This would have been - I think - Origins 2004. I had gone to the con with four or five of my friends, and had spent most of the weekend playing various one-offs where we'd show up in pairs and just try to generally be the most awesome people at the table, in a (hopefully) not obnoxious way.
On the last day, we'd all been trying to get into a Call of Cthulhu game that was advertised as being for "adults only". Since people are kind of touchy about child safety at cons, we figured this warning translated to "horrific madness and mind-twisting gore", which is what we'd signed up for. There were two such games, with different story lines, apparently, and two of us signed up for each. About an hour before the start of one game, however, one of the games got canceled, so at the last minute one of our group managed to muscle in on the other game. Having three people who all knew each other at one table seemed a little unbalancing, but hey, gently caress it, it was the last game of the last day, and besides, there were going to be another five people at the table.
Things seemed promising at first. The group running the game was reportedly some "legit" outfit that ran games every year, and they had a room dedicated to the games they'd be running over the weekend. The CoC room was decked out in appropriate mood lighting and had some decent, haunted house-style decorations going on. Nothing extreme, but it created a decent ambiance.
That was the end of the good news. Me and two of my friends sat at the table with the Keeper and five other people. The Keeper reminded us all that the game was for "adults only" and said he'd distribute our pre-fabs for the game.
The game itself was supposed to be a sort of Nature Trail to Hell scenario, where a group of friends set out on a wilderness excursion and things then go horribly, horribly wrong. Sounded pretty decent. The Keeper hands out sheets without bothering to ask anybody what sort of character they'd like to play or whether a given character was suitable for the player. Normally, I let that go, because some GMs just don't have time to gently caress around trying to fill orders. Fine, cool. The character I was given, however, was a seventeen year-old high school girl. Again, whatever. I can live with that. I've played girls before.
A few years back, I started keeping all my character sheets, pictures, notes, etc in a folder at home, so thankfully I can now share with you exactly what was handed to me:
I was fairly disappointed about the rather anemic set of skills, if only because it limits what the character can do, but again, gently caress it, I figured I could make this work and pull myself through by just playing smart. Then I got handed the character writeup, and a semaphore squadron’s worth of flags went up:
The emphasis on sex caught me off guard. Maybe the relationships between the party members were going to play some integral part in the plot down the line, but the paragraph of sentences used to catalog my character’s sexual history could have been summed up in one sentence, no more. I was glad to know that one of my pals was playing Craig, the big brother character, so at least I’d be assured there were no creepy incest tropes I’d be forced to endure. I was handed a piece of white cardboard with my character’s name on it to place in front of me, and as the rest of the group got familiar with their characters, we started.
Five minutes in, Craig broke his leg while trying to climb up a ridge, and was forced to play the rest of the session using a makeshift crutch and dosed to the gills on pain pills one of the other characters had in their equipment. I think “cripple on opiates” would have been a role better suited to an NPC, but whatever. The game went on, our party comprised of myself, the older brother, two of the older brother’s guy friends (one of which was the dreamy ‘Dominic’), Craig’s girlfriend Stephanie, the girlfriend of the other guy friend, and lastly, our tour guide, played by my other mate. I don’t remember exactly what was wrong with the tour guide, but he was an older guy, and had some disfiguring deformity that made him “ugly”. For purposes of this story, we’ll say he was a burn victim with a harelip.
Rather than trot back to our vehicles and call the expedition off, the Keeper informs my friend, the harelip burn boy, that there’s a sort of backwoods little hamlet about two kliks away. Harelip, who had until then been advocating we simply go back, was curtly informed by the Keeper that “hours” had passed before the accident, as opposed to the few minutes we had all believed it was, and that it would be faster and easier to just move on to the village. When my friend asked if they had a clinic or even a nurse at the town, he was told that no, there wasn’t. Even though he still decided we should turn back, the Keeper forced us all to move on, insisting that there wouldn’t be a game otherwise. Whatever. On the rails we go.
Arriving at the town, we find ourselves trapped with the cast of Deliverance, which is what I’m fairly certain most of the concept for this game was pulled from. The locals, some fifty of them, live in this backwood little community without electricity or sewage, cars, or any roads leading in or out of town. Again, the whole idea is pretty dumb, but we roll with it.
Pretty much immediately after rolling into town do the contrived sex scenarios start. While getting his leg splinted by one of the local girls, Craig is compelled to gently caress his willing caregiver, in spite of his ostensible faithfulness to his girlfriend and the, y’know, freshly broken leg. Meanwhile, the couple gets roped into a four-way with two of the strapping village bucks, and the Keeper makes it a point to describe to the male player that his character gets hosed in the rear end by both of them, “but strangely, you seem to enjoy it.”
At this point, I took my name plate, pulled out a sharpie, and added the following under my character’s name:
quote:
LACY MIZNER
would like to not be raped. Seriously.
For my part, there isn’t a lot for me, Dominic, Stephanie, or Harelip to do. Stephanie eventually decides to go looking for Craig, and ends up getting seduced by one of the locals. Harelip wanders around town for a bit, and I, foolishly thinking that maybe I should try to do some roleplaying in this abortion, strike up a conversation with the dreamy Dominic, with whom I make an honest and sincere effort to flirt with, as best as a chubby (at 5’6” and 140lb?), embarrassed, self-conscious high school girl would. Dominic’s player showed admirable role-playing skill himself, when he passed on the opportunity to vicariously bang a high school girl in his imagination and instead politely gave me the “You’re a sweet kid” speech. It turns out that Dominic’s background sheet noted that he was attracted to Craig’s girlfriend and was kind of hoping to throw a wrench in she and Craig’s relationship during this trip. Cool.
At this point, my character is crestfallen, mopey, and even more self-conscious and down on herself than normal. Makes sense, right? I figure, hey, I’ll go look for Craig, see if I can find my big brother to console me. Instead, I walk in on him banging six shades of poo poo out of Stephanie and some farm girl – mind you, he was basically being run as an NPC at this point, my friend had no part in this – and in horror, convinced that the world was hosed, she ran away in tears.
The next time I get any face time is at some fest hall banquet dinner the yokels are throwing for us, their “guests”. I insisted that I wanted to sit next to Craig, regardless of his indiscretions, but the Keeper informed us that our hosts had laid out all our places for us, and none of us were sitting together, but all of us were bookended on either side of the bench seating by some appropriately-sexed local. I tried to insist otherwise and was promptly told to gently caress off. The meal begins, and I mention – because I’m still desperately trying to do some actual roleplaying – that my character isn’t eating. The Keeper becomes thoroughly distressed by this, and demands I eat. At this point, I know something’s up, but the decision had nothing to do with suspicion: I’d decided that my character, the fat girl, felt unattractive and sad, and so she was going to starve herself in a fit of self-hatred. That seemed reasonable to me, but when the Keeper started becoming unhinged by the fact I wasn’t eating, it gave me plenty of OOC motivation to stick to my guns. Then he asked me if I drink anything, and I said I didn’t. He continued to bully and browbeat me throughout the dinner scenario to eat or drink, and I continued to tell him to get hosed.
The reason for all this ham-fistedness became apparent pretty quickly: the food and drink all had some sort of Cthulhoid aphrodisiac in it (Rhy’lethian Fly?) that forced all the PCs to become sex-obsessed hand puppets for the Keeper. Everyone at the table degenerated into some bacchanalian orgy, except for Harelip, who’d taken a few bites and quietly excused himself to go outside and smoke.
The end scenario of the game was basically the Keeper detailing what happened to our characters with little to no actual choice in between. The last vestiges of choice left in the party were mine and Harelip’s, and despite playing against the Keeper’s infantile little erotic fanfic, we were railroaded all the same. Harelip was called out to the woods by some siren song, where he found a dark cave. Venturing inside, he discovered a Cthulhoid monstrosity, a sort of great, seething ball of flesh that lured him in with a series of inviting lips, genitals, breasts, etc. Thinking perhaps it would advance the plot and eager to run this loving nonsense into the ground, he willingly gave himself up to the Pleasure Sphere, and that’s where his story ended. Mine hit a dead end after dinner. A couple of the farm boys tried to seduce my character, who was, at this point, horrified, sickened, and frightened, and the Keeper was genuinely astonished that I didn’t break the loving sound barrier opening my legs for these guys. He called me out on “poor roleplaying”, which pissed me off enough to jump right down his loving throat about how hosed-up and insane the game was, the scenario was, and how my fat, rejected, virgin character was doing the only thing that made sense in the loving game. At this point, the Keeper got angry with me, and told me that the two boys were now attempted to – you loving guessed it – hold me down and gently caress me by force. I made a token roll to resist, but I already knew how it was going to play out, and I had my poo poo packed up by the time the Keeper had started describing how I was overpowered, raped, and then thrown to the Pleasure Sphere, followed shortly by everyone else in the party. I went outside and had a cigarette, myself.
After the game was over, I saw the guy who played Dominic, and asked him what he thought. He echoed the sentiments shared by my friends and myself, but admitted that he was too sheepish to walk out, and stayed to the end. Apparently, he explained, the village was some self-contained cult for a minor Cthulhoid deity of lust that they tended to in the nearby cave, feeding it occasional travelers by seducing them with food and livestock grown and raised with the aid of a “nectar” that the Pleasure Sphere gave them. We agreed that the game was a miserable, clusterfucked railroad along the Bullshit Express, and, lacking the Keeper’s presence so that we could feed him some knuckles, awkwardly apologized to each other and parted ways.
Sorry for the long-rear end post. Anyway. Worst game ever.
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