Little Fears Actual Play: Night of the Squashed Cat

RPPR is always expanding, so we are proud to present our first Actual Play. In the future, we’ll bring you a wide variety of games. Please let us know what kind of games you want to hear. Bear in mind this recording was made in 2005 with a simple voice recorder. However is is perfectly understandable.
Synopsis: Little Fears is essentially a horror game about kids for adults. It can be very dark, but this was my first game of Little Fears so I ran it middle of the road. I based it on several of the stories in Scary Stories to tell in the Dark and More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

The setting: All of the PCs lived on the same block, so their parents got together and bought a time share at a large cabin in the woods far away from home. There is no TV and no video games.

One day, all of the parents left to visit the lake. They hired a babysitter, a teen named Chad who was kind of a good ole boy. Of course, they complain to Chad that they’re bored. He tells them that being bored is better than they know. You see, Sophie’s mom once ran over a cat but it survived being squashed flat. She felt bad for the animal so she brought it to the cabin and fed it. It’s still in the basement looking for its next meal…

The players (all played 8 or 9 year old kids):

Mikey Athletic and outgoing
Jeni, future cheerleader with cellphone
Stanley: Bookworm with a beagle named Atreyiu
Sophie: Tall and wants to be a cop.

Overall, i think everyone had fun and were appropriately creeped by the squashed cat. It was a great monster as I could simply have it brush by the PCs to scare them.

Also, the rules for Little Fear work well for the game. I didn’t explain the belief rules beforehand but I did let them use it when they figured it out on their own.

Some things that worked well with the game:

The Squashed Cat was a great monster because it was both easy for players to visualize and it was damn useful as a GM. Whenever they went into the house, I could just have the cat brush up next to a player’s foot since it could hide under a sofa or dresser.

Having it slither over a character who had fallen down, describing it great detail (you feel a leathery weight over your face and the stench of roadkill and pee overwhelms you) I think worked pretty well. The PCs never saw it in great detail, I always made it vague and uncertain.

Giving the players some breathing room so they could recover a bit helped. If I had made it nonstop scary stuff then I think the players would have gotten numb.

I foreshadowed several times which helped. For example, the PCs saw the headlights of their parents’ car in the distance. Then later, the headlights disappeared, just as a ghost was stalking them.