The Chair - Play Review
I'm down a player so it's time for Random One Shot Night! Since the current game is Shadowdark, the time has come to try something else and I've been wanting to run an Odd-like. I gave the players two options: horror or party and horror won out. Liminal Horror is the system and I'm running Between Two Cairns favorite(?) the Chair. I ended up running from both the original pamphlet and the revised version in Case Files Vol 01: Anomaly.
What is this?
The Chair is a pamphlet or 6 page statement sized adventure with minimal art all created by Zach Danger Vaupen, edited by Josh Domanski and support by Goblin Archives, Evlyn Moreau, and Matthew Morris. Both versions have a picture of the eponymous furniture and map. The Case Files version includes a picture of the adventure site's lit window. It's a 7 room location that is just a normal(ish) house. It includes unique Fallout table, a mechanical result for taking too much stress. If you're not familiar with Liminal Horror these are its take on disorders mixed with some SCP like effects. There's a hook table for how everyone got into the house. I choose the first: you fell asleep somewhere weird and woke up on the floor in the house to start right in the action.
At the table
The Chair was a single 3 hour of night of gaming for us. My players made characters before we met up. We played on Foundry, which feels like overkill, but it's the VTT we're used to.
I had my four characters, complete strangers to each other, describe what odd place they had fallen asleep in. There was a nap at the job site, sleeping on the side of the road and other bits of characterization. Then they all woke in the house, in the dark, to the strange wet gurgling of the Chair. Boom. Great start.
The exploration begins. What's outside the windows? Why does this staircase end at the ceiling? Why is this door hot? This first room puts a lot of things in front of the players: locked doors, a hot door, a staircase to nowhere, windows to a front yard in the woods that cannot be broken. Fallout is acquired and adds to the mystery as players grow old or feel heavy.
And in the middle of it all, a Chair that gurgles, ominous and wrong. It's in every room. It's in all rooms. It's the toilet in the bathroom, a dining room chair, a vinyl 50's chair in the kitchen.
But the chair isn't alone. There's people in this strange house. These NPCs have a theme: they're one-note weirdos about something. They repeat a line 3 times before becoming hostile. Ignore them and they are quiet. It's reasonably easy to figure this out but players want to talk to these freaks in the hopes they can learn something so the players ended up egging them on.
Eventually having scoured the rooms of the house my players focus on the Chair. Can they destroy it? What happens when they attack it? Poof! A PC disappears. A moment of confusion and quiet with a secret message to the missing PC who finds themselves squeezed and in the dark. Trapped between layers of sheetrock between rooms.
The PCs have discovered a few of the keys to this adventure: the Hermetic Devices, but completely by accident. They bring these to bear on the Chair and find it actually damages the thing. One PC loses two fingers to a swipe from the Chair's clawed arm, but the thing is broken and every window in the place blows outward with the door.
They're free. They stumble to the road, call the police and get back to town.
Final thoughts
This was a total blast. My players had fun coming up with solutions to a lot of these problems. They managed to teleport the Diner and the Sleeper into the walls using the Chair. In our post session chat one player described it as an escape room or adventure game and it does have a bit of that vibe. You use what you have to solve the mystery.
I'd highly recommend the Chair for one shots. It's a fascinating, but small, space to explore. Between the Chair and the NPCs there is enough mystery and weirdness to keep players engaged and moving forward.