Previous Events
A brief summary and photos of previous events.
September 2016
Chapter One
The Copper Temple campsite, they look harmless enough…
The Lancaster University Society of Heretics, had become more than just another student society to the players. LUSH had become a community where they and their peers of skeptics and atheists had spent many a long evening in the throes of hearty debate, setting the world to rights over a pint of real ale in Grad bar. That being said, they were all too aware of the echo chamber.
The Copper Temple campsite, they look harmless enough…
But then the cult appeared on campus. Calling themselves the Copper Temple, they began evangelizing to students, luring the vulnerable into their ranks with promises to fix what was broken, cutting them off from their courses, their friends and even family.The players secured an invitation to their commune in Silverdale forest intending to produce an exposing documentary project, like a bunch of young Louis Therouxs, to record this cult’s bizarre beliefs and abusive practices.
Led into the woods
Their beliefs turned out to be more real than the players had hoped and of eight players two converted, four sold themselves into slavery with the power they had upset by destroying it’s shrines whilst the eighth lay dying within a supposedly magical circle…
Documentary Interviews
Inside the circle
Chapter Two
The missing reported in the media
It was a week before the police had identified all the missing persons. All members of LUSH, all lost in Silverdale forest. The players had never heard of this cult, yet for no discernable reason members of this student society, family and friends to the players, had gone out to the woods and never returned.
The brothers comfort each other
The Lancashire Constabulary had done all they could but there was never much to report. The woods were combed day and night for any signs of the missing cultists or the student film-makers, but they seemed to have vanished without a trace. Soon, a week had past. Then, nearly two.
Then they broke into the inspector’s house
Then they found the cameras. After a few days analysing the footage, the Inspector called to tell the players that there was footage you needed to see.
Things didn’t look good
A hard weekend was supposed to consist of the police will be sitting them through a screening of the footage they found, and the next morning participation in a press conference regarding the ongoing search. Accommodation in Lancaster was arranged, and for the first time the players found themselves in the company of others whose family have vanished somewhere in those woods.
But there was more to this than they realised. The police themselves had been infiltrated by the cult, the footage had been edited and the truth of the matter seemed far too big to take in. Of fourteen players two ran away, three took the mysteriously appearing dying man to hospital (saving the dying player from the previous chapter), two distracted the police and ended up in the cells, three exchanged themselves for three lost in the woods, one actively converted to the cult and one silently bore witness to the strangeness.
January 2016
This event was originally scheduled to run on the 6th December 2015 but had to be postponed due to the local substation flooding leaving us without heat, light or running water.
For many years, the Secure Facilities programme was classified “above top secret”. Only those directly involved in its administration were even aware of its existence; some say even the Prime Minister and the Royal Family didn’t know about it.
Get into the bunker!
The players didn’t know about it until a few hours before the event when a soldier arrived and informed them that the nuclear situation was now deadly serious. To the point of imminent catastrophe. However, the Secure Facilities programme had established a network of secure and completely secret bunkers across the country; places where the great and the good could shelter throughout the worst disasters. And the players were important enough to have an invitation.
And so, they joined the other VIPs on the bus, and made their way to safety.
Are they all dead?
Except that it didn’t really turn out that way. After a bus journey during which they were informed that the facility was compromised but that there was no where else to get to they arrived to try and survive as best they might.
Foreshadowing
It’s not my blood…
The facility was eerily empty except for the suspicious head of maintenance and the grey tentacles occaisionally emerging from the walls, ceiling and floor. After shooting two thirds of the humans alive in the bunker when they arrived fourteen of our eighteen players made their way to the cocoons that would help them live out their lives in a distant future free of radiation.
What do I do?!
It was a merciful death…
One was shot, two committed suicide and one died of radiation poisoning.
July 2015
‘Yes, I remember Adlestrop — The name,
because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there Unwontedly.
It was late June.’
yone knew you. Or so the players thought… Morning, noon or night, the streets would ring with friendly greetings and pleasant conversation. This was Adlestrop. This was home. Of course, it’s not just the beautiful scenery that brought in the visitors. The welcoming community was the heart of the tiny town, ready and willing to organise any and all events for the villagers. And that most important time of the year had rolled around again.Players took the part of the residents of Adlestrop on the 4th of July, when the annual village fete took place in the local church hall. It was supposed to be a fun day out for all the family where nothing could ever be more perfect…
As players discovered though, the reason for the perfection of Adelstrop was indeed the welcoming community of robots and nanite controlled hum
Welcome to Adelstrop Village Fete
ans. This community was very welcoming and they wanted to welcome the players into the heart of their perfect, efficient community. Players found themselves increasingly paranoid as more and more of their friends and neighbours turned out to be a robotic part of the community, even as they tried to plot together to free themselves from their threat.
Reverend Beaument is getting nervous
The WI cannibals have realised that not everyone tastes meaty…
The first casulty; heart attack induced by nanites…
The stand-off between the robots and the humans
Things are getting very tense…
March 2015
The wine tasting starts perfectly pleasantly.
‘In this valley of dying stars, In this hollow valley…’
In 1938 Howard Auseil, a well-known collector of objets d’art and wines invited people to join him at his home for a weekend of wine tasting. Once an asylum housing the criminally insane, the Auseil Manor contained the largest collection of esoteric art and artifacts in the north. A recluse of no small repute and wealth, an invitation from Howard Auseil was not easily turned down. The question was; what did he want with them?
Players were a variety of Howard’s friends, colleagues and acquaintences.They found themselves trapped in Auseil’s home, when the aylum machinery which Howard had converted in accordance with various ancient rituals that he was familiar with, locked them inside after he was killed. The murder too died, vapourised by Howard’s machine. Then, the dread Hollow Men began to appear.
The game was the first of the three single day events Room 13 are running in 2015. In the (Clark Ashton Smith) Mythos based survival horror that followed six of the fifteen players were killed by the strange faceless Hollow Men, one committed suicide in the name of love, five stepped through a strange portal between this world and that of Cykranosh and two lived to emerge alive from that former asylum.
Flirting whilst high on opium does not go well.
The professor tries to grasp what his friend was attempting.
Reading the curious ritual documents.
They’re coming for us again
We’ve got to get you patched up soon.
September 2014
Trying to film the ghost without letting it affect them
The British Haunts team returned to ThirteenTV with a weekend long live special at The Big White House in Cumbria- an apparently unassuming house with a long history of paranormal phenomenon.
Alongside the live shows, fans were able to follow the action online, with webcam feeds and Twitter interaction providing the best opportunity ever to be part of the action. As evidence of paranormal activity mounted, this was an incredible opportunity for research, and quickly became the most exciting investigation the British Haunts team and their special guests had ever undertaken!
The cast and crew of the British Haunts team (plus guests) documented the strange occurrences for as long as they could, as they sighted first an orb and then a growing ghostly shape which not only made them do strange things but also started to have an effect on the eagerly watching fans at home. After discovering the gruesome remains of their technician – who had apparently died horribly whilst they filmed – they shut down the feeds but it was too late. Fans were already converging on the site as their psyches began to fray; this weekend was like no other show they’d made before.
Eighteen of eighteen lived, escaping as the building burned to the ground. However, they sacrificed hundreds of their fans and twitter followers in the process – many indirectly, as they fell into a catatonic state as a result of their actions, but also some directly through being set fire to or run over in the course of their escape.
You can read the events as they happened on Twitter at http://britishhaunts13tv.wordpress.com/.
I… uh… found something
I don’t know what happened officer. There’s been this ghost…
“Quick! Catch him!”
Today, work was… stressful
October 2013
The source of all the problems…
Brackenheath Hotel, the most haunted hotel in the north-west (possibly in England) welcomed guests to it’s Annual Ghost Story Weekend on the 18th-20th October 1954. Members of the Society for Psychical Research were invited to work throughout the weekend, with exclusive access to parts of the building usually off-limits to guests.
Guests were told to expect chills on Friday night with readings from classic and local ghost stories- a well known local author joined them, and guests were invited to read their own favourites, too.
On Saturday there was an unfortunate seance with the landlady acting as an experienced medium.
After the chills and thrills of the weekend, alas the guests did not enjoy, as promised, being brought back to to the world of the living at the end with a delicious, traditional Brackenheath Hotel Sunday Roast Dinner.
This was a more traditional ghostly horror story albeit with some scientific elements.
The Members of The Society for Psychical Research making Science to Save Us!
Fifteen of nineteen emerged from that terrible, bloody weekend.
The Explorer believes in the power of guns rather than science…
The Doctor binds wounds
It was some time into the digging that they found what they were looking for…
September 2012
Taken by Ann Sundqvist
Sergeant Hawthorne surveys the jungle
The year was 1968 and players found themselves in the middle of the Tet Offensive. Not that it means much of a damn to them – stuck in a field hospital, surrounded by the stinking hot jungles of Vietnam. Every day more injured dragged off the front lines and brought there, waiting for evac by the same helicopters the gooks used for target practice.
The only thing to do in the ferocious heat was wait. The nurses did their best, tending to the injured and handing out whatever meds the last drop brought. All to the constant rattling of gunfire and drumbeat of distant exposions. They sat by the radio and waited for the med-evac, their ticket out of there on a chopper and out of the humid, bloodsoaked deathtrap.
Sherman once said “War is Hell” and Sartre said that it was other people.
The truth was a lot worse…
It was mythos based survival horror set in the Vietnam War. They players found themselves plunged into the middle of VC Territory. They were faced with a trek across Vietcong Territory to get to the Evacuation Point but not everybody made it across the terrain or past the VC and that was without the weird temple that stood in their way.
The nurses of Station 936, little aware of what awaited them
The slow attrition of war.
“How are we going to get there?”
Five of eighteen survived to tell the tale…
April 2011
Set in the wilds of Cumbria in 1905: John Templeton has died and he asked his nearest and dearest to gather at his home in Cumbria to attend a will reading. They gathered at the appointed time and discovered that his will was actually a series of clues to his fortune, as they were trapped at the house due to weather they also discovered that he had been a magician trying to travel across to another dimension…then the house got stuck between the worlds…
The whole group ready and waiting
Pouring over Treasure Hunt clues.
Smiling innocently, because she knows what her stats are in a knife fight…
“Mum…are you having an affair with the lawyer?”
“It’s scary out there…”
“It’s scary in here too!”
Eleven out of twelve got out alive. (It was our first event, the threats have
increased since then).
Photos by Ann Sundqvist.
