Intermission, a Dread one-shot

It's the premiere night for a much anticipated movie in Old Americana, Picante's Inferno, and you and your friends have tickets!

The warm night air is cooling, the crowd is hungry, and so far, the movie is everything everyone hoped it would be.

When intermission arrives, so does everything else. 

It doesn't take long for a storm to push the party on to figure out why the intermission is taking so long, however. Hopefully you and your friends can get back before the movie starts!

Intermission is a one-shot adventure for Dread, the Jenga tower tabletop game where every pull brings you one step closer to something going terribly, permanently wrong.

Play as a group of anthropomorphized food-based friends descending through the layers of a very specific, very cheesy Hell, guided by a grizzled can of Vegemite, to ultimately be judged by a cartoon demon eating birthday cake alone in the dark. All the while, haunted by hands that reach from everywhere, into mouths that lead to nowhere. 

Featuring

• A cacophony of demons to encounter, barter with, and hide from.
• Numerous locations for the GM to pick and choose from
• Traps galore
• A section where you get to make crazy weapons and go BUCK WILD.
• WAY too much Dante’s Inferno lore. 

Too much to draw from for one game, leading to innumerable replays, the story engine lends its flesh to the ouroboros loop. 

The goal is simple. Get out of Hell, don't get eaten, and get back to your seats. Finish the amazing movie.

No two descents are the same, although the Malabologne will always reek.

Intermission is built utilizing the looping story engine. Nine circles, hidden rooms to find, dozens of demons, alliances to forge, traps to fall into, and factions with their own agendas. All this goes to say that this booklet contains vastly far more than any single run can hold. 63 pages of crap. SIXTY-THREE. The GM chooses the path each time: which circles get explored, which demons show up, which alliances are available, which traps the party walks straight into. The Malebranche might be negotiated with this run and hostile the next. The Broker's price changes. The Shepherd's reach grows. The Archivist has different records depending on what the party did last time.

The private character traits and wildcards shuffle every session. The judgment at the end is different every time because the players are different every time. What you held back tonight won't be what you hold back next run.

And Virgil's jar has a few more cracks than it did before.

The module doesn't reset cleanly. It accumulates. Each run leaves a residue on your table. A demon who remembers, a deal that's still technically open, a question Rando didn't finish asking. The party came here to catch the second half of a movie. They haven't managed it yet.

The night always starts again.

How many runs until the jar doesn't hold?

Ut superius, sic inferius

Content Warning - body horror and blood (even though it’s food), psychological horror, jumpscares, the neverending realization of Hell, hopelessness. This scenario contains themes and situations that may be distressing to some players.

Disclaimer: I am a wordslinger, worlds spill out of my head. I'm currently learning how to draw and NOT be a buttnard, but admittedly, there are a couple of instances of AI generated art in the booklet to instill imagery better than the words. Some people need pictures out the wazoo.