Crash : The Shotgun Diaries

11/04/2011
CRASH
The Shotgun Diaries

Zombies make a huge screamfest in this one-shot session using John Wick's incredibly mood building game called The Shotgun Diaries.

Survivors of a plane crash in New York City find themselves having to deal with a zombie menace as they try to make their way to a sanctuary.  Five players graced this game with two playing for the first time under me:  Mika and Patton have played in my Orpheus game (link to follow), Anton and Paolo were playing under me for the first time ever (and frankly I hope my gaming style and antics did not freak them out too much), and of course there was Rocky whose character was Terry O'Quinn from shows such as Lost and Millennium.    The group was making their way to the apartment of another player when they chance upon Terry O'Quinn already hiding out in the place with a pregnant woman named Bethany.  Bethany turns out to be a Lost fan who met Terry O' Quinn during a convention and ended up sticking close to him to survive.  Of course, when her mania reaches frightening levels, one in the group is forced to sacrifice her for his own survival.

The group eventually venture out to gather more supplies, witness a biker dude who gives up on life and blows himself up to kill off a large number of zombies, and learn that this game has frightening monstrosities similar to the fiends of the computer game, Left4Dead.  There was the tongue lashing wall-walker that had much similarities to the Smoker and the Resident Evil monster in the movie.   The Hunters were present too, but never had a chance to attack the players (none of them traveled alone).  I changed the concept of the Boomer, however, and it instead was a vomit-spitting monster that caused the Walkers around it to turn into Runners when its acidic spit burned their legs up.    Finally, the game reached its finale with an appearance of a Tank.

And ended with their escape car being slammed by the other car the Tank had thrown at them.

The game was pretty crazy, with players hitting as high as four Fear counters at this point, and sadly none of them ever got to use an explosive (one tried to create a Molotov to throw at the zombies, but ended up rolling a fear success, and he decided to keep it with him for safety.)

I wonder if there will be others who will dare play a session of The Shotgun Diaries.  For fun, I decided to keep the current Diary, and in future sessions have others add to it, so it becomes sort of an artifact of all the Shotgun Diaries sessions that I've run.