Rescued from storage: Chill invitation

When I was visiting my family a couple weeks back, I delved into my grandmother’s musty garage, stuffed to the gills with storage boxes from my family’s past. There are tons of my old toys, books, etc., and it’s always something of a mystery just what I’ll find. I might report back later on some of the books and toys I uncovered, including a few things I shipped home, but for now I thought I’d share this one piece of paper I found, an invitation I crafted 23+ years ago (yikes!) for a game of Chill.

I remember the game session well, and for the rest of my high school days, those friends and I would sometimes say, “Ahhh! Fear check!” (a game mechanic when a character encountered something frightening or unusual). Lots of fun.

A few random thoughts:

• Dig that lightning bolt motif for the word Chill!
• I’m pretty sure I photocopied this, so I actually did it in red ink less for the scare/blood factor and more because I thought it would scan better than black or blue ink would.
• The language in the bottom left cracks me up: “you possess,” “you can conceive.” I was a pompous guy, wasn’t I?
• S.A.V.E. was a sort of anti-monster organization that all the PCs in Chill ended up belonging to. It was useful, I guess, as a way to get all the PCs together. I used it because back then I was nervous about deviating from game backgrounds and module info, but I think in general the game would have been better off without it. Let the PCs be people caught up in the craziness somehow without an organization, and you can ramp up the fear. Not that the concept itself was all that bad, but it wasn’t developed in enough detail to make it worthwhile, as I recall.
• If you go here and scroll down, you can see the module I ran that session, Isle of the Dead. I’ve got very fond memories of Chill in general and that one in particular.
• Part of what drew me to the module was the freakiness of the various carnival characters, a fascination that continues today and that showed up in Devil’s Cape.

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