The show¶
The show is the framing device of the whole campaign: every session of PITF is played as an episode of an early-1990s television series about the Paranatural Incident Task Force. Andre, the game master, narrates camera moves, cold opens, credits and title cards, and the players treat their characters as that show's cast.
This page covers the television devices only. For the stories themselves, see the episode guide.
Premise¶
The device is set up in the first line of the first session. Andre opens with "If this were a TV show, which let's say it is" and describes a helicopter shot over a forest with white text in the corner of the screen: "Jefferson National Forest, Virginia, 1992." (Radford Horror 01)
The show is treated as a real production. Andre speaks of "the fiction of the TV show" when deciding where an episode cuts to credits, calls the team's meals at Spud Hut "kind of a plot point of the show", and credits "the producers of the show" with buying song rights. (Radford Horror 07, Appalachia 04, Roulet Estate 03)
The series is set in 1992 and 1993, in the alternate history in which Ross Perot becomes president. Its in-fiction chronology is on the timeline.
Anatomy of an episode¶
Cold open¶
Nearly every session begins with a short scene before the credits. Of the 37 recorded canon sessions, 35 have one; Summer Service 05 and Walkers 08 start mid-scene instead. Almost all of them show something the player characters are not present for: a victim, a monster, a villain or a stranger cleaning up. In the third session Zack tries to act in the scene and is told "you're not here"; by the sixth the table expects it, and Ezra asks "Is there a cold open again?" (Radford Horror 03, Radford Horror 06)
The cold opens work as teasers and as clues. Several are only explained later. The fleeing woman of Radford Horror 05 is identified in the same session as Amanda Lucky, which Andre says makes the scene "presumably a flashback". The night-vision headset of Appalachia 06 belongs to the Biz. The face that rises from a tank in Walkers 07 is answered two sessions later by a second Huell eating Twizzlers outside the community center. (Radford Horror 05, Appalachia 06, Walkers 07, Walkers 09)
The full list is in the table below.
Credits and title cards¶
The cold open ends on Andre's stock phrase, "we cut to credits". In the premiere he plays the intro music and describes the title sequence: double exposures of the characters' faces over "scenes of urban decay and supernatural cult imagery", with the cast "looking off into the middle distance, looking super serious, wearing suits". As the music tapers out, the name of the episode comes up in a plain white-on-black font: "The Radford Horror". (Radford Horror 01)
Each case has its own title. Andre shows the players "the new title screen for the show" when the second case begins, and a title card for Utah at the end of the Georgia epilogue. Individual episodes have no titles. (Radford Horror 08, Walkers 01)
Credits also close some episodes. Radford Horror 07 cuts to black on Kurt's last line, which the table settles as "Aw heck." Andre describes the end of Walkers 06 as the point where "we got to the closing credits". Radford Horrors 01 skips the credits after its cold open and holds them until the very end, where Ezra reads the new title aloud. (Radford Horror 07, Walkers 06, Radford Horrors 01)
Recaps¶
The show has no scripted "previously on". After the credits Andre usually places the characters with a line such as "when we left off", or asks the table "who remembers where we were?" and lets the players reconstruct it. When a recap is needed he gives it himself, sometimes before the cold open, and once nearly forgets the cold open altogether: "Oh right, we should do the cold open." (Appalachia 07, Walkers 05, Walkers 07, Walkers 09, Roulet Estate 02)
Camera and editing¶
Scenes are joined with editing terms: "we cut to", "we smash cut to", "we cut to an hour later". Andre calls shots such as "the camera tracks in on Andrew Howard's face", "a slow Hitchcock zoom" and "an establishing shot over Washington, DC", and the baptism cold open of Appalachia 04 switches to "a series of Dutch angles". (Radford Horror 05, Appalachia 02, Appalachia 03, Appalachia 04, Radford Horrors 01)
On-screen text places and dates scenes. Location captions open three arcs: "Jefferson National Forest, Virginia, 1992", "Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest, 70 miles north of Atlanta" and "Inauguration Day, 1993". The Marblehead finale uses "A few hours ago" and "A few seconds from now", and the Rhode Island arc uses "78 days ago", "Twenty-five days ago" and "Present day". Subtitles introduce the Vorkuta Corrective Labor Camp "(abandoned since 1962)" and translate Russian dialogue. (Radford Horror 01, Summer Service 06, Appalachia 01, Roulet Estate 01, Roulet Estate 03)
Music¶
Andre scores the show live, starting with the intro music of the premiere. The players comment on his choices as they play, most often the Psycho strings and "Tubular Bells", which returns in several arcs. "Radar Love" plays in two cold opens. When the music fails, that is noted too: Andre stops a scene to say "This is the wrong music", and in Radford Horrors 02 the credit music cannot be played because Discord has broken it. (Radford Horror 01, Radford Horror 06, Radford Horror 07, Appalachia 03, Appalachia 07, Roulet Estate 03, Radford Horrors 02)
Endings and cliffhangers¶
Most sessions simply stop at a convenient point. A few end on planned cliffhangers. In Radford Horror 04 Andre says "I have an opportunity to end on a cliffhanger, so I'm gonna do it" and has Molly Underhill take the agents aside to report a girl's body found by the interstate; the players answer with Law & Order "Dun-dun" stings. The Rhode Island arc ends on a phone call from the president and a cut to black. (Radford Horror 04, Roulet Estate 03)
Commercial breaks¶
The show itself never cuts to commercial. The only commercial breaks are inside the fiction: the Late Night broadcast in the Walkers 01 cold open ends as it "prepares to cut to commercial", and backstage a production assistant tells the Biz to watch for the light that warns of a break. (Walkers 01)
Cold opens by episode¶
| Episode | Cold open |
|---|---|
| Radford Horror 01 | Helicopter shot over the Jefferson National Forest at twilight; something blue darts over the tree line. |
| Radford Horror 02 | A man in a dark suit watches through binoculars from a rooftop, swears at what he sees, and speeds off in a white van. |
| Radford Horror 03 | A pile of dog collars in the woods; footsteps, and one more collar is thrown on. |
| Radford Horror 04 | Beside burning trees, a coyote approaches a slumped, smoldering figure and begins to eat him. |
| Radford Horror 05 | A young woman in a bloody dress runs through the woods clutching her stomach; something passes overhead. A flashback to Amanda Lucky. |
| Radford Horror 06 | A teenager buries three Ziploc bags of cash in a dark yard. |
| Radford Horror 07 | A man in a suit sifts the ash where the team's assailant exploded, lights a cigarette and waves soldiers and men in reflective suits into the woods. |
| Radford Horror 08 | None for the Radford finale. Late in the session the next case opens on four men in an unlit boat aiming a mounted gun at something in the dark: "Mr. Miller, you may fire when ready." Everything explodes. |
| Summer Service 01 | Slow zoom into the mouth of a sea cave; something big moves inside. |
| Summer Service 03 | Jester carries a tray of food to a chained house at night; a dog growls behind the door and something thumps against it again and again. |
| Summer Service 04 | A woman of about ninety jogs through pouring rain and tells her daughter, "Pastor says God is coming." |
| Summer Service 05 | None. The session opens mid-scene. |
| Summer Service 06 | Two captioned scenes: Big Bill answers a phone in bed ("A few hours ago"), and the USS Oklahoma City fires on a contact that has come back from the shore and is closing at 80 knots ("A few seconds from now"). |
| Appalachia 01 | A woman carrying a sack of peaches through the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest is dragged off-screen. |
| Appalachia 02 | A Spud Hut worker, locked out on a smoke break, follows a sobbing sound into a fissure and is attacked. |
| Appalachia 03 | A gold mine tour; a boy with a Game Boy vanishes into a roped-off tunnel. |
| Appalachia 04 | A vacuum salesman changes into a white robe in a gas-lit tent, drinks from a jar of peaches and is plunged into a river red with clay. |
| Appalachia 06 | State police comb the bushes outside the hotel and bag a night-vision headset. |
| Appalachia 07 | A Spud Hut truck driver listens to "Radar Love" at sunset; something breaks out of the back and the truck crashes. |
| Appalachia 08 | The camera glides to the "Special Projects" doors and drops through the floor into a dark room of cages; a dozen eyes turn toward it. |
| Appalachia 09 | Jan Martense brushes past his secretary, loads a large animal crate into a red pickup and drives away. |
| Walkers 01 | An old television in a derelict room switches itself on to Late Night with David Letterman; someone breathes heavily behind the camera. |
| Walkers 02 | A rancher patrols at night and finds nothing. After he leaves, a coyote stands up on two legs. |
| Walkers 03 | Rows of human shapes wrapped in clear plastic in a dark industrial space; the last one moves. |
| Walkers 04 | A man in a desert trailer lifts a plate of Jell-O to his chin and grey tendrils spool out of his mouth. |
| Walkers 05 | A woman drives into the desert, is ringed by coyotes, and pours white powder down the throat of one of them. |
| Walkers 06 | A woman lets herself into the same trailer and finds cupboards full of Jell-O ("What the fuck, Doug") and a wrapped figure in a chair; Doug comes in behind her. |
| Walkers 07 | Tanks of dark liquid in a dim room; Huell's face rises from the last one. |
| Walkers 08 | None. The session opens mid-scene. |
| Walkers 09 | A high shot of the fortified community center, panning down to a wet, naked Huell eating Twizzlers beside a bulldozer. |
| Roulet Estate 01 | Caption: "Inauguration Day, 1993". The four agents lie ill in an abandoned living room; the Biz vomits into a Stetson. |
| Roulet Estate 02 | A nude man with an unnaturally shaped head loads shotgun shells one at a time in a dark, dusty space. |
| Roulet Estate 03 | The camera pans up from the back seat of the stolen car to a grey alien at the wheel, humming along to "Radar Love" as the fuel needle drops. |
| Radford Horrors 01 | Found-footage style: FBI agents are chased through snowy woods and picked off from above. Runs straight into the first scene with no credits. |
| Radford Horrors 02 | Workers in bunny suits comb fenced woods and bag a blood-streaked handgun; the camera pulls back to a "Safe Environment Fund" logo. |
| Radford Horrors 03 | A long pan down an aisle of pinball machines; a Taser cracks and a masked man carries a woman out. |
| Radford Horrors 04 | A slow pan over frozen Russian countryside to a triangular craft buried where a farmhouse used to be. |
The one-shot Philosopher's Fist has no cold open or credits.
Experiments with structure¶
- Vignettes. Arc openers follow the cold open with a solo scene for each character before the team assembles. (Appalachia 01, Radford Horrors 01)
- Intercutting. The Georgia epilogue cuts between the Oval Office, a CIA black site and a talk-show set. (Walkers 01)
- Non-linear opening. Roulet Estate 01 starts with the hangover, jumps back 78 days, forward to Christmas Eve, and returns by smash cut. Andre had realized that "the time skip skipped over Christmas", so the Christmas episode was done as a flashback. (Roulet Estate 01)
- Epilogue montage. After the pharmacy siege, each character gets a scene months later, staged as cuts with subtitles. (Roulet Estate 03)
- Two storylines. In The Radford Horrors the Biz's scenes in Russia alternate with the team's in Virginia. (Radford Horrors 03, Radford Horrors 04)
- The scene after the episode. Walkers 08 continues after the other players have said good night, with Andre telling Rita, "So let's cut to the other Andrew Howard." (Walkers 08)
- Scenes the cast does not see. For secrets, Andre asks the other players to leave the call, as with the Biz's KGB business. (Appalachia 01, Appalachia 02)
Casting, credits and production jokes¶
- Guest stars. During the first title sequence Andre has the table roll to see whether Chevy Chase is in the show as a guest star. The result is a mixed success. (Radford Horror 01)
- Joke credits. Zack adds "Made by Vagina Lovecat" to the first title sequence and "Created by Dick Wolf" to the first cliffhanger. (Radford Horror 01, Radford Horror 04)
- Casting. When an enormous naked intruder appears in Utah, Dante casts him at once as Ving Rhames, and Andre agrees. Zack had been about to say Laurence Fishburne. (Walkers 07)
- Music rights. When "Radar Love" plays in the Roulet Estate 03 cold open, Andre says "the producers of the show sprang for the rights to another song this time". (Roulet Estate 03)
- Sponsorship. The team eats at McDonald's so often that Andre says the table "should have negotiated a sponsorship deal". (Summer Service 05, Appalachia 01)
Quote
Dante (out of character): "We just really want you to associate the taste of McDonald's with worm parasites. That's just, you know, core part of our brand." (Summer Service 05)
- Episode titles. The players supply their own. Dante titles the Rhode Island opener "The gang gets unemployed", and Zack says the latest episode would have been called "Opposite of Aliens". (Roulet Estate 01, Radford Horrors 04)
- The sequel. When the sixth arc is revealed as The Radford Horrors, plural, Dante and Zack say Andre "did an Aliens". (Radford Horrors 01)
- Rejected cold opens. Dante pitches his own for the second case, "Amanda Lucky's corpse explodes and a thousand moths come out", and a narration gag after the real one: "Freeze frame. I'm Mothman. You're probably wondering how I got here." (Radford Horror 08)
- Television inside the show. The characters watch a good deal of it. Watching Roseanne is Huell's "rock bottom", and the Biz's appearance on Late Night with David Letterman is itself a cold open. (Walkers 01, Roulet Estate 03)
The OVA: a show within the show¶
Philosopher's Fist 3.J/2: Unchainable is a one-shot played in a different game system with different characters, on a planet that is all one country and is run by a werewolf president. It is non-canon. (Philosopher's Fist)
It was tied to the main series afterwards. At the top of the next session of the campaign, Andre "decided, right, retroactively, that the stupid fucking shonen arc we did was an OVA that Huell watched on the hotel's cable TV as he was falling asleep". Because Zack had not been at the one-shot, Andre added that Andrew half remembers it from turning the television on at the Smith Hotel. That makes it an anime video playing on a television inside a television show. (Appalachia 02)
The one-shot has its own framing. Late in the session Andre shows the players "the title of the anime that we are in", which Dante reads out as "Three Point J over Two", and he encourages Rita to do "a dub voice". See the 1992 OVA framing. (Philosopher's Fist)
Lost episodes¶
Five sessions were played but never recorded: Summer Service 02 and "05.5", Appalachia 05 and 10, and Walkers "08.5". Their events are known only from later recaps. See Lost episodes.
Trivia¶
- The only cold open with no following credits is Radford Horrors 01. Andre: "This time we don't cut to credits." (Radford Horrors 01)
- The recording of Appalachia 02 begins mid-recap because Andre forgot to start it. (Appalachia 02)
- Andre noted "for the record" that he had written down the 4:30 a.m. pager call of Radford Horror 04 before the players chose to spend the night on excursions of their own. (Radford Horror 04)
- The night after Andrew's sleepwalk, Andre begins the same smash cut a second time ("we slowly zoom in on Andrew's face as his eyes close, and then we smash cut") before admitting he is kidding. (Appalachia 03)
- Kurt's interrogation of Jan Martense is short on screen. Andre explained that it "is quick for dramatic purposes, not for in-universe purposes". (Walkers 01)