To try a hand at “Doomsaying” for Best Left Buried, I went there and created a homebrew adventure set in an abbey with all the monks disappeared from one week to another. Yet unsure if I had gauged the threat level correctly for the unfamiliar system, I invited a couple of people from the Discord Server to join in the game. That fell flat, and at the proposed time of the game nobody was there. A second try went the same way. So I herded together a handful of kids and teens and let them run through it.

Since Best Left Buried is a fantasy horror game, I tried to start with a bit of eerie and dropped some hints on the way to the Crypt that something strange and bad must be going on at the destination.

Reaching the place the group met a rival NPC Cryptdigger party. They spoke and made a deal: Draw an imaginary line through the area. The eastern part belongs to the NPCs, the western part to the PCs.

That seemed to work out well. But then they found odd slime, and thanks to the my description of the place they started to feel uneasy there. As they entered a building and found more slime on the floor there, they became convinced that should they look up they would see a monster and it would drop on them, so they kept their gaze strictly to the floor … following the old horror movie trope that the fiend only attacks after you see him and cry out in shock.

They grabbed whatever valuables they could lay their fingers on, then, as they heard something like a scream from the east, where the NPC party was at, they turned tail and ran.

Curtain.

No fatalities.

Note to self: Be less horror-esque. At least with younger players.

Image: public domain from pixnio.com