RQG Halloween 2015!

## Content Warnings

Character death, blood, injuries, corpses, using body parts, poor habitability of rented property (mould, lack of fire safety etc.), being trapped, real person fiction (players play themselves), reference to animal death (horse)

## Plot Summary

Join Alex, James, Bryn, and Lydia as they play a one off special of Dread, as themselves! In the episode, Bryn stays asleep, James repurposes Ben's liver and Lydia tells James to shut up.

## Synopsis

Bryn awakes to find himself in a dark room. He rolls over and goes back to sleep.

James wakes up in a brighter bedroom but it is not a familiar one. Unlike Bryn, he examines the room and finds a key by the door which he tries to use to exit the room.

Lydia wakes up in a very nice but *also* unfamiliar room. There is a sound coming from the far side of the main door. Lydia proceeds to put a pillow over her head and attempts to go back to sleep but is unsuccessful because of how annoying the sound is. She shouts, "shut up!" and James hears her from another room.

James successfully exits the room he woke up in and enters a hallway. There are five doors in the hallway and a staircase at the end. At this point, Bryn mentions he snores like a "pneumatic drill" and is probably audible to the others around him. James hears Lydia shout "Shut up James" again, presumably because she assumes that a loud annoying thing would be James.

Bryn discovers he cannot sleep because the bed is getting colder and clammier the longer he lays there. Bryn scoffs at this and pulls three blocks to ignore it. He rolls over and falls back asleep.

A sound like "a horse being sawed in half" approaches James and Lydia from one of the rooms. The air is "viscous and unpleasant with musk" causing the sound to travel slowly. James heads towards the noise and opens the door to find Bryn asleep in the room.

As James loudly cajoles Bryn to wake up, Lydia gets up to tell them to shut up again. Bryn finally gets out of bed as they discuss how they might have gotten there. He then searches for a bathroom, trying two doors to find them locked. The second has a key laid nearby which he uses to open the door, finding Ben's dead body and blood all over the room. He screams and James and Lydia join him.

When they look for a phone to call help, they find they are all watching matching striped pyjamas that none of them owned but fit them perfectly. They spend a bit of time coming up with theories, none of which even begin to make any sense. James does crack a very good joke about there being another spare Meredith brother\*.

James grabs a candlestick wall sconce to use as a weapon. Bryn opens the next door and an animated toilet duck flies at his head *[Editor's note: Toilet Duck is a toilet cleaning product found in several countries; its mascot is a duck and the bottle has a kinked neck that looks vaguely like a swan's]*. Bryn ducks and then James pulls two blocks to hit the duck out of the air. Bryn removes a block to pee in the bathroom they just found and manages not to die whilst urinating.

An eerie voice of unknown origin says "You'll never find me." Some good jokes happen. Lydia asks if there were any weapons left *IN BEN* and then both she and James pull blocks simultaneously to search Ben's corpse. They find thousands of tiny puncture wounds, but no weapons. There is a scuttling nearby.

Bryn leaves the others to try and find a phone but he is unsuccessful. While he is searching all of the doors shut, splitting the party.

Lydia attempts to leave through the window but it is nailed shut, demonstrating poor fire safety. James smashes the window and white mist starts rolling into the room, burning James. Lydia attempts the door to help them get out. James plucks Ben's *liver* out of his *dead body* and stuffs it into the window.

The party reunites in the hall and decide to head down the stairs. Lydia picks up a shotgun from the mantelpiece. There are no bullets but she can still threaten people or whack them over the head. The party insists they will not be going to the attic, so they go down the stairs, holding hands just in case a step collapses.

They arrive on another floor to find doors on either side of them. The same voice as earlier calls, "You're getting warmer." The party are *unmoved* by this development.

The party attempts a small room on the left. It is dark but a flickering reveals one of the walls to be what's left of a movie screen. There are three skeletons chained to chairs, a half filled coke by one skeleton, and popcorn in one of their laps. The party examines the coke, finding it apparently flat but drinkable so Bryn drinks it.

Scratched into the back of the chair in front of the left skeleton is the phrase "oh god I shouldn't have been sarcastic"; in front of the right skeleton is "Why won't he let us leave?". The cinema screen suddenly comes to life, and Night of the Living Dead is starts playing on the screen; apparently it's on loop.

The party moves on to a dining room opposite the theatre. Bryn picks up a knife. There are little notes on each plate and as Lydia leans down to read one, a circular saw flies out, missing her head and giving her an artful fringe. The note reads "There's only food when you're finished."

Bryn opens another door and a house elf flies at him wielding a blade, but stops upon realizing who was at the door. The House Elf returns to the kitchen while apologizing. There are multiple House Elves in the kitchen cooking 'incredibly bad fast food.' The elves start panicking when James says he only eats low-salt chips.

Bryn asks who they are, and the elves says that they're the elves that make the food that 'The Master' eats. The elves describe the Master as human, gross and enormous, with a squinting eye and bad sort of vaguely teenage-esque facial hair. The Master knows all; The Master sees all. She also explains that there are no phones in the house, and that the Master is the only one that can leave the house. The elves seem to be in physical pain when the party mentions 'fruit'. The party causes an elf riot before continuing on. The elves reckon that The Master is in the cellar. James asks if he has any weaknesses and they say he is slow, and overestimates his strength. They says they are kept here against their will and that The Master has the keys to the house and they will have to find him to leave. They say they were lured to the house under the pretence of incredibly low market rents in the Greater London area *[Editor's note: Rent is very expensive in London]*.

Bryn is almost drawn in by a computer game room before James is able to pull him from the next room. They finally find a window in the study and can see a garden through some bay windows, covered in some rolling mist. Bryn searches the desk and, avoiding the dagger that shoots out, finds an unfeasible business plan based entirely on podcasting. The party begins to suspect they know who the bad guy is. They find a list of crossed-out titles: Crusty Quill, Dusty Quill, etc.

They begin to plan around what they know Alex's weaknesses are: food, healthy things, directions, sleep, and facial hair envy. A voice comes out from nowhere, saying that it's fine and he doesn't want a beard anyway. Lydia threatens to be late to a recording session if Alex doesn't come out and meet them. A voice comes out of nowhere. "Never again, Lydia, never again!"

The party goes down the stairs to the basement. A low hum comes from the door to the left, and a scritching-scratching comes from the door to the right. No sound comes from the door at the far end.

Bryn tries to go through the middle door, but spikes shoot out, killing him. He tells his parents he loves them in his last moments.

James opens a different door to find a dark room glowing pentagram and a table with a podcasting set up for RPG dedicated studio, including expensive mics. Four chairs were set up but the ones labelled Ben and Bryn have had the names scratched out. The ones labelled James and Lydia remain intact and there is a one way mirror to one side. James smashes the one way mirror to find a recording studio, including a recording panel covered in thousands of buttons and a spot for the GM. James threatens to smash the equipment unless Alex reveals himself. Lydia joins in by changing settings on the recording equipment. The voice tells them to stop it, and asks, why won't they do what they're told? Why won't they just RPG?

Alex reveals himself and slams a red button. Steel shutters slam down over the entrance and the window. A voice comes from hidden speakers and tells them they forced his hand and that he only needs one of them to run a podcast, so only one of them may leave. He has fast food until the house elves run out, and asks how long they can wait. He tells them there are weapons in the cupboard, and that the audience will love their ensuing fight to the death. James and Lydia decide to actually smash the equipment. Lydia dies in the process, a rogue bullet from the shotgun accidentally ricocheting from the recording panel. Her last words are 'Bye James'.

A clapping sound is heard. The steel shutter lifts and Alex emerges to try and lure James into a facial hair podcast, or a hairband appreciation podcast. James asks about his revenue, Alex says there is none- popularity is all that matters- and James accepts the offer.

They release loads of podcasts and none of them are profitable; they grow withered an jaded and on their deathbeds realised they have wasted their lives- James dies.

## Mechanics

Dread is a horror-themed system in which players use a Jenga tower (or other non-branded block tower) to narrate the story. Every time a palyer wishes their character to attempt an action, they must pull a block from the tower and place it on the top. If they succeed, the action is achieved; if the tower falls, the character dies.

Since this system is so simple, assume that whenever a character does something in the story, the player has pulled a block, and if they die, the tower fell.

## Trivia

Alex narrates in a spooky voice throughout.

The harmonisation on the standard RQG theme tune was changed in this special to sound more spooky!

The game opens with Alex telling Bryn 'you awake to find yourself in a dark room', which is a reference to John Robertson's 'Dark Room' live-action videogame. John is a friend of Rusty Quill and has appeared on RQ's charity fundraisers.

\*The 'spare' Meredith brother is Tim Meredith, who would later become the showrunner of RQ's podcast Stellar Firma.