Re: Help Me Populate A Creepy Hotel
I love this thread, this is some serious idea catnip. Having dug my posting account out of mothballs, some humble additions.
Motherly Love
A woman in her late twenties or early thirties, no longer in the bloom of girlhood but fit, comfortable with herself and damned attractive - the sort of person the media like to call a “yummy mummy”. She’s friendly and will make conversation. Perhaps a little wary of revealing too much about herself, but only the way you’d expect of someone talking to a relative stranger in a hotel. She’s doing some sort of postgraduate study and has a part-time job to pay for it: if she’s a resident she can be seen in the hotel cafe with her books, or perhaps she actually works at the hotel, perhaps as a clerk or a cleaner, and the management turns a blind eye to her using a corner table at the restaurant as her office for a few hours a week. Her child is about eighteen months old, and will often be in the hotel with her, cost and rarity of childcare places being what they are.
The weird aspect of these two is subtle and may take the PCs a while to spot. They interact with others as a perfectly normal mother and child, but when they think they’re not being watched they look at each other with a poisonous mixture of anger and loathing. It’s a startling enough expression to see on the face of a mother with her infant, but to see the baby’s face wearing such a hateful, and very adult, expression is thoroughly unnerving. Their private body language is more like that of a long-married couple who’ve fallen savagely out of love, right down to the hurried adopting of a superficial “not in front of these people” act if someone interrupts them. There’s never any violence going on, nor neglect, just this obvious mutual hate, so strong it’s a wonder the air between them doesn’t start crackling.
Is the kid actually its mother’s familiar? Or perhaps a useless familiar from a misfired spell that she’s nevertheless now unable to get rid of? How about her abusive father/ex-husband, transformed or reincarnated now and still with some kind of power over her? Maybe they’re not related at all and she’s been assigned as the kid’s guardian. Maybe an aspect of herself has become split off, one that she doesn’t want to reintegrate with but can’t dispose of. Or maybe any or all of these relationships apply, but with the roles of child and mother reversed.
Alex the Websurfer
Somewhere in the hotel foyer is a public internet computer, the kind where you buy time in increments and your session counts down from your logon. If the hotel is a fairly slick sort of place then it’s a flashy kiosk with a card reader and a proper booth; if the hotel is a run-down flophouse then it’s an ancient “beige box” machine, at least ten years old and probably fourth or fifth-hand, with rattling fans and a grubby, smeared CRT monitor (but the staff are still very proud of it: they’re providing their guests with internet, just like a modern hotel!).
Alex the Websurfer is an unremarkable man, anywhere between twenty-five and forty. He has a job, or at least errands that take up most of his day, so he’s usually on his way in or out when the PCs meet him. He’s clean, dresses neatly (chinos, collared shirt, polished shoes, clean-shaven, nothing odd) and has no obvious weird traits, although he’s not really interested in conversing with anyone.
What he does do is buy ten minutes on the internet machine every morning before he goes out, and every evening before he retires to his room. He seems to be checking email accounts and a roster of forums and blog sites, although he’s scrupulous about not letting people read the screen over his shoulder: if someone tries he’ll minimise his browser, turn in his chair and glare at them until they go away. Every so often, though, he’ll leave in a state of some agitation or anger and forget to log off, and sharp PCs can get a glimpse of what he’s been doing.
Things they could see on the screen include:
- a glitzy commercial website that seems to be devoted to one of the other guests;
- a blog apparently filled with hysterical, homicidal or bizarrely sexual rantings... which seems to be written by one of the PCs;
- a discussion forum about the hotel, with sub-boards for each guest including the PCs and much conversation (as well as threads with titles like “didja hear the news about the messed-up guy in 604?” or “Poll: which guests will be first when the fun starts on Saturday?”);
- a cascade of rather disturbing instant messages (“Alex? R U there?” “I can still hear it Alex plz plz help” “Alex where R U gon I cant d” or perhaps “Your too late man, theyre all gonna suffer” followed by “WHO R U & WHY R U READIN ALEXS MSGS?” “STOP READIN ALEXS MSGS [PC name] U BASTARD, U’LL PAY 4 THIS”);
- Googled floor plans of the building the PCs have just returned from; or
- a MMORPG that seems to be set in a virtual version of the hotel, with all the other guests as NPCs.
No matter what’s on the screen, Alex never leaves much time on his prepaid session and so there’ll only be time to get a tantalising glimpse of any of this before the computer automatically logs off. Buying a token for more session time is easy, but it never happens quickly enough to let the PCs extend one of Alex’s sessions. Logging back onto the machine won’t help: there’s nothing cached or available for the PCs to retrace his surfing history, and the staff can’t help. (“I wouldn’t know anything about that, sir, we bought the system as is. Even if I could get a record of where he’d been, I don’t think I could really share it with you, sir, just on principle.”) If Alex himself is challenged he’ll be appropriately angry about having his web usage spied on and be more careful about walking away from the machine from then on.
Pattern Man
Early middle aged, dressed rather scruffily but normally (ie no obscene stink, no unnaturally identical or weirdly super-clean clothes, just a normal sort of wardrobe cycle). Glasses, a PDA and a couple of small notebooks and scribble pads. He’s often got a tape measure, a spirit level, plumbline or other sorts of measuring and surveying tools, some of which are rather odd.
He’s found all around the hotel at odd hours, making notes. He’ll record what rooms guests are in, what people ate or drank in the bars and cafes, the distances between bits of furniture or the dimensions of doorways. The PCs may well first notice him when he goes out to the car park on their arrival and makes measurements of their cars, where they’re parked, distances and angles from the car to various points on the hotel and so on. He’ll then strike up a conversation and try and work out their room, their height and weight and other odd facts about them.
He always seems distracted but is always pleasant and apologetic for his behaviour. (“Hi, me again, look, I know I’m being a pain, I’m so sorry, but if it’s not too much trouble, could you just, um maybe tell me, do you happen to have more copper coins in your pocket at the moment, or other metals? Oh, and, um, last question for now I promise, but do you happen to know if your father was born in November?”) He has the demeanour of someone who hates having to cause inconvenience but is constantly forced to by his job. If the PCs are friendly to him he may occasionally ask them to do something like sit at a certain table in the restaurant, or stand with him in the foyer doorway for three minutes. He badgers the staff with similar requests, up to and including asking them to move guests around or evict them. They brush him off.
My initial idea was that he’s a moderately powerful numerologist/geomancer, who’s obsessed with the idea of working a spell which requires exact patterns of numbers, substances, energies, alingnments with the stars and seasons and so on. This may be an attempt to harvest the weirdness chart of the hotel, or perhaps is the cause of it if the spell is still taking effect. Thing is, his spell is so detailed that he can never get all the alignments right, and he’s not effective enough with people, magically or otherwise, to organise them to be, so he remains here, stuck in a constant low-level haze of frustration.
Other possibilities: an accident or experiment that has massively boosted his intellect and/or mind powers has also knocked him off the rails and given him this obsession, Beautiful Mind style. Or he could have slipped here from a parallel version of the hotel and trying to make sense of his surroundings by obsessively trying to work out what all the differences are.
Minor weird stuff
When the PCs are outside one evening, one of them notices that every single window of the hotel is lit and contains the silhouette of a person standing motionless, staring out at them. Perhaps all identical silhouettes, or all different, perhaps not all entirely... right. As soon as the PC’s attention flicks away and back, it’s gone.
A row of rooms on one floor have their doors open as housekeeping goes around with their cart. Walking down the room looking idly into the rooms and out their windows, the PC realises that the view out of one window was wrong somehow. The city skyline has totally different buildings, or the time of day was wrong, or the hills were a different shape. The view from all the other windows is fine, and that door is shut fast when the PC doubles back to it.
Whenever a PC goes to turn off the television in their room, the people on screen stop what they’re doing and give an indignant how-dare-you glare out of the screen and at the PC in the last second before the picture goes black.
If the PCs' windows overlook any kind of thoroughfare, then every person who walks by will at least glance up directly at the window while the PC is there looking out. Some people might wave, some even stop and regard the PC for a while. If the PC goes out ont the street and checks his own window there's no evidence of anything that might be attracting this attention, but as soon as s/he stands at the window again, here come the glances and stares.
Oh, and the Peter thing was fantastic .
