You Awaken In a Strange Place is a zero prep, completely improvised roleplaying game, for inventing a setting, characters, and playing all in a single session. This session was a horror story set on the international space station.
In the distant future when humans have died out and all that remain are aliens, animals, and movie monsters, the international space station has been infiltrated by drug-dealing vampires. Four individuals that will soon find themselves dragged into this conflict are:
- Archibald (Paul), an accountant descended from Frankensteins monster, who is secretly an undercover cop investigating the vampires.
- Jeffrey (Dom), literally just a crocodile with a voice translator collar. He works on the space station as an intergalactic real estate agent.
- Ricarro (Aaron), a four-armed invisible alien. Only his sunglasses, jacket and jeans are visible.
- Bob the blob (Kye), an amorphous grey blob (swarm of nanobots) going through an existential crisis since being separated from its hive mind. It communicates visually through its shapeshifting form.
Our four heroes awaken in a strange place - the broom closet of a Starbucks that only sells pumpkin spiced lattes. The last thing they remember is being knocked out and tied up (or, for certain blobs of nanobots, placed in a mason jar) by a gang of drug dealing vampires. After freeing themselves and interrogating a vampire (and a certain crocodile climbing into the vents to go on a vampire chomping sidequest before returning to the group) they find out the reason the vampire gang is attacking civilians is because they are searching for a mysterious shapeshifting creature called the Splumptydoo. They intend to harvest its organs to make extra special drugs, and then leave the space station on an escape ship.
Our heroes find the Splumptydoo first - it first appears to them as the creepy twins from The Shining, and then it turns into a wall to hide from them, and then it turns into a biblically accurate angel to communicate with them, and then it turns into a white cat that looks like it should be named Casper. They figure out that it hungers for hydrochloric acid. Ricarro finds a bottle of hydrochloric acid in the broom closet, ignoring all the warning signs and notes from Rusty the janitor saying that he will hunt down anyone who steals his beloved hydrochloric acid. They feed the Slumptydoo, whose face grows misshapen as it reaches for the acid, like Buzz Lightyears face from the ‘this floor is made of floor’ meme, and its face stays that way.
Suddenly the group is set upon by vampires with guns - Bob forms a wall to protect the group, while Ricarro goes looking for a control room. At the control room, Ricarro is chased by Rusty the janitor, a giant axe-wielding maniac with a blood stained metal bucket on his head, angry eyebrows drawn on it in chalk. Ricarro tries to negotiate for more time to replace the stolen acid, but Rusty will only take payment in severed arms. Ricarro manages to escape unharmed and even manages to set off a kind of lighting surge that kills the vampires in his friends area, but in doing so he throws the space station into darkness.
The rest head for a security office, only to find the weapons armoury has already been raided by the vampires. The Slumptydoo transforms into a man creepily staring into a corner of a room to show that it hungers for more acid. As they run ahead, the man and the corner of the room seems to follow them. Everyone regroups at a chemical lab to find more hydrochloric acid, but they only find enough to satisfy either the Slumptydoo or Rusty, not both. They choose Rusty, and in respect for them repaying their debts, Rusty kills the Slumptydoo, which was about to attack in the form of a biblically accurate shark.
The group head to the departures area where Dracula and his vampire gang are loading supplies onto an escape ship. Bob the Blob shapeshifters into armour, fusing onto Jeffrey as he engages Dracula in combat. Archibald activates a special gadget that calls in his security guards as backup, but he finds out they’ve all been captured and tied up by vampires, and he spends the entire final battle berating them over comms.
Jeffrey, Bob, and Ricarro get sucked into space as Dracula attempts to escape, not needing to breathe in space as he is undead, but Jeffrey completes his mission of consuming Dracula before Archibald manages to reel them all back in with rope.
The end.
Comments