About this wiki¶
This is a fan wiki for PITF, a tabletop role-playing campaign about the Paranatural Incident Task Force: four mismatched federal agents sent to look into things the government would rather not explain, in an early 1990s that is not quite ours. The campaign is played with Monster of the Week and is framed at the table as a television show, with cold opens, credits and cliffhangers.
What it covers¶
The wiki covers the campaign's six story arcs and one non-canon one-shot: 38 recorded sessions in all, plus what later episodes establish about five sessions that were never recorded. It has pages for the episodes, the characters, the monsters, the places, the organizations, the items and the lore, and for the people at the table.
Where to start¶
- Episode guide: every session in story order.
- Cast and players: who plays whom.
- The player characters: Andrew Howard, Kurt Larson, Dick "The Biz" Baxter, Huell Kendrick and Daniel Webster.
- Paranatural Incident Task Force: the unit itself.
- Timeline and Alternate history: when it all happens, and how this 1992 differs.
- The paranatural and Unresolved mysteries: what the team has found, and what it still does not understand.
- Tropes, Quotes and Running gags: the fun pages.
Where the information comes from¶
The wiki was compiled from automatic transcripts of the session recordings. It was not compiled from the game master's own material or from the players' character sheets. A reader should keep four things in mind.
- Only what was said aloud is here. Anything settled in a private message, written on a character sheet or decided between sessions appears only if someone mentioned it during a session. The Game mechanics page has gaps for this reason.
- Names may be misspelled. Automatic transcription guesses at names, and the same name can come out several different ways. The wiki uses one spelling per subject. That spelling is a best guess, not an official one. Notable variants are listed under Trivia or Aliases on the subject's page.
- Some speaker attributions are uncertain. Five sessions were recorded on a single mixed track, so it is not always clear which player is speaking. They are listed on the Lost episodes page. Quotations are given as transcribed and may differ by a word or two from what was said.
- Some sessions were never recorded. Five sessions were played without a recording. Their events are known only from recaps and remarks in later episodes, and are labeled as such wherever they are used. See Lost episodes.
Where two episodes disagree, usually over a name or a date, the page says so.
How episodes are cited¶
Statements are cited to the session they come from, in italic parentheses, like this: (Radford Horror 03). The short names are:
| Cited as | Arc |
|---|---|
| Radford Horror 01–08 | The Radford Horror |
| Summer Service 01–06 | The Summer Service |
| Appalachia 01–10 | The Things in Appalachia |
| Philosopher's Fist | Philosopher's Fist 3.J/2: Unchainable |
| Walkers 01–09 | The Walkers in Skin |
| Roulet Estate 01–03 | The Roulet Estate |
| Radford Horrors 01–04 | The Radford Horrors |
The first and last arcs have nearly the same name. The Radford Horror (singular) is the first case. The Radford Horrors (plural) is the return to the same town.
Episode numbers follow the order the sessions were played in, including the unrecorded ones, so the numbering has gaps: there is no recording of Summer Service 02, Appalachia 05 or Appalachia 10. Two more unrecorded sessions were never numbered and are called Summer Service 05.5 and Walkers 08.5 here.
Conventions¶
- Voice. Pages about the fiction are written from inside it, like an encyclopedia of the show: Ross Perot is the president, and Nancy is a goose. Pages about the table, such as the player pages, are written from outside it.
- Status. Character statuses ("alive," "missing") are given as of the latest recorded session, Radford Horrors 04, unless a page says otherwise.
- Dates. In-fiction dates are those stated at the table. Where the table was unsure, the Timeline notes the conflict.
- Labeled boxes. "Unrecorded session" marks anything known only from later recaps. "Uncertain" marks material where the episodes are unclear or disagree.
- Real people. The campaign's alternate history includes fictional versions of real public figures: presidents, a talk-show host, a billionaire. The wiki writes about them as characters in a story. Nothing on those pages is a claim about the real people.
- Players. The players are named by first name only, and the wiki describes them only as players at this table.
The one-shot¶
Philosopher's Fist 3.J/2: Unchainable is a one-session side story with different characters, a different world and a different rule set. It is not canon to the main campaign. Within the fiction it is an anime OVA that Huell watched on hotel cable, which is as much as the two stories have to do with each other. (Appalachia 02)
Its characters, places and lore have their own pages, all labeled non-canon, and its facts are kept off the main campaign's pages.
Spoilers¶
The wiki describes the whole campaign up to the latest recorded session, and no page hides anything. That includes the fates of the player characters and the secret Rita kept from the rest of the table in The Walkers in Skin. If you intend to listen to the sessions first, start with the episode guide and read one episode page at a time.