Andre¶

Andre is the game master (Keeper) of PITF. He runs every recorded session, voices every NPC and monster, and narrates the campaign as if it were an early-1990s television show.


Role	Game master (Keeper)
Plays	All NPCs and monsters
Sessions	All 37 recorded canon sessions and the one-shot
First session	Radford Horror 01

Style¶

The campaign as a TV show¶

Andre's defining habit is to describe the game as something being filmed. In the very first session he says "If this were a TV show, which let's say it is," and from then on scenes begin with "cut to", the camera zooms and pans, and nearly every session opens on a cold open that ends with "we cut to credits." (Radford Horror 01, Radford Horror 03, Appalachia 03)

The cold opens almost never feature the player characters. They show a victim, a villain or a place the party has not found yet: a pile of dog collars in the woods, a teenager burying cash, a worker attacked in a cave, rows of plastic-wrapped figures, a triangular craft buried in a Russian field. By Radford Horror 06 the players expect one and ask for it. (Radford Horror 03, Radford Horror 06, Appalachia 02, Walkers 03, Radford Horrors 04)

He varies the device when it suits the story. Summer Service 06 intercuts two scenes with on-screen captions ("A few hours ago", "A few seconds from now"). Roulet Estate 01 is told out of order under title cards ("Inauguration Day, 1993", "78 days ago", "Present day."). Radford Horrors 01 opens with found footage and, for once, does not cut to credits until the end. He will also end on a cliffhanger on purpose: "I have an opportunity to end on a cliffhanger, so I'm gonna do it." (Summer Service 06, Roulet Estate 01, Radford Horrors 01, Radford Horror 04)

See The show for the full list of cold opens and framing devices.

Sound and pictures¶

Andre scores the sessions. He plays intro music for the show, cues music from The Thing under a search and Psycho strings for a shock, and opens one session with the remark that "the producers of the show sprang for the rights to another song this time." He plays opera audio during the Boris Yeltsin scene. (Radford Horror 01, Radford Horror 02, Roulet Estate 03, Radford Horrors 01)

He draws maps for the players on request, of varying quality: "All right, this is the worst map, but here you go." (Radford Horror 04)

Period detail¶

The campaign is set in 1992 and 1993, and Andre checks. He looks up when Crystal Pepsi went on sale and what Ross Perot sounded like ("I literally just looked up what Ross Perot sounds like"). When a detail turns out to be wrong for the year he changes it: a CD becomes a floppy disk, and the purple Game Boy he wanted for a lost child is dropped because "those won't be out for another four years." Players join in, and the anachronism check is a standing table ritual. (Radford Horror 01, Roulet Estate 03, Roulet Estate 01, Appalachia 03, Walkers 04)

Improvisation¶

Andre runs from "a big Google Doc" and "a lot of fucking PDFs" and invents freely around them. Names are a known weak spot: he forgets or swaps NPC names often enough that it is a running joke, and several characters carry the scars as aliases (Esteban was also Alejandro and Jose; Deborah Wells was briefly Misabelle). Ezra's observation is that Andre does not use a name generator and that his names usually have "a joke to the name or a relevance to it"; Douglas Douglas is the standard example. (Radford Horror 01, Summer Service 04, Walkers 03, Appalachia 04, Radford Horror 07)

His most committed piece of improvised worldbuilding is the Spud Hut menu: about a hundred potato dishes, read aloud in full because the table refused to stop him. His verdict afterwards was "I should have prepared five hundred." (Appalachia 02)

He owns his mistakes on the recording ("I really gotta keep my notes in a more organized fashion") and corrects them in play, asking the table to "retcon that in your minds." (Walkers 04, Walkers 03)

NPC voices¶

Andre voices the whole supporting cast, including every recurring NPC: Diane, Big Bill, Donald McManley and the campaign's versions of Ross Perot and Boris Yeltsin. Some that drew comment at the table:

Harvey the Great Dane, who backs up his owners' claims with "Woof." (Appalachia 01)
Ross Perot. Dante: "Why is Ross Perot a D&D goblin?" Andre: "Yeah, that's what he sounded like." (Roulet Estate 03)
The Rhode Island police, for which he stopped to ask the table what a Rhode Island accent sounds like. (Roulet Estate 02)
Robert Bigelow: "He almost got his own voice, and then I got lazy." (Walkers 02)
Yusuf Ansari, mid-scene: "I'm not doing his accent very well." (Walkers 08)
The creature in the storm, a fluting noise he could only perform after switching off his noise suppression. (Summer Service 06)

He also plays whole crowds at once, such as the Covenant members who each answer hygiene questions with "We're getting a boiler." (Appalachia 04)

Running the table¶

Secrets and private scenes¶

Andre keeps secrets between players. He removes people from the voice call for solo scenes, sends private messages and handouts, and lets players hold information their characters would not share. Ezra's whole KGB subplot for the Biz runs this way across several arcs. (Summer Service 01, Summer Service 04, Appalachia 01, Appalachia 02, Appalachia 06, Walkers 06)

The largest example is the Andrew Howard switch. In Walkers 07 he tells the table "I'm going to eject everybody except Andrew Howard," runs the gym scene alone with Rita, and ends it by telling her she is now playing a replica. Rita plays the copy in front of the other three players through Walkers 08 and into Walkers 09, when the reveal comes mid-scene. After the others leave Walkers 08 he runs one more private scene with Rita showing what happened to the real Andrew. (Walkers 07, Walkers 08, Walkers 09)

Tone and danger¶

He warned the players early that Monster of the Week combat "tends to turn into like a slugging match where people die really quickly unless you're being kind of tactical about it," and he delivered on it at the church in Radford Horror 07, which Rita summed up as "we just half-TPK'd." Andre: "I wanted this to be a tense combat encounter." He is equally willing to shorten a fight when the fiction calls for it, ending Summer Service 06 early because the party was too sick to do more. (Radford Horror 02, Radford Horror 07, Summer Service 06)

He lets consequences stand. When the task force is disbanded he asks each player what their character does next and is ready to assign a fate to anyone without an idea; Ezra offers abduction or a life under the radar, and Andre sends the Biz to a Russian labor camp. (Roulet Estate 03)

Rules¶

Andre teaches the system as he goes in the early sessions, reading out question lists and explaining moves, and he adds to it. The dread track is his own import ("I'm borrowing it from some of the Lovecraft games"), introduced as a mystery mechanic: asked what dread is, he says "You don't know yet. Well, you're gonna find out." In later arcs Zack is the one who reminds him it exists. See Game mechanics for his rulings. (Radford Horror 01, Radford Horror 02, Summer Service 03, Walkers 07, Walkers 09)

Memorable rulings¶

The Chevy Chase roll. In the first minutes of the campaign the players ask whether Chevy Chase is a guest star. Andre has them roll for it. The result is a mixed success. (Radford Horror 01)
Two questions for a 12. When Rita rolls a 12 on Investigate a Mystery and points out that the 12-plus result is an advanced move she has not unlocked, he answers "Well, you still get two." (Radford Horror 02)
Luck after the roll. Asked whether Luck can be spent once a bad roll is on the table: "Yeah, yeah, no, you are." (Appalachia 01)
A secret roll. He rolls Kurt's bluff against Jan Martense himself and keeps the result hidden: "That's not how we're doing this one. 'Cause it's more fun that way." (Appalachia 08)
Rolling for the NPC's plane. "I am gonna do something I haven't done before here, and I am going to roll for Freak and his maintenance of the Cessna." (Radford Horror 07)
The OVA. He decides "retroactively" that the one-shot, "the stupid fucking shonen arc we did," was an OVA Huell watched on hotel cable. (Appalachia 02)
No ear-gauge puck. Dante, still sore about it: "Andre wouldn't let me have the fucking ear gauge puck with, like, supplies hidden in it." (Radford Horror 07)
A perfect 12 or nothing. "If you roll a perfect 12 on a Sharp check, I will let you modify this thing to go faster. If you don't, you are going to either injure yourself or break it." (Roulet Estate 02)
Rolling for the players. When a player's dice roller is broken he rolls for them. (Radford Horrors 03)

Table moments¶

"For the sake of immersion, I have just eaten some McDonald's." (Summer Service 03)
Needing a school anthem on the spot, he had a chatbot write one and sang it in character. Dante: "Art is dead." (Walkers 04)
On the campaign as a whole: "It's an erotically charged campaign." (Walkers 09)
Forgot to start the recording, so Appalachia 02 opens in the middle of a recap. (Appalachia 02)
Briefly thought "we've been doing Investigate a Mystery wrong the whole time," then corrected himself. (Radford Horrors 01)
Told Ezra, who had forgotten the other FBI agents in their past cases: "There weren't." (Radford Horrors 01)