Notes From The Director

Be sure to read and follow the guidelines for our forums.

KCC

Jul 3, 2023 1:04 am
"Alright! Alright! Huddle up, folks. Let’s make this quick. Hey! Hey! Yeah, you! Huddle time. Let’s get this show on the road. The sooner we start, the sooner we can all get on with our lives, alright?

Alright, great. Welcome back to… what fucking season is this again?… Season Five of "Revenant Hasslers". Let’s send this piece of shit off with a bang, people!"

Act One
The bulk of KILLER RATINGS involves going from Room to Room, creating and deciding together what this haunted location is like – not only its history, but what it feels like to be there. Lean on each other if you get stuck. This is about making a weird, wild, and memorable location together.

The Director guides you from Room to Room. They will decide what the Room is (ballroom, barracks, ECT treatment room, or whatever). You can try to make a Room-to-Room layout that "makes sense," but don’t stress too hard about this. Your progression into the location is linear, but not literal. Hand-wave away "in-between" rooms you don’t comment on because they’re boring.

The players will take turns defining Features of the Room clockwise around the group. Examples include the Room’s vibe (humid, deathly cold, crackling with dark energy) a spooky sight (a crashed chandelier, an ax buried in the wall, oil portraits that look suspiciously like the Crew in old timey clothes), and whatever else sounds cool, weird, fun, or gross. Everyone gets to add a Feature.

The Director should keep track of these Rooms! Each Room gets one card. Write the Features of each Room on its card and lay them out on the table, connected in order; this way you can all visualize your progression into the haunted location. This will be important later.

Once you’re set up in a Room, it’s time to film. Have the Face give an introduction to the audience and explain where they are. Each player can take turns describing the Room, the odd features that are in it, and how the Room "feels."

DIRECTOR: Help break the ice by providing prompts in their "ear pieces": ask individual players leading questions relevant to their role, like asking the Academic what this Room used to be, or asking the Charlatan what kind of "vibes" they’re picking up. Ask the Camera Person to film things in a provocative or misleading way. Make them talk to each other, too; The Face is an obvious candidate to interview the Charlatan or Academic, but the Camera Person can too. If players are stuck, pick a Feature and layer on some ominous backstory about it.

PLAYERS: It’s your time to shine. It’s natural to be a little shy or embarrassed at first, but the key feature of all of these characters is their shamelessness. Be loud, brash, stupid, dramatic, or whatever your backstory and career asks. So long as everyone’s having fun, there’s no wrong way to do this.

Aim For Act One: Get the chumps that watch this stuff to come back after the first commercial break. A jump scare or cliffhanger will do nicely.

(This will be handled mechanically once you feel you’re done with the first act!)

KCC

Jul 7, 2023 10:25 am
Act One: Mechanically
Once the players have milked the Room’s potential for wild speculation and interpersonal drama, have them all roll PROVOKE. If any of them were particularly outlandish or remarkable, let them roll 2d6 and pick the best roll.

Success means something odd happens. Odd... but explainable. Failure means nothing happens at all – it’s a dead room. Write down Features you liked and move on to the next Room.

Repeat this process Room by Room until the Crew racks up a number of successes.

Once the Crew hits the target number, something supernatural will occur – something that’s subtle but undeniable. The Director will illustrate this moment, maximizing creepiness. Perhaps a door slammed shut, or a person in a painted portrait turned its head to follow the movements of one of the Crew.

THIS IS IT! Evidence of the Ghost, caught on tape! The Crew should summarize what just happened for the camera, then give us the sing-out ("See what happens next... only on WRAITH WRANGLERS") and cut to your First Commercial Break.

KCC

Oct 13, 2023 1:07 am
Remember how many Rooms it took to get to the final summoning? Well, it’s going to take you that many to get back out again. That’s right: the Crew is going to retrace their steps Room by Room, running their asses off as the Ghost (now played by the Director) goes fully phantasmagorical. This is why having a high PROVOKE is good – you hit your haunting threshold sooner, which means there are fewer Rooms to flee through now.

(Does it make logical sense to retrace the exact path you took? Don’t worry about it. The Ghost is in charge now – environments will change and doors will lead where they shouldn’t, forcing you to retrace your steps no matter what you do. Consider it just punishment for your no-doubt impressive number of sins.)

In each Room, every member of the Crew rolls 1d6 and adds their PROVOKE rating. Whoever rolls the highest will draw the ire of the Ghost. The Ghost will attack, using one of the Features in the Room to assist. The Ghost’s target takes 1 off their SURVIVE stat as damage. Every player can also simply negate this damage once per game – describe what you do to fend off this harmful attack.

(Did two or more players tie for the highest roll? Congratulations: you confound or befuddle the ghost in such a way as to avoid harm entirely. Describe how you did this.)

If a Crew member loses every point of SURVIVE before they escape... too bad, so sad. You’ll live on in syndication. This is why having a high SURVIVE is good. Decisions, decisions.

But what of characters with high PROVOKE and low SURVIVE, like our dear Leigh? Rather than risk a dot of SURVIVE, they can sacrifice a point of PROVOKE – by diverting the Ghost to attack someone else instead. Don’t just say that’s what you do: play out how you shift the Ghost’s attention onto your unfortunate coworker. The unlucky target of their Crew member’s selfish act just has to take the hit (or burn their one-time-only negation): the Ghost can only be redirected via PROVOKE once per Room.

If you lose every point of PROVOKE you have, you succumb to exhaustion – you are tiresome to be around, even you agree with that – and give in to the Ghost. But hey, it’s not all bad. If you die, you get a shot at the next best thing to being famous: REVENGE.

As the recently deceased, you join forces with the Ghost to kill your still-living costars. You may overrule a PROVOKE redirect once while dead – forcing the targeted Crew member to soak or negate and accept the consequences.

You do not have permission to post in this thread.