AUGUST PORT (21-24) House on Haunted Hill Plotting Post!
It's finally happening. From August 21st-24th, prepare for pure campy terror :|
Below the cut is an enormous writeup of the details behind the port, and this is the post in which we encourage everybody to plot! The original infopost, with the preliminary information is here. Please read that if you have no idea what is going on, and prepare for an enormous infodump below.
WHAT THE INMATES GET:
The Inmates will each have their standard journals, which will provide them basic information such as:
1. An alternate alias and occupation with which to go by.
2. Vague directions or written clues on where to go and look for their Wardens.
3. Will flicker during electrical disturbances (namely if there are ghosts closing in, but you won't know that's what it is -- this will be near constant in the lower levels of the facility).
4. Will display written passages from their Warden’s journals and allow fellow Inmates to maintain written communication only. Audio Links/walkie talkies will NOT work in the house after lockdown.
5. Will display objectives for them.
THE PARTY: Millionaire thrill-maker Stephen Price is hosting a birthday party for his estranged wife, Evelyn. The two share an eccentric relationship -- in that they both hate each other and have for years attempted to stage accidents to kill one another at public functions. The purportedly haunted facility is expected to be stuffed with Price's staged scares, and he hoped to invite a long list of people desperate for money that would be willing to kill for it -- attracting them by promising that anyone who stays the full night gets a million dollars. Somebody leaves or dies, their share is divide between everyone else. His list has been tampered with, however, and instead, a horde of strangers have come to the house -- some of them are you, the Inmates. You must invent an alias to throw off suspicions.
Price will also provide every guest with a gun. He claims the weapons are filled with blanks, but the man isn't the most honest person in the world. Watch where you aim that thing, and remember that if you tempt fate and fuck any of your fellow shipmates over, you may die before reaching your door, thereby stranding you, and your Warden, forever.
THE HOUSE: The Vanecutt Institute for the Criminally Insane was once run by a madman known as Dr Richard Benjamin Vanecutt. He and his staff conducted sadistic, inhumane experiments on the unwanted and most dangerous of lunatics in the Western United States. When the Inmates eventually staged a riot, Vanecutt activated the facility's lockdown mechanism, which sealed all outer doors and windows with great steel plates, and the turmoil led to mass murder, tortures reportedly inflicted upon Vanecutt and the staff, and eventually a fire which killed everyone still trapped inside. Only a handfull of the staff members managed to survive.
Since its closure, the Pritchetts, a family of architects, bought the structure to renovate and remodel it into a hollywood home. Two generations of men were killed during the restorations under mysterious circumstances, and the house itself belongs to the one surviving Pritchett, who takes care of the grounds but refuses to venture inside, and is more than willing to accept payment for a party to be staged there, but is completely unwilling to stick around and watch.
The upper levels of the house are all fully restored, containing lounges, studies, bedrooms, bathrooms, etc -- with the exception of the attic, which contains much of the older machinery. One of the only remaining features of the original structure on the upper levels is a stained glass window that takes up the entire ceiling in the entry way, depicting the souls of the insane caught between a battle of good and evil forces.
The lower levels are unrestored, an immense maze of flickering, shadowy corridors, containing close to three hundred cells, operating rooms, storage rooms, furnaces, electro-shock wards, and many many other chambers dedicated to experimental and grotesque procedures, intended to treat the insane but more likely concocted to torture them. Upon first entering the basement area, a large chamber is entered, which has in it multiple glass display cases, holding sculptures of people, horses, and strange, deformed creatures at multiple levels of dissection. There is also one chamber at the dead center of it all, nearly impossible to intentionally find, that has been mostly walled in, which contains a second chamber that has been mostly sealed off, and a pit, where the dead bodies of patients were once left, and if entered is literally waist-deep in ash and mummified remains.
...There are also a fuck-bunch of ghosts down here. They are attracted to electrical devices and seem more keen to approach/attack people that are alone. They will often appear, in brief glances, as former patients or staff members going about their devilish business, while at other times they may appear as familiar people and will lead you to grow further lost if you follow them. These ghosts will be played by all of you. Warden and Inmate pairs? Plot together to determine how you’d like the ghosts to mess with your characters - because your job is to scare each other/drive each other crazy :D You may also coordinate scares with unpaired characters too.
WHERE ARE THE WARDENS?: Most, if not all but one or two, of the Wardens, are trapped in cells in the lower levels. The Ghosts? Think they're fellow Inmates, and through a bombardment of images and the appearance of phantom Doctors and Nurses, they are slowly driving the Wardens insane and may cause them to forget who they are, what their mission is, and who you are. Their Items are not on their persons. They are stored in locked boxes in multiple nurses stations, that are dotted all over the lower corridors.
Because the ghosts think that the Wardens are patients, they will do whatever is in their power to prevent you from finding their cells, and if you try to kill your Warden or if it is perceived that you are behaving overly aggressively toward them, the ghosts will try to kill you, and you had best hope your Warden is in enough possession of their mental faculties to protect you.
Your Inmate Items will not point you toward the Warden's Item until you have successfully found and removed your Warden from their cell.
NON-PATIENT WARDENS: A few Wardens may be other guests at the Party, Pritchett, or Stephen or Evelyn Price. The Inmate items will not give any obvious indications of this, and these people cannot be recognized by looks alone. In Character, this will not even be indicated as an option. The Inmate item MAY lead to offices in the lower levels containing documents, staff photos, etc that may reveal one of the former staff members directly resembles your Warden, but possesses the surname of one of the guests/other NPCs. This will be the ONLY IC indication that the item can lead them to. The rest may be inferred by mannerisms, or through familiar turns of phrase, etc. In the end the Inmates with these Wardens will have to take a leap of faith and hope they chose the right person. For whatever reason, they will just think their Item isn't as helpful as everyone else's. But they must also beware, because the ghosts will be trying to isolate then kill these people, or get them to kill each other. To have one of your Wardens be a NPW, your pairing should have one of the following circumstances:
1. If your Inmate will learn more from having to take a leap of faith in guessing who their Warden is, this is the scenario for you.
2. If either the Warden player or Inmate player will be absent during this port, and you would still like the CR. This would mean that the Inmate would either find the NPW dead, and find their Item and go home, or both could die, etc etc.
FACILITIES IN THE LOWER LEVELS:
- The Saturation Chamber. A giant compartment that bombards the patient with bizarre images and sounds. Believed that what will drive a sane man mad will drive a mad man sane. You will also likely see lots of horrific visions of the terrible things done to the patients in here.
- Electro Shock. Nuff said.
- They Hydro-Therapy Room. Giant tank of water. Patients are doused/dunked/half-drowned in it. Calms them down don’t you know.
So in Summation:
Wardens - Mostly patients, will be in cells in the lower levels. Choose to be in either the South, East, or West wing and try not to clump together. There will be announcements over the PA suggesting various things the “doctor” ghosts will be doing to patients. You will not be just sitting doing nothing, and you will be able to communicate with one another between cells and journals - the journal communication between wardens will be shaky and won’t send all the information because yeah - ghosts are fucking with you.
Inmates - Find your Wardens. Try not to die. Try not to kill them.
Find the Wardens. Find the Warden Items. Find the door that the item unlocks.
UNSORTED WARDENS AND INMATES:
May enter the port, as random other guests. But this is at their own risk. They will be wandering like the other Inmates are, without objectives, free to be messed with by angry crazy ghosts.
Also? NO POWERS. :3 Merry Christmas.
Below the cut is an enormous writeup of the details behind the port, and this is the post in which we encourage everybody to plot! The original infopost, with the preliminary information is here. Please read that if you have no idea what is going on, and prepare for an enormous infodump below.
WHAT THE INMATES GET:
The Inmates will each have their standard journals, which will provide them basic information such as:
1. An alternate alias and occupation with which to go by.
2. Vague directions or written clues on where to go and look for their Wardens.
3. Will flicker during electrical disturbances (namely if there are ghosts closing in, but you won't know that's what it is -- this will be near constant in the lower levels of the facility).
4. Will display written passages from their Warden’s journals and allow fellow Inmates to maintain written communication only. Audio Links/walkie talkies will NOT work in the house after lockdown.
5. Will display objectives for them.
THE PARTY: Millionaire thrill-maker Stephen Price is hosting a birthday party for his estranged wife, Evelyn. The two share an eccentric relationship -- in that they both hate each other and have for years attempted to stage accidents to kill one another at public functions. The purportedly haunted facility is expected to be stuffed with Price's staged scares, and he hoped to invite a long list of people desperate for money that would be willing to kill for it -- attracting them by promising that anyone who stays the full night gets a million dollars. Somebody leaves or dies, their share is divide between everyone else. His list has been tampered with, however, and instead, a horde of strangers have come to the house -- some of them are you, the Inmates. You must invent an alias to throw off suspicions.
Price will also provide every guest with a gun. He claims the weapons are filled with blanks, but the man isn't the most honest person in the world. Watch where you aim that thing, and remember that if you tempt fate and fuck any of your fellow shipmates over, you may die before reaching your door, thereby stranding you, and your Warden, forever.
THE HOUSE: The Vanecutt Institute for the Criminally Insane was once run by a madman known as Dr Richard Benjamin Vanecutt. He and his staff conducted sadistic, inhumane experiments on the unwanted and most dangerous of lunatics in the Western United States. When the Inmates eventually staged a riot, Vanecutt activated the facility's lockdown mechanism, which sealed all outer doors and windows with great steel plates, and the turmoil led to mass murder, tortures reportedly inflicted upon Vanecutt and the staff, and eventually a fire which killed everyone still trapped inside. Only a handfull of the staff members managed to survive.
Since its closure, the Pritchetts, a family of architects, bought the structure to renovate and remodel it into a hollywood home. Two generations of men were killed during the restorations under mysterious circumstances, and the house itself belongs to the one surviving Pritchett, who takes care of the grounds but refuses to venture inside, and is more than willing to accept payment for a party to be staged there, but is completely unwilling to stick around and watch.
The upper levels of the house are all fully restored, containing lounges, studies, bedrooms, bathrooms, etc -- with the exception of the attic, which contains much of the older machinery. One of the only remaining features of the original structure on the upper levels is a stained glass window that takes up the entire ceiling in the entry way, depicting the souls of the insane caught between a battle of good and evil forces.
The lower levels are unrestored, an immense maze of flickering, shadowy corridors, containing close to three hundred cells, operating rooms, storage rooms, furnaces, electro-shock wards, and many many other chambers dedicated to experimental and grotesque procedures, intended to treat the insane but more likely concocted to torture them. Upon first entering the basement area, a large chamber is entered, which has in it multiple glass display cases, holding sculptures of people, horses, and strange, deformed creatures at multiple levels of dissection. There is also one chamber at the dead center of it all, nearly impossible to intentionally find, that has been mostly walled in, which contains a second chamber that has been mostly sealed off, and a pit, where the dead bodies of patients were once left, and if entered is literally waist-deep in ash and mummified remains.
...There are also a fuck-bunch of ghosts down here. They are attracted to electrical devices and seem more keen to approach/attack people that are alone. They will often appear, in brief glances, as former patients or staff members going about their devilish business, while at other times they may appear as familiar people and will lead you to grow further lost if you follow them. These ghosts will be played by all of you. Warden and Inmate pairs? Plot together to determine how you’d like the ghosts to mess with your characters - because your job is to scare each other/drive each other crazy :D You may also coordinate scares with unpaired characters too.
WHERE ARE THE WARDENS?: Most, if not all but one or two, of the Wardens, are trapped in cells in the lower levels. The Ghosts? Think they're fellow Inmates, and through a bombardment of images and the appearance of phantom Doctors and Nurses, they are slowly driving the Wardens insane and may cause them to forget who they are, what their mission is, and who you are. Their Items are not on their persons. They are stored in locked boxes in multiple nurses stations, that are dotted all over the lower corridors.
Because the ghosts think that the Wardens are patients, they will do whatever is in their power to prevent you from finding their cells, and if you try to kill your Warden or if it is perceived that you are behaving overly aggressively toward them, the ghosts will try to kill you, and you had best hope your Warden is in enough possession of their mental faculties to protect you.
Your Inmate Items will not point you toward the Warden's Item until you have successfully found and removed your Warden from their cell.
NON-PATIENT WARDENS: A few Wardens may be other guests at the Party, Pritchett, or Stephen or Evelyn Price. The Inmate items will not give any obvious indications of this, and these people cannot be recognized by looks alone. In Character, this will not even be indicated as an option. The Inmate item MAY lead to offices in the lower levels containing documents, staff photos, etc that may reveal one of the former staff members directly resembles your Warden, but possesses the surname of one of the guests/other NPCs. This will be the ONLY IC indication that the item can lead them to. The rest may be inferred by mannerisms, or through familiar turns of phrase, etc. In the end the Inmates with these Wardens will have to take a leap of faith and hope they chose the right person. For whatever reason, they will just think their Item isn't as helpful as everyone else's. But they must also beware, because the ghosts will be trying to isolate then kill these people, or get them to kill each other. To have one of your Wardens be a NPW, your pairing should have one of the following circumstances:
1. If your Inmate will learn more from having to take a leap of faith in guessing who their Warden is, this is the scenario for you.
2. If either the Warden player or Inmate player will be absent during this port, and you would still like the CR. This would mean that the Inmate would either find the NPW dead, and find their Item and go home, or both could die, etc etc.
FACILITIES IN THE LOWER LEVELS:
- The Saturation Chamber. A giant compartment that bombards the patient with bizarre images and sounds. Believed that what will drive a sane man mad will drive a mad man sane. You will also likely see lots of horrific visions of the terrible things done to the patients in here.
- Electro Shock. Nuff said.
- They Hydro-Therapy Room. Giant tank of water. Patients are doused/dunked/half-drowned in it. Calms them down don’t you know.
So in Summation:
Wardens - Mostly patients, will be in cells in the lower levels. Choose to be in either the South, East, or West wing and try not to clump together. There will be announcements over the PA suggesting various things the “doctor” ghosts will be doing to patients. You will not be just sitting doing nothing, and you will be able to communicate with one another between cells and journals - the journal communication between wardens will be shaky and won’t send all the information because yeah - ghosts are fucking with you.
Inmates - Find your Wardens. Try not to die. Try not to kill them.
Find the Wardens. Find the Warden Items. Find the door that the item unlocks.
UNSORTED WARDENS AND INMATES:
May enter the port, as random other guests. But this is at their own risk. They will be wandering like the other Inmates are, without objectives, free to be messed with by angry crazy ghosts.
Also? NO POWERS. :3 Merry Christmas.