All Your Supernatural Elimination Needs

Not every ectoplasmic entity is Gozer or Samhain. The majority of the aggravating apparitions a Ghostbusters franchise will face in a given work week are likely to consist of barely there wisps and indistinct noises. 

The real money comes from removing troublesome spirits of course but even this often entails capturing poltergeists more mischievous than malign. Epic battles against world-ending Class VII Meta-Spectres are thankfully few and far between. 

Image based on a t-shirt design by Secret Base

The Ghostbusters RPG campaigns I've run and played have all featured encounters with minor ghosts and annoying but easily dispelled hauntings. A Ghostbusters ongoing campaign definitely benefits from these 'lesser' though still potentially problematic situations and I thought I would explain how and why in order to give anyone interested an insight into constructing such events themselves. We start with...

The Call

"We Got One!"

The Call is the term I use for the majority of paranormal encounters the Player Character Ghostbusters will come across during the campaign. There are a lot of reasons to use these Calls as opposed to/in addition to going straight into a larger, more involved scenario. I often refer to the latter as Cases.

The main use of Calls is pretty simple; journeymen ghosts give the players and their characters exciting moments separate from the larger narrative of the adventure. Like random encounters in old school Fantasy or fights with common thugs in Superhero games, the ghasts and ghouls you face on Calls are fun fights that keep the momentum and excitement of a session going.

The Calls also give the players a chance to see their Ghostbusters being Ghostbusters. I can't emphasize how important this is in any and all games, especially at the beginning of a campaign. If the players are playing Ghostbusters they should get the chance to bust ghosts. Otherwise you've sold them a false bill of goods. 

How The Call works:

Consider opening a session with the GM or better yet an NPC employee (Executive Assistant, Intern) telling the PCs that they received a call from someone about a paranormal presence at a particular place doing a certain thing. The caller has hired the Ghostbusters to get rid of the ghost ASAP! 

Example: "Hey guys, we just got a call from that little French bakery down on 13th and 5th. They say something is eating all the bread and pastries right out of the oven - literally! How fast can you get down there?"

The team might receive The Call when they are:

•  At their Headquarters doing individual tasks.
• Driving back to HQ following a previous Call (real, false alarm, or a hoax).
• At the location of a Call they've just completed. 
• While eating dinner, relaxing, on their day off.

There are lots of possibilities.

A Call can also come in while in the middle of a adventure or story arc if the PCs are unsure what to do next or overthinking their current predicament. Shake things up with a Class IV Mass on the loose and snap the team into action. It might clear there heads or give you the GM an opportunity to throw in some clues to the bigger picture. 

One thing to note is that where the Ghostbusters are and what they're doing can color the scene and/or point to a larger plot. Say they get a call immediately after a finishing up a previous outing (likely having occurred offscreen) and it isn't too far away from the prior bust. Someone mentions they went on a call one town over just yesterday. Hmm...something might be up in this neck of the woods. 

Now imagine the PCs are all hanging around the Headquarters and you ask each what they're up to: One of them is washing the Ecto-vehicle. Another is re-organizing the team's reference library. Still a third is making everyone lunch. That's all nice but it seems like business is pretty slow. Mention this and ask when was the last time they had a Call? If your players are anything like mine this will give them an opportunity to role-play as they discuss how long it's been, which also gets them more invested in their characters and the campaign.

Maybe they're having a magnificent feast with the last of the petty cash. 

Picture this:

"Our last call? It was pretty recently, right gang? It had to be last Thursday. The 11th."

"Last Thursday was the 18th. *Checks the records* "Yes. It's been two weeks."

"Two weeks? Dang. No wonder I'm so bored."

"Geez. We're just too good at our job."

I've done sessions 'en media res' as well, having the Ghostbusters already on site. Play it as if they responded to the Call sometime before the start of the session. One of them might be clever enough to get on the walkie-talkie or phone and say, "I don't see anything so far. What are we looking for exactly?", so that HQ (the GM) can fill them in on the specifics of their present outing. If you and your players are really in sync they might just roll with it and start building the mission through in-character banter (my Home Office guys have done this). 

A vital use of these incidental hauntings is to give the GM a way to introduce the various elements of the game without the threat of an imminent apocalypse. A Call is a great way to start a campaign (or really any given session) by slowing doling out information on the setting, the job of the Ghostbusters, what the equipment does, and how the rule mechanics work. In addition, any such encounter can certainly lay the groundwork for greater machinations going on in the background. The Call can also be expended into an adventure itself. Let's take two examples: Slimer of The Sedgewick Hotel and Gulper/Big Gulp.

The haunting of the Sedgewick Hotel's 12th Floor is the template for The Call. The original Ghostbusters haven't had any work since opening their business and are having dinner at the firehouse. The Sedgewick's Hotel Manager calls to hire them for their first job. Janine Melnitz receives the call, rings the alarm bell, and the boys leap into action.

When the team arrives they briefly speak with the Manager and get a little history and info on what's going on, then head up to the 12th Floor to take care of the situation. After a series of mishaps and fumbles (blasting at a maid, Venkman getting slimed), the guys in gray manage to weaken, lasso, and eventually trap the iconic green Focused, Non-Terminal Repeating Phantasm. They came, they saw, they kicked its ass!

At the time they had no idea the appearance of Slimer - or any of the others ghosts they would capture - were symptoms of a much greater supernatural disturbance linked to the coming of a particularly destructive Sumerian god. But ya'know how it is. These things happen. 

For another take, there was Gulper, later re-named Big Gulp, an original creation of ours who appeared in our Ghostbusters: The Home Office game. This was a good dozen or more sessions or so into the campaign and the Home Office gang received a call to clean out some ghosts haunting an abandoned hospital in Staten Island, NY. There were several spooks at the location, mostly Class II and III. There was one Class V however and it proved hard to catch. At some point it panicked and swallowed up a small Class II ghost. The Class V basically ate the littler one! This charged up the Class V, now dubbed 'Gulper' by one of the guys. With the extra PKE it gained in doing so it increased its speed and escaped through a wall. The team cleared out the rest of the place but could not find Gulper. We told the client that if he showed up again, we'd capture him at no additional charge. 

Later in the session, which focused on an ongoing investigation from a prior session, we got a couple of Calls that were pretty weird even by GB standards. An office in downtown Manhattan had a spirit causing a ruckus so they called the Ghostbusters but when we arrived the situation had subsided. There was no ghost to be found. Nothing on the Ectogoggles or PKE Meters either. Similarly, later in the day two members of the group went to check out a sighting a few blocks from the firehouse only to come up similarly empty. No spectral activity at all. 

Eventually the gang finds out that Gulper followed the Ghostbusters back to New York City where it kept on 'consuming' other boos. In doing so it got bigger, stronger, faster, and was nearing Class VII Meta-Spectre status. While on a Call to bust three ghost crooks, Gulper shows up to eat them and he's huge!

Renamed 'Big Gulp', the entity set about trying to eat everything around it but could only actually subsume PKE and Ectoplasm. Anything else that went into its mouth would be crushed up and destroyed but basically pass through the entity and be ejected out the rear wrecked and covered in slime. Did you go 'eww'? Ha. Funny, so did we. 

I'll leave you on a cliffhanger there as I want to cover Gulper/Big Gulp further in an upcoming post. Suffice to say, these are two very different directions to take otherwise basic ghosts; one lead to a big bad and the other became a big bad. 

Other reasons to use a 'random' haunting include:

• Disrupt some mundane trouble the gang has gotten into. Lucky break, huh?
• New equipment needs a field test when a call comes in. What great timing!
• On patrol, days before Halloween. Stop that ghost! Cheese it - It's the Ghostbusters!

Case Dismissed!

That's enough for now. I've actually been writing this post for over three days. I've split my original thoughts into a few different posts, so keep an eye out for those hopefully coming out tomorrow. 

Now that we have an idea of what The Call is and how it can work, next up I'll talk about the entities your Ghostbusters are likely to meet, blast, and hopefully trap. 

See you soon,

AD

Barking Alien