by drmiller32
I'm pretty new the the forums and I think I want to start being a regular poster. I talk about the sessions my friends and I play with my friends all the time, but I find myself just retelling the same stories to people who were actually there. So maybe I can hear some new stories?The day we got Haunt 16: The Phantom's Embrace, my girlfriend had people from out of town over. This was our second session of the evening, and we were coming off a win for the heroes two hours earlier. There were five of us: myself (Professor Longfellow), my girlfriend Erica (Ox Bellows), and her friends Mark (Brandon Jaspers), Michelle (Zoe Ingstrom) and Danielle (Jenny LeClerc). Danielle was new to the game and it was my first time playing anything with her, so I wasn't sure how she would take to it.
And of course, on her first turn...she got the Webs. And of course she failed every roll, so it took four rounds for her to be able to actually play. Off to a great start!
The rest of us were having a pretty unlucky day rolling. Brandon was actually hovering just above death before the haunt even started.
The haunt roll failed at 7 omen cards with the Girl and the Dining Room. Danielle failed the haunt roll and Michelle was the betrayer.
It sort of worked out. The little girl, Zoe, must have been best friends with the poor, trapped Girl and didn't want her new playmate to leave. This was Michelle's first time being the betrayer, and that's the most important roll in the game, so pressure was on! She did an excellent job, she knew her roll well and executed beautifully.
The situation was pretty bleak from the Heroes' perspective. We had not found the stairs into the basement yet, so having a haunt that took place down there was going to be challenging. The mystic elevator was already down there, and the only other way down was to jump through the collapsed room. So one by one, we all jumped and...landed like graceful cats, unscathed. It was a dice rolling miracle.
The first few times we found the phantom, we lost the attack attempts. Mark rolled a 1 on two different attempts...the phantom rolled a 1 and then a 2 in response. Face-palming bad luck...This proved to be our undoing, as we ran into problems finding the Phantom after the first 4 appearances.
Towards the end, our layout was not very favorable. We only had three directions the basement could grow: moving across the chasm, which was a speed roll; moving across the catacombs, which is a sanity roll, or off one other room, which I now forget. The betrayer explored the forgotten room and capped it with a dead end. Foolishly, we tried to get across the catacombs and failed across one round. Mark finally made it, only to find a dead end and then he had to try to cross back over it...Ox got hobbled up and could only move two spaces a turn so his speed rolls were crummy. Luckily, ole spry Longfellow could run across the chasm. Sweet little Zoe was in the room connected to it, so I threw some dynamite in that room and blew her up. Unfortunately, the haunt continued...
Stuck aimlessly wandering around in the basement unable to effectively explore new rooms to find the Phantom meant that after 7 rounds, the bomb finally went off, killing all of us, presumably the Girl as well.
At least I got to murder that back stabbing ***** before we all died. That counts for something, right?