Pool Party | Suburban eldritch horror investigation!

Creating your character

You'll need to decide a few things about your character. If you need help with any of these steps, feel free to join the Discord and brainstorm with me and other players! 1. Occupation or concept: This will determine what your character is good at and what equipment they start the game with. You'll be playing as ordinary people with no combat training, so avoid concepts like "police officer", "jiu jitsu black belt" or "private detective with eight confirmed kills". Things like "car repairman", "nurse" or "occult-obsessed TikToker" are much better fits. 2. Connection: Ideally, your character has some connection to the pool party in 2016, most likely because they attended it. If they were a child at the party, one of Juliana's friends or young family member, they're probably around twenty years old now. If they're older, they were probably an adult when the party occurred, and they attended it as a friend of the family, the parent of one of Juliana's friends or an older relative. You can also play as someone who wasn't at the party in 2016; I have a few ideas for you. However, your character having a stake in finding what happened to Juliana ten years ago might make the story more interesting for you! 3. Name, appearance & co: You decide all of that! The rest (everything that has to do with stats and abilities) will be rolled for during session zero, during which we'll review all character concepts, create sheets and play through a scene or two if time allows it. I'll guide everyone through the process. Just focus on the three aforementioned points for now!

Preparing for the session

Join the Discord here! That's it. https://discord.gg/pjZwRTByYk

What Gabelin brings to the table

I will create a world that reacts to your characters' actions, filled with NPCs with their own personalities and agendas. Your characters will have friends, families and colleagues, a home that provides them with a sense of purpose and peace - until it's threatened by the mounting horrors. I also love doing character voices and using ambient music. Horror is all about ambience, and I'd say I'm pretty good at that. This will be a rules light, fiction first game. There could be combat, but it won't be the focus of the experience. This is a game in which escaping with your life intact should be considered a victory in most cases. I am LGBTQ+ friendly and will not tolerate any form of bigotry.

How Gabelin creates a safe table

Once you've joined the Discord, DM me your lines and veils. A line is a topic that you don't want mentioned or present in the game. A veil is a topic that you'd be fine with it being mentioned or present, but that shouldn't be given much focus (ex: fade to black). A personal line I always enforce is that in my campaigns, animals are always safe from harm. Even if your character's cat is missing, it's always just chilling happily somewhere. During play sessions on Discord, if you're ever uncomfortable with something, every player will have the option to play one of the Discord sounds (ex: duck quacking) to signal that they need the scene to be paused. We'll discuss a way to edit the scene to make sure you're comfortable with it. I'll only ask questions if it helps me understand what needs to be changed, not to judge you. We'll also have a quick (10 mins.) debrief session at the end of a session for aftercare and discussion on what went down. We'll use session zero to make sure all character concepts align (ex: making sure not everyone plays the same concept) and that each character has a reason to join the group. We'll do character creation and maybe play through a scene if the time allows.