Annalise: Neither Sanctuary nor Salvation, part 2

Well, that went downhill.

content warning: cannibalism, gun violence, murder, mutilation, violence toward and murder of children, bird fetuses THERE ARE LOTS OF WARNINGS OKAY

Colin drives back to the hardware store with Billy. It's closed today, and he's robbing the cash register when he hears a tapping on the window. It's Quentin Drake. Colin pulls a gun on Quentin and tries to rob him of what's in the briefcase. Quentin sets some jewelry and cash aside, but suggests that Colin might be interested in some of the odder items. He offers Colin a jar with a pickled bird fetus, which he claims is a fetus. He tells Colin that if Billy eats it, then it will bring the life back into Billy's eyes. Billy seems possessed by desire at the sight of the bird fetus. Billy eats the entire fetus, and he seems momentarily suffused by a red glow, before his pre-death appearance is restored.

Colin shoots Quentin. Quentin only laughs and pulls the bullet out of his chest. Colin grabs the briefcase and he and Billy make a run for it.

Georgia hides under the porch of the old house for a few hours, until she hears a familiar humming outside the door. It's Quentin (who looks perfectly fine now, though there's a black stain and a hole in his shirt). He offers to sell her some rope that she recognizes from the hardware store -- if someone is killed with this rope, no magic and no tricks involved, then the curse will end. She refuses to trust him and runs for the door -- only to trip over the rope, which has appeared in the doorway, and see Billy and Colin inside the house, with the open briefcase and its merchandise spread out.

Billy is surprised to see her and greets her. Colin is suspicious and pulls a gun on her, while she tries to explain why she's in this house without revealing the mob after her or that she was responsible for Billy's death. (Georgia is not a great liar, but fortunately, Colin is not very observant.)

Things escalate when she overhears Billy whispering to Colin: "I'm hungry. Can I eat her?" Georgia tries to run for it, but Billy chases after her. She realizes that he's still cursed and tries to strangle him with the rope but fails, and Colin shoots her. He gets Billy to tie her up with Quentin's rope.

The sound of the gunfire brings the cops, who call for Colin to come out. Colin tries to negotiate with the town's cops, using Georgia (who is going into shock) as a hostage. He's just convinced the cops to let them leave when Billy's hunger gets the better of him. Billy reaches toward Georgia's gunshot wound and starts ripping off pieces of her to eat.

The cops raise their guns again, witnessing this cannibalism/assault. Colin, realizing that taking a hostage isn't going to work if they EAT the hostage, nudges the door and commands Billy to run for the car in the back, using Georgia as a hostage (without eating her). Then, he takes some strange, silver-grey bullets from the briefcase (conveniently the right bullets for his gun), and as Billy makes a run for it with Georgia, Colin holds up his gun to shoot.

He doesn't realize until it's too late that his mother Lorna had come up to speak with him on behalf of the cops. He shoots her dead and then massacres the other cops, his aim preternaturally accurate and fast. Colin's secret is that he fantasizes about murder (even of his mother), and that in this moment, he feels good. But as he aims for the last cop, the bullet jams in the gun. The deputy shoots him dead.

Billy gets Georgia to the car, but he's stopped by the neighbors, the Evans. The Evans rescue and untie Billy, only to realize that the hostage is Georgia, who they think is a witch She tries to appeal to their history with her mother, to no avil. As they reach for her, she panics and taps into her power, grabbing them and freezing them from the inside out. (She flips two traits here: Eager to Please to Not Gonna Take Your Shit, and Afraid of Men to Men Are Afraid of Me).

Drunk on death magic, she commands Billy to follow her. They're going back to the house. She guesses that Quentin will be there -- or at least, that he'll come back for his briefcase. Before they go, she eats the ghosts of the Evans and uses that power to heal her wounds.

When they reach the house, she sends Billy ahead to scout, and he reports that the cops are still in the house and the salesman is hanging around outside. She commands Billy to lead the cops away so that she can confront Quentin and agrees to let him eat. As he leads the cops away and the sound of screaming comes from outside, she heads in to confront the salesman.

As Georgia uses her power, ice creeps up from Quentin's feet to cover him, but she's getting tired and he has power of his own to resist her with. Desperate for more, she drains the ghosts of those who have died around the house, and when that isn't enough, she begins draining the power from the magical items in his briefcase. For the first time, Quentin loses his temper.

As she reaches for more power, her hand brushes against a mirror, which drains her of all of her power. Quentin calls a knife into his hands and approaches her. She may have ruined his merchandise, but fortunately, a witch's tongue has power...

In the Aftermath, Billy is feeding on the cops he's killed when Quentin emerges from the house, no worse for wear. Billy finds himself helpless to resist as Quentin shrinks him and places him within the briefcase, promising that he'll become full-sized once they reach their next destination...
With Lorna and Colin dead and Billy's body missing, Colin's other siblings are sent to orphanages outside of Sanctuary. They bury Colin in the same plot Billy was buried in, since they can't afford a new one.

They find Georgia's mutilated body hanging from the rafters of the house the next day. Her tongue and every other part of her that might have magical value have been cut off. Her death drives her father even deeper into alcoholism and there are rumors he's haunted by her ghost, until one day, he snaps on the way to the liquor store and murders someone.

It was the first incident among many, as violence continued to haunt Sanctuary for generations to come.

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?

Actual Play - Annalise, the Mystery of the Auspicious: Part 2

It's been about a month so I honestly don't recall all the details of the end of the game. The Captain and the Doctor decide to explore the Queen Anne, meeting the Beast, a giant white wolf-like creature.

The Doctor's possessed hand tries to kill the Captain. The Captain lost control of his fire powers and saw the Beast, which recognized him as a brother.

At this point, undead creatures (including Sailor Godfrey) begin crawling up the sides of the ship and filling the water.
The two of them manage to escape the ship in a rowboat, where the Doctor turns out to have one sentimental feeling on seeing a vision of his fiancee Annalise.

As the two escape, the Captain resists the tempting call of the Beast and uses all of his power to set the Queen Anne on fire, ending (almost) the menace of the Beast.

The Doctor isn't so lucky, however. He wakes up the next night to feel his possessed hand across his throat. He amputates himself with a scalpel, but when the Beast calls to him to give in and to serve it, he succumbs. His secret, revealed, is that he once poisoned a hospital on the command of a foreign power. (A: "Your secret is that you're a MASS MURDERER, not that you're a traitor.")

The Captain continues sailing, now a better man who has come to peace with himself and taken command.

The Doctor disappears, until a decade later, a handsome young man - a widower, who seems surprisingly young for the job - signs on as the doctor of a new merchant vessel...

And so the curse persists.

This was a good game, but the ending was less fun that Laying the Foundations. I think we dragged on the Confrontation a bit too long and didn't put high enough stakes -- there were a few too many rolls. I think this would have been served by faster confrontations.

Still, I love the way the story came together, even if I didn't get to play with the Doctor's secret that much.

Annalise: The Mystery of the Auspicious

The Game:

We're playing the Mysterious Voyage of the Auspicious. A. plays Captain David Merrylees, whose vulnerability is that he is unwilling to take command when it matters (but nonetheless wants to maintain the appearance of being a great captain and liked). I play Doctor Thomas Billingham, a young doctor and man of science to get into that during the Confrontation!)

We started hitting our stride during the second scene, when the Doctor is called during a storm to tend to Godfrey, a sailor having a seizure. While the Doctor succeeds in stopping the seizure - Godfrey is still sick, his eyes now white and pupil-less, and apparently has lost his senses. The Doctor is intrigued and excited to discover a new malady, already envisioning the papers he will write, and takes Godfrey to his cabin for further.

Later, the Doctor hears the Captain banging on his door. The crew, troubled by omens and Godfrey's sickness, has decided to toss Godfrey overboard. The Doctor requests the Captain's help to save a [s]valuable test subject[/s] innocent crew member. When they enter the Doctor's cabin, Godfrey is mumbling from the Book of Revelations: "And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. It had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on its horns, and on each head a blasphemous name." [1]

When Godfrey notices the Captain, he points to him: "The beast! Who is like the beast? Who can wage war agaisnt it?" The captain is enraged.

Zachary Hicks, a grizzled old sailor, remembers the last ship he sailed on - Queen Anne, which was terrorized by a Beast and white-eyed crewmen. He and one other were the only survivors, barely escaping in a lifeboat after they burned the ship. Convinced that whatever was on the Queen Anne is after him, he tries to toss himself overboard, but he is stopped by a mysterious fire that springs up in front of him (and is quickly controlled). To no avail - the next day, he kills himself.

To quell the crew, the Captain throws Godfrey overboard. The next morning, he wakes up and, looking himself in the mirror when he shaves, discovers that his own eyes have gone white.

Despite the loss of his test subject, the Doctor attempts to study what he is convinced is a new disease. He stumbles upon a Indian boy stowing away on the ship and attempts to gain the boy's trust, speaking to him in Urdu and hinting at a shared acquaintance in Calcutta. But his attempt to inject the boy with blood he drew from Godfrey (to test whether the disease is contagious goes too far) - the boy bites him and the syringe cracks, spraying blood over the wound. He is also discovered to be aiding a stowaway by the crew.

The Captain, who has decided to stay in his cabin affliction, is summoned by the first mate, after spending hours smoking opium. Adam Fitch to deal with the Doctor and the stowaway. He attempts to disguise his white eyes with a low-hanging hat, but lurching toward the deck, he loses his balance. The hat falls off his head, and his eyes are revealed to the crew. However, he manages to convince the crew that it's only a disease - unlike Godfrey, who has full command of his faculties. He decides to put the doctor in the brig, on half-rations (with provisions made so that the doctor can continue practicing on patients).

When all of this is agreed, a sailor comes running up - there's a burning ship sighted on the horizon, approaching them. It's the Queen Anne. Before the Captain can respond, he loses consciousness. The Doctor determines that it is not, in fact, his sickness but the result of too much opium. First Mate Fitch takes control and suggests, quietly, to the Doctor that natural deaths happen. The Doctor, reluctant to lose a possible protector and a test subject, convinces Fitch that they should keep the Captain under sedation instead.

As they're taking the Captain to the medical cabin, the Captain dreams that he is exploring a ship. Seeing white eyes in the darkness, he hears a voice, low and inhuman: "If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with them, and they with me." That jolts him back into consciousness.

The Captain quickly takes control of his ship again, regaining control from Fitch. Fitch had turned the ship back toward Calcutta, but the Captain restores their original course. Still, the Queen Anne follows them...

That night, the Captain takes a rowboat toward the Queen Anne, no longer burning after some rain in the afternoon. Parts of the ship are miraculously intact, including the captain's cabin. Opening the door to the cabin, he sees a shadowed face that looks much like his own. When he speaks, he hears a faint echo of his own words.Then a shadow in the shape of a beast of some sort flows past him, toward the Auspicious.

Returning to the Auspicious, he is spotted by the sentry, who is convinced that the Captain is in league with the Devil. He bribes the sailor to keep quiet.

The Doctor wakes in the middle of the night to find that his wounded hand is pointing toward the burnt ship. As he turns, he finds that his finger remains pointed, unerringly in the direction of the Queen Anne. Hiding his hand in his pocket, he goes out onto the deck and spots the Captain conversing with the sentry. With a surprising grace and stealth, he sneaks closer to eavesdrop, attempting to learn what the captain is up to. To no avail [2], but the Captain spots him and discovers what is wrong with his hand.

They hear a tapping upon the side of the ship, as if something is skittering up and down.

The Doctor, alarmed, asks what it is. The Captain states that the men believe that it is Godfrey, the man they tossed overboard - or perhaps the Devil himself, come to toss them overboard.

The Doctor protests that surely the Devil has better things to do: corrupting maidens, bargaining for souls. What have they ever done to deserve the Devil's attention? The Captain suggests that all their souls on the ship are claimed. The Doctor doesn't deny it.

Thoughts:

I was once a skeptic about Annalise. It took me two months to finish reading the rulebooks - there were just so many terms! Different rules for each stages! It all seemed a little unnecessary. Finally, I reluctantly finished reading the rules so A. and I could play a two-person game.

We got partway through the game (just about finishing Laying the Foundations), and now I think Annalise may very well be the apotheosis of using mechanics to create story games.

The mechanics started clicking very quickly, and the crunch of the Moments was actually pretty satisfying (in much the same way that D&D combat can be). But, unlike D&D combat, losing was often more fun than winning and the crunch always added to the story.

Annalise just works. It incentivizes dragging the other players to hell, and it makes it fun to drag your own character to hell as well. The point is to get to the Confrontation and to reveal what the Vampire is, and you can't do that if the darkness never shows up.

And the atmosphere! There's the horror and evil beyond the comprehension of mankind. There's the way people tear into each other, the isolation of a ship and the way going to sea creates its own laws. But also, surprisingly, there's a sense of cosmic justice - that the troubles that come upon the Doctor and the Captain are perhaps not completely undeserved. The Captain is ruthless enough to throw people overboard. The Doctor is a piece of work - a racist, ruthless man who attempts to infect a child in the name of science and doesn't see anything wrong with that. And yet, I pity them: they deserve to be judged, but they don't deserve the Beast.

We struggled a lot with remembering to set up Moments and with Consequences - the second to last scene ended up being several scenes worth, in truth, because we spent far too long on atmosphere. (But how amazing was setting up the atmosphere! Negotiating the nature of the Beast, describing in detail the characters' reactions and the bleakness of their surroundings).

The last scene was my favorite - such a perfect ending to the night. I got chills.

[1] Playing online makes quoting Revelations easy.
[2] Despite THREE attempts to fix this via claims, on both of our parts.