Fellow Travelers
A coach journey through 18th century England becomes the setting for an eerie & disturbing haunting.
TYPE
SYSTEM
LANGUAGE
EXPERIENCE
AGE
Free
Details
Once / Friday - 7:00 PM UTC
Oct 30
Session Duration / 3–4 hours
1 / 6 Seats Filled
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Meet your party members
1/6
About the adventure
These woods are not safe; bandits, beasts and worse lurk out in this wilderness between villages, preying on the unwary. It is safest to band together and watch each others backs, though that can mean making do with whoever happens to be going you way. Will fear make companions of you all? Taking place over the course of a long coach journey in an analogue of 18th century England (analogue = don't stress over the historical details), this is a folk horror game drawing on the deep lore of the land. This is a sample of Apps: Shades of Home, a PbtA game that mixes the domestic with the supernatural, exploring the differences in class & generation, as well as the divide between those who can see ghosts and those who can't. Most of the campaign play aspects have been stripped out for this session, to create a streamlined experience for new players. Some of the PCs have the advantage of being able to see ghosts from the beginning, but that also makes them more vulnerable to being haunted by these apparitions.
Game style
Roleplay Heavy
Theater of the Mind
Combat Lite
Puzzle / Mystery Focused
Game themes
Meet the Game Master
5.0
(4)
Less than a year on StartPlaying
18 games hosted
Highly rated for: Inclusive, Creativity, Storytelling
Average response time: 1 hour
Response rate: 100%
About me
Dedicated indie storygamer based in the UK, been playing and running TTRPGs since Black Box Traveler and Red Box D&D (yes, it's a long time.) I like short, character focused campaigns with emerging stories, paying attention to narrative arcs for all players. Favourite games are Monsterhearts, Dead of Night, My Life with Master, Best Friends and others, and I also enjoy play-out-of-the-box games like For The Queen, Women Are Werewolves, Rest in Pieces and many more. I've run multiple campaigns for friends and TTRPG groups since college, both face-to-face and online, along with multiple attendances at UK conventions and have recently been recruited into the Games on Demand stream at UK Games Expo, running games for a new group of players every 2 hours, all day.
View Profile →Character creation
Creating your character
Characters will be provided for the game, with six to choose from.
What to expect
Preparing for the session
Players will need a device with a Discord account and a microphone in order to play, but a camera is not essential. They will also need to be able to edit a Google Sheet to record their character details. The game will be played on a smalll, private Discord server which all players will receive an invite to.
What James Mullen brings to the table
This is a situation rather than a scenario: at the start of the session, the players will answer a couple of simple questions about their characters and their shared experience, to frame the narrative going forward. PCs are then encouraged and supported in a set of personal interactions on the journey, facing common hardships from different perspectives, with the tension slowly ratcheting up as the true threat to their progress becomes clearer the further they travel. There are many potential roads the story may take, with different destinations awaiting the PCs depending on the actions they take on their journey, but at all times, the PCs command the spotlight and the story remains fixed on their actions. The PCs are always relevant and central, with their own backstories playing as much importance to the narrative as the events they encounter on the way.
Equipment needed to play
Internet
Computer
Microphone
Platforms used
Safety
How James Mullen creates a safe table
At the start of the scenario, we'll talk about expectations for the game, using the Same Page tool to explicitly lay out assumptions of play, as well as a discussion of lines & veils for acceptable content and its portrayal. During play, anyone may pause the game at any time to skip content, rewind the scene a little bit to retake their portrayal of their character in the scene or discuss upcoming content and how best to handle it. At the end of each session, there will be time to decompress and unwind, with some discussion of the session, the characters and where we think things might go in the following session.
Content warnings
Safety tools used