Murderous Ghosts 10/14 AP

Played two games of Murderous Ghosts with Misha, Divya, and Ken. I was the MC for the first game. Ken was the MC for the second game -- his first-ever time MCing!

Unfortunately, I don't remember the sequence of pulls or moves precisely, so this 

Before play I thought up a pretty detailed chronology of the violent act which spawned the ghosts. A husband, the owner of the hotel, found his wife cheating on him. He castrated his wife's lover and tossed their twin babies in the fireplace, and then hung himself. His wife clawed her eyes out in despair and slit her own throat.

The precise chronology turned out not to matter at all during play. And the whole thing was more complicated than it needed to be. We started off with "Fang" finding the husband's corpse, still swinging, dripping someone else's blood from its hands. Fang recalls that he doesn't want children any time soon.

Fang moves to another room, a richly appointed living room, where he finds the burnt corpses of the babies still smoldering in the fireplace. He takes them out of the fire and wraps them in his jacket. A ghost appears, the wife, and the rich appointments of the living room vanish. The ghost kneels at the empty fireplace and wails. She notices he holds the babies. He runs. She catches him. He tries to fight her. She kills him.

This was pretty successful. I felt a little spooked while playing, though I didn't have any troubling questions that I was personally unable to answer. I triggered disgust more than fear, but I could tell from the other players' affect that they were freaked out or nervous as well.

Now, Ken's game. Divya is the name of the explorer. She found a large room, reeking of feces, with a few couches scattered around. Two of the couches had corpses on them. These couches were eaten away by rot and feces, and were the source of the smell. One of the corpses was seriously mutilated, with multiple visibly broken bones.

We had some personal question, which I do not remember.

We dig through one of the couches, finding a lot of trash and a "grabber", one of those poles with a claw on the end.

A ghost entered, a man in a hazmat suit. He asks questions in an imperious tone. Ken raised his voice. This was anxiety-provoking, for me at least. I found I was really unhappy being grilled by an angry male authority figure! The questions are things like "Who are you?" and "What are you doing here?". We try to pacify the ghost, but bust. The ghost gets aggressive, attacking us, breaking our wrist. He picks up the grabber. We run. The ghost catches up. He puts the grabber around our neck. We try to knock the grabber out of his hand, but the grabber has spikes at the ends (Ken says if we'd examined the grabber, we would have noticed this) which pierce our neck. We cannot escape. We are killed.

Here, too, I was scared and unhappy, especially when Ken was speaking aggressively. I had a question unanswered -- what the fuck was going on? Ken told us it was inspired by a news story he read of a family that left their disabled daughter on a couch in a similar state for multiple years. Fuck.

On the whole, it was a very good, moving experience. I was thrilled to see Ken MCing. He navigated the fiction well, and was usually very clear about the geography of the rooms we were in. He stayed within his authority and followed the rules.

My thoughts  on the system itself were similarly positive. I wonder how much we can keep replaying it -- both games so far had the same basic structure. It might be worth playing a different kind of ghost, or a different kind of violence. The blackjack resolution was maybe a little predictable, but this same predictability brought tension, when we thought "Maybe we can make this, if we just pull a 7 or higher..."

I am also curious about the role of the personal question to the explorer. In both of our games, the personal question did nothing, were not reincorporated, had no connection with the rest of the fiction. Am I missing something there?