So, we found out that we weren't "announcing" meetups for the recurring Story Games Glendale meetup, which obviously might have some impact on whether or not people are getting notified it's happening. This was the first time Mark had just done so, and we ended up with a well rounded group of 6 of us.

One of the players who showed didn't even know about the meetup, but just happened to be hanging out at Game Haus, and saw that I put up the "Story Games Glendale" name text on my table. He came over and was asking about it, and was already familiar with many of the types of games, so we had another taker!

The Final Girl

After a few pitches, some of which sounded great, we went with The Final Girl for a few reasons. We barely had enough for 2 tables (and if we did split up, the pitched games wouldn't be optimum). Some of the pitched games were new-ish, so would need a bit of reading and work. And best of all: Many hadn't played The Final Girl before (and those of us who had were looking forward to it).

I had a copy of John Atkinson's Horror Plot Generator, which helped us as we were otherwise being indecisive as a group. I had four of the players each secretly choose one word from each column, and then speaking it out loud: "Writer in Maine eaten by clown". In this case, our new player was mentioning that "clown" just wasn't going to do it for him, and felt like it was taking the game too "gonzo", and would cheapen the session. The player suggesting 'clown' wasn't married to it anyways, so we changed it to "mental patient". Using the X-card for tone FTW!

Writers' Conference in Maine, and the cannibal mental patient

We decided on a conference in a small motel near a lake up in the mountains. We each created two characters, and almost none of them explicitly said "writer" as the profession, which was a great start. Many were perspective, aspiring writers (as it turned out during play), one was at the wrong conference, and of course we had the very odd groundskeeper as well.

After some introduction scenes at the airport and the hotel, we got to First Blood. An newbie ambulance driver pulled up to take care of an injured person, and of course they just happened to have an insane asylum patient in the back of the van, as well. The game proceeded how it normally does, and people started dying left and right.

A tweak for The Final Girl with large groups

One tweak I really enjoyed, and would recommend when you have more than 5 players: The Final Girl has Carnage rules for larger groups. In those rules, the Killer (director of Standard scenes) kills everyone but one character. In our case, with 6 players, this felt like it would cause the game to proceed too quickly (even though the Killer can choose how many characters are in a given scene).

In our case, we made it so that the Killer could choose ahead of time whether they would play the scene as a Standard scene (with the goal of killing one character), or a Carnage scene (with the goal of killing all but one character). This allowed us to easily tweak the pace based on our desires and how long we wanted the game to possibly last. It was just a little more control over pace that worked to our advantage in this case, and didn't complicate or change the game in any other way.