Dead Halt
A roleplaying game about a megalithic Hotel, clunky computer consoles, modded humans going haywire, and wonderful adventures. Equip your Maintenence crew at the Gashapon, grab a job from the Bartender, and take the elevator up to endless wonky floors beyond your imagination.
Actual Play
Players
Joe (Gamemaster), N4T3 (Brendan), NULL (Ian), Esther (Ali), Jace (Colin),Lyla (Anna), Jessica (Joy), and JonBon (Jessi).
Nonplayer Characters
Dhurand the Bartender, Gad, The Rat Gang, Hallway Bot 95, Desmond (#704), and a Travel Agent.
Plot Points
Hotel Lobby (Character Introductions)
We meet in the Lobby about a Hotel Maintenance Job offer and Dhurand, a robot bartender, goes into obscure details about the gig: We fix problems around the hotel. The first job is getting rid of rats on the seventh floor—and it pays in gold coins and tokens for a gashapon machine.
We blow our tokens at the gashapon machine (see Treasure, below) and head up to the seventh floor.
Seventh Floor
- Bing! We arrive on the seventh floor and yell “Hotel Maintenance is here for a Rat Problem!” Hoping someone would answer.
- Hallway Bot 95, announces itself by crashing through the wall like a lead bowling ball, but it doesn’t have leads after talking to JonBon.
- Desmond #704, also doesn’t have any leads; but does have several maintenance requests we can at least get parts ordered for. We give him our glow rock to compensate for the busted living room light and heater.
- Layla and Esther knock on the door to another tenant’s room and talk to a Repair Bot, patching a large hole in the wall with duct tape.
- My notes are hazy here, something about a pillow fort #703, fill me in if you remember.
- Many of the rooms on the seventh floor are unnervingly empty.
Rat Trap
- Esther takes the lead, having the only tangible weapon among us and we set a rat trap using a lawn dart, string, and Whether candy. We wait quietly in the dark and the trap springs shortly—the rats don’t like the light. We pounce.
- The lights flip on to reveal the lawn dart has stabbed a 4-foot tall anthropomorphic rat-person.
- Wounded it scurries into a crawlspace hole in the wall and squeezes in to pursue.
Rat Den
- They’re stuffing papers into a briefcase and unbarricading their hideaway as we tumble in behind, the one hit with the lawn dart whirls on us with a gun.
- It’s down to Esther with the sword and the rats with a gun, so the rats win.
- It doesn’t fire instead one of his rat friends parleys with an Etch A Sketch. The best we can figure out is they got lost and are trying to find their way back to floor 2½. Dhurand didn’t say what kind of rat problem the Hotel was having and helping them get home felt sensible.
- Everyone chills out on the weapons and we figure out how to find Floor 2½.
Floor 2½
- Jace comes up with the idea to take the elevator down to floor 2 and go up through the maintenance hatch, to what would technically be floor 2½.
- It works! There is a floor here, under construction like the unfinished floor scene in Die Hard, but it’s pitch black.
- Lyla (?) flips on her miner’s helmet and we delve into sheer horror—we find the previous maintenance crew, a trio of insane cybered-out cenobites. We clash and put them down for good.
- The rats are home safe and we leave.
Back at the Hotel Bar
- There is another character here as we arrive back in the lobby. [Crow guy] has a few comments about not getting cybered up.
- Dhurand pays us in gold coins and a few more gashapon tokens.
Session Ends
Treasure
- Gashapon Machine: Basic coding book, normal sword, boned-carved Knife (knife made from bone tools), prop-sword, fire sword (hilt is aflame), radio-flyer wagon, miners helmet with working torchlight, and a glowing rock.
- The rats gave us their gun after we got them home.
- 25 Gold Coins each after the maintenance request was completed.
Character Development Moments
- Jace doesn’t trust machines, N4T3 to be specific, he’s too like the other weird things in this hotel. N4T3 doesn’t like Jace because he’s an asshole.
- Jace spends all ten of his gashapon tokens only to get a prop sword after Esther scores a real one. He used the fake sword once to zero effect and degraded it for his multi-tool.
- Esther gave Jace her sword after the emasculating experience of trying to use a prop sword in a fight and Esther is better with the gun anyway; Jace respectfully calls Esther, Mum now.
- Jace drew a face on NULL because it weirded him out he’s an expressionless art manikin; the player (Ian) ran with the idea to great effect, smugging his “face” when angry or redrawing it.
Review (Update: 2024-11-12)
This game has such a tight core activity the game master (Joe) has reliably pulled an engaging session of play weekly since early September. This is one of the few zine games I will heavily defend as not just another art punk cash grab by the tabletop roleplaying community, it has real character and will create a novel campaign well beyond a forgettable one-shot night.
I hope the developer gets a TV show deal out of it.
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