Actual Play - Annalise: Neither Sanctuary Nor Salvation

Or the "well, that escalated quickly" game.

A. and I did a two-person game of Annalise, using the At the Crossroads of Sanctuary and Salvation scenario. It took two rounds of scenes before we started using Moments...but once they came, they came fast and furious.

I play Georgia Stevens, a morbid, eager to please girl with an abusive, alcoholic father and a crush on Tommy Mather, the captain of the local baseball team. A. plays Colin Ellis, the eldest of five children, who dreams of a life away from Sanctuary instead of working in a failing hardware store.

Everything started innocently enough. Colin meets Quentin Drake, a salesman new in town who comes into the store to buy fishing tackle. Georgia's crush asks her to the bonfire on Saturday night.

Flash forward to Saturday night, with Georgia in her mother's makeup and black dress. When she heads outside though, Tommy's friends drench her in ice cold water, and all three of the boys laugh at her. Tommy never wanted to date her after all (and in fact doesn't even know her name); it was a dare.

Humiliated, Georgia hides in the house, but there's soon a knock at the door, asking for the lady of the house. Georgia meets Quentin Drake, who sells her a human heart that will grant her whatever she wishes for...as long as she gives up Tommy.

Colin is minding the store and managing fighting siblings until his mother comes in, in tears. As Colin shoos the younger kids out of the room, she tells him that the sheriff told her that Billy had died in a car accident earlier -- along with tree other boys (Tommy, Jimmy. and Jack).

At the joint funeral for the boys, Georgia tries to offer her sympathies to Bobby (who she knows from the bookstore), but is then rebuffed. Spotting a familiar hat in the crowd, she chases after it and confronts Quentin Drake on a hill, forcing him to admit what she has suspected all along: the accident was her fault all along. She traded Tommy away in exchange for a wish. Angry, Georgia makes her wish: she wishes to bring the dead boys back. Back in her room, the heart glows a brilliant blue... as below, the funeralgoers begin to scream.

When Colin hears banging on the caskets, he opens up Billy's casket and sees his very much dead brother (his face is bloodless, his skin is cold, and his eyes are filmed over). Billy is blind, but he calls Colin's name and reaches for his brother's hand, and Colin defends his brother against the other funeralgoers, stealing first a gun. He ushers his family to safety, but Lorna sees Billy's resurrection as the devil's work and refuses to have anything to do with him or Colin. Colin steals the mayor's car and tries to leave Sanctuary with Billy, but Billy has a seizure as they approach town lines -- which only gets better as the two of them turn back.

When Quentin explains what she's done, Georgia runs down to the funeral. She sees Tommy supported by his family and starts to head toward him, but her father intercepts her and tells her they're going home. Finding her courage, Georgia invokes her dead mother and shames her father into standing down. She runs over to Tommy and tells him that she's sorry. Tommy's mother, overhearing, accuses her of being the witch who did this to Tommy, and the other townsfolk begin to remember the stories that Georgia's mother was a witch...

The townsfolk quickly turn into a mob, and the scene ends with her crawling under the porch of an abandoned, haunted house near the church.

This was fun, but also INTENSE -- I felt a little grossed out by all the dead people. At one point we had to have a discussion about whether Billy had blood or embalming fluid. Also, it touches darker real life stuff than the other Annalise games I've played: Georgia's relationship with her father and the way Colin stubbornly clings to his dead brother are poignant and disastrous.

It was cinematic and had the feel of a Southern Stephen King novel. We both agreed that we would watch this as a movie. It's a lot more quickly paced than our other game, and the game seems narrow in focus: there's Quentin, there are the dead boys, and there are Georgia and Colin dealing with the burdens of family legacy and learning to take a stand...and making seriously questionable decisions in the pursuit of already questionable goals.

What I like about this game (and I think, this scenario in general) is how the story has a certain momentum to it. I think this is partly because A. and I play a lot, and we are both in the habit of saying "yes" to things. But this game also invokes a lot of genre tropes. Once a humiliated Georgia opens the door to a salesman, you know an unwise deal with the devil is going down. This started early, really, with Tommy asking Georgia to the dance, because good things do not happen to Georgia. As soon as the banging started on the coffin, Colin was going to make a choice, and it was pretty obvious what the choice would be.

Actual Play - More Annalise: The Wake of Zenas Quantum

This time we're playing The Wake of Zenas Quantum. It's not very GOTHIC HORROR and a lot more... superheroes of questionable heroism doing questionable things.

I was a little unsure at first if the system could handle this, but once everyone got a feel for it and once we switched to more psychological play, it worked out. Instead of pupil-less eyes and drowned men crawling on the hulls of the ship, we have golden glitter, strange seductive scents, alien trinkets from Banner's homeworld..and donuts. There's kind of a homey, old-style American comics feel about it: alien trinkets and really special donut shops just have a vintage twentieth century feel. It's shaping up to be tragedy by way of the Silver Age, and the most monstrous thing so far is probably...well, honestly, us.

Isabella breaks and enters, but it's fine because she bought out the cops! Banner tried to steal from a journalist and kidnapped him (Isabella helped, and is really more concerned about the PR than the kidnapping). Barry covered up an accidental killing and then tried to take over the Heroic Agency. Kelly is the only one of us who is actually nice.

Everyone decided in the first scene that Zenas Quantum is the Vampire. The question, of course, is if it really is Zenas.

Zenas is plotting something in the background, but we're all too busy fighting each other. Barry's jealousy of Banner's heroism and superpowers motivated him to get Banner kicked out of the Heroic Agency. Isabella sort-of-accidentally gassed Banner with fear gas (someone replaced her tranquilizing gas system with fear gas!). Writing this made me realize that all the terrible things happen to Banner.

Also, all of this is building up to a fascinating...something. Why are there mirrors everywhere? What are the weird properties of Zenas's blood? Where's that seductive smell coming from? What does Banner's homeworld have to do with anything (and why was Zenas's blood inside a trinket from there?). What does the kitsune home/afterlife have to do with any of it?

And whatever the hell is going on with Zenas gloating in everyone's head?