Anomaly Hunters

I ran Anomaly Hunters for a group of four and we had a great time with it! It was the first time any of us had used the Breathless system and found it worked well for this! There was an underlying tension that could be, and was, alleviated by Role Skills and seeing PCs work together to up the show's Cool Factor was an absolute delight.

We took about 30 minutes at the start to go over questions and make minor adjustments to ensure the comfort of everyone in the group. From there we played our first episode, where my notes amounted to: Ghost - Haunted Mansion, Clown. Group found a tarot deck and decided to do a reading in the house with everyone drawing a card, and that wound up really shaping the story of this ghost, a circus clown who had been upstaged by a charlatan magician and who wanted quite badly to be the Best Act and make people laugh. Part of why the episode did so well was because of the appreciative comments made by the National Clown Assc. about how this Ghost Clown had not been adhering to their standards with his frightful behaviour. It was funny, it was fun, and took us about 90 minutes!

A quick break later and we decided to play a second episode where the issue was Zombies at a farm. I'd been apple picking the day before so based the setting off of that place, and this episode was entirelllyy different to the first in that where the first was more intrigue and vague interactions until the very end, this one saw the group encounter - and fight - a zombie within the first 15 minutes! It was a really different tone, and both me and my players enjoyed the vastly different stories we were able to tell. (Group wound up setting nearly the entire farm on fire, which made some of the ending shots harder to see due to smoke, but they still did a fantastic job with making it a Cool Episode.)

Anomaly Hunters is currently on hiatus in our story universe due to the Face ending Ep. 2 with 4 stress and needing to go spend a bit of time decompressing, and healing from his injuries. 

This was a fun game for our group, especially because any creepy content was scary for the PCs, but not for the players themselves. There were plenty of opportunities for people to use their Role Skills and Items and, in our second episode, their Skills proper. Seeing how the group managed item use and worked together to keep their equipment (and themselves) in good working order was satisfying from a facilitator's perspective, and despite the high-stress the PCs were in, we as the people behind them had a good 3.5 hours laughing, joking, and making a cool limited series tv show!