Oracle Society: To Erase All Sin (aka The Brewery of the Damned!)
We actually got to play Oracle Society tonight, for the first time in many months. Yay!
It was a fun little adventure, with a bit of investigation and a fair amount of combat. This episode was originally named Brewery of the Damned, but that was too silly so I renamed it To Erase All Sins.
For you see, I got to bring back one of my favorite Oracle Society monsters: The Sin Eater! Last seen waaaaay back in Season 1's Angel of Mercy.
The Society was called in to investigate a rash of violence in a small town of Vermont. People were acting weird and then dying in horrible, unexplainable ways.
As it turned out a local businessman had renovated a long-abandoned church into a micro-brewery. Silly human...one never does anything with long-abandoned things in a horror games.
And sure enough, he accidentally released a Sin Eater. But the Sin Eater didn't just start killing people..noo it realized it could use the brewery. With a little bit of magical cursing, the beer that it produced would cause people's sins to well up and intensify when they drank it. Fermented sin, if you want to call it that, that the Sin Eater could then extract at a later date. Thus the sudden rise in uncontrolled anger, drunkeness and horrible awful deaths.
But the Oracle Society tracked down the evil beer and confronted the Sin Eater, along with her guardians: a couple of animate scarecrows, a possessed murder of crows and some giant spiders. The characters did well, despite the Magician/P.I. getting chewed on, poisoned and nearly possessed by enchanted beer himself.
Also the poor techie got his car trashed by the Crows and then a Scarecrow ripped the door off. (vehicles do not fair well in my games...)
The game was a little linear but it was fun. Players seemed to have a good time and pretty well kicked ass. Of course they're getting up in level so challenging them is proving interesting.
And I got to use the Sin Eater again. The Oracle Society Sin Eater is a modification of the original legend:
In the Middle Ages a ritual was developed in which a bit of food (usually an apple) is placed on a grave of the recently deceased. As the spirit rises from the grave the apple absorbs the sins, and then another spirit (the Sin Eater) eats the apple and the sin, letting the deceased go to Heaven with a clean slate.
But this proved to be a mistake as the Sin Eater eats the sin it quickly gets corrupted into a horrible creature. Notable mainly for it's control of animals and vermin, as well as the rotted black lips it appears with.
What I like about this monster is that it has a decent backstory and is easy to bring forward because some poor sod finds only the first half of the legend, the ritual to cleanse oneself of Sin and casts the spell, completely unaware of the later repercussions.
Luckily the PCs prevailed and Vermont is once again safe from cursed beer. Hopefully it won't be quite so long before we get another session/episode in the can. :)
It was a fun little adventure, with a bit of investigation and a fair amount of combat. This episode was originally named Brewery of the Damned, but that was too silly so I renamed it To Erase All Sins.
For you see, I got to bring back one of my favorite Oracle Society monsters: The Sin Eater! Last seen waaaaay back in Season 1's Angel of Mercy.
The Society was called in to investigate a rash of violence in a small town of Vermont. People were acting weird and then dying in horrible, unexplainable ways.
As it turned out a local businessman had renovated a long-abandoned church into a micro-brewery. Silly human...one never does anything with long-abandoned things in a horror games.
And sure enough, he accidentally released a Sin Eater. But the Sin Eater didn't just start killing people..noo it realized it could use the brewery. With a little bit of magical cursing, the beer that it produced would cause people's sins to well up and intensify when they drank it. Fermented sin, if you want to call it that, that the Sin Eater could then extract at a later date. Thus the sudden rise in uncontrolled anger, drunkeness and horrible awful deaths.
But the Oracle Society tracked down the evil beer and confronted the Sin Eater, along with her guardians: a couple of animate scarecrows, a possessed murder of crows and some giant spiders. The characters did well, despite the Magician/P.I. getting chewed on, poisoned and nearly possessed by enchanted beer himself.
Also the poor techie got his car trashed by the Crows and then a Scarecrow ripped the door off. (vehicles do not fair well in my games...)
The game was a little linear but it was fun. Players seemed to have a good time and pretty well kicked ass. Of course they're getting up in level so challenging them is proving interesting.
And I got to use the Sin Eater again. The Oracle Society Sin Eater is a modification of the original legend:
In the Middle Ages a ritual was developed in which a bit of food (usually an apple) is placed on a grave of the recently deceased. As the spirit rises from the grave the apple absorbs the sins, and then another spirit (the Sin Eater) eats the apple and the sin, letting the deceased go to Heaven with a clean slate.
But this proved to be a mistake as the Sin Eater eats the sin it quickly gets corrupted into a horrible creature. Notable mainly for it's control of animals and vermin, as well as the rotted black lips it appears with.
What I like about this monster is that it has a decent backstory and is easy to bring forward because some poor sod finds only the first half of the legend, the ritual to cleanse oneself of Sin and casts the spell, completely unaware of the later repercussions.
Luckily the PCs prevailed and Vermont is once again safe from cursed beer. Hopefully it won't be quite so long before we get another session/episode in the can. :)