Sunday, July 16, 2023

Death at the Drive In

Once I got back from vacation, I put the call out on my Discord that I could run a PLANET MOTHERFUCKER adventure if anybody was interested. I got a bunch of interested replies, so one afternoon in a Taco Bell I sketched out an adventure and then ran it later that night. You may note a heavy dose of inspiration from Joe R. Lansdale's The Drive In, which I had just finished reading. Anyway, if you want this kind of fun in your life, head on over to the Dolorous Exhumation Press site and pick up a copy of PLANET MOTHERFUCKER.

Here's what went down in our game:

The Characters

Runa Ravensbane, heavily tattooed metal babe (Church Burner)

Remington Chadsworth IV, a goon from a long line of goons (Face-Breaking Goon)

Chet, a vampire who looks suspiciously like the Naked Cowboy (Living Dead Hustler)

Fat Elvis, exactly what he sounds like; has a feral child companion named Marsha Marsha Marsha (Wastelander)

Events

After their experience in Spaghettysburg, the motherfuckers were heading southwest in the General Lee. Along the way, they lost Dr MK Ultra, Toffy Jones, and Juice Pouch, but they picked up a hitchhiking Remington Chadsworth IV. They were doing fine on fuel for the car, but finding food was becoming an issue. But then they saw a sign for Cosmic Al's Far Out Drive In. Figuring that a drive-in theater would at least have a concession stand, they decided to pull off the highway in search of some grub.

A fat guy wearing a shirt decorated with rocket ships and planets, and wearing an alien Halloween mask over his face, was sitting by the entrance gate reading a sci-fi paperback titled Samson of Mars. He turned out to be Cosmic Al. He informed them that the drive in had three screens; one was running Prom Night, another The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and the third...Bambi. They paid for tickets and decided to drive up to the screen that Prom Night would be playing on. (Runa was disappointed that it wasn't Prom Night II.)

There were already some cars parked in the lot facing the screen for Prom Night: there was a Miami Vice-lookin' douchebag talking on his car phone in a yellow Porche, two unoccupied pink Vespa scooters, a guy in a cowboy hat smoking a Lucky Strike in front of a beat-up truck (the nametag on his gas station shirt read "Corncob"), and a van with a big circle A on the side with loud, shitty punk rock coming out of it. 

The motherfuckers parked and made their way to the concession stand, where a teenage girl in a plastic "Indian Princess" Halloween mask was taking the orders of two bikini babes. When it was their turn, the motherfuckers loaded up on hamburgers, hotdogs, popcorn, and sodas. They started to eat back at the General Lee and the trailers began playing before the feature. 

Just then one of the bikini girls cried out "What's that!" and pointed to the sky. Everybody saw a big flaming rock streak through the sky and begin hovering above the drive in. It even popped open some eyes and a mouth and started laughing maniacally! As it streaked off, a wall of strange, hazy smoke rose from the ground, encircling the drive in. The motherfuckers jumped in the General Lee, hoping to find clear passage back at the gate, but no dice--the smoke had them walled in.

The motherfuckers drove back up to the concession stand where they found everybody near the edge of panic. (The punk rockers had even left their van; Fat Elvis nicknamed them "Sid and Acne.") The big flaming rock returned. Most folks kept their cool, but a few people lost their shit. The guy in the Miami Vice-lookin' suit got in Chet's face, blaming the group for the comet-thing's appearance since they were clearly "weirdos." Chet responded by ripping his finger off. He ran away, his mangled hand spouting blood. Sid and Acne decided to try to drive through the smoke in their van. Everyone present heard the result: the sound of the van's metal body being peeled open like a tin can, and then screams of agony.

The motherfuckers decided it was high time to interrogate Cosmic Al about the nature of his business here. They first questioned Shoshana, the girl in the Indian Princess mask, but she didn't tell them much. She thought that Cosmic Al was just an incompetent nerd who was too into sci-fi shit. They also paid her to take her mask off to prove that there was nothing weird going on underneath, but she was just a teen girl. She explained that the masks were simply "part of the uniform" for working at Cosmic Al's.

She did, however, point them to a small cinderblock building that served as Cosmic Al's "box office." The door to the box office was locked, and through the window they could see that the walls were covered with gore horror, grindhouse, and exploitation movie posters--but Cosmic Al was nowhere to be seen. Remington smashed the window with his barbed wire-wrapped baseball bat, and Marsha Marsha Marsha, Fat Elvis's feral child sidekick, jumped inside to scout out the situation. A voice from under the desk told them to go away; Cosmic Al was cowering in fear. In fact, Cosmic Al had pissed himself in terror and asked them to go to the other concession stand, get an American flag from in back, and bring it to him so he could fashion it into a makeshift diaper.

On the way to the other concession stand, the group decided to check out who was gathered in the lot in front of the Bambi screening. One vehicle was occupied by a newlywed couple who were busy getting busy in the backseat. They were entirely unaware that they were trapped in the drive in. The other vehicle in the lot was a van with JESUS SAVES painted on the side. Taking offence to this blatant display of Christianity, Runa slashed the van's tires. The family's patriarch saw what she had done and slapped Runa across the face. At this point a horrific and murderous brawl broke out.

The mother ran to the van to get a shotgun, but Remington smashed her up pretty badly with his baseball bat; the woman fled, terrified by the gore that clung to Remington's instrument of death. The children, who were all blonde-haired little Village of the Damned-lookin' gremlins, swarmed Chet and were biting the shit out of him. Fat Elvis looked on in horror, unwilling to take part in this particular atrocity. Runa squared off against the family's father, unsheathing her ritual dagger and stabbing the man several times. 

Heavily wounded, the man tried to make a run for a weird hill the motherfuckers had noticed earlier. Runa climbed the hill after him and managed to stab him in the back. She noticed that it felt like her dagger hit something hard as it exited his body. She flipped him over and started digging into the hill. She discovered that underneath the soil were human bones and what looked to be Native American artifacts. The drive in had been built on ancient Indian burial ground!!!

At the other concession stand, they found a teen wearing a werewolf mask manning the register. They explained Cosmic Al's situation and got the soon-to-be-defiled Old Glory that Al requested. And then, the flaming rock creature reappeared! The sky cracked with thunder and lightning. A bolt struck the kid in the wolfman mask; he leapt out of the concession stand, ripped his werewolf mask off, and revealed that he had been transformed into an actual werewolf!

The motherfuckers made a run for it toward the other concession stand. Corncob was there, and he drew a knife from his cowboy boot. Soshanna looked...distinctly calm about the whole situation. The two bikini girls freaked out and began to argue about whether this was all God's judgment or the work of the Devil. Eventually, the blonde bikini girl knocked the redhead to the ground and tore out her throat with her teeth. Meanwhile, the motherfuckers were joined by Corncob in fighting off the werewolf. The wolfman knocked Fat Elvis prone, then leapt fangs-first at Remington--but the motherfuckers were eventually triumphant. 

In the conversation that followed with Shoshana, the group learned that she knew all along that Cosmic Al had built the drive in atop sacred Native burial grounds. In fact, that's why she took the job at the drive in--all of this was her doing! She was of Native descent herself and had conjured the meteor thing to trap everyone at the movies, to be killed off one by one, as a way of reclaiming the land. Now that the jig was up, she pulled out a tomahawk and prepared to kill the motherfuckers.

Now, the motherfuckers are generally bad people. I mean, they killed a family with very little provocation like half an hour ago. But they drew the line at racism and defiling Native lands. They were especially offended that Cosmic Al had made his only Native employee wear an Indian Princess mask. They explained this to Shoshana, and her position toward them softened. As long as they weren't going to try to stop her, she offered to tell them about a way out of the drive in. She told them to go into the walk-in freezer in the concession stand, move aside the box of Otter Pops, enter the tunnel beneath and follow it to exit the drive in via an underground passage. 

Before they left, they got to see the meteor-thing conjure Leatherface from the screen showing Texas Chain Saw Massacre and watch as Leatherface murdered Cosmic Al. Everyone else was left to death at the hands of Shoshana. Fat Elvis considered not leaving the drive in, but eventually gave in. He probably realized someone other than the rest of the group should be in charge of raising Marsha Marsha Marsha.

The group hid out for a few days, then returned to the drive in once the smoke surrounding it had dispersed. Everyone was dead and Shoshana was gone. They reclaimed the General Lee and looted the remaining cars, netting a bunch of cash, a lucky rabbit's foot, a workout book written by Charles Atlas, a big box of extra-splintery chopsticks, and a box of limited edition Jim Jones Kool-Aid.