I'm feeling a bit nostalgic tonight, so I figured I'd share this little tale from my early days of GMing. I'd been running games successfully for about a year at the time this story went down, but so far, none of them had lived up to the expectations I'd had for them when I planned them out. It was early 2001, and I had started an oWoD Mage chronicle that revolved around the establishment of the Virtual Adepts as part of the Council of Nine in the early 1960s. Most of the characters were playing renegade Difference Engineers who took to the roads to avoid being killed in the Technocracy pogrom while their application for admittance was stymied in the byzantine machinations of Council politics. I managed to cook up some pretty interesting encounters with the Men in Black, but the story didn't really hit its stride until I decided to bring a new big bad onto the scene: a twisted Nephandic cult leader and time mage bent on summoning his demonic master to Earth. The session in which I introduced him has always stuck out in my mind as the first game in that cycle that really worked, the point where the story crested the first hill and became a roller-coaster ride, and it will always be one of my favorite games that I've ever run.
Part of this was due to the details that I put into the planning. The villain was based off of a serial murderer from the 19th century, Dr. H. H. Holmes, who would lure his victims into his home and then torture them to death in various nasty ways. I spent hours mapping out my version of his mansion, a four-story maze with deadly traps and horrific scenes to be explored. I also took great care in my descriptions of his mannerisms, so that I would be able to play him as I imagined him: a charismatic charmer who could turn into a raving maniac at the drop of a hat. I also decided to warn the players in advance that they would be playing for their characters' lives, thereby waiving a tacit agreement in our group that a GM would do anything possible to avoid an unexpected character death.
Another element that largely made the game was the setting in which we played. I had recently purchased an eight-person tent to serve as a portable roleplaying arena when our parents didn't want us in the house, and we would often host all-night Mage parties using it as the venue. On the night we played this game, there was a terrible thunderstorm raging around us as we played, and I narrated the entire game by the glow of a single press-light positioned at the center of the tent. It threw off a faint florescence that was barely enough to read by, but set the mood perfectly.
In any case, the most suspenseful scene came when one of the characters, a happy-go-lucky VA named Steve O'Riley, discovered the murderer's secret basement torture room. Being a small man, Steve was the only character able to crawl through the secret passageway that led through the killer's furnace, and into the hidden rooms on the other side. Everyone else in the party listened as I described the foundations made of human skulls, the trinkets made from preserved body parts, and the perverse instruments of torture that littered the room. He also discovered a man being kept alive by magick who was stapled to the wall in three places, with large metal brackets wrapped around his spine and driven into a support beam behind him. The effect of the scene was so profound that Steve's player decided that he should have post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the experience, and completely changed his upbeat portrayal of the character.
I've run many other games since then that I would consider more successful, more dramatic, or more fun, but this was the first one that really clicked for me as a GM. It was an awesome feeling to run that game, one that I'll never forget.
