanced time-wise but will feel less daunting to Keith.
Janine: And it won't feel like it's over in the next thing. It feels like there's a chance where if Keith can, y'know, keep one of them alive then it's fine in the house. They're not dying.
Ali: So, with the hard numbers in the current -2 HP—or actually the daughter was at full health. That's my bad. So, that's 18/20 for mom and 15/15 for the daughter. [pause] Papa's gone. [laughs] What's his excuse? Is he just, "Oh, I gotta go. My friend called me. He's got a leak in his house. I'll see you tomorrow."
Sylvia: “I'm off to go find our son.”
Keith: Yeah, that's what I was gonna say, basically, is that you go it's the excuse of, like, "I've gotta go get the kid," but really you're, like, "I gotta get out of this house."
Ali: [chuckles] Yeah, okay. Do we have a death image for the father? [laughs]
Keith: He is also a gamer. He just plays Age of Empires.
Ali: Oh, true.
Janine: Yeah.
Ali: Is he a boomer shooter guy? What's a boomer shooter? I don't know what that is. I don't want to start that conversation right now. [Keith laughs] I don't know what that is. Okay. So, I—is that our phase?
Keith: Yeah, that's the phase.
Ali: That's three turns and so, yeah. Yeah.
Keith: So, what phase is this? This is...?
Ali: We've now moved on to ‘midnight’.
Keith: ‘Midnight’. Okay.
Ali: The mother and daughter have accepted that what they're dealing with is uncanny and unnatural.
Keith: Yup.
Ali: And... they're, like, "We're gonna—we're gonna—we're not succumbing to these creatures." And, yeah...
Keith: So, I don't think that the daughter is going to try to hide again. She can't use her move but I think that the mother is going to try to hide. I think there's definitely a, sort of, acceptance of what's happening in the house that makes hiding seem productive rather than a cop-out. I don't even know if she knows the daughter is still... that isn't still hidden. Or, like, what she thinks of it. I know that probably—went to the daughter's room, opened the door, daughter's not there. Sees evidence of the daughter having geared up with the nerf gun and the spy gloves, and goes, "Okay. She's set. I'm going to go into the coat closet." I used to play hide-and-seek when I was a kid and there was this coat closet that was great for hide-and-seek because behind the coats there was, like, this weird little slope upward where you couldn't see even if you checked behind the coats. You still couldn't see to the right. There was this weird ramp that sloped upward til it met the ceiling and you could crunch up there. That's where the mother hides behind—the coats to the right. To win hide-and-seek. That's the winning hide-and-seek spot of my childhood. So, that's her move. She's going—she's hiding. Someone's going to double up or triple up even this one 'cause there's not—there are now more ghosts and ghouls than there are family members.
Ali: Oh, true! Oh, true! [laughs] Okay.
Keith: And so, just to—just to give you all the options. I think the daughter's going to try to set a trap? Like, sort of like a Rube Goldbergian like Home Alone style sort of like ghost hunting trap.
Sylvia: Okay.
Ali: Do you have more details of what the trap—is it, like, a thumb-tack situation? Is it a paint...? Is it like a...?
Keith: It's a, um—it's a house—the trigger is a house of cards 'cause a ghost has to trigger it and even a ghost I think could knock over a house of cards. And then once the house of cards knocks down it knocks down onto a spoon and the spoon knocks a marble onto a hot wheels track. And that goes—the marble zooms along the hot wheels track, bumps into a set of dominos, and then the dominos fall all the way around the circumference of the room until they hit another bigger marble which falls down to strike a match, to burn a rope that drops a ghost net. I don't know what a ghost net is but she called it a ghost net. The kid did.
Ali: Mm-hm. Okay. Alright. Um, hiding in the—okay, alright.
[pause]
Sylvia: I think I have an idea.
Ali: Sure.
Sylvia: So, I got this nerf thing stuck in my head for a bit there and immediately my idea was, like, I should throw this at somebody from a place where they can't see.
Ali: Ooh.
Sylvia: I think I’m going to do it to the mom 'cause I think I'm a little scared of the daughter still 'cause she shot me. [Ali and Keith laughs] So, yeah, I think that it's just the way I see this playing out is she just feels it hit the back of her head and, like, turn around and just sees it rolling on the floor but there's nothing behind her where it could have come from or where—
Keith: Right.
Ali: Ooh.
Sylvia: —yeah.
Keith: Where she is there's no-one—there's nowhere to do that from.
Sylvia: Yeah. It literally had to have come from the ceiling which she doesn't know that. Or maybe she—I don't know. I'm going to roll the dice.
Ali: Okay, I—oh. I was gonna assist you.
Sylvia: Sorry.
Ali: No, I was gonna assist you. You did not need it. It's all good.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: 6?! People listening might not remember—you're not—you didn't read the book and we, y'know, we're not talking about it all that often but regardless of all the 6s, a 5 is also a full success.
[Ali laughs]
Sylvia: I just wanna—I've rolled four 6s tonight.
Ali: Uh-huh!
Sylvia: [cross] Just getting all the good—
Keith: [cross] Four cumulative 6s. Not individual 6s.
Sylvia: Yeah, yeah, that's fair. I mean, I think the three at once—actually I miscounted I’ve rolled five total.
Keith: Yeah, that's what I meant.
Sylvia: The three at once I feel I can count each of them separately.
Ali: Yeah.
Sylvia: Anyway. Uh, 5 damage.
Keith: Jeez! This is not a good hiding space. I think this is a scream. I think this is maybe the first scream. Oh, no, the son screamed. This is the second scream. This is the second scream. She screams. She runs out of the room. I think that now is, like, I have to find my daughter time. Like, even hiding isn't working. No-one should be able to find you in that closet.
Ali: Oh, sure. Yeah.
Keith: Which is also true of the daughter's hiding. No-one should've been able to find her. She was found immediately.
Ali: Y'know, it's—
Keith: So this is team-up time.
Ali: When you live in the walls you can really... you can really get people. Actually that's a great—I was gonna assist the Thing in the Walls here but I think instead of the assist I think I maybe follow this up with another attack on the mother. I think that the Demon was going towards the closet or looking through the walls to find where people were. And then upon hearing the mother run out and, like, scream, I think the mother is going to hear footsteps behind her and maybe there's glowing footprints on the floor or whatever. But. Y'know. There's a chase. This is a chase situation. And I'm going to roll. We're going to see how it goes. 3d6. Okay, so my highest is a 5 and I get a -1 so that's a 4—
Keith: So, another mixed success.
Ali: —so I succeed and cause fear but suffer a minor setback. Loving these 4s tonight. And I'm going to do my 1—oh. Roll 1d6. And that's a 2!
Keith: Okay. That's not so bad. I think we're going to give—we're going to give you the hat trick next time you cause fear your result is halved.
Ali: Okay.
Keith: So you've had all three minor setbacks now.
Ali: Uh-huh.
Keith: And I don't think anyone else has had a minor.
Janine: No.
Keith: Ali has only had minors but every other roll has been a full success.
Ali: Uh-huh. And then mother goes from 13 to 11. And, yeah. Now it's the baby pearl and the daughter.
Janine: Yeah... um.
Ali: Not that you need to necessarily target the daughter. It's just—these are who have turns left.
Janine: Mm-hm. I want to do something interesting about that trap. Like, I feel like that should be some sort of special thing. Right?
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: Mm-hm.
Keith: I'll give it to me.
[Ali and Janine laugh]
Janine: Okay, so the trap was a house of cards with a Rube Goldberg-like cards fall and then trigger a bunch of stuff right?
Keith: Mm-hm.
Janine: What's the end thing?
Keith: Ghost net.
Janine: Right. Ghost net. Okay. I mean to be fair, a neural net would probably work on a doll.
Keith: Yeah, sure. I mean, yeah.
Janine: [cross] It doesn’t even need—
Keith: [cross] It'll definitely work, yeah. If it gets you.
Janine: So, I wonder if—okay. I... I wanna, like, give you something for this trap or have to roll to defeat the trap? Maybe that's what my roll actually is is that it’s a roll to, like, hm...
Ali: Like trigger it without getting trapped?
Janine: Or to, like, get out of it or—
Ali: Oh.
Janine: —you know what I mean?
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Janine: Or, I mean, the thing we could say is that what happens is the trap works and it means that I don't get my extra dice when I try to scare... my extra die when I try to scare the daughters so I have to, like, roll with the 3. We could just say that's true. That's, y'know, rule of cool, right? That's—the daughter went to a lot of work to set up this cool-ass trap and coincidentally the ghost—the spooky thing—that came for her next is the thing that is most vulnerable to things like a net?
Ali: [amused] Mm-hm.
Keith: Yep. Yeah.
Janine: So I kind of, like—that's the thing I kind of just want to give to her, you know?
Ali: Yeah.
Janine: I just want her to get something out of that.
Ali: Especially since we've established the daughter now as, like, a very tech-y, very resourceful. Has a lot of tools on hand for ghost hunting.
Janine: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah, yeah. Everyone else is in Poltergeist and the daughter is in Home Alone.
[Ali and Janine laugh]
Janine: So I'll just—I'll roll a normal 3d6 instead of a 4d6 that I would normally roll for the first time spooking. We'll say that she got a victory die outta me. I got two 5s. [Keith laughs] I'm seeing your point now. I think on the one hand we are rolling just really well tonight.
Keith: Yeah.
Janine: And these rules or these ranges are in line with a lot of ranges that we work with.
Keith: Yeah.
Janine: They’re not that, like, necessarily different, y'know?
Keith: But it's—it's, like, you have a fifty percent chance per die to have at least a partial success and you're rolling minimum three dice per...
Ali: Yeah.
Janine: Yeah. There should also—I feel like it would be good if there was a "take the lowest, take the highest" thing in the mix.
Ali: Oh, sure, sure sure. Yeah.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah, I—
Janine: 'Cause if you move before the family you're at a disadvantage.
Keith: I think that there should be something mechanised about—it's sort of like what you were doing with the trap, Janine. Like, the game is wanting me to come up with scenarios of the family trying to help themselves against the ghosts but there is actually no benefit to doing that and so it's not just to, like, "Oh, it'll be boring to just let the ghosts do a bunch of rolls in a row with no flavour." But it's also, like, "But it doesn't matter what the flavour is that I do because you're always going to just get to roll three or four dice.”
Janine: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah, I feel like if we just had a couple more tangible moves it would—
Keith: Right, like, if I go through the trouble—when I set up—when I went through the—when I did a really good job off the top of my head doing a Rube Goldberg machine.
[Ali laughs]
Janine: Uh-huh.
Keith: That made sense. That is possible. There should've been—there should be something in place where you don't have to come up with how that changes your roll.
Sylvia: We'll say, like, I don't want to feel like we're coming across too unfair to the game when we started on easy mode and then tweaked stuff.
Janine: Yes.
Ali: Oh, yeah.
Janine: A lot of this is—we didn't—we haven't played the game before. We didn't really know what—
Sylvia: The balance was?
Janine: —y'know, it was our first time taking a crack at it so, yeah, it's hard to know what the balance for a group is and, y'know, how long—I mean the other thing we don't consider that there is a lot of people in the world who when they sit down for a table-top game want it to take an hour. And we basically never have that luxury because none of us can ever shut up. So, y'know. So, it's—for us we're trying to make every game like a four hour thing even when we say, "Oh, we'll be done by ten."
Keith: Well, it does specifically say in the rules that pretty much all the difficulty does is change the length of the game. And it did a hundred percent do that.
Ali: Mm-hm.
Janine: It's true.
Keith: Uh, I—I just—I think that my tastes are to have a little bit more of a crunch for, like... I like it when the book answers the question of, like, "Well, I have done all—I have said that my characters do all of these things," and the game has an answer for how that gets represented in the game.
Ali: Oh, sure yeah.
Janine: You want a little more mechanical—
Keith: Yeah, yeah.
Janine: —support.
Keith: Yeah. That's just my personal taste.
Ali: Yeah, that's the kind of—those are the classes you tend to do is, "I've done this thing. I know what I spent. I know what I've gotten and it's gotten me this thing." Y'know? Whereas this is a little more—and I think that it makes sense that it leans towards the monsters because, like, this is a horror game about...
Keith: Right and they’re technically the protagonists.
Ali: Uh-huh.
Janine: It's—
Keith: You know what it is? Because there's no—here's what it is. I figured it out.
Ali: Okay.
Keith: For me. For me anyway. Because there's no failure on the ghost's end, I don't have any space to represent the things that the book says that the family is there to represent, which is that the ghosts are fighting against the—they're basically the banal evil of the suburb. And that actually the ghosts being spooky and weird is good, and the family being boring, like, y'know boring American nuclear family is bad. And because there's no succeeding from my end it's really hard to play that because I just have to keep getting scared over and over again. [Ali laughs]
Janine: So, it’s—
Keith: And I can't—and I can't win against the ghosts. I don't have—I can't just know cellar haunt because the dad is too serious to look up from the newspaper because—
Ali: Mm-hm. It's also—
Keith: —everything has scared me.
Ali: [laughing] Right. It's a tower defence game and you're the tower. That's just what we're going to keep—
Janine: Well, but it's not. Like, so, so—we've actually—I don't want to get—I want to get back to the game obviously. But it's worth saying that we've been—I've been following Anna Landin's games for a while on Itch, and there's a bunch of them that we keep looking at and it's, like, “We should play this for a live or whatever we should, y'know?” It's a thing that comes up pretty often because Anna has done some really interesting—especially one sheet and GM list kinds of things. And a lot of those games are very much, like, solo games or games that you play with another person but you're both kind of making the same side of the story and it's a lot about telling a story and it's not so much about the back and forth game with a GM where there is victory versus loss, or a little hint of competition to it, right? So the vibe that I get from this game is that the facilitator is basically taking half of the story as control but there's not—it definitely doesn't feel like—it feels as if the family wins it should be a really wow, rare thing. It does feel in some ways this is along the lines of a lot of Anna's other really cool solo games about witches and knights and robots and a whole bunch of stuff. But it tends to just be about the journey that the player character or the main figure goes on. And I think that there is that element of it but also there is the fact that when you look at this book it presents as—it feels a little more like a game with a stronger back and forth, when I think what it is is something closer to those really neat interesting narrative story games, y'know?
Keith: Well, one of the things it says about the facilitator is: there can be no tug-of-war without an opposition and in this game—
Janine: Yeah.
Keith: —this opposition is you. While your fellow players will take on the role of things that go bump in the night, you'll embody a different sort of horror. A threat of the outside world. The bleak light of reason. The invasion of mundanity and logic into the soft and creeping comfort of a nightmare. As a facilitator you'll shoulder the responsibility of playing this picture perfect nuclear family moving into the house unaware of its darker denizens as well as helping frame new scenes in keeping the game moving forward. And there hasn't been a lot of space for me to—to—I have not been able to tug. There's been no tugging.
Janine: I wish the family had more moves I think is my big—
Keith: Yeah, yeah.
Ali: Oh, sure.
Janine: —like if there were more spells that they could put on. Or if they could do things once per turn. Well, now that might be too much but if they had that—
Ali: Right, but it's four moves to five, yeah.
Janine: —one move that could be done every turn and one move that could be done—
Keith: Even something like, "Okay I set up the thing." Like when I go hide, roll a d6 and if you succeed then you find me and then you can do your fear roll. I mean obviously y'know just doing some work to actually figure out what would be the most fun is what would be the most fun. But, that's where I feel the most friction is that it doesn't matter what I say, all that the ghosts have to do is say, "Okay, well I found you and I'm going to do my fear roll." The same way as if you had not said anything.
Janine: Yeah, I mean again I think it's more... my read is that that's sort of the style of the game. It's not about failure, it's about the creativity of the solution.
Keith: Yeah.
Janine: It's about the—well, y'know, you're adding complications for flavour but not necessarily as obstacle. But you're right also that a lot of the text in the rules is very, like, "Here's how you throw up obstacles." But you're not really doing that. It's not how it feels.
Keith: Right. And it—and it's also totally possible that a lot of this has been coloured by, like, being down—
Ali: A person?
Keith: —twenty-five percent on the second turn because I lost—
Janine: Yes.
Keith: —a whole character?
Ali: Uh-huh.
Janine: That is the other side of it. Like, we did just get some really—some really, like—
Ali: Yeah.
Janine: —nasty good rolls real fast.
Ali: Very successful. Um.
Keith: Um.
Janine: Sometimes that just happens. Sorry, I need to roll my fear—
Ali: Yeah, that being said.
Janine: —die but I was gonna ask, I wanna know what happens—so the net falls and catches the doll. And I want that moment of: how does the daughter respond to that? Like, what's the plan once the trap goes off?
Keith: Um. [sighs] I have two things that I am thinking. There's the first thing of, like, I caught it. Now let me run away. Like, let me get away. I did it. I caught it. Now it's time to get out of here. The other thing is that I could try to close the net and drag the doll somewhere? Excuse me. Um. But I don't know where I would take it or what I would do with it. I might even try to—I might even... I might even try to talk to it. Yeah, I'm wanna talk—
Janine: Okay.
Keith: —to the doll.
Janine: Uh-huh.
Keith: You're—are you in the net? You still have a fear. You did fear me, right?
Janine: I haven't done my fear roll yet but I did succeed in getting the right to a fear roll.
Keith: Okay.
Janine: Fear dice.
Keith: So I guess I wouldn't try to talk to you. If I didn't get scared—see, that's the thing. If I didn't get scared then I would have tried to talk to you.
Janine: Well, the thing I'm doing here is—I wanna—I can't—it's less interesting to me if I scare you when I'm in the net. The net falls and then you're scared. Like, that's kind of boring. I wanna have, y'know, some sort of more meaningful thing because again it's about—it is about the journey of, “Yes, the trap worked. So, what happens because the trap worked?”
Keith: I wanna take the net and try and bring it. Do I know—I probably don't know about paint thinner.
[Ali laughs]
Ali: You might!
Sylvia: A really funny thing for a kid to know about.
Ali: The dad might be really super into models or whatever.
Keith: Well, no, 'cause Janine had mentioned that when the mom brought the doll home she was gonna DIY it up.
Ali: Oh, sure, sure, sure.
Keith: Had kept it in paint thinner so did I know that this doll was in the garage in a bucket of paint thinner?
Janine: Oh, she was—I said she was going to put the doll in paint thinner but—
Keith: Okay. Well then, um, maybe fireplace. I'll bring the doll to the fireplace.
Ali: Ooh.
Janine: Okay. Alright. Um. Do you throw the doll in the fireplace?
Keith: Yeah, actually I have something really good for this. I do throw the doll in the fireplace. I open up the thing. The fire is on. I throw the doll in the fireplace but nothing happens because this is a flipped home and it doesn't have a real fireplace. It has an electronic fireplace that looks like there's fire but it's just basically there's just a screen in there that does fire and she didn't know 'cause she's a kid.
Janine: So, the doll just hits the screen?
Keith: Yeah.
Janine: Okay, well—
Keith: Anyone seen these weird fireplaces with the screen in there?
Ali: Mm-hm.
Keith: Okay.
Janine: Yeah. We have one. It's not like an actual fireplace. It's one you put in the corner.
Ali: Oh, yeah, yeah. My parents have one that's propped up on a little chair.
Keith: This—I've seen this—I've seen this a lot.
Janine: You can get an electronic wood stove now.
Keith: Like, this used to be a fireplace but at some point someone decided to cement up the fireplace to make it unusable and instead just put a digital fireplace that's a space-heater in where the real fireplace—
Ali: Mm-hm.
Keith: —used to be.
Janine: Um. So, I have an idea for what happens next but I wanna know how scary my roll is?
Ali: Yeah, let's see.
Keith: Yeah.
Janine: That's, like, medium scary. That's a 3.
Ali: Ooh.
Janine: So, I think the doll hits that fireplace screen and in the net lays there for a minute. Also, the doll does not have the legs re-attached. The legs are still somewhere. Um, and I think the doll is for a second waiting. Because the doll also thinks it's a real fire 'cause it's an old doll. It doesn't know about electronic fireplaces.
Keith: Yeah.
Janine: And I think after a second, it starts to crawl out. But it... it's not on fire, right? It's—we know it's not because it's not a real fire. But in its wake it leaves little scorched hand prints and a scorched drag mark as if it had been on fire. So, it's sort of, like, little embers. It's sizzling and smoking a little bit and scorching the floor as the doll very slowly crawls out of the fireplace and towards the daughter.
Keith: Mm. That is scary. Why is it burned, Janine, if it's not a real fire?
Janine: It has the will to burned.
Ali: Oh.
Keith: Mm.
Janine: It expected to be burned and y'know sometimes when you're a haunted doll your expectation becomes reality. This is just a fact about haunted dolls.
[Ali laughs]
Keith: This is the end of the phase or is there more?
Ali: Yeah. That's the end of the phase.
Keith: Oh, it's the demon hour.
Ali: It's the devil's hour, yeah.
Sylvia: Oh.
Ali: Between three and four AM, true evil is unleashed. The long grey hours between midnight and morning send screams echoing through these old hallways.
Sylvia: Usually this is just when the son is smoking weed in the backyard.
Ali: [laughs] Yeah. Well, now he's smoking weed at Jonah's house.
Sylvia: Good for him!
Ali: Safe and sound.
Keith: Ali, will you change the daughter's HP?
Ali: Oh, I did. She was full HP.
Keith: Yeah, and now she's 13. Or 12. 12.
Janine: Yeah.
Ali: Yeah, does it not say that for you?
Keith: No.
Janine: Nope.
Ali: Oh my god, really?
Keith: Yeah, really. I've got 0-11-0-15.
Sylvia: It might be on the GM layer or something.
Ali: Oh fu—okay. [laughs] It should say 12! 12. [softly] Try to delete this one. Uh. Text. 12. In green. Make it big. Too big. You see it now?
Keith: Yep.
Ali: Okay, cool.
Keith: It's wonky but it's there. Yeah, there it is.
Ali: Okay. 3-4 AM. What's the scene? Where do we find ourselves?
Keith: Okay. So. Hiding didn't work but you know what might work is that book that I found with the priest.
Ali: Ooh.
Keith: The priest that left the book. And maybe the book holds a clue to how to defeat this demon. I mean, the mother doesn't really know. The daughter is, like, “There's a creepy haunted doll,” and the mother is, like, "I don't know what there is but this priest book seemed to think that there was a demon here." 'Cause I don't think anyone's had that direct contact with anything. Um. Like, the mother had the dart thrown and then the hand on the foot but that could have been anything.
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: So.
Ali: I guess the daughter made eye-contact with the Thing in the Wall to be able to shoot it in the forehead.
Keith: Oh, that's true. That's true. So I guess she's got—she knows the most of what's going on in here anyway. But the mother's got the book.
Ali: Mm-hm.
Keith: And I don't know what the book says about demons, Ali, but you're a demon. What would you say about demons?
Ali: [laughs] Yeah, I think the book is pretty informative ‘cause it's the thing that you want to be finding in a horror movie, right? I hate that horror movies have Googling scenes now. There are a lot of Googling scenes in horror movies. But the old, like, “I'm going to look through this journal and I'm going to see a picture of this family that looks like my family but it's from the 1920s,” and I'm like, "What's going on?!"
Keith: Do you know why Googling doesn't make any sense in horror movies and why it's silly? 'Cause I know that horror audiences go—have been going for a long time, and this just might be casual audiences and not the serious people—I don't know the horror scene very well.
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: But I know that there's always been a—like in movies in general, this whole thing would have been solved by a cellphone.
Ali: Ooh, sure, yeah.
Keith: That's a very common theme. Because they always have to lampshade in movies like they don't have their cellphones for x or y reason.
Ali: Uh-huh.
Keith: But the thing about Googling the answer to why something is haunted? The internet is full of absolutely fake shit about ghosts. It's full of it. You'd never be able to find reliable information about haunted shit online because it's full with fake shit about haunted shit online.
Ali: Oh sure—well, what if that’s all real, y'know?
Keith: ...but it's not.
Ali: I just think that there's something more visually interesting about someone going to a library—
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: —or, like, talking to an old guy or whatever else.
Keith: I want to see a horror movie where they try to Google it and all that information is wrong and it gets them into deep trouble.
Ali: [laughs] Put in the script folks. Yeah, but I think it's initially—
Keith: Give me credit.
Ali: [laughs] I think that the journal is really about this town that was dealing with the demonic presence and then this priest who was, like, "I've been trying to exorcise people. That's not working. Y'know, shit's getting weird. I'm reaching out to god." Yadda, yadda. And then it's about the decision of why they chose this house and what that ritual was and, y'know, y'know. Maybe the demon had a connection to the land and/or they thought that there was, like, the portal to hell or whatever was in this vicinity, or they felt like if they could walk it in then they would lock in more—keep more demons from coming or whatever. And yeah, yeah. Lot of demon talk. [laughs] Okay. Do we have an establishment for where the daughter at this point or… creature starts to move around and we’ll see what she’s up to?
Keith: Yeah, I think this is another—I think this is another run and hide moment. Like, the, uh—the confidence of: I set up this trap. I have my ghost net. I actually got the thing. I have a plan to get rid of it. It's ‘I throw it in a fire’. And it very—it hits very hard that that plan actually amounted to nothing. The fire was not real. And maybe even a little bit of, like, the only reason that I didn't succeed at this plan is because I'm just a dumb kid. I shouldn't be doing this. I need an adult. An adult would have known that wasn't a real fireplace.
Ali: Okay.
Keith: So, I think this is a run and hide moment. Maybe even bedroom. Maybe not even a good hiding spot, like, in the bedroom closet or something.
Ali: Not to overstep or whatever but this is, like, maybe going to the bedroom and then trying to find a crawl space to the study? 'Cause the desire of wanting an adult when the mother is in the house. They don't have to be together at the start of the phase, right? But…
Keith: Sure, yeah.
Ali: Okay. Sorry to add more to that.
Keith: I don't mind. I'm secretly pissed!
Ali: I… [laughs] Um.
Keith: Can you believe Ali wanted the two characters to be in the same place?
Ali: [continues laughing] Sure. Okay. Um. Creatures. What are the creatures up to? What kind of freaks and geeks are we going to be this turn?
Keith: I want to be the Seth Rogan monster.
[Ali and Sylvia laugh]
Ali: I don't know what the demon—I'm sort of in the mood to do an assist, right? Just to give someone the extra die and figure out a team-up.
Keith: This is the other big thing. This is another big chance thing. All of these—all of the successes, one of the interesting things about the way that it's set up is that you can either do your action or assist. Because we've had all these successes, everyone's just been doing a normal attack, fear attack, instead of assisting? But when you assist, you're more likely to succeed but it's a whole less attack per turn.
Ali: Mm. Yeah.
Keith: Which is a very interesting dynamic that we fell into early by no-one failing.
Janine: Yeah.
Ali: Um. I mean I feel like I could take the lead with the demon book? In terms of maybe there's a passage in the demon book that's, like, y'know, "I went to this place and this person was murdered. And then I was hearing this voice chanting this thing.” And then the mother starts hearing the demon making that voice, chanting the thing, and being, like, "What... the fuck?"
Keith: Does this book know what kind of demon you are?
Ali: Oh, maybe. I don't know how much face time the priest got with me. But I guess if the priest was able to, y'know, succeed.
Keith: If the priest knew your name—
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: —whatever it is. We still don't know.
Ali: The Demon.
Keith: If the priest knew your name then I think the priest would be able to make some assumptions about you whether or not they're true or not. Who knows.
Ali: Oh. From, like, the bible.
Keith: Right. From—yeah, from being, like, the kind of priest that would do a weird exorcism.
Ali: [laughing] Sure. Sure. Sure, sure, sure. Um, yeah. Wait, I—I might be missing the relevancy of...
Keith: I just want to know about your demon.
Ali: Oh! Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I don't think that I... I don't think that I have introduced myself to anybody in my life so I don't know that the priest knew my name.
Keith: Okay. Here's my specific question. This doesn't have to be in the book. I just want to know. Why does this demon want to scare the shit out of my family instead of, I dunno, being a demon that tempts us into sinning or something?
Ali: [laughs] Well, I think that game sets this up, right? In sort of the ‘why that I'm here?’ I've been contained into this house. The measures are holy. I have spent a decade or century or whatever trying to get out of this house—
Keith: Right.
Ali: —that was a century ago. I know I'm not getting out of this house. The thing I don't want is you fucky people in it.
Keith: Right.
Ali: 'Cause—
Keith: So you're both—you hate it here. You hate being trapped here. You hate people because they trapped you here.
Ali: Uh-huh.
Keith: But also you're territorial because—
Ali: Right!
Keith: —you're here forever. Gotcha.
Ali: Yeah! I mean, get out of the house!
Keith: You're an asshole because you're a demon.
Ali: [laughs] Yeah, I mean, this is basically my house.
Keith: Yup.
Ali: This is basically my house. I was contained within here. The least y'all could do—
Keith: Okay, but I got a bank statement saying it's my house, buddy!
Ali: I'm sorry that this house got foreclosed for the church after, like, went down or whatever—I don't know what churches do. Do churches close down?
Keith: They burn. They burn down.
Ali: Sure. Sure. Yeah. But, okay. The bank sees the demon house and knows there’s demons in it. The church people weren't alive anymore to be, like, "Can you not?" And you moved into this house and that's your problem now. But yeah, I think—I think you're going through this book, reading about this haunting, and experiencing the, like... I'm gonna— [laughs] I was trying to think of a scary demon thing to say but I couldn't.
Janine: “Like what you see?” I dunno.
Ali: Hm!
[Ali and Sylvia laugh]
Janine: Well, you said—I mean, look. You could maybe also tempt them.
Ali: Sure. Sure. I think you could be, like—I think I could be, like... [laughs].
Janine: “Get bent.”
Ali: “Get bent.”
Janine: Eighties ghost.
Keith: “This ghost just told me to get bent!”
Ali: [laughs] Maybe you just hear chanting of, like... “I need—” well. Do demons drink blood?
Keith: [cross] Sure! Demons do whatever you want.
Ali: [cross] I'm trying to eat souls right?
Janine: [cross] Why not?
Ali: “I'm going to eat your soul. I'm going to eat your soul. I'm going to eat your soul!” And then you look into this book and this priest was, like, "Yeah. I went to this lady's house. She was a demon. The demon kept saying, 'I'm going to eat your soul' over and over again." And in the halls you hear, "I'm going to eat your soul! I'm going to eat your soul! I'm going to eat your soul!" And I'm going to roll. It's my turn to roll. This is the hold up here. That's a 6.
Keith: Roll 6.
Ali: Um... 1d6 for the fear. That is also a 6.
Keith: [cross] Unbelievable! Unbelievable!
Janine: [cross] Wow!
Ali: [cross] But my damage is halved!
Janine: That's true. Your damage is halved.
Ali: The damage is halved. I immediately take 3. So you're down to 8.
Keith: Okay.
Ali: Mm-hm! That's not bad.
Keith: No, not bad at all.
Ali: Mm-hm. That's the Demon's turn.
Janine: Um—
Keith: I think at this point we can have the daughter show up in the study in time to see the mom be, like, "Uh, fuck this book." And, like, shut it and throw it back at the wall.
Ali: [laughs] Yeah.
Janine: I am still—so the daughter I'm assuming ran away from the burning fire stuff and things have... because of the time change, maybe things have been cooled down a little bit? But, I think I've been following her just at a distance. I think I let her get a bit of a head start. But then just, kind of, kept scorching my way, y'know, down the hall or whatever. And I think at this moment when she enters the room with the mother and the mother has the book, I—I wanna, like, I still define that the legs are somewhere else. So I think—wait, is the mother in the study? Is that where this book is?
Ali: Mm-hm.
Janine: Okay. Good. That's where the legs were. That's perfect. [Ali laughs] I—so what I want to do is, uh, run on my hands to the curtains where my legs are to get my legs back. But I have to run probably between her feet or something. I have to skitter past her on my hands. Like tch-tch-tch-tch. And it's still leaving the little scorchy marks. And I'm hustling so there's probably, like, a few bits of the paint and stuff that have flaked off my face.
Keith: Is this going to scare the daughter or the mother?
Janine: Um... I'm aiming at the daughter. I think the mother's maybe looking at the book still or, like, is going to miss it. Or maybe would attribute the sound to the daughter or something like that. I got a 6! You know what? If we were playing any other game, I would kill for us to be getting a 6 every roll.
Ali: Uh-huh!
Sylvia: Yeah.
Janine: It's—it's actually a little bit—it's a little bit, like, cursed and weird that almost the majority of our rolls have had 6s in them.
Keith: The only rolls that have not had—
Janine: If we were rolling like this playing Heart it would be a riot. We'd be rioting.
Sylvia: Maybe the Roll20 is haunted.
Ali: [cross] Oh, maybe the Roll20 is haunted.
Janine: [cross] Maybe!
Sylvia: They're going to eat our soul.
Ali: This is just Roll20 being, like, “We saw what happened with the whole thing. We just want to—” [laughs]
Janine: Mm-hm.
Keith: Seventy—yeah. Seventy percent of all rolls have had a 6 in them. This game.
Ali: Well.
Janine: I got a 5 also. So that brings the daughter down to 7?
Ali: Mm-hm.
Keith: Yup.
Janine: This is actually—so this is actually tense, right? Because after this there's one more chance to get both of these people to 0.
Ali: Yeah.
Janine: And if we fail even one of them then we lose.
Ali: Yeah.
Sylvia: And now I'm going to use my boost. Two times a night you can choose to scare two different—
[Ali gasps]
Janine: Hell yeah!
Sylvia: —family members in a single round.
Ali: Yes!
Janine: All right!
Sylvia: I think it works because they're in the same room right now too.
Keith: Yup.
Sylvia: I know that, like, fictionally the move is supposed to be, like, "Oh you can move quick." But, um, I have this... I kind of think it would be good if they saw the thing crawling out of the wall now? Like, 'cause it's all been, like, seeing it through the floorboards and shit. I think if they saw a weird spindly thing climbing on the ceiling before skittering back into the wall, it would probably fuck them both up.
Keith: What does it look like when it's out of the wall?
Sylvia: I picture a—I was trying to think of this on the break and actually the best way I could kind of describe it is: you know how daddy long legs are to spiders?
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: It's like what if that for a person. I'm getting a little too close to Weavers but I'm thinking more, like, I don't know. A little more bug-like. There's a part of me that was, like, "Maybe I'll be a giant tick monster," 'cause it's living in the wooden floorboards and shit.
Keith: The interesting thing about daddy long legs though—and if you live in a part of the world that daddy long legs something totally different from this then these are also called—
Sylvia: Zaddy long legs.
Keith: They're also zaddy long legs. I—[laughs]. I almost called them longshoremen. That's not what they're also called.
Janine: [laughing] No!
Keith: Um. Anyway, this is the spider with the medium sized body but the extremely long thin legs. I think it's the long and thinness over the limbs mixed with the, sort of, abdomen that is so weird about daddy long legs.
Ali: It's also the proportions of where the joint is in their leg, right? Isn't the second half, like, way longer? Or at least seems that. I'm not going to Google a picture 'cause I'm live right now.
Sylvia: It might be.
Keith: Wait, sorry. What is longer?
Ali: So, like, y'know, when you bend your arm or whatever I feel like the outside part is longer with the daddy long legs.
Sylvia: Yeah, no, I—
Ali: If divided into two...
Sylvia: It's got, like, two joints on its legs so I bet two joints on my legs is... um. [Ali laughs] Yeah. So, I think I roll 3d6 two times. One for the mom and one for the daughter.
Keith: The thing that I was trying to remember. Not longshoremen. Harvestmen.
Ali: Oh!
Sylvia: Good name.
Janine: Ugh.
Sylvia: Someone put that in the Sangfielle. [Ali laughs] Okay, so I'm going to roll for the mom first and then roll for the daughter second. Hey, that's 6 for the mom! That's a 5 for the daughter. Uh, so let me roll the damage now. 2 damage to the mom. Not bad. 3 damage to the daughter. So I didn't, y'know—they saw a fucked up guy and were, like, it's not that fucked up. It's a little fucked up. It's not that fucked up.
Keith: I—I—yeah. I think the bar on what's fucked up has been raised.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: On one sense, they're on, y'know, tenderhooks of anything could set them off but on the other hand, like, the things that they've seen have been so wild that, like, everything will set them off but maybe not so much because it's all been so bad.
Sylvia: Yeah. It's—y'know. They just saw a guy when they didn't mean to.
[Ali laughs]
Keith: [laughing] Yeah. I didn't mean to see that guy! [Ali and Sylvia laugh] I sure wish I didn't! Is this dawn?
Ali: This is dawn.
Keith: Okay.
Ali: Sunlight breaks across the horizon and the long night turns towards its end. The sun is coming up. You're almost—you're almost there.
Keith: I think this has got to be—I know that I wasn't… Okay. That was—you weren't a ghost just now, Sylvi.
Sylvia: No. I've very, like, physical form. It's more of a monster than a ghost situation.
Keith: Yup. And so—
Sylvia: I say ‘guy’ but I'm not a human I don't think.
Keith: So we're dealing with a doll. We're dealing with a Thing in the Wall. The Demon is not really revealed itself physically. It's—I think that there's a,"Let's go to the garage where it always sort of smells like gasoline and grab some of dad's tools." Like, “Get the big metal rake and some other thing.” Like, maybe a baseball bat or maybe a hoe, like some gardening thing. Because now it looks like maybe we can hit these things? [Sylvia laughs] It's not ghosts—there was haunting stuff before but now there's just, like, a freak in the wall. [Sylvia laughs] And maybe we can just kill it.
Sylvia: Smack the doll really hard.
[Ali laughs]
Keith: Yeah, break the doll. So that's what they're doing. They're together still and they're in the garage.
Ali: Okay. Gearing up.
Keith: The garage. [pause] Who's got something for me?
[Ali laughs]
Janine: Oh, I know. Is this a two car household?
Keith: Yes. Oh, yeah. Three. Two in the garage. One parked out in the driveway.
Ali: Oh, the son has a car.
Keith: No, the dad just has two cars. They have, like—
Janine: Which one did he take? The one in the driveway, I guess?
Keith: Yeah. He took the one in the driveway. And it's, um, a big white ram pick-up truck.
Ali: Ugh.
Keith: One of the ones where you see a pick-up truck and it's the biggest fucking thing I've seen.
Janine: Yeah...
Ali: And he doesn't even need that truck.
Keith: No, they never do.
Janine: What's he—he fucking works in an office. What's he hauling in that? Nothing.
Ali: Ugh.
Keith: No. Nothing. Pristine bed.
Ali: That is such a specific version of a guy who is everywhere.
Keith: Yeah. Everywhere.
Ali: But, like, I ran into so much in southern California.
Keith: Oh, Massachusetts is nothing but guys who drive gigantic white pick-up trucks who have never worked outside ever.
Ali: Uh-huh.
Keith: Like, as someone who grew up kind of on a farm there was no animals but there was constant, constant yard work. I will tell you that those trucks are so fucking stupid because you have to reach up so high to put anything in them.
Ali: Oh, yeah.
Keith: We used John Deere tractors with trailers in the back and we also had a golf cart with, like, a flatbed in the back. And. The bed is, like, two feet off the ground and so it's really easy to get tools and mulch and whatever you would need to carry and that's what those old pick-up trucks were like. The pick-up trucks are literally not designed for actually working. They're just big. They're just big to buy big. I hate it.
Ali: Same.
Janine: Um.
Ali: Okay.
Janine: Well.
Keith: Anyway, the dad has that.
Janine: The thing that I do, um, somehow—uh, okay wait. Hang on. Where's the mother? Where's the daughter? I need—I want, like, a lander here.
Keith: Both in the garage.
Janine: Mm-hm.
Keith: One of them is—I think the mom is trying to find a weapon for both herself and for the kid.
Janine: Mm-hm.
Keith: And the kid is, maybe, trying to barricade the... oh, is trying to unplug the automatic garage door opener and lock the garage door so that no-one can come in through the garage.
Janine: Okay. Um. So, I think these are drive in and park people, not back in and park people. So I think the cars are parked facing—
Keith: Yup.
Janine: —the back wall where maybe, maybe 'cause this is convenient the mom is, like, rooting around looking for weapons.
Keith: Windshield gently resting or on the windshield is gently resting a tennis ball on a string.
Ali: Yes.
Janine: Mm-hm.
Ali: Uh-huh.
Janine: Um. And, uh, I think what happens is the car's headlights suddenly turn on and the doll is behind the wheel of the car and she's, like, turning the key in the ignition. Or I guess the lights would have to already be on if—the keys would have to be in if the lights were on, right? I don't know from cars.
Keith: She's mid-key turn. Where the light is on and the car is turning on.
Ali: Mm.
Janine: So she's—okay. So she's—she's turning the keys in the ignition. The lights turn on. She has her legs back so theoretically—
Keith: Oh, this is the dodge caravan by the way.
Janine: —there's potential to step on the petal, I guess? She'd have to drop down 'cause she's still a doll. I don't know. It's still bad, right? It's still a bad time.
Keith: Yeah. Uh, this is a dodge caravan and the third car is a late-eighties Volkswagen luxury sedan.
Janine: Mm-hm.
Keith: That the dad bought because it was, um, a car that he wanted but never got when he was younger and so bought—
Ali: Ooh, yeah.
Keith: —he wanted an older one when he was in the late-eighties/early-nineties. So he bought the late-eighties/early-nineties one now in the early twenty-twenties.
Janine: I got a 6.
Ali: Mm.
Janine: Again, if—I wish we rolled like this forever.
Ali: Uh-huh.
Janine: And a 6! I got another 6. The mum is done.
[Ali gasps]
Ali: [very softly] Oooooh. This is a bad way to go.
Keith: How did this happen? How—
Ali: Where did we go?
Keith: Is there—is there another part—is there another second part now that you've got the car?
Ali: Y'know, I feel—
Keith: Do you do something with it to cause this last big chunk of fear?
Janine: I wonder if the—my pitch—I mean, the mother is yours to control but—my pitch is that the doll wants to ram the car into the mother but has to drop away from the wheel and go down to the pedals and clamber around. I think what if as she's doing that the mother jumps on the hood of the car, climbs over it? And, like, just opens the garage door and bolts or something like that.
Ali: Mm.
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: Yeah. No.
Keith: Dead mom.
Ali: [laughing] No blood in this one.
Janine: We've got two chances to take this daughter out or else we lose.
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: Three because—oh, wait, actually Sylvi, can you attack the same person twice? Or is it you can hit two different people?
Sylvia: You can attack two different people in a single round. Twice a night.
Ali: Oh, it's twice a night.
Sylvia: It’s twice during a game, yeah.
Keith: It's twice tonight, yeah.
Sylvia: But I could do it again.
Keith: But there's only one character left, so.
Ali: Right.
Keith: Ooh, the ghosts played not optimally. This is not a perfect run.
[everyone laughs]
Ali: What are we doing?
Sylvia: So it's just you and me left, Ali, for creature rolls?
Ali: Uh-huh.
Sylvia: Was gonna ask if you anything here ‘cause I did get the other kid. I thought, y'know...
Ali: [laughing] Oh, sure, sure, sure.
Sylvia: But I—I can—I'm trying to think of something creepy to happen. She's still in the garage too, right? The daughter? Or did I mishear that.
Janine: She was, like, barricading or something.
Keith: Uh, yeah, yeah. She was trying to keep the garage door from being an entrance so that they only had the one place to hole up with weapons.
Ali: Oh, sure, sure, sure. Oh, laundry in the garage?
Keith: Laundry in the basement.
Ali: Eugh. Is there a sink or a drain hole or something here?
Keith: Yeah, like, a bin—a big bin sink. Yeah, sure.
Ali: Oh, sure, sure, sure. Okay. Okay. My move—my move for this turn is that the sink is going to turn on and a dark red sticky gross liquid is going to come out of it.
Janine: Ew.
Ali: Start really filling up that sink.
Keith: Gross.
Ali: [laughs] Yeah, get outta here.
Keith: Does it turn into anything? Or does it just be—does it be—just be a big vat of liquid.
Ali: We'll maybe see what the result of this roll is and then make some decisions around that.
Keith: Sure.
Ali: I think it's getting to the point where it's overflowing the sink and it's, like, you're starting to really understand how vic—what's the word there?
Keith: Viscous?
Janine: Viscous?
Ali: Viscous! I was gonna say vicious like the fucking—
Sylvia: Yeah, I always do that.
Keith: It's just liquid. So is it viscous enough where it doesn't really start spilling out? It more, like, piles up?
Ali: I think it fills up and then it's starting to go over the sink and it's almost, like, a syrupy or gack kind of...?
Keith: Gack. Right.
Janine: Ew.
Keith: So it oozes but it doesn't, like, flow.
Ali: Right. Right. It's—
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: —it has the appearance of blood. But also has like a—like a... it—
Keith: It's congealed.
Ali: Right. Yeah. It's like, "What is that?" You don't know what that is.
Keith: "Is it blood?"
Ali: [cross] You don't feel good about it.
Keith: [cross] "This sink is about to scare me, I think."
[Ali laughs]
Ali: Okay, I got a 4.
Keith: Okay.
Ali: That's a success with a minor setback.
Keith: Right. On your next roll doesn't matter. There's no next roll.
Ali: Uh-huh. 1d6 is a 4.
Keith: [cross] There it is!
Sylvia: [cross] Here you go! We did it!
Ali: [cross] You're scared!
Keith: So everyone got scared.
Ali: This is scary.
Sylvia: It is!
Keith: Yeah, you mean the game or this ooze?
Ali: Both! I think the ooze—
Janine: The ooze is very scary!
Ali: Yeah!
Janine: Gack in the plumbing and stuff. That's...
Ali: [cross] You might think there's a person in your sewage.
Keith: [cross] Yeah, you'll get a scary bill from your plumber.
Ali: Ew.
Keith: When we come back from Jonah's.
[Ali and Janine laugh]
Ali: Um, yeah. I guess this really works. I guess the—I guess the ooze starts making the figure of a person. And it's, like, y'know, the ooze on the floor starts taking the shape of a body and you see the head sort of start to raise off the floor and the daughter's, like...
Janine: Ew!
Ali: Done-zo! Gotta go!
Keith: Yeah, there's a last scream and the daughter runs, drops whatever weapon she was gonna try to wield and the only thing left in the house is the cat who I think is pretty chill with the ghosts.
Ali: [cross] Yeah, he can stay here.
Sylvia: [cross] Yeah, no, I'm friends with the cat.
Keith: Cat is totally cool.
Sylvia: We're hanging out playing the son's video games.
Keith: Yep.
Ali: Yeah.
Ali: [laughing] Between these demons or—I keep saying demons! Sorry! Among one of these creatures, I think one of us could set up a Chewy subscription between us and the cat.
Keith: Oh, yeah, the dog can totally use that keyboard.
Janine: Yeah, yeah.
Sylvia: I have fingers too!
Ali: Yeah, see?
Sylvia: I don't know if I have any grasp of any sort of language but I do have fingers to use a keyboard with!
Janine: You're gonna get it all—you're gonna get the keyboard all beef and sour creamy. And then where are we gonna be?
Sylvia: Yeah, fair.
Ali: Ooh. True.
Sylvia: God. Good game!
Ali: [laughing] Yeah.
Janine: Mm.
Keith: Yeah, in the end I feel, like, the thing that I want isn't necessarily a chance to win. If anything, maybe the ghouls and the baddies can be even stronger but just succeed half as much.
Ali: Sure.
Keith: Where it's, like, I just wanna see some failure, y'know?
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: There was not a single failure the entire game.
Sylvia: It only really felt like we weren't—the only time it felt like we might not get it was right before the dawn round started and then the mom got taken care of immediately.
[Ali laughs]
Keith: Right, yeah. And then—but that was only—and again we hadn't played the game before.
Sylvia: Oh yeah.
Keith: We didn't start it easy. But it was only after we gave, like, an extra 15 health—no it was an extra 7 health to the daughter and an extra 10 to the mother?
Sylvia: So extra 17 health. You were roughly pretty close.
Keith: Yeah. Um. So. Yeah, I—I actually, like—I don't think it would be weird if the game had ended in the demon hour and I don't think that that would have sucked at all.
Sylvia: Mm-hm.
Keith: It's more, like, could we have gotten a win for the ghosts and the demon hour? But also had some scenes where we got to set up some failure of, like—
Ali: Mm-hm.
Keith: —y’know. Just spitballing. Maybe it gets progressively easier for the ghost to succeed as time goes on so you get front loaded with a lot of ignoring the haunting and then back loaded with a lot of dying.
Ali: I—I—
Keith: I don't know. I just—my thoughts.
Ali: Yeah, yeah. That would be—it's worth thinking that there are sessions of this game where nobody rolled a 6-6-6. So!
Janine: Yeah!
Keith: Yeah. Yeah. Totally true.
Janine: You said that pretty dramatically.
Ali: Ugh. Yeah, this was—I had a really fun time playing this.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Janine: Mm!
Ali: I was really excited to play this.
Janine: Yeah.
Ali: Great to be a demon. [laughs]
Sylvia: Yeah! Shout out to our creepy crew!
Ali: Yeah!
Keith: Great to be a whole family!
Ali: True.
Sylvia: Oh wait. We—there's a—isn't there end of game...?
Ali: Oh, is there an epilogue?
Sylvia: I think there are a couple—there are epilogue questions. Uh, if your haunting succeeded, what happened to the family afterwards?
Ali: Ooh.
Sylvia: They just—
Janine: In California?
[everyone laughs]
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: Um. I wanna—
Sylvia: They live at Jonah's house now.
Keith: Epilogue question. Okay. If your haunting succeeded, what happened to the family afterwards? Who—what—who—do we all just answer that one? 'Cause we have your haunting succeeded.
Sylvia: Yeah, I feel like this is a round the table discussion.
Ali: Mm-hm.
Sylvia: Opposed to being the player—like, one specific player answers this.
Keith: Do they die?
Sylvia: [cross] Do we want them to die?
Keith: [cross] Or just move? They could! They could die.
Sylvia: I was thinking moving. Especially because, like, a couple of them left very alive.
Keith: They all left very alive.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: But sure. You come back. You have a couple days at Jonah's house. And you're, like, "I don't know. We're probably fine. I don't know. Families are weird." I'm just putting it out there.
Sylvia: Um.
Ali: I think we specifically played it as a—we could have had the mother situation go really worse there—
Sylvia: Yeah.
Ali: —and we didn't so I feel like this has made me the family riding off into the sunset to live somewhere very far away from here.
Keith: But it's a scary sunset.
Ali: Ooh, yeah. The doll hand.
Sylvia: That's the sequel hook.
Keith: Do you know the scariest thing that ever happened to me in my entire life? Is when I was eight years old, my dad made me watch a Goosebumps movie. And it was one of the earlier Goosebumps movies. I didn't want to watch it. I said it was going to be too scary.
Ali: Aw!
Keith: And I know that people have stories of being this young and watching actual horror movies not Goosebumps. But this movie, the plot of it was that this family moves to a town where everyone in the town is a vampire. It's a whole vampire town.
Sylvia: Oh.
Keith: And they slowly learn that different people are vampires and then get help from their other, y'know, neighbours and friends and then they're also vampires and so they keep having to be, like, "Oh my god, fucking everyone is trying to eat us here." And the last shot—this is what got me for years—the last shot is they're driving away from this town in their, y'know, Subaru station wagon, and the dog is in the back seat and does the flashy red eyes to indicate that they're a vampire. So that their dog turned into a vampire and is going to follow them and fucking get 'em. That got me for a while.
[Ali laughs]
Sylvia: Sorry, what's the vampire dog Goosebumps movie called?
Keith: I don't remember.
Ali: Aw.
Keith: I think it's called, like—
Sylvia: Don't worry. I'll track it down.
Keith: Yeah, yeah. It's—I remember the title. I looked it up one time to be, like, what was that called? And I don't remember but I remember the title was something boring. Like, y'know. Y'know, ‘Welcome to Vampire Street’ or something like that.
Ali: Amazing. That's not boring. That's a great title. [laughs]
Keith: Goosebumps movie. Vampire town. Yeah, you google—you google it and it's just, like, "Do you mean the 2015 Goosebumps movie?" It's just, like, everything.
Ali: Oh. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Um. What is a new rumour that begins spreading in town as the result of your wicked haunting?
Sylvia: There's this cat in this house that just seems to be fine living on its own. It's really weird.
Janine: I heard the cat owns the house. I heard the cat got the house in a will.
Ali: Ooh.
Janine: They willed the house to the cat and the cat owns the house legally.
Keith: I heard the cat is running for mayor.
Ali: Woah. I heard the cat's a demon. You know they have demons in this town one time?
Janine: True. In the fifties.
Ali: Uh-huh.
Sylvia: I feel like we kinda answered the 'what happens to you' part with the—I'm assuming that's directed at the creatures?
Ali: Oh sure.
Sylvia: Party house! What’s up? We're chilling.
Ali: Yeah, party house.
Janine: The doll gets her driver's licence. Drives a large caravan around town.
Sylvia: Yes!
Ali: Ooh.
Janine: Accepts hitch-hikers.
Ali: I think the demon's starting to eat some of those chimuri. Those, like, disgusting tubes of goop that you give to the cats.
[Sylvia laughs]
Janine: Oh yeah!
Ali: Gets into those. Chewing on it. The demon's just, like, eating it like goghurt.
Janine: Ew! Ugh!
Ali: [laughs] Yeah, well, you know.
Sylvia: Good shit!
Ali: Great! Well... [laughs] that's—that has been, um, Something Is Wrong With This House—
Janine: Sure fucking is.
Ali: —by Jonah Walker and Anna Landin. Jonah, I think I called you John at some point in this recording—I'm sorry about that.[laughs] You can find—you can find this game over at annalandin.itch.io/something-is-wrong-with-this-house with dashes inbetween each of those. a-n-n-a-l-a-n-d-i-n dot itch dot io. Check out her other games for sure. Janine mentioned it briefly that we've been, like, looking into some of the other games that she's designed. I don't know that we're going to do it any time soon but I've been planning a Grimoire stream for a little bit. I don't know if I'm gonna do that solo-solo or have a group. Make some spells with me but that'll be in the future at some point. Um, and yeah, thanks for—thanks for helping us have a good night talking about demons for a little bit. Not just demons! [laughs]
Keith: Wow. I cannot believe this.
Ali: Okay, Keith, you've also done it every single time when you say demon's hour instead of devil's hour. It's not the demon hour! Everybody's out and about! All the freaks and geeks are out there. The hellhounds, the evil doll, there's something in the walls—they’re out during that hour. That's not a demon hour.
Janine: That’s just when I'm playing Animal Crossing.
Ali: [laughing] True. Yeah, thank you everybody. Have a good night. We're plugging stuff—do we have any stuff to plug? Not really. Sangfielle is still going good. Thanks for listening to us. Thanks for supporting us.
Sylvia: New arc this week, right?
Ali: New arc this week, yeah! Yeah!
Sylvia: Yeah.
Ali: Off the boat shenanigans. You should have stayed on the boat, but you got off the boat, and now there's some stuff going on there.
Sylvia: Listen. [Ali laughs] Look. I don't want to get into it! It's fine.
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: Oh, is that the one?
Ali: You were compelled off of that boat. I'm not gonna say. I'm not gonna blame you for getting off that boat. I'm just saying you were told not to. [Sylvia laughs] You specifically were told not to let other people on the boat, but you know, neither here nor there! That session is very fun and we're gonna be starting that Thursday so look out.
Keith: I believe it's—I believe it is Welcome to Deadhouse?
Sylvia: Oh, thank you. Thank you so much.
Ali: That's such a—Welcome to Deadhouse? I guess vampires are dead, right?
Keith: I could be wrong. I could be wrong that it's Welcome to Deadhouse. Um. I gotta know.
Sylvia: Welcome to Deadhouse is the first Goosebumps. Ali, please...