Nine Tenths of the Law

By Fergal O’Brien

Players: 10

Genre: Horror

In the beginning,
there was a creature.  Call him a demon,
call him a ghost or even a nephilim if you wish - Shabra had one very important
characteristic.  Shabra didn't have a
body.  What Shabra did have was the
box.  The box was very important, because
it kept his spirit hosted between excursions.
These excursions took the form of possessions - sojourns out into other
people's bodies, whereby Shabra would taste the delights of the human world and
then leave as suddenly as he came.
Unfortunately, Shabra was not a good lodger.  In his wake he left ruin of the mind.  Not content merely to have his own
experiences and then leave, Shabra would ravage the mind of his victims and take
away theose parts he found most enticing.
Life forming experiences, emotions and even skills would be torn from
the mind of his host and brought back to Shabra's box where he could toy with
them for eternity.  Sometimes, he took
only a little, and the victim's only sign of having been possessed would be a
mild case of forgetfulness.  Sometimes he
took almost all and the victim would be left in a vegatative state.

For centuries this
pattern continued.  Transported by a
fanatical cult of followers, Shabra would move from place to place, sampling
human life.  In all probability he could
have kept this up forever and never been caught, but then life
accelerated.  The twentieth century was
an exciting time for Shabra.  Never
before had life offered more options.  As
the century wore on, life became more and more interesting.  Technology boomed and whole new worlds were
opened up.  Anxious to experience it all,
Shabra became less cautious and took more hosts.  Worse, he took more and more with him when he
left the hosts.  By the turn of the
millenium, there was a pattern there to be followed by anyone alert enough to
notice it - and they did.

Enter an intrepid team
of investigators/adventurers/plucky heroes in the right place at the right
time.  They track their way back through
the vegetables that Shabra is leaving behind him and finally find out where it
is that he is holed up.  Thoughful folk
that the cultists are, they have decided to keep Shabra in a casino where he
has plenty of frenetic life to choose from.
People tend to go a little crazy in Las Vegas anyway, so who's going to
notice a few more?  At least, that's what
they thought.  Eventually it all went
wrong though, and our heroes manage through a combination of luck, skill,
strength of arms and cunning plans (none of which will ever come to light in
this game) to corner the cult and Shabra's most recent host in one of the back
rooms of the casino (along with one or two innocents who are just caught in the
middle).  A pitched battle erupts, there
is a bit of frantic spellcasting, Shabra's host is badly injured and when he
flees the body he is destroyed.  With me
so far?  Good, 'cos here's where I
explain how the game works.

Shabra may be dead,
but his legacy lives on.  In agony, he
lashed out as he was destroyed and sundered the minds of all those around
him.  The box, which was his home for
years, did what it was designed to do - it sucked in the free flowing mind
stuff around it assuming it to be the demon.

So what does this mean
for the group?  What this means is that
most of the players have very little recollection of what the hell has
happened.  In fact, they aren't too clear
on most of their life in general.  They
have bits, but most of their memories are stored in the box.

Cost: free

Available from: http://www.irishgaming.com/scenario\_storage/fob/nintenths.zip