Thank goodness her cell phone had reception all the way out here in the woods. "Max," she said evenly, trying to sound more annoyed than frightened, "I ran off the road and the car is stuck." She described where she thought she was and he promised he and Holden would drive out right away.
So much for partying at Denise's place.
Hoping to calm her frayed nerves, she decided to get out of the car and walk around a little. She absentmindedly left the cell phone on the hood of the Cadillac and paced around in the beams of its headlights. She was sure her dad was going to ground her for --
A horrible wail pierced the crisp quiet of the autumn evening followed sharply by a snap as Alice Grace spun around in terror. Like the Cadillac's wheel, her ankle was caught in the gnarly pine roots and now it was sprained or maybe even fractured. She almost collapsed in pain but the same horrible wail echoed among the trees again, and she bit back her agony.
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The gravel road crunched under the wheels of Holden's restored VW bus. "Are you sure this is right?" he asked, looking at Seth in the rearview mirror. "Uh, actually," Seth replied, characteristically pushing his glasses back up his nose, "this is precisely as close as we can get without following Alice Grace down the ditch off the highway."
"You may want to be, like, a bit more sensitive when we find her," Denise chided, smacking Seth's arm. Max grimaced in the front passenger seat looking down at his cell phone. Alice Grace was not answering any of their calls. "Seth knows everything," he sighed, "except how to talk to girls." "Women," Denise corrected him flatly. Max let it go. This incident had ruined her party, after all.
Holden stopped the VW and turned off the ignition. "Well at least we have some moonlight." "And my flashlight," Seth chirped, hoping to reassure his friends. Ignoring him as usual, Denise had her cell phone up to her ear. "I'm calling the ranger station. We're going to need someone who actually," she imitated Seth's nasal voice, "knows the area."
Max and Holden shot each other a knowing look as they climbed out of the van.
+ + + + +
In the Trapped scenario, one of the characters is randomly chosen to be stuck in the center of the play area quadrant diagonal from the quadrant where the rest start. The isolated character is meant to have stepped in a bear trap and can only move within 4" of their starting position until the others get within 2" and make a successful Awareness test with a -5 modifier to release them. At that point the trapped character can hobble along with -2" to their Movement stat, or -1" if there are other characters within 2" of them. So the objective is to get to the trapped character and then escort them off the edge of starting quadrant.
We were quite lucky NOT to randomly chose Seth, who notoriously only moves 3" per Movement action. The scenario also specifies that all the characters might randomly step in a trap but of course I forgot about that, which may have been for the best as the area terrain was so dense that every character needed to take a Jump Scare test every activation. And the Killer arrived on Turn One as a result. We randomly conjured an Ethereal Killer with the Stalker MO and traits that buffed its damage and required a successful Awareness test to melee attack it.
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A lot of the action occurred in and around a creek running through the forest, with our hapless teenage heroes splashing up and down the banks trying to stay alive. We counted both the creek and the pine stands as difficult terrain, halving movement, and while we were able to pretty well avoid the trees there was no way to avoid crossing the creek to get to Alice Grace and then re-crossing it to get back to Holden's VW. But allow me to "zoom out" so you can take a wider look at the forest:
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You can just see the Light Token representing the headlights of Alice Grace's dad's Cadillac from behind the trees, in the top right of the picture. And although there is a fairly clear path going around that same pine stand, we opted for the narrow path at the top of the bank where the Killer had us squeezed between the creek and the trees. Thanks to Seth's flashlight, most of the teens managed to scramble away (mostly) unscathed but poor Max took quite a beating.
The Ethereal Visage is fairly squishy compared to, say, the Mutilated Visage so we debated trying to drive off the Killer but, not able to get it done in a single turn, forged ahead to free Alice Grace instead. Denise had used her cell phone on Turn 1 to place fan-favorite supporting character Ranger Sandy at the edge of the starting quadrant. We hoped this would gives us some time to navigate the dense terrain but the Killer kept appearing near the teens due to rolls on the Jump Scare and Fright Token tables.
Supporting characters are the Killer's priority targets, such that during this session the Killer was always trying to get to Ranger Sandy way back past Holden's VW. Even so, the Ethereal Visage has a 10" area attack that automatically hits. So the teens were just about always caught in that area attack but very rarely suffered the Killer's secondary melee attack.
Despite the slow going and relentless area attacks, Seth and Denise finally got close enough to Alice Grace to free her from the trap and so began the slog back to Holden's VW.
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The combination of scenario and terrain layout gave us little incentive to split up either heading out into the woods or retreating back. This was fortunate as the damage inflicted by the Killer's area attack was fairly tightly balanced against the teens' capacity to heal themselves and one another. Rather than feeling like we were being stalked by an 80s slasher film antagonist, however, it was a bit closer to being buffeted by a heavy downpour of particularly caustic acid rain while applying Band-Aids.
Doug suggested that, cinematically speaking, we were not being attacked by a single monster but rather a whole band of restless ghosts. My own impression was that, if this were a horror film, the backstory would have to be that Ranger Sandy had killed a serial killer years ago whose spirit returned this very night to take revenge ... and the teens just happened to get caught in the middle. True to form, the Killer did finally slay Ranger Sandy on the last turn. But everyone else, including poor Alice Grace, survived.