13: Preparing for a Caving Survival Horror, Part 2

So, after all the preparation for the first half of the caving adventure, I'll bet you assumed that my work was done. Well, not exactly. I used a different format for the second session and so I needed to do a whole bunch worth of prep work.

I drew up a map on several A4 sheets of paper and created another layer of room covers so they couldn't see what was within those room. There were six major antagonists to design alongside the Cryers that were almost faced during the session beforehand (a knight in armor enchanted to release pulses of the Decay lore when struck who had a flaming sword Imbued with the soul of a Namaru), a brawler (with brass knuckles enchanted to wrack people with agony), a knife thrower (with knives that each had their own enchanted ability when they struck people), a statue that Nechoshel could possess to attack them, a Mage that she briefly possessed who would keep struggling to disrupt her lores, and Nechoshel herself when they reached her reliquary chamber.

Then there were the traps:

The first corridor had zombies embedded in the doors and a weakly made rug across the floor that stretched out over spiked pit traps so if they tried to crawl over it to avoid the blade-embedded fingers of the zombies, they would fall into the traps. Oh, and one of the Cryers was at the other end of the T-Junction, throwing daggers at them.

The corridor to the right was lined halfway down with dampened sticks of wood from the doors that lined that corridor, and those lines even crossed the corridor at one point at a height of about two feet, and at the other end was a cul-de-sac similarly lined, where the brawler waited out of sight with a hostage (random guy) and a non-safety lighter that he could drop on the chemical-stained wood once the Fallen had come into range. This would fill the corridor with choking smoke that would likely cause them to pass out.

Another couple of corridors had this thick fungal growths (from Earthbound Lore of Corruption) that bulged here and there and would release hallucinogenic spores. I had to make up a bunch of mini-hallucination cards.

There was also a shotgun trap. Just because.

The Earthbound statue possession room also had a similar looking statue sitting in a wheelchair in the middle of a very large and gloomy room, so they would focus on the wheelchair-bound statue when the real possessed statue had taken to the ceiling, using its chameleon-like appearance to blend in (Lore of Corruption).

So, there was a lot of thinking time, though less literal cutting and pasting than when I was preparing for the first session.

Next week, I'll talk about the Downtimes in a Caving Survival Horror and how they really worked to provide some additional tension. If you'd like to read prior articles, you can find them here.