players: Drew, Drew, Zenia, Ben

Our research submarine disappeared mysteriously. What's our plan? Send another sub! What could go wrong?





Notice the lack of characters in the second photo. This is the classic before and after Geiger Counter shot. Offscreen: the graveyard for all the characters that were wiped out. But the final shot would show just a submarine with zero characters on it, because after starting with 15 characters, not a single one survived. None. You go, haunted submarine!

The store unexpectedly closed an hour early because of Windstorm 2016, which meant instead of having a nice character-delving, suspenseful ending, with people creeping around the silent submarine having personal moments, we had to rush and do a shootout to finish. So we had the build up but didn't get the whole payoff. There were hints that we were haunted by restless spirits of the first sub (the Phoenix, ironically) but we never got to reveal what really happened, whether some shifty behavior doomed it in the first place, etc. Yep, having to suddenly wrap our game an hour early messed us up. No surprise there.

I also mistakenly skipped the secrets mechanic (i.e. characters have hidden agendas and if they succeed the menace is weakened), which probably would have helped our odds a bit -- though by the end we were rolling so poorly maybe not. Keeping secrets from other players feel pretty backwards nowadays, and in other runs we've replaced them with "open" secrets where the players know what's up, which lets us enjoy the story a lot more. It's always good to have tension between the characters, so we invented some on the fly (Chad & Ronnie! <3 <3 <3) but it would have been better in setup.