A tourist has come to visit. It is very curious and loves to see new places and meet new people. It hates to travel alone though. Won’t you be a good host and help? That’s nice. Be sure to explain everything to the tourist and don’t forget to show it lots of nice maps. It loves to see new maps of places to visit. Every new map means new people to see. Don’t worry about missing the tourist. Sooner or later, you’ll meet somewhere and won’t that be delightful?
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This episode was great. Really goddamn creepy, and the interaction with NPCs was amazing as the players try to figure out what the hell is happening.
Well that was bleak. Jesus.
Happy Halloween.
That was amazing. I now can’t stop using that voice with my teenage kids.
that episode description is
distinctly unsettling
I look forward to this
This was super good, a nice little horrific pick up game!
and I was not disappointed! you continue to alarm and dismay, Caleb, ten points
Not the darkest or the most messed up episode but it sure tries. Great episode
Holy shit, this felt like we were back in God’s Teeth.
Also, the Traveler felt like a JoJo Stand, which is good because I’m planning a JoJo campaign and would love to use this as an enemy Stand.
Do I have the rules right?
1. If a person is bitten by the ‘critter’, they are infected with the Traveler.
2. A person infected with the Traveler spreads the infection through blood.
3. The goals of the Traveler are to see the world and infect more people.
4. The traveler can give commands to people through people its infected.
5. It can perceive via infected hosts, but only if the infected aren’t following an outside command.
(Also, I got mildly freaked out whenever you said ‘Cameron’ in the Traveller’s voice, lol)
God damn it Caleb I like that show!
Where the hell did you get that music Caleb! I know i have heard that music on a DVD MENU SCREEN BEFORE! What the hell is going on! I’m not joking. This made this 100% more terrifying.
@Cameron Berg
1. I wasn’t entirely clear on what the ‘critter’ was except for when the Japanese woman infected the PCs. My understanding is that it basically built some delivery mechanism inside of the host’s body to launch its particles into a target’s bloodstream. After that point, it was unclear how it was spreading to other people unless it was doing so the exact same way and the PCs simply weren’t able to see it or feel it happening (it was mentioned that they couldn’t see things the Traveler didn’t want them to see unless they were commanded to do so, I believe).
For that matter, I wasn’t sure how patient zero was infected. How was seeing the cut enough to infect her? Is the Traveler some kind of multi-cellular hive mind consciousness or something? I’m probably overthinking the details, and I know some of the vagueness was on purpose, but I’ve still found myself trying to fill in the blanks on what the hell it is and how it works beyond the explanation given by Caleb at the end.
Also, if everything they were doing of “their own volition” was spurred by the Traveler, wouldn’t giving commands to other humans also be following its commands? I guess the point is to relinquish your sense of self by following orders of other people, but it seems like it would still be coming from the Traveler if an infected person gave it.
This was something that I think with just a bit of tightening up of the concept could make for a pretty good published adventure to be honest. Not to be tried with a newbie group but for the CoC group that’s tried everything..this provides some very good r/p chance.
Major spoilers beyond this.
One thing I am slightly unclear of. If Person A is following Person B’s order, can the traveler in Person A just not see Person A, but still give commands to people around Person A? Or would a trip to the grocery store following a “Go there, get all items on this list, return here when you have”. Be enough to keep them in the clear?
As, if so, there is a very simple an elegant solution if the players can not figure out the “I order you to remove this thing from me”. At least one I thought of right at the point the two began to try out giving orders to each other. “I order you to go back to your normal life, from now until the day you are dead”. Seemed pretty concrete to me. Like, if your literally ordered to just go about your life..then anything you do is following said order. Your essentially being ordered to ‘stop being two minds merging, go back to being just one” and since, assumedly the voice can no longer mess with you or people around you, unless it can send someone after you there is jack-all it can do.
In that sense even thinking about and removing it yourself might be possible purely due too the fact that hey, by that point going back to their lives involves getting this thing out of them for good, long-term at least.
Certainly open to DM-call if they want to let players get away with that, but ‘lets pretend none of this ever happen” and the voice going totally blind as the entire human race slowly learns the trick to making it go away is an interesting ending.
The Traveller (which I have to struggle not to get confused with the giant god-sphere in Destiny) wasn’t the things inside people, I don’t think. Those were just how it was perceiving them and riding along. The actual entity is somewhere else and it seemed like it couldn’t see things other than blood unless it had an eye in someone and their sense of self was bound up with the Traveller.
Jesbus, I heard that music on the tram today….that added to the creep factor no end.
I watched a bit of the show on youtube that inspired this episode, just now, and it’s creepypasta as fuck after listening to the AP.
Would the following order have worked between PCs.
PC1: “PC2 name”. Go, live a a full life and ignore Casandra til the day you die.
Oh hi gang, I’ve been having trouble getting motivation to listen in for a while (due to my own stuff, nothing y’all have done.)
This was a nice game. Good length. Nice simple gimmick. The music stuff worked well.
ALSO: there is a show like that in Australia as well, or there use to be. On SBS.
This felt like… The Delta Green version of Fiasco or something. And you know, it felt GREAT!
Wow. I LOVED this! I’d certainly want to run this, I learned so much about running a game and roleplaying from listening to the techniques you used for NPCs and the way you paced the story and followed along etc, it went perfectly!
Major spoilers on how to run “Somewhere Lane” following!! 🙂
I spent a little more than 2 hours analyzing the explanation and guidance at the end, especially the “how to defeat it” because it got a little unclear and hard to hear when you spoke over each other, so I spent most of the time to transcribe the whole last part. The basics I got out of how to defeat it was that the PCs had to command someone else to “root out the eyes”, meaning the things that got fired out of the Japanese woman.
Then there were the maps that it needs to see blood to make more shooty (?) things like it made out of her (the Japanese woman), and its whole aesthetic because it doesn’t know what humans are, which is stolen from the show of the woman whose blood he saw when it was shot into space through a radio broadcast signal.
I also transcribed the NPC rules! Because I spent so much time getting it through, I’ll post it here:
Basic NPC rules handout – “Rules for playing NPCs”:
1. The person in front of you is the host.
2. The voice. you must always respond to the voice.
3. Your responses to the voice must be absolutely, completely; and if need be, inappropriately, honest.
4. You talk to the voice with the candour you would provide answering a thought in your mind.
5. You must do whatever the voice says, no matter what.
6. There’s never anything unusual about what the voice says or asks you to do.
(7 is tricky and might need a push by GM):
7. Once the host speaks, you only recall the host asking the questions, making requests, and saying anything you might otherwise attribute to the voice. The conversation may be between three things, but you will only ever be able to conceive of it as a conversation between two people. So, no one can understand the voice was giving them orders.
8. While nothing the voice demands unusual, if it’s pointed out that the host shouldn’t have that kind of power over you, you may act out how distressing and odd your character might find their personal words of actions if they had occurred as a result of a conversation with a regular person.
The second you point out “yes, we had a conversation, but why are you cutting your wrists open? -Because you said so.” Like then they cannot get over that cognitive dissonance and that’s when the NPCs starts freaking out.
Thank you for creating this Actual Play, I really adored it, and I hope I got something right, I’d love to hear someone’s input on this 🙂
Mike, Mighty Keeper.
This episode was remastered for improved audio quality: https://www.patreon.com/posts/67476668
This is so amazing. Thank you for the talent behind watching a culturally weird and slightly inappropriate show and deciding that would be the perfect seed behind this DG masterpiece.