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Help Me Populate A Creepy Hotel


AlHazred

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Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Hotel

 

I love this thread! Here are a couple of classic gimmicks that surely belong…

 

The Dummy

Wesley is the disheveled young man carrying the ventriloquist dummy whom always seems tired, like he hasn’t slept. His tie is loose, his shirt is untucked, his hair is mussed, he has a five o’clock shadow. Wesley is often seen in the downstairs restaurant drinking coffee with his ever-present companion, Dandy. Dandy is a classic ventriloquist dummy wearing a neat 1920s style dark green suit and blonde hair. His smoky baritone is in stark contrast to Wesley’s nasal tenor voice. Servers and staff speak to Dandy, not Wesley. Wesley must be an incredible ventriloquist, though, for Dandy is able to converse fluently while Wesley reads, eats, or even while he seems to be napping. Such talent! One wonders why Wesley seems so despondent…

 

Occasionally, Wesley will be seen without Dandy. It only happens very late at night and for a very short period. He seems agitated the whole time, frequently checking his watch and glancing toward the elevators. He will mutter “come on, come on…†as he waits for his coffee, or the public phone, or whatever he is downstairs for, and he’ll run for the elevator when he’s done. If delayed for more than a few minutes he’ll become hysterical and start sobbing. There are frequent reports of yelling and arguing coming from his room even though Wesley never takes visitors.

 

The Twins

Martha and Marcia are identical twins that are never seen apart. Ever. They are middle aged black women of medium build, not unattractive, with hair pulled back in tight braids. They always dress alike in vintage clothing (from the 1950s, 1940s, as far back 1880s) which they sew themselves. They seem friendly enough. They always seem to be giggling.

 

If approached, however, the twins won’t respond except to stare and start giggling again. The laughter seems to take an ominous turn as if the twins know a nasty secret, or a rude inside joke. When the twins do speak, to hotel staff or other guests, or very persistent PCs, they speak in perfect unison, glancing at each other out of the corners of their eyes, and laughing in sometimes menacing tones.

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Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Hotel

 

The (All-Too-)Handy Man

(as an alternative to the Guy in the Basement, or perhaps working for him)

 

So introverted he can barely communicate, the hotel handy man speaks only when spoken to. He can be found at any hour of the day fiddling with this or that device or fixture. He sleeps his full daily allotment in his room in the staff section, though at no predictable hours, and obviously spends the time for proper hygeine, but seems to have absolutely no other life. Even his meals are something portable from the hotel kitchen, eaten while working on something.

 

Oddly enough, nothing EVER seems to be broken. The handy man always catches it before it breaks, malfunctions, or otherwise stops working properly. There also seems to never be a shortage of things to work on, as he is never seen idle, but he always has time to take a look at whatever toy/gadget/device a guest or another employee has that needs attention, which he is always able to fix with a minimum of difficulty, perhaps requiring him to step out for a part or two. From an antique wind-up toy soldier with a jammed mainspring to a bleeding-edge laptop with a virus-infested proprietary-technology harddrive, "it'll just take a moment."

 

The handy man has that ageless appearance, anywhere from late 20s to early 40s, clean-shaven with short-cropped hair. His blue workman's shirt (sleeves always rolled up) and grey trousers would be at home in any decade of the 20th century, though maybe a little out of place in the 21st.

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Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Hotel

 

The never-seen kids

 

They are only heard. They are playing, laughing, and running throughout the hotel at random times (rarely late at night, they are usually good kids). However, no amount of searching will ever locate these kids playing.

 

Of course, when the PCs are utterly bored and grown used to it. Have the playing, laughing, and running sound and then.... Horrible, horrible screaming sounds. Are they dying? Are they scared? Where the hell are they?

 

Mundane Explanation: The kids are running up and down the very small and secret passages within the building. This time, something terrified the poor children.

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Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Hotel

 

Another 14th floor idea/the unseen guest

 

If room service is called for guests on the 14th floor, sometimes the food is gone, plates covered with glop, sometimes the food is on the floor covered with the green snot stuff.

 

Chairs bang about at all hours of the night, some yowls of frustration.

 

The closest a perseon gets is a green glow that quickly becomes snot on the wall. Sometimes the glow will attack, and the observer is floored with green snot all over his body.

CES

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Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Hotel

 

No Reading After Dark

 

This is a room in the hotel, not a denizen thereof...but I think it's sufficiently creepy to offer here.

 

When a guest checks into this particular room in the hotel, all seems normal. The room is a clean, comfortable and well-appointed double, with a spotless white wool carpet and new-looking curtains and bed covers. However, guests that read in the room after dark will have a less than pleasant stay....

 

If any book, newspaper or other reading matter is opened in the room after dark, the pages will appear to have been spattered with a fine spray of reddish-brown droplets, now quite dry. This also applies to the room's phonebook. (If the reading matter is an E-book, the screen will seem to have been spattered with the mysterious droplets.)

 

Any guest who tries to remove the droplets will find they can be wiped away normally with a wet cloth and a little soap. But any guest who does this, or anything else that causes him or her to be distracted from their reading matter, will have an unpleasant surprise when he/she looks at it next.

 

The droplets on the pages are now red and wet, and they smear if touched. If the guest checks other pages in the book, each page has more of the wet, red droplets...and now there are little clumps of something gray and greasy speckled across the pages. (If the guest has an E-book, the red droplets and gray specks appear on the page inside the screen.)

 

Now the guest will begin to hear a dull thumping or booming in the corridor outside, as if someone were walking slowly down the hall towards the guest's room and slamming their fists into the walls and doors on the way. When the guest looks at the bevelled mirror opposite the bed, he/she will suddenly see a bright red liquid running and dripping down the splattered glass.

 

The white carpet isn't white anymore; near the bed it's almost scarlet, and it squelches underfoot when the guest walks. The bed linens are dripping, as if someone had upended an oil drum of something red over the bed. The thumping and banging is getting closer and louder...and suddenly, the phone rings. The phone's white plastic is spattered with sticky red and more little clots of gray. If the guest answers the phone, a shrill, breathless voice on the other end babbles, "It's out, I tell you, it got out and it's in the hotel now -- !"

 

The voice breaks off with a shriek and the door shudders under a perfect barrage of thunderous banging. The doorknob rattles furiously as if someone were twisting it from side to side -- the guest can see it moving -- the air smells of suddenly of vinegar and hot copper -- and all the lights go out.

 

Silence.

 

The lights can be turned on normally, to reveal that everything is as it should be again. There is nothing amiss in the room; no red droplets in the books, no banging on the door and the mirror is clean. The guest is left to wonder if it were all a terrible hallucination...and likely as not, will insist on changing rooms that night.

 

There are no further disturbances for the guest, until he/she checks out of the hotel. The next time the guest opens his/her suitcases after check out, that guest will finds that he/she needs to buy all new linens...because every white item in the suitcases has somehow managed to get covered in spatters of dried rusty-brown.

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Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Hotel

 

Rob

 

A really nice guy who always has a smile on his face and tells alot of jokes in passing. He's the kind of guy you wouldn't mind being your best man or dating your sister. The only odd thing is that Rob likes ordering out for dinner. He gets pizza, chinese take out, and other deliveries all the time. You see the delivery guys going up to the room, but you never see them leave, and no one has ever seen the same delivery guy more than twice.

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Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Hotel

 

A Problem With Specs

All of the room in the north wing of the fourth floor have the same problem; anyone leaving their spectacles (i.e., eyeglasses) unattended will find them ... changed ... next time they pick them up.

 

No matter what prescription the glasses had been ground to, they will be changed to be correct for someone with extraordinarily bad astigmatism; as well, the left side would correct 20/150 vision while the right is correct for someone with 20/20 vision. The frames, etc., will not change, nor will the material of the lenses. Note that non-prescription reading glasses are equally affected.

 

Despite repeated attempts, no record can be found of anyone the altered glasses would fit, neither living nor dead.

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Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Hotel

 

"You lost this..."

Herman is remarkably old, just a shriveled shell of a man who was never tall to begin with. His face is long and drawn out with a forlorn visage betraying two rheumy eyes. A few thin desperate white hairs float around his head. He wears a colorless sweater that is three sizes too large and grayish sweatpants. He is always in his slippers as he doesn’t go outside anymore. He doesn’t see very well, and his hearing is suspect.

 

His shuffling approach precedes his soft, throaty “Pardon me” as he taps you on the shoulder. “You lost this…” is usually all he’ll say as he takes your hand and places something in it. You may look to find your missing car keys, or your misplaced favorite pen…or a picture of your high school sweetheart that you lost twenty years ago. If asked where he got any of these items, he answers glumly “I found it.”

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Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Hotel

 

Sometimes when the moon is right, and the sky is virtually cloudless, a low flying plane will roar pass the hotel, rattling windows, and shaking the furnishings.

 

Only no one ever sees a plane flying away, and the airport is miles out of the way for such a pass.

 

CES

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Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Hotel

 

Sometimes when the moon is right, and the sky is virtually cloudless, a low flying plane will roar pass the hotel, rattling windows, and shaking the furnishings.

 

Only no one ever sees a plane flying away, and the airport is miles out of the way for such a pass.

 

Variation: A body falls past the windows. Or the shadow of one does, anyway.

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Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Hotel

 

The Savant

 

If a PC enjoys a certain topic, ideally intellectual, but can be any topic, a man will start talking to him when he is all alone in the lobby. The PC will not notice him enter. They will have a pleasant conversation about the subject, after which the man will leave. This will happen after a long pause, and the PC has turned away for a moment. The man is suddenly gone. Nobody in the hotel will recall seeing this man. He will appear mysteriously occasionally to the PC for a pleasant conversation and disappear in the same manner.

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Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Hotel

 

The Game Room

There's a smallish room off the main lobby that is mostly used by the hotel's guests for various games: chess, poker, checkers, etc.

 

Anytime people are playing cards, if a substantial number of cards (including the whole deck) are accidentally dropped onto the floor, only five cards will land face up. It's always the same five: the ace, two, and eight of spades, and the ace and eight of clubs.

 

This doesn't happen if cards are deliberately dropped, or if only a few cards (say 20 or fewer) are dropped by accident.

 

 

 

{http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_307.html :eg:}

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  • 10 months later...

Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Hotel

 

Man, I miss being able to surf the Internet at work. What with the massive amounts of OT I've put in this year, and an inability to hit the Hero boards, well, my output's been lagging! Ah, well, maybe we can resurrect this thread - it's one of the most worthwhile I've read, what with all of the fantastic suggestions from contributors - I've enjoyed each and every one!

 

Alright, the rest of these, I could see justified any number of fun and interesting ways. But this one...

 

I gotta ask: What the hell???

Well, back then I hadn't yet started posting plot seeds.

 

The Clatterer

 

Just before dusk, shrieking brakes are heard in the parking lot. A youngish man, with wild hair and generally unkempt clothing, runs into the lobby, hastily arranges for whatever room the clerk has available, and flees into it, carrying two nondescript suitcases that clunk and jingle suggestively. As soon as he gets into his room, the shuts and locks the door, and moving furniture can be heard as he apparently stacks it up to block the entry.

 

Throughout the night, all sorts of strange sounds emerge from the room. Clacking noises almost like railroad noise, strange whistles and hums like a radio, electrical discharges, sizzles, and pops... Calls from the front desk to turn down the noise result in hasty assurances in a panicky voice and, at best, temporary abatement of the noise. (Psychic/mystic PCs get only a fuzzy "static" and a sense of barely-constrained panic.) By morning, the noise is at an all-time peak. Whether the PCs barge in themselves or get the hotel staff to do so is irrelevant.

 

As soon as an entrance is forced (it must be forced due to the fact that all available furniture except the bed has been stacked in front of the door) the noise stops abruptly. The room will be found to be empty except for the two suitcases, sitting open on the bed. The inside of one case has been thoroughly charred, as if a fire was started inside it, yet the smoke alarm never went off. The other seems to have a slight coating of glitter inside, which seems to be suspended in some sort of mildly-acidic slime.

 

Of the man, there is no sign. Nor does anyone fitting his description exist inside any current database. His description does match a missing person case from 1968; that case was marked as "Inconclusive" and closed more than twenty years ago...

 

And his car? If anyone bothers to check, they find a double set of skidmarks in the parking lot, but there is no sign of any car that might have dropped him off. Local traffic cameras or parking lot monitors show a brief period of puzzling blank tape right around the time he came in...

 

Plot Hooks:

 

1) Mystical: The man is the missing person from 1968, or at least, his ghost. The man was part of a group of friends that uncovered the Long-Term Occult Menace. They managed to find its Only Real Weakness and stole it, but were caught in the act. The man was the only one to escape; his friends were slaughtered to buy him time to escape. He flagged down a passing car and hitched to the Hotel, where he attempted to make his last stand. Unfortunately, he didn't have enough time to figure out how it worked, and the Long-Term Occult Menace vanished him from the face of the Earth. Perhaps the PCs latest caper caused some mystical fallout that bought him enough time to reenact his last hours in true ghostly fashion. PCs who investigate the suitcases (or Object Reading PCs) can perhaps glean a few clues as to the Only Real Weakness; perhaps this alert will be enough to enable them to defeat the Long-Term Occult Menace once and for all.

 

2) Weird Conspiracy: There is an ancient secret society that aids travelers from the Future/the Past/an Alien World, helping them to fit in with society to take notes/gather specimens/lay the groundwork for a takeover. The "man" was one such traveler, being dropped off for his ride home by a member of the society - they have technology to enable them to cloak their movements from electronic surveillance for brief periods. In any case, the "man" had to make his transmission beam (or whatever) tonight, and used the technology in the suitcases to make it work. The last time he visited was back in 1968 - investigating his movements then might give a clue as to what he was about this time, and lead the PCs to uncover the conspiracy before it's too late.

 

3) Fortean: The man was from one of the "dimensions next door," an alternate universe where things are just a tad different. The device in the suitcases allows him to transport himself, an invention of his own or of some group to which he belongs (perhaps the screeching tires was the sound of the "dimensional hole" forming; also, perhaps the device also allows him to travel through time in a limited fashion, explaining his "previous" visit). He was on the run from other dimension-hopping beings known as the Wardens, who seek to prevent such "unauthorized" reality-hopping. The Hotel might get a great deal more interesting in a short while, when the Wardens arrive looking for the fugitive...

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Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Hotel

 

Seventh Sanctum has some name generators.

I'm having difficulty finding floorplans of hotels - online they only show ballrooms and event areas, not living areas :(

 

I might have to go with just a standard - choose floors, rooms per floor, and percentage of hotel filled and leave the exact mapping to the GM.

 

It'll be a little PHP dokuwiki action plugin.

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Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Hotel

 

Looks like the bottom two floors are almost always conference rooms, the business office, and restaurants/bars. Above that, floorplans typically look like this or this. Pretty much, any GM should be able to fake it - I'd go with just stats as opposed to floorplans, unless you feel really energetic!

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