As is tradition, the stops tend to come out for this time of year when it comes to your game. The props show up, lights go out, and generally crazy stuff happens. Anyone with any big plans this year?

Nah, I'm saving the crazy stuff for October in-game.

~J

My players have asked me for a trip to the countryside, so I'm giving them one...

In essence, my plan is thus:

PCs get hired to track down a group that just 'jacked a bunch of experimental biodrones; the corp wants the drones back, but as for the 'jackers... "brain cells in a blotter will suffice."

The group of 'jackers, however, are an initiatory group, and they stole the biodrones for a good reason: they need firepower. Lots 'n lots of firepower. See, they got contacted by a spirit in need of assistance. Its home metaplane has a pest problem: shadow spirits trying to get to earth by taking a shortcut. Unfortunately for the metaplane in question, the shadow spirits are going about the construction of their shortcut in a manner similar to Vogons. So the natives are fighting back, and one resident had the bright idea of going to Earth for backup and sent a spirit.

So, the idea is that initiates will attune the drones to themselves and then go to the mtaplanar Place via the spirit's astral gateway power... just as the PCs show up.

Where things will go from there really depends on my players, but there is one other problem for them...

A Horror. Specifically, the Shadow spirits' boss. He's just a minor one, but he's hungry and aims to get to the banquet table before his brethren do. If the shadow spirits succeed in getting their shortcuts built before the initiates (and hopefully the PCs) destroy them... well...

Here's an idea that is directly ripped off from a campy TV horror episode but I'm embellishing certain details to make it cool.

The characters are hired by a Johnson from Vietnam. The Johnson's family have gone missing while on a nature appreciation camping trip in an area that still has dense jungle. In order to avoid embarrassment and reputation damage the Johnson is sending runners to do a basic sweep of the jungle, recover his family, administer basic medical care (such as rehydration, or splinting of broken limbs should that be necessary), and finally escort them out of the jungle on foot to a RV that is waiting by dirt roadside a few miles from the edge of the jungle. It seems like a very reasonable and basic task and the Johnson will brief the characters on dangerous wildlife.

So at first it seems like a rescue and recovery type operation. There could be 1 or 2 encounters with scary awakened tigers that should only be lightly challenging for a team working together. Eventually the team finds the remains of a camp site but it appears that the family has been dragged into an old network of vietcong tunnels dating back to the Vietnam War. Clearly the PCs must search the tunnels if they want to be able to recover the family. Perhaps some bandits holed up in the tunnels have been meaning to hold the family ransom.

So the GM has some sheets of graph paper which are mapping out the tunnels. There's maybe 5 "floors", hard to tell apart because of the tunnels sloping. The tunnels are confusing but they're all mapped out by the GM so the PCs bust out their Dungeons and Dragons skills and pretend the dwarf has an advanced probability to detect sloping floor and they go deeper and deeper into the tunnels. There's old sandbags and empty hammocks and backpacks filled with rot. The smell of mold is almost acrid and choking in its intensity.

When the character get deep into the tunnel network they find some of the family members but they are no longer human. Instead they've become classic horror movie zombies but they have long clawed hands. They're not ghouls, though. It's evil magic that's at work here and not some virus. The earth here has been corrupted because it was the site of an especially brutal and nasty series of combats and it is "taking revenge for all the blood that has been spilled on it", or some shit.

Immediately the dirt starts to soak through with blood and the tunnels becomes muddy, resulting in Difficult Terrain. Zombies suddenly populate the entire tunnel network, phasing through the bloodstained mud like a swimmer through water. They're all wearing rotted Vietcong black PJs but they only attack melee. If the PCs don't escape they will be overwhelmed. Anyone killed by the zombies becomes a zombie himself 1d6 hours after death and becomes an unintelligent monster under control of the GM.

Now, the PCs, because of their solid D&D backgrounds, have definitely been mapping the tunnels, right? So it should be a simple matter of following the maps back and blasting the zombies before they can get massive Friends in Melee bonuses. But it's not that simple.

Because the tunnels actually *shift* to keep the players trapped in the tunnel network. Certain tunnels on the map will shift in pre-determined ways to send the PCs back the way they came and cause confusion. In fact, there is NO WAY to escape from the tunnel network by just walking out because the exit tunnels will always end up twisting back down into the tunnel network. If the PCs want to escape they must use explosives at a point of the tunnels that is near the exit. Only by blasting a hole through the tunnel may they make it to freedom in the jungle, where they would continue to be persued by zombies until they make it to the RV and drive away.

If the player characters did not bring any explosives with them the GM should make sure that there are some old Vietnam-war-era munitions somewhere in the tunnel, a few of which are still useable for the purpose of making a hole in the tunnels.

i remember that tales from thr crypt, i think it was tales from the crypt anyway, but i remember the short anyway.....thats evil man, simply evil

Yup, it was Tales From The Crypt - one of the few episodes I actually found scary at the time truth be told.

In order to make the shifting tunnels seem more plausible in SR, one could throw in a toxic earth spirit perhaps (former nature spirit of the area). Or just have the whole complex by an alchera and call it good. Not that the PCs ever need to find out either of these things though...

I'm making my players spend the night guarding an antique toy and doll museum. I'll figure out how to torment them as i go.

saving the weird stuff for xmas.

What? The Ghost of Christmas Past has a glock? That would be awesome.

Want to share Snow Fox? The forum is for people to share ideas, not just tease us. Right?

Luckily enough my PCs hiding out in a small backwoods town in the CAS that I can run them through one of those campy 80's southern horror flicks that used to be shown on Showtime.

Civil War Memorial, Redneck Shaman, Great Form Spirt, Astral Gateway, and a metaplane where twisted versions of the townsfolk are planning to off the PCs to as sacrifices to their leader [a shadowish Free Spirit].

For my non-canon setting of Koblenz, I had something unfortunate happen to the suburb of Vallendar. In the 2040s when Koblenz sunk (in my setting almost sunk) because of the floods. Not only were large parts of Vallendar submerged (and the citizens in the upper stories of buildings or on the roof, trying to save whatever they can) but the water also eroded the hills around the town and one day, a landslide buried most of Vallendar together with it's residents.
Vallendar stayed submerged and was abandoned. Because of the Flood affecting many other cities along the Rhine, there were no resources left for a large-scale Search&Rescue. Many of the people remained buried under mud, their bodies conserved by water and dirt...
My plan is to have Shedim appear there and take over the town by inhabiting the corpses. I want to flesh it out a bit more though before letting my players encounter that.

For our campaign, which is set in the Hong Kong area, though primarily in Macao, Macao is currently experiencing heavy riots and a complete shutdown of infastructure thanks to an armor car robbery that got out of control. The entire island is essentially abandoned while different groups vie for control. That being said, the runner left their gear there during a week long trip to the Himalayas and really want it back. Unfortunately, there's no good way to get back to the island as it's being blockaded to prevent weapons or people to leave at this point (since the JIS really would like to take control of the city instead of aiding in reestablishing a pirate port).

Eventually, the players figure out there's an old steam tunnel that runs from an off-shore power plant to the city proper. Of course, the plant is abandoned and the tunnel runs under the bay, meaning no astral escape once inside. This being a nasty old power plant, the tunnels actually have a variant on the bogeyman (from the In Closets and Under Beds thread) inhabiting them. It's not actually a violent spirit so much as one that feeds on fear, so the more freaked out he can make the players the better.

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Since I ran this last night, the best part was when the cyber sammy freaked and started sprinting ahead, freaking the rest of the group. The technomancer then proceeded to hack to sammy and drop his foot anchor, bringing him to an immediate halt and causing a pile-up in the tunnels. Of course, when the foot anchor was released, the water started pouring in, making it much more of a race against time than I had originally planned.