Sinister Sutures of the Sempstress is SO fun (spoilers)

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slorg
Ill-Fated Peasant
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Sinister Sutures of the Sempstress is SO fun (spoilers)

Post by slorg »

Ran this for friends who have never played tabletop RPGs. I swapped out most of the encounters for ones themed around movies my friends like. I sneakily asked them which scenes or movies they found scariest as kids, or even as adults, in the days leading up to our session. Knowing I could burn them out, I aimed for a two-hour session. For the sake of keeping it as rules-light as possible, I ran it as a 0-level funnel, too! Below is a summary of our evening and my modifications. Maybe this will inspire someone else (I *highly* recommend the module, especially with Halloween just around the corner!). And I'd also love feedback about what I could have done differently, tips, etc.!


I don't think my players would have been able to keep track of or appreciate too many PCs, so I had them roll two each:

- Guinevere the beekeeper
- Jethro the cheesemaker
- Lancelot the turnip farmer (and Henrietta the hen)
- Robin the healer
- Pularia the rope maker
- Jonathan the street urchin
- Behepsha the huntress
- Fitzwilliam the tax collector


The setup of 'Sempstress' is that the ancestors of the PCs imprisoned a boogeyman in a spooky pocket dimension, and it is finally breaking free of its bonds. The first encounter as written involves assassin monsters attacking the PCs in their sleep (with the PCs potentially isolated from one another in different homes, etc). Having defeated their assailants, the PCs then find their way through cupboard drawers, closets, wardrobes, etc. into the horrifying home of the Sempstress. Michael Curtis's descriptions are fantastic and really spooked me and my players when I read them--("tinged with gangrene" got a verbal groan out of me when I first read it, and from all the players).

I didn't want to kill off half of the characters in the first encounter, so I had the assassins retreat after 1 round. Pularia got iced in the first round.

From there, I simply narrated that the PCs followed the assassins to the Sempstress's lair, with everyone arriving in the Pulsing Foyer. However, I gave them the option of going a) up the staircase, b) down the staircase, c) through a "dark, clouded-glass door" to the left, or d) down a "potted-fern-filled corridor" to the right. They opted for the fern corridor. Didn't investigate the fleshy walls, unfortunately.

The fern hallway led to a noxious greenhouse with a hole in the floor and several large trees and rancid plants growing around it. Two stitch-covered vines horrors from "Sailors on the Starless Sea" attacked, with both Fitzwilliam and Behepsha getting killed. These were both characters controlled by one player (who had put a lot of thought and love into designing them, and who was the most into the game so far), so when another player asked if his healer could attempt to revive them, I allowed him a chance to save one (he did, with a celebrated die roll). One of the defeated vine horrors was revealed to be the town mayor. With the vines dying but their animating properties not quite ebbed away, he regained consciousness long enough to tell the PCs that they must find a key if they want to escape.

The other dead vine horror, they discovered, was Pularia. They used her rope to descend from the hole in the floor to a steamy, tiled room below. They found a swimming pool below them, but the lower they descended, the wider the pool became, until it seemed indistinguishable from an ocean. And directly below the rope was a half-sunken fisherman's boat. At this point I queued up some music that all of my players recognized but couldn't quite put their finger on. They descended belowdecks to a flooded passage, where they found a big hole torn out of the wall. It timed up surprisingly well with the music--I had the head from 'Jaws' (a favorite of the players) pop out of the hole and called for Lancelot, who was first in marching order, to make a Will save. He failed and rolled from the unraveling table.

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(Everyone LOVED the unraveling effects).

Fortunately he reached into the glinting eye socket and discovered (P1: "A diamond!" P2: "No, the key!" Me: "A diamond-covered key!" Everyone: "Oooh!") To scare them I had em make a few bogus rolls as *something* bumped into the boat. Lancelot, now the last person in marching order, rolled a 20 so I allowed the whole lot to flee back to the rope just as a huge, dark shape in the water slammed the boat and dragged it under the surface. The shark-like shape emerged and the heroes looking down had to roll for stability--for instead of a shark head, the monster had the powdered, make-up-caked face of a hag, with a mouth full of shark teeth. More players oohed and aahed as they rolled for various unraveling effects.

I should add that I ignored their stability totals and just had them roll from the Unraveling table to get more flavor into the night, with an unspoken rule that anyone suffering two Unraveling effects would fully unravel.

Anyways, they get back to the Pulsing Foyer and decide *not* to go down the stairs (which was fortunate for them, as a "Psycho" fruit cellar was waiting down there for them). Instead they went through the clouded-glass doorway to a lightless corridor stuffed with junk, birdcages, mirrors, etc. I said that they heard slow, heavy, powerful footsteps thumping behind them, getting closer. They decided they did not want to run blindly ahead, nor confront whatever was coming, so they hid among the junk. Light shone from the various mirrors, and indeed in the mirrors they could see the reflection of a hulking elderly ogress of a woman in a tattered Victorian dress creeping down the hall with a lantern, cooing and calling to the intruders. But despite the rattling junk and the footsteps nothing was visible in the hall itself.

I had everyone roll for Stealth. My Lancelot / Robin player had just left at this point, and fortunately Lancelot fumbled. I gave the poor turnip farmer a Luck roll but he failed that too, and so a nasty, lace-sleeved giant hand emerged from a mirror, wrapped about his body, and drew him through the glass shrieking and struggling. Then the lantern bobbing in the mirrors went away. This scared the pants of the remaining players but they commented on the "fairness" of the rolls, etc.

They proceeded to a kitchen, where they didn't fall for a few tricks, and decided to go back to the Pulsing Foyer and up the staircase. We were maybe 90 minutes in at this point and everyone was getting ready to move on with our evening (we had plans to go out afterwards), so I sped things up a bit. Some mannequins chased them up the stairs ala the hedge animals in "The Shining", and as soon as they reached the top landing both they (and I) forgot all about the mannequins, haha.

I reduced the numbers of paths I'd originally intended; they could go left, through a child-fort array of sheets strung over furniture, or right, past huge heaps of wet fabric and puddles, towards a steaming doorway.

They went left and I described the room as a children's bedroom housed within a tent-fort. Jonathan failed a Stability roll and, unlike the rest of the PCs, could see the inhabitant of the room--the sister from 'Pet Sematary', which came scuttling right up to him--to the shrieks of Jonathan's player. The players understood that their characters couldn't see what Jonathan saw, so when the street urchin rolled from the unraveling table, eeeveryone was thoroughly freaked out, players and heroes alike. Robin discovered a dollhouse within the bedroom, which contained a doorway with a diamond-studded keyhole. He managed to unlock the door before being fully unraveled. Rather than try to figure out how to defeat the monster, the rest piled through the door.

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As the characters scrambled down a white passageway, they began to perceive the gleaming white passage was in fact a filthy gray tube of spiderweb, and the Sempstress--now appearing as a huge spider with the head of the old woman (which one of the players called "Baby Jane")--came charging down the tube in pursuit. I gave them a round to ready an attack or try to flee; they decided to flee and a few became entangled in the webs. I wanted to get combat over as quickly as possible and wanted to the players to be victorious, so I just used the statistics for the beastman champion in 'Starless Sea'--even then, the Sempstress managed to kill Jonathan and Jethro! Behepsha, who was the only character to stand her ground when the Sempstress first appeared, managed to hit the leering old face with a few flaming arrows. The players could see how much health the Sempstress had left, so each successful attack (by the heroes and by the Sempstress) was very suspenseful.

The final three rolls of the evening were the best. Guinevere, who was *everyone's* favorite character during creation, hadn't done a damn thing all night (hadn't even gotten to roll from the unraveling table). With the Sempstress at only 2 hp, she landed a natural 20. The player was *so* excited and leaped up from her seat cheering. Instead of rolling damage next, she rolled from the crit table and landed the "miracle strike" option. The Sempstress failed the roll, and what with her being on fire in a burning web tube between worlds, we had her collapse in a roiling wave of flame and burning webs and floral wallpaper and peeling skin, with the players emerging from a tool shed into the moonlit, perfumed summer air of the tidy, apiary-dotted garden behind Guinevere's cottage.

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So! While my take on 'Sutures' is very different from the module as written, I like to think that I was able to capture its spirit. I would have LOVED to prepare a few bowls of 'eyeballs and brains' etc. but didn't have the time, unfortunately. Will definitely try to run 'Sempstress' as written and include the practical effects next time!
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