[UA] Online game ideas required

[Mike Lake]

Simon Brake wrote:
> The premise, so far, is that the characters all knew each other when younger,

My first thought was of their invisible childhood friend, some kind of 
ghost or demon or horrible beastie which got attached to them and the 
grown-ups never saw.  (Maybe it's invisible to adults generally, 
although the PCs, having grown up with it, believe in it enough to see.  
Maybe the adults never paid attention to the kids' fantastical stories.  
Best of all, maybe the kids knew on some level that this was something 
*wrong* and kept it to themselves.)  An unspeakable servant which has 
lost its master would be a good choice.

The kids reached adolescence, and then adulthood, with new interests and 
responsibilities, and were glad for the distraction; it allowed them to 
push the thought of the invisible friend to the back of their minds.  
None of them ever established for sure that it had anything to do with 
Mrs. Tibbets' horrible accident, or the disappearance of the bully down 
the street, or the half-eaten neighborhood pets.  Maybe it didn't.  But 
the kids suspected, and carry the guilt with them to this day, the same 
way a child might blame himself for his parents' divorce.  They were 
glad to forget the beastie.

But it hasn't forgotten them.  It's lonely, and misses the attention it 
got from its friends so long ago.

Is it engineering horrible events to bring them back, or is something 
else at work, and the beastie just wants to play again, gamboling 
through the cornfields on all sevens?  Has it found friends among any 
other children in the meantime, and if so, what do the PCs want to do 
about that?

The beastie can be as benign or as horrific as you like.  A horrible 
beastie is simpler: play up flashbacks to a time when innocent children 
didn't understand just how *wrong* it was.  But I'd prefer a nice 
beastie, especially if your players are familiar with Stephen King's 
IT.  I recommend faking them out with a nice if repulsive beastie: let 
them think the beastie is responsible.  Then let them learn that their 
childhood friend is really a friend, and in fact the one tool they have 
to defeat the real menace.  Then crank the pathos up by arranging things 
so that the only way to defeat the menace is to sacrifice the beastie 
which the PCs should now feel guilty for doubting.

On an entirely different note, if you go with the Ouija board idea, 
don't miss the bullshitting Ouija board at 
http://www.criticalmiss.com/issue4/bullouija2.html.  You might not use 
it for this campaign, but I love the idea so much I had to share it..  
The BOB was my second thought, and the addition of a "lonely" twist on 
the beastie came from here.