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BLOOD

        This occasion we were playing an older RPG called Blood, this is a horror RPG, but instead of being cerebral horror like Call of Cthulhu, or monster based horror like The World of Darkness based games, Blood is a splatter horror game. Based around horror movies like Halloween and Tremors, with lots of violence and destruction, it was a game almost designed for our group. The game itself was simple enough, with a large chunk of the rulebook consumed by hundreds of different weapons (from chainsaws, drills and other splatter movie weapons, right down to damage caused by Television sets (and seperate damage for them when they are plugged in), and the damage caused by slamming a toilet seat onto the back of someones head while they are being sick in a toilet). The book also had three adventures published within its pages, these from what we saw were brilliantly written, as we played through the first two adventures ourselves.

        This was several years ago so my knowledge of the characters is somewhat shaky, I was playing a Midget Mortician, K was playing a martial arts instructor, and L was playing a Private Detective, what anyone else was playing I can`t remember, J (who I`ve written about before) was GM`ing, and the campaign was set in the south of England (since that was where J was from originally).

        The first adventure started with us being kidnapped and waking up in an abandoned house, as we searched the house we got attacked by a guy wielding a kitchen knife. This is when we discovered the true joy of the Blood combat system, L punched the attacker. Calculating out this punch, the random hit tables showed that L`s character had hit the attacker in the hand, the damage caused was too much for the attackers arm, which broke, much to our delight. we overwhelmed and killed our attacker, out of who a small white worm wriggled and disappeared.

        Anyway, we headed off out of the house, all armed with a variety of household implements we were using as weapons. Searching the small rural village we found ourselves in, we found it was abandoned, however we could hear chanting in the distance so we went off to investigate.

        The chanting was coming from the villagers who had gathered, and as we watched small white worms wriggled out of their mouths and joined together into a giant 50 foot white worm with a massive fanged mouth.

        Looking at our collection of knives, baseball bats and garden tools we had armed ourselves with, and comparing them to the monstrosity facing us, we fled.

        Running as fast as we could, we got back to the village just in time to see an army jeep roar up the main street. The jeep was filled with soldiers and was armed with a machine gun on a pintile mount. The soldiers opened up with the machine gun, blowing chunks off the worm, which started to flee. But it was blown apart and killed before it could escape.

        We cheered our saviors, and started to go up to them to congratulate them on our rescue, when they swung the machine gun round and wasted us with the same swift efficiency they had killed the worm with. We were dead.

        However, this wasn`t the end of our characters.

        Our characters came awake in a crypt, nearby gnawing on the bones in the crypt was a hideous ghoul, who explained to us that we too were ghouls. When we complained we didn`t want to spend the rest of our existances as ghouls, he offered us a way out.

        What we could do, was get parts of freshly killed bodies and make ourselves new bodies, he then gave us a spell that would allow us to transfer our souls into the new bodies. However we had to make sure that the new bodies didn`t have more than 20% of any one body, or we would end up contending with the old host of that body.

        So we set out looking for fresh bodies, first stop the local hospitals morgue, with only a minor stopover to get get new clothes. So we stole a car, and accidentally ran over a pedestrian on the way (first body). At the morgue a fight broke out between the players, as we battled for the best bits (most buff body, full head of hair and largest sexual organs). But eventually we all gathered together the parts we needed, and some swift needle craft later we had new bodies. A quick blast of magic and we were in them, and only had to clean up and dispose of our old decaying bodies and everything could return to normal.

        We did a bit of investigating about the worms, and the military attack which had wiped us out, and foud out that it all seemed to be a distraction to help a Psychic child who the army had contained nearby to the village could escape, something he eventually did when we broke into the army base to investigate.

        This finished the second of the three adventures printed in the Blood rulebook, we all looked forwards to the third, but J had other ideas.

        J had written his own adventure for Blood, and threw us straight into that instead, to say it was confusing is an understatement. We were contacted by a man to do an investigation into an old woman who was living on the streets in a box. When we tried to ask the man further questions, a pillar of flame appeared on his palm shooting up towards the ceiling.

        Huh ?!? we thought.

        J explained to us patiently that this was his flaming sword, and that this man was an Angel. Okay, we could live with that, and went off to investigate the old woman.

        So we searched around the streets, asking questions, and eventually locating her, but while we were asking questions we were approached by a gang of youths warning us off. Something we didn`t take well, and L started to explain to them that they should leave, with the help of his pistol.

GM: Okay as you wave your pistol around, they pull baseball bats with nails through them and attack you.

Us: Where did they get them ? Shouldn`t we have noticed them carrying baseball bats with nails through them before now ?

GM: They were holding them behind their backs.

Us: What ?!? How ?!?

        Which started a debate on whether you notice someone holding something behind their back, but because "the GamesMaster is always right" his ruling held (and for some time afterwards anything held behind a characters back was considered invisible (yes we are a petty bunch really)).

        But this was pretty much the end of our investigation, we spent several game sessions confused and bewildered by the events going on, sessions which mainly resembled this.

Us: J, give us some clues !

J: You`ve got all the clues, all you need to do is work them out.

Us: We don`t know whats going on, help us !

        But he never did, and we never played Blood again (we quickly moved onto another game, to avoid J trying to continue his adventure). Although we always wanted to play that third adventure that was printed in the rulebook, but never did.

        Talking to J some years later I discovered that J has now sold his copy of Blood (the only one in the group) because it was signed by the authors, which is a great pity since it is a brilliant game no longer in print (if anyone has a copy they don`t want any longer get in touch and we`ll talk). So we will never discover if that last adventure lives up to the promise of the first two, and never have the joy of those extensive damage tables for such a huge variety of weapons.

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