These are our imagined adventures…
I’m gonna play some highlights from my first session with my wife, Terra, in the story The Sinister Secret of Peppermarsh, from the campaign book The Dread House.
Our setting here is a vague 1900s to 1930s. If pressed, we’d say it’s in the Murdoch Mysteries universe so we can be lax about the technology of the time and that sort of thing.
Terra is playing Miranda, an antique shop owner with a unique gift of insight into the history of any object she touches.
A drifter tries to sell her an item that, when she touches it, reveals a vision of horror and injustice. She feels an inexplicable urgency to get on a train and travel cross country to find out more.
When she arrives in the town of Peppermarsh, she sees, in the distance, an old house on a cliff, reaching out over the ocean.
She gets a room at a boarding house. She missed dinner, so Mr. Carmody, the husband of the crotchety woman who runs the house, brings her some stew and Miranda gets her first few clues about the house from him… and afterward.
Then we’ll hear the scene at the breakfast table the next morning where she has more questions but finds that the answers she wants are apparently very closely guarded.
After that, we’ll hear some highlights from her asking various people around town about the mysterious house.
First, she chats with a clerk at Town Hall, who hasn’t lived here long but has observed secretive behavior among the townspeople.
Then, she goes to see the local priest, who replaced the previous priest when he disappeared recently, after the town council made an unusual request of him.
And then, Miranda questions a member of the town council who has a fake smile and has a quick answer for everything – and denies everything else.
And we’ll end with a grisly tale about the house, told by the oldest child from a group of kids playing in the street who say they’re not even allowed to go near the house – yet, they have stories of things they’ve seen there.
Does Miranda dare believe the things they tell her?
Well, let’s start from the beginning…
Here is the original, much longer video version of this session…
. . . The Sinister Secret of Peppermarsh – 1.1 Prologue – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A6gYCq5uHw
. . . The Sinister Secret of Peppermarsh – 1.2 Carmody’s Boarding House – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6rGqxIUEDk
. . . The Sinister Secret of Peppermarsh – 1.3 The Mouths of Babes – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usYKkGFCWiI