Ghostbusters roleplaying game - a Halloween three-shot (PART 3)

 

Where are we?

Happy Australia Day for yesterday everyone. I celebrated the national day capping it off with the lads coming around for our monthly role-playing session. We finally managed to finish off my Ghostbusters adventure.

My "one-shot" Halloween Ghostbusters scenario that became a three shot mini campaign finally came to a conclusion last night. You can find part one and part two here.

This part of the adventure saw the players arrive in a strange place, having jumped through the portal back in the cavern as Vigo the Carpathian brought the roof on the cave down upon them. With no other choice, they all dived through the open portal and ended up here.

Where was here? Good question. They found themselves in some other worldly realm where the sky looked purple and studded with stars that didn't quite look like stars. Moreover, they found themselves on islands of floating rock that were suspended in the void.

I decided to let the players stew for a few minutes as they tried to figure out how they could move over the islands to the portal they could see in the distance. Some testing revealed that if they tried to jump, and didn't make it to another floating rock, they would plummet for all eternity. Not surprisingly, none of the players wanted to test that out in reality.

Fiddling around, they caught the attention of three spooks who proceeded to slime two of the PC's, knocking one out. The pesky spooks were finally captured and one of the PC's go it into their head to shoot the portal gate they came through just to see what happens. They destroyed it!

Fortunately, at this time, Lewis Tully and Slimer (aka "Spud") turned up making their way from rocky island to rocky island to ascend to where the players were. Apparently, Egon had been getting Lewis to test out some modifications to the proton pack and there was a bright flash. Next thing Lewis knew, he and Spud where here. The players recognised that this must have been over a month ago, but to Lewis, it seemed like only yesterday. Lewis showed the players the slime injector modification that they had on their proton packs but never knew about. Together, they proceeded to slime tether one island after another to make their way across to the gate they could see in the distance, the method Tully had used get to the PC's. Problem solved.

Given one of the PC's was out cold, they had to drag his sorry backside across the rocks and weren't too gracious about it. Whether or not it was the gravel rash, or providential timing, the PC awoke as they arrived at the far gate.

Stepping through they were transported to another located and presented with a puzzle. Ahead of them were three portals, only one of which they could pass through safely. Deciphering the clews got them the correct portal and they went through. Only to find themselves plummeting to a distant rock island far below.

Just prior to impact, they slowed in mid-air and floated to the ground safely. Once again however, they were confronted by the same type of puzzle, but this time it contained different statements to decipher.

Once again, after much hair pulling, they correctly deciphered the clews and passed on safely. Now they found themselves in an area with multiple portals. The one they passed through, and the exit portal at the far end, did not change, but the four others would rotate clockwise to face the next portal in the chain.

Again, after much trial and error, one of the players correctly deduced that the portal had to face the one it was linked to for them to pass on to the next island. I had numbered the portals one to six so that they could quickly identify each portal.

Portal one, the portal they arrived at, always pointed to portal six, and the PC's could pass back and forth between these portals each round except when portal six was facing portal three. When it faced portal three, the players would arrive on the rock island where portal three was located. If they passed through any portal when it wasn't facing its linked portal, they would always appear back at the first portal.

The link sequence was portal one always lined to portal six, six to three, three to five, five to two, and two to four where the exit arch portal was located. This kept the players amused for a while (and very frustrated).

That finally solved, they moved onwards.

The final challenge was not immediately evident. They arrived at a group of linked rock islands where they could see the exit portal in the distance.

Two of the PC's moved on cautiously whilst Lewis, Spud and two of the other players remained behind. As the first two PC's approached the exit portal, the Guardian jumped from a floating rock island above them and crashed onto the island with the exit portal. This rocked the island, knocking the two PC's to the ground.

The Guardian them attempted to squish them (hey, it was a one-off adventure so if any of the PC's died now, back luck). The lumbering Guardian was crap at its job however and rolled a 5. Miss! They players got to their feet and bolted through the exit portal.

This just left Tully, Spud and the other two players. The Guardian rounded on them but rolled terribly with each attach roll (5 was its highest score!). One of the PC's on the other hand scored a critical with their proton stream attack and, rolling on the Critical Tables we use, literally melted its face off! Stunned for eight rounds, the rest of the team bolted for the exit portal.

Diving through the exit portal, the team were reunited with Ecto1b in the material realm. Job done; they took off to hospital to get one of the PC's check in to Casualty. With one hit point left, the PC had survived multiple attacks and escaped with his life.

So much for the one-shot Halloween special. But we had fun and tried out a setting that we normally wouldn't have played. So, a win all round.