The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

The Soundstage

It seems strange that there is no entry on this despite the term being so widely used in the Atlas.

Most stories are set physically here in Carousel. If you aren’t careful and you ignore the NPCs trying to shoo you away, you can find yourself on the set of an active storyline that you aren’t a part of. It’s pretty surreal until you get chased off by whatever killer or monster is at the center of that story.

Some stories don’t work like that. After being activated, there’s no way to find where the players went. They aren’t physically in Carousel anymore, at least not the part of it we have access to. This place is called the Soundstage. If a storyline is set in a world that Carousel cannot portray in “real life,” like a dream, hell, or even the far past, you’ll find yourself on the Soundstage. Everyone learns that eventually.

It’s common knowledge.

The reason I’m writing this is because I found a storyline out in the Gourmand Housing district that acted weird. It was set in the past, maybe the 1940s. That much was certain. The entire district was still being built during the storyline. After we finished, I expected to find ourselves back in the modern neighborhood, but even as we left, the houses were still under construction. I went back there today. Still, the whole place is like it was during the setting of the story.

We were not on the Soundstage.

Carousel changed when we ran that story. I swear it did. I can’t figure out why for the life of me. Arthur thought it was interesting too and he hasn’t found anything interesting in a long time.

Why was this storyline not on the Soundstage? Running the story appears to have permanently changed this neighborhood. I wish I knew what was going on.

March 5, 2017

-AW

In the end, I could almost understand how a stubborn new player could finish this storyline without believing they were in another world. It was so easy to think it was all an elaborate prank.

Normally, we were supposed to have a Paragon who could help guide us through the first storyline gently after dropping us off at the original resort. The second time around, we didn’t even have the Stranger there to help us.

Still, I didn’t think it mattered. We didn’t need handholding.

As we hiked up the Overlook Hill and found the little resort we had been staying at, two things became immediately apparent.

First, we were in the past. The hotel we originally stayed in was being renovated to a more modern Scandinavian aesthetic. This version of the resort looked like it was last renovated in the early eighties.

Most of the buildings were still there; they were just uglier.

Second, it was clear that our suite, Jedediah Geist’s old manor, had not become part of the hotel yet. There were no paths to the other side of the hill, and many of the trees had not been trimmed back. We would have to hike to get around unless we could find the actual road .

“We might be on to something here,” Antoine said as he looked around the hilltop resort.

We must have been.

We made our way to reception. It was pretty similar except for the style change.

I expected to see Mandy, the same employee working at the front desk that I had seen every time we came by here for food or towels, but she was gone and replaced by an older man named Ned I didn’t recognize.

We didn’t have any money, and frankly, we weren’t sure if we were even supposed to be here.

“We were sent here for a room because of the Centennial,” Antoine said testing to see if the old story still worked.

“Stragglers, huh?” the man asked.

“Excuse me?” Antoine asked.

“I thought we already had everybody,” Ned said. “Guess you were the last to arrive. Stragglers. Let me get your keys.”

He turned around to a large pegboard, retrieved a large brass key with a room number on it, and handed it to Antoine.

“Sorry about the key. We still haven’t updated things to the keycards. Do you need help finding your suite?”

Antoine looked back at the rest of us before saying, “Is it on the other side of the hill?”

Ned shook his head. “All of our units are on this side of the hill. We don’t have any over there for obvious reasons.”

“Obvious reasons?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Ned said, looking for one of us to understand. The old Geist place. It’s not somewhere people would want to stay, you know. You’ve heard the legends—ghosts haunting the place, murderers about, and whatnot.”

“That makes sense,” Isaac said. “Everyone knows ghosts and murderers stick to their side of the hill.”

Ned shrugged unenthusiastically. “Anyway, we have room service if you want to call from your room. If you need anything else, you can call me. I would be happy to help.”

“Thank you!” Kimberly said.

We left to find our new suite.

It ended up being the furthest suite from the office.

“If I were new to Carousel, I would never go play a creepy little game in an abandoned murder house,” Kimberly said.

“I doubt you’d have a choice,” I said. “Could be like the version we played where the Stranger has a trope to trigger the story before we even get here.”

“Could be the town just loops unending until you go over there,” Bobby suggested. “Or maybe Carousel uses mind control.”

I had no doubt Carousel had some foolproof way of getting a group of players into a creepy house for a game of murder Monopoly. Still, it was hard to imagine. How would you get someone like Jeannette in there?

Antoine unlocked our new suite. He opened the door, and we all basked in its visage.

“Oh my god,” Kimberly said.

It was not great. Two twin beds, a pullout couch, and a few old cots provided enough beds for all of us. The television was small, and the place smelled old and uninviting.

“They really should fix this place up,” Isaac said.

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“If we had to stay here for weeks, I would be spending the night in the murder house within the first three days,” Cassie said.

There was very little space and only a tiny table for working out clues.

“I know Carousel only gave us the renovated Geist suite to throw us off the trail, but I am super thankful we weren’t stuck here,” Kimberly said.

We moved our stuff in. I stood outside to get mentally ready to go explore the Geist house while the others got unpacked inside.

I examined the game box.

Antoine was outside with me.

“Should we practice this game,” I asked. “Once we’re in there, playing the game will trigger the storyline. I don’t want to learn the game on the fly like that.”

“That’s not a bad idea, but there is like a 100% chance someone was murdered in that hotel room, so maybe we do it over at the picnic table,” he said.

And so we did.

Here is how the game was supposed to go when you weren’t trying to summon dead people in real life.

The game included:

· 1 Board

· 7 Player Figures (Film Buff, Eye Candy, Athlete, Wallflower, Outsider, Comedian, and Psychic)

· 25 Murder Weapons

· 1 Bell

· 200 Séance Cards

· 1 Rule Sheet

· 200 Ghost Scoresheets (which were just little pieces of paper you could tear off)

It was simple. To win, you needed to “capture” three ghosts. You captured a ghost by finding its name, the murder weapon that killed it, and a piece of important backstory.

You moved your character around the board, trying to land on special squares that let you draw a card. The cards might list a question you can ask, such as, “Spirit, were you killed for money?” or a collectible ability, such as, “Because of their training, the Athlete managed to run out of the room before the ghost attacked them.”

Occasionally, the card would say something like, “There is a strange presence in the music room that lashes out against all those nearby. Any players in this room must go back to the entrance and reset all progress on uncompleted captures.”

When you asked a spirit a question, you would wind the bell. If it rang, the answer was yes, and you would learn something about a spirit, be it its name, murder weapon, or backstory. Until the murder weapon is found, any player can try to capture a ghost.

Murder weapon questions stated, “Grab a murder weapon from the weapons cache.” And then allowed you to ask, “Is this the weapon that killed you?”

A “yes” means that the ghost is yours to interrogate, and no one can steal it from you. A “no” meant to try again later with a different card and other players can still talk to it.

The ghosts were just hypothetical. They came into existence when you started asking them questions.

The rule sheet showed a picture of 24 missing posters, indicating that there were only 24 ghosts in the game.

The game was okay. Might have been fun under different circumstances.

It involved a lot of luck but some strategy once you realized you could save abilities to use at opportune times. If you were in the same room as a player, you could ask your own questions to uncaptured ghosts after they did, effectively giving you an extra turn.

It wasn’t until we played the game in Geist’s old house that I realized how unnerving it really was.

“I told you I was no good at board games,” Isaac said. “You shouldn’t even bring me to this next storyline. I’d just get in the way.”

“If I’m going, you’re going,” Cassie said, pulling him along through the woods.

As we rounded the hill, Jed Geist’s manor slowly came into view. It had seen better days.

Some of the windows were boarded up, and the siding was falling off. The door still had police tape on it, but that had long been torn, and it just stood there as a reminder that a crime had occurred here.

As we approached the front door, I pointed out a large plastic tub filled with newspapers that had been collected and delivered for a long time after Jed’s death. Somewhere in these would be the paper with a clue as to how Jed Geist was killed, though new players would be unlikely to guess that. These were the same papers that were used to pad Geist’s belongings and placed in boxes in the storage room in the future.

The house had been tagged by graffiti artists many times over.

“Carousel must have a lot of gang activity,” Isaac said. “I’m starting to think this isn’t a safe place to start a family.”

“Door isn’t even locked,” Dina said at a glance.

“I’ll still knock,” Antoine said. He had brought his baseball bat, and he rapped his knuckles on the door. There was no answer.

He reached down and turned the knob, which creaked loudly as it opened.

As we looked in, I could see Isaac getting ready to tell a joke, but I beat him to it.

“Maybe we should call housekeeping,” I said. I could have done better.

That seemed to have deflated whatever joke he was preparing.

The place was completely different than we had seen before. It wasn’t as run down as a meth den or anything, but it scored a ten out of ten in the murder house category.

Everything inside was old, the things that hadn’t been stolen at least. There was spray paint on the wall. The crown molding needed to be rebuilt from the ground up.

The place was a mess.

But that was not the first thing anyone would notice when they entered.

“Let’s leave,” Kimberly said, at least half serious.

“That explains some things,” Dina said.

We had been debating on whether new players would talk to Jed Geist on their first run. If we got to the house and the fireplace poker was sitting there with an evidence tag on it, surely they would be able to talk to him. That seemed… too early.

That was not a concern anymore.

Thousands, literally thousands, of weapons littered the living room floor and surrounding hallways. Some kids had organized them into concentric circles and other patterns. Knives, crowbars, hammers, ice picks, screwdrivers, and every other handheld object that can be used to kill a person lay littered around the room. Some knives were stabbed into the walls. Some were in the furniture.

“Anybody got eyes on the poker?” Antoine said.

“I see at least two,” Dina said.

The odds of someone finding the right one on accident were minimal.

“So new players fail the first time,” I said. “By the time they realize what weapon to look for, Willis shows up in his car to escort them to the second storyline, assuming they ever figure it out.”

“Could you at least pretend you're not having fun?” Kimberly asked playfully.

“I smirk when I’m nervous,” I said.

We gathered around the center of the room and set up the game. At the exact moment Kimberly finished shuffling the séance cards and placed them in their designated space, the Omen was triggered.

We were in the story.

There was much debate over what tropes we would bring. Given what we knew about the story, we decided minimal was best. We wanted the unvarnished story. No Looks Don’t Last for Kimberly, no Last-Minute Casting for Bobby, and no Deathwatch for me. I didn’t even use Trope Master, so I didn’t have to worry about being attacked. We assumed that we had already seen the enemies for this story, so I didn’t need to see their tropes again. Even if that backfired, we would be fine. This was an easy story.

We were just a group of young people playing a board game with Dina and Bobby.

As the needle on the Plot Cycle ticked from Omen to Choice to Party, there was a knock at the door.

Antoine answered it.

Three cute girls swarmed past him, giggling the whole time and carrying vodka and shot glasses.

“You found the game!” one of the girls, Brenda, said. They were all level-three NPCs—nothing out of the ordinary.

These weren’t sorority girls. They were some flavor of alternative, maybe hipsters, but that was a stretch. I wasn’t around in the early 90s to know. They acted like they knew us.

“Guess what I brought,” one girl named Serenity said, holding out a long, thin object wrapped in a handkerchief. She opened it up to reveal an ancient boning knife. “My brother swears this is the real weapon used to kill Jed Geist. His friend was one of the cops on the scene. He says he actually talked to him with this.”

“We’ll have to try it,” I said.

Serenity sat down on the floor next to me and hugged me tightly, the boning knife poking me in the arm.

“This is so exciting!” she said with a smile.

She was very physically close to me. I was starting to see how Carousel might trick a bunch of new players to go along with playing a creepy game in an old murder house.

I took my attention off of her the best I could. I could flirt with girls or commune with the dead, but not both.

I noticed that the sun outside was starting to set.

“Are we going to play this, or are we just sitting around?” I asked.

“Oh my gods, I’m so excited!” Cassie squealed loudly. The three NPCs echoed her excitement, as she must have predicted they would because she laughed at their reaction.

At first, I thought we were in trouble because there were only seven player pieces, but only Serenity was brave enough to play. The others just wanted to drink and watch. Isaac graciously volunteered to sit out. I thought he was going to spend his time talking to the girls, but he pulled an old chair up behind Cassie and sat in it as if blocking anything in the dark house from getting to her.

Antoine rolled the dice, and we were off.

He rolled an eight, which just so happened to be enough to get him into the hall closet, land on a special square, and draw a card.

He drew a backstory question. Backstory information could be anything; as long as you got something, you were set.

He showed us his card.

“Did the (player archtype) kill you?

Pick a player character. If the spirit says yes, the named player will be killed if they ever interact with or enter the same room as this ghost.

Killed players had to start over.

He had to choose one of us and ask the question.

He made eye contact with me. I nodded. He asked, “Did the Film Buff kill you?”

Better me than the newbies, I guess.

Then he twisted the key on the bell.

The bell ticked and ticked, and then moments later, it rang.

I felt something move over me. A shiver went down my spine.

The others seemed to sense it, too, though nothing appeared on the red wallpaper.

I smelled something vaguely familiar.

It smelled like ash. It smelled like cigarettes.

Where had I smelled that before?

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