The incidence took place on Mon, May 23 from 8pm to 1:30am, by request of myself explicitly for the purpose of research for this project. It was held in Lagunita library, a small library attached to the main meeting and administrative building for Lagunita Hall, a campus dormitory complex. Eight people participated, of which seven belonged to SGS and one was a local friend of an SGS member. The Director, GD Crowley, was the writer of the module, and the other seven players played seven out of the eight characters given by the module.

The Process of Determining Participants

Participants were recruited during the previous week through verbal request and use of the SGS email list. Monday night was converged on as the night that the greatest number of people could participate. An SGS event that normally regularly took place on Monday nights was moved to Sunday night so that the two people who wanted to participate in both could do so.

In addition to the Director, seven people showed up on Monday night to play. Given that the module was written for four to eight players, starting was delayed about twenty minutes as various people phoned various other people asking them to come. No eighth player was found, and at around 8:45 the event started with only seven players.

The OOC Process Surrounding the Incidence

The event began with distributing and finishing characters. The module provided characters that were partially prewritten and partially player-determined, where the player would answer a set of guided questions on the back of the character sheet in order complete the concept. The process of finishing characters and discussing and approving them with the Director took another hour.

All players were told to use the bathroom ahead of time, because the characters were trapped in a room with no bathroom access, and once the game started it would be disruptive to leave OOC.

The actual game started at 10pm, when it was determined that IC the time was really 9pm, and that the game would run to IC midnight (so OOC 1am). Afterwards, there was a brief discussion in which the Director explained what was really going on and players gave their characters' secrets.

The Physical Setup

The incidence translated the real space of Lagunita Library into the single cramped room of the Cunningham house in which the characters were trapped. A small alcove under a window was determined to be the closet in which the shrine and Tanya' body were kept. The exit was determined to be the IC exit to the hallway.

There was one IC gun in the story, which belonged to Kurt Carter. A small spark gun prop was used for this. There were also two knives, belonging to Mandy Vernon and Ariel Thompson, for which simply pencils were used as representative props.

A Summary of IC Events

At the beginning of the game, all the characters entered the room, the lights went out then back on, some but not all characters heard a voice in their head speaking to them, and the room was sealed. Initially, the responsible characters (Kurt Carter and Patrick Cunningham, with occasional help from Lars Carter and Will Cunningham) spent a while trying to get the door open to no avail.

During that time, Ariel told Jenny that a voice had told him to check in the closet if he wanted to see "her". They persuaded the adults to open the closet, whereupon the body of Tanya Carter was revealed.

There ensued chaos in which Kurt and Lars Carter tried to keep Jenny from looking at the body, which was badly mutilated, while Jenny obsessively tried to get closer to Tanya. At one point, Jenny's hysterics sufficiently frustrated Patrick Cunningham that he hit her across the face, thoroughly intimidating and dominating her.

Disembodied voices whispered that everyone was being kept in the room so that the guilty party could be caught and brought to justice. Over the next hour, the responsible parties tried to work out which of them was the killer, while Jenny and Ariel became convinced that Jenny's father, Kurt, had killed his own daughter in order to control her and would kill them next.

Both Patrick and Will Cunningham knew rituals of divination using Christian magic, and enlisted reluctant aid to help pray for the identity of the murderer. Ariel was briefly pointed to, but nobody believed the conclusion.

Jenny found out from the evil spirit that her father was carrying a gun, and tried to steal it from him. She failed, but everyone was then shocked that Kurt had brought a gun to the party. Later on, Jenny convinced Lars that Kurt was the murderer, and Lars stole the gun from him.

He immediately used the gun to try to shoot open the door, but the evil spirit caused the bullet to ricochet and kill Will. Patrick was relatively unfazed by the death of his son. Discussion ensued about the nature of the disembodied voices, and whether they could be trusted. More anger and fear followed, though little progress was made. Finally, everyone decided to stop trusting the evil spirit except Mandy, who was secretly on its side, and Jenny, to whom it had promised to bring Tanya back if it succeeded.

As midnight approached, the increasing tension caused Jenny to set Kurt on fire, killing him. Thinking that Jenny was evil, Lars shot at her trying to kill her. Ariel jumped in the way, got injured, but saved Jenny. At that time, the evil spirit broke free because a majority of people in the room (Jenny, Ariel, and Mandy) were on its side. It opened a wall, through which Mandy escaped. In the confusion trying to stop Mandy, Lars accidentally shot and killed Patrick.

In the aftermath, Mandy got away and became powerful with the sponsorship of the now freed evil spirit. Ariel escaped with Jenny during the confusion, and the two of them ran to New York, where the spirit did in fact bring Tanya back to life and return her to them. Lars was convicted of killing Patrick and went to juvenile hall.