1885. New London.

Madame Verity Winterbottom (Shuo) - photographic memory and OCD. The picture of a proper Victorian woman.

Professor Phineas Boggletrop (Marc) - his forte is chemicals, and it turns out he's somewhat absent-minded as well.

Mister Wells's Marvelous Machine AKA "M" (Jamie) - there to do filing, but occasionally brought along on fieldwork just in case his various built-in contraptions prove useful

The Case of The Colours In The Sanitarium:
A distraught worker at the condemned sanitarium in one of the seedier parts of New London tells of strange colors and lights that terrified her - research indicates this condemned sanitarium is home of the "lightning bug", a notorious criminal who was committed due to ravings about a "sphere of coloured gas" that followed him about.
After a brief dressing-down by Inspector Shelby of Scotland Yard as our heroes reconnoiter the abandoned building they plunge into the catacombs below, where they discover bioluminescent slime and a secret door clearly meant to be activated by something with inhuman hands - there they find the prison of the alien coloured gas and accidentally unleash it. Fortunately it is susceptible to Madame Winterbottom's cleansers and disenfectants - they are able to use M's pump and sprayer-arm to hose down the extraterrestrial menace.
It seems the "lightning bug" was telling the truth about that strange coloured sphere after all. But there must have been other extraterrestrial influences here - what *was* that claw-shaped hand?
Once they escape the collapsing building, they run into none other than good old Inspector Shelby. The look on his face!


The Case of The Ministry of Internal Internal Internal Internal Affairs of Internal Affairs.
Sir Warwickshire of the Ministry of Internal Internal Internal Internal Affairs - or IIIIA - approaches the Society with a delicate situation - they dare not involve Scotland Yard in this internal matter, of a reported haunting in the IIIA. Unable to dig up much information on this Ministry or its Affairs, they accompany Warwickshire to the small brownstone that houses the IA, the IIA, the IIIA, and the IIIIA.
But why are the posters on the wall written in obscure Phoenician hieroglyphics?
Why can Warwickshire move through solid objects?
Why are there stacks of demonic tomes in boxes in the halls?
In the archives (a building much bigger than the one housing the ministries) - why is stack 666 gone, and why is a class 4 nether demon magically trapped in its place?
Happily, we manage to get the code from the ghost who has been haunting the building, and although Margaret was tragically splattered after she loaned us her protective necklace, we learn that to save london from the demonic ministry we simply need to go through a demonic portal to the gates of hell and destroy the necklace. Professor Phineas suggests we free the demon and follow it there, which we do.
Silly demon.
But what of Warwickshire? Was he a friendly ghost who led us here to save London - or was he trying to lead us into a trap? I suppose we'll never know.

On GM-less Inspectres:
Took us a bit to get us in a groove with this. The GM typically has these responsibilities:
- scene frame
- play NPCs
- make stressful things happen and make the players roll stress
We mostly went in a circle saying what we do and making rolls, and then afterwards one of the non-rollers would come up with something stressful to happen - or not - and we'd negotiate how many stress dice that sounded like. We were violating Czege principle a bit, I suppose. Confessional is less useful in GMless, because we'd adopt GM stance whenever we felt like it and complicate the mystery (or just describe the setting) from there. But Confessional was still good for giving us direction "Why, oh why did we step into the portal?" and tagging characters with role-playing keys.
Whoever made sense would play NPCs.
In the first case we rolled the client table and were very expository about her - in the second case I rolled in secret and role-played the client, which was slower to get going (we went off on some role-playing tangents) but weaved a more vivid fictive dream, IMO.

I don't know - I'm not sure there's much advantage to GM-less. Inspectres seems like it would play great with 1 GM+2 players.

Those were my first real games of Inspectres (I'd played "Inspeckers" with my family once before) and it's a lot cooler than I thought it was - I could totally imagine using it to play a "Lost" type game where random stuff happens and you don't know why but you have some theories but they may or may not turn out to be right...

I had a blast playing my first Inspectres game. I thought it went pretty smoothly GM-less, although I can't really compare. I like all the different elements and mechanics in the game: the confessionals, stress and action rolls, the Foundation, and the unveiling of the clues. I especially enjoyed the collaborative element of the game.

The results of the stress and action rolls made for some pretty hilarious moments:
"We jump through the portal and... we're in Hell. Literally."
Stress Roll
"Apparently I'm not bothered at all."
"Yeah, I've seen worse."

I'd love to play this another time with 3 players plus a GM (for the full experience) and as Jamie suggested, two players with a GM.

Thanks to Marc and Jamie for facilitating. It's always a pleasure playing with you gentlemen!

Have you guys seen Cthulhu Dark? The rules are like Inspectres Lite, and although it's intended for running prepped adventures, we could totally mash it up with Inspectres and play it with no prep and no Keeper.

http://catchyourhare....­

I would definitely give Cthulhu Dark a try. I'm already thinking of some tweaks to make it work GMless...

Iiiiiiiiiiinteresting. I'd be happy to play if you want to facilitate.

Sorry for jumping in late on this.

I'd love to play a Cthulhu game! I'm always down for anything eldritch and/or non-Euclidian.

GMless Inspectres was really not bad at all. I had a great time with the game and my co-sleuths were delightful. But I do want to repeat what I said after we finished, which was this: it seemed to me that a fair bit of the game's functionality rested on the three of us being experienced story gamers. Were it not for that, we would probably have faltered a lot more in trying to figure out how to work the fiction. As was noted, we basically took turns coming up with stuff that happened. We'd often need to throw wrenches into our own characters' plans in order to make Stress appear, which was a bit odd.

I think where I'm going with this is thus: With a GM, there's a very clear sense of who is antagonizing your character. The GM brings in the danger and decisions. With just the three of us, we basically took turns filling that role as needed. It was something we did naturally, but I wonder if a less experienced gamer might struggle to find that balance between playing and narrating.

All that said, still lots of fun and no complaints. I'm glad I was able to sort of facilitate; it's been way too long since I played Inspectres, and I really like it!