The Tunnelers Campaign Session 4

Played Tuesday, June 3^rd, 2025.


photograph by me, 6-4-2025, on an early morning walk while thinking about this play report

June 4, 2003, just after 4:00 pm, the party is loading into Dennis’s pickup as he blasts The Eminem Show through absolutely godawful car speakers. Jel gives Dennis a description of the CIA Occultist the party encountered, hoping to learn if he is a known local eccentric. Dennis doesn’t know this guy but does point the party to the Resort (officially Mossy Getaway Camp Ground and Spa, but everyone just calls it The Resort), as it is where “rich nuts” tend to stay in town, but warns them to not go there on account of “Grandad” Colhoun (not anyone in particulars grandad, he’s just always been called that by everyone, explains Dennis) takes security very seriously and has the will and resources to cause infinite grief to anyone who disturbs his rich customers.

Arriving back at the motel in 0504 around 4:30, Dennis offers to sell the party some weed. Ash accepts and I find this a good time to implement my financial assets rules, with both players opting for cash and as a result being under active investigation at the behalf of concerned family members.

The evening is spent reviewing Jel’s camcorder footage, starting with taking a fine toothed comb to the recording of the CIA Occultist (colloquially called “the hiker” or “patriotic guy” by the players, who as a reminder do not know his affiliation). It is determined that:
He definitely vanished by walking into an angle where there shouldn’t have been anything to conceal him.
The bush he vanished behind bent out of place as he vanished, then sprung back into place a millisecond after he was gone, but he didn’t touch it directly.
There is a product tag on the back of his coat, as though he had not removed it after buying it.
(at this point there was a digression as I explained to one of the players the aesthetic space in USAmerican culture occupied by LL Bean, which while finding images to share lead to the discovery of “The Bootmobiles,” a real thing the company LL Bean has made on purpose)
The point at which he disappeared, based on what was seen through gaps in foliage, is the vertical center of the bush.
There is no camera artifacting or distortion around him.

Next they check footage from 0103, where the “yeti” (undertaker) sighting occurred. The party finds that:
Jel did not get the cloaked arm or shovel on camera.
She did however, while recording the destroyed camp, film multiple humanoid figures with notable artifacting around them that seemed like branches in motion until the camera distortion highlighted them. These figures dart and hide behind trees at a significant distance.
A low whistling can be heard in the recording in between the croaks of ravens, not a tune any of them recognize. This is the song the undertaker whistles to command its undead minions to Lurk, as detailed by the Lowlife zine.

Footage of 0104 seems totally mundane.

A call I made for this film appraisal was that undead specifically cause distortion and artifacting, but still living magic practitioners do not. I will likely need to make some additional calls along these lines: one of the players has a love of found footage (which I share, I often watch such movies with them) that means they recognize the ability to record and rewatch something later as both a staple of genre and as a valuable tool to be deployed often.

For dinner the party visits the Woodchipper. I am struck by a desire to make a full Woodchipper menu — a nonessential but deeply fun thing to prep. Ash orders blueberry pancakes and a pepsi, and Jel gets chocolate chip pancakes with a side of sausage and a ginger ale. The pancakes are delicious and the sausage is godawful. The decor is PNW-specific redneck-americana-kitsch. Ash, concerned about the “yeti” climbing the sign, asks the waitress if kids climb around on the building or sign often. No, she replies, the kids mostly hang out at “the rocks” (which isn’t “the rock,” thats a different place in town) and listen to “weird music” and “play with fireworks” (an aside I had to explain to both players is that, in my own small town PNW childhood experience, while fireworks are a valid concern wrt fire safety in forested areas, their invocation often carries some cultural baggage: an association with reservations where they can be sold with less restrictions, and thus some anti-native animosity is implicit in the moral panic of children acquiring them).

Some final thoughts:
I revisited The Eminem Show as cultural research on guys who sucked in 2003. I still don’t like it.
Encounters for the next ingame day are rolled: 2 instances of 3 blacktail deer, 12 coyotes as agents of a thoughtform-worker with a positive reaction, and a renegade and hostile thoughtform from 0406 (an especially deadly possibility for a small party)