Youth Halloween One-Shot

You wake up in a strange room...
You wake up in a strange room with a bunch of strangers...

1. The characters wake up with no memories in a stone room. They must find their way out and discover what happened to them. The room contains a stone altar, a pair of bronze doors opening onto a vast abyss, and a passage leading out on the far side from the doors. The walls and pillars are carved with grotesque images, still colored in faded layers of ancient paint. The place feels indescribably old.
Also, the characters are really hungry. They can describe their physical appearances but don't know anything else yet, including their names.
Mechanics: They begin as ordinary humans, but with 100 points to spend. Points can be spent on all sort of things, from additional strength to claws or tentacles or alternate forms to reducing their vulnerability to sunlight or their need to feed on humans. Other resources -- languages, skills, mundane items -- can also be purchased cheaply; purchased items cannot be lost.

2. Encounter a human in the ruins. He recognizes them. Let the kids make the introductions (i.e. choose their own character names). He swears he's not "one of those things" and begs them to help him out of the ruins. His name is Darren Anderson, and his leg is broken. He says they were student researchers, come here to meet with Dr. Shaw and learn from him. Dr. Shaw has been working to unearth these ruins. They're in northern Iran.

3. As they exit the ruins, they encounter a tall security fence with razor wire along the top. Something has torn through it. Beyond is a ruined camp, its buildings a combination of large tents and converted shipping containers, holding records of the dig. If they look, they can locate Dr. Shaw's tent and extract a hand-written diary from its ruin. ("Could this finally be the fabled city of Kamorel, said to be home to a civilization older than all of mankind? What secrets could we pry, even now, from its remains?")

4. Before they can discover more, a team of soldiers arrives, shouting in Farsi, and begins shooting at them. (Speaking Farsi costs two points.) Players may spend points on things that would help their characters. If Anderson is still with them, he is shot and killed. If any of the soldiers interact with the characters, they will reveal that whatever happened here has loosed a great flood of evil things onto the world.

5. Further perusal of the diary will reveal that the expedition has discovered the Temple of the Doorway, and that Dr. Shaw anticipated the arrival of a group of student researchers. He planned to use them in a ritual to break the Great Seal that held the doors closed. With the doors open, Shaw believed he would learn the location of Tananorak, where the ancient oracles were said to break the bonds of space and time and become one with the knowledge of the greater worlds. (They now have vague memories of taking their places and assisting with the ritual while Dr. Shaw lectured them about historical practice and how the ancient priests would have conducted their worship. Then the great stone doors swung open, and darkness spilled out into the world, and then the world was darkness. Somewhere beyond or behind those memories is a vision of a place they've never seen: a stone temple, emerged from antarctic ice after millennia beneath.)

6. How to get there? There are civilian and military cargo planes on a temporary runway some twenty miles from the camp, and plenty of vehicles in the camp. (Knowing how to drive a stick shift costs one point, but there is at least one sedan if the characters don't mind crowding in. Knowing how to fly a plane costs four points, and knowing how to prep a plane for flight costs two points.) If they can get on a plane, the characters can fly south with only two stops to refuel -- but at the second one, they are international fugitives, wanted by Interpol and potentially subject to arrest by the local authorities. The runway used to be part of a temporary U.S. military base; most of the housing is composed of modified shipping containers. They will also need to deal with new hungers (human flesh? blood? hearts?) and their vulnerability to sunlight. (Buying off the hunger or the sunlight vulnerability costs ten points. Apiece.) Anyone they encounter here will probably shoot at them.

7. Once they've crossed Africa, they can head unerringly to the temple in Antarctica. Unfortunately, there's no airport nearby; they can either search for one, buy knowledge of one, or put the plane down the hard way and hope to walk out later.

8. Dr. Shaw has beaten them to the temple by a bare margin, and now they have to stop him from completing the Ritual of Opening; this will be difficult because he's come partly unstuck in space and time, so he will blink around and sometimes there will be as many as five of him. He might also summon things, or have an entourage of eldritch beasts with him; whatever it takes to make this an epic final battle.