Tremors (Part 2)

As Paulo mentioned, it’s been a little crazy on my end with my dog’s recent surgery. He now has a cute neck brace and two screws and four pins and some bone cement holding his spine together. It was a life-saving and expensive surgery that was incredibly dangerous due to his size, but he’s a fighter, and now his future looks so much brighter! I’m so grateful for the skilled doctors who treated and cared for him and I urge you to get pet insurance. It saved me from making a very painful and difficult decision as I watched his condition deteriorate. Now he’s making huge leaps in regaining his balance and movement.

But! On to Tremors!

This is one of my favorite movies, so I really went deep to try to honor it as much as possible. I had so many thoughts—are the players the Graboids? If they play the people, how much of the later lore might be revealed if they survive long enough? Do they get the hell outta Perfection and we go on a Bixby adventure? Or Las Vegas? I didn’t know so I prepared for anything.

Realizing that, as a good old fashioned camp horror film it would probably work best as a good old fashioned dungeon crawl, I would need a hex map. So I set out to find that damn map Val rips off the wall. (Did you know it’s a map of a portion of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park?) I l wanted to track everyone and not just make it feel like a bunch of arbitrary Graboid attacks. Amazingly, I stumbled across the Stampede Tremors website with all of these super fans who have made some amazing fan art and memorabilia, and lo and behold, someone grabbed an aerial shot of the actual filming location with a link to coordinates. It was nowhere near Sequoia/Kings Canyon, obviously, but it matched the film perfectly, so the distances would “feel” correct. I grabbed a screenshot of the whole canyon, doctored it a bit, and then laid hexes over that and the close-up of the film set for Perfection (accidentally creating the hilarious size discrepancy between the two—Chang just wanted a big store, alright?!).

Then, I did a deep dive on Graboid lore and facts. I built them to be a force to reckon with, but not be undefeatable, so winning the encounters with them felt nerve-wracking but possible. After that, I turned my attention to the town residents. I strategically gave each character skills and equipment that would give the players options, and the more people they collected and kept alive, the more resources and skills they would have to work with. (Pretty sure looking up Burt’s entire firearm wall put me on a watchlist somewhere…)

After that I cooked up a couple of special sauce resources, should we go completely sideways, and then I cast my crew. I knew I’d need wacky, to match the film’s tone, so Mason and Court immediately came to mind. JWest felt like the exact balance for them because he has a naturally grounding energy, like Fred Ward’s Earl. Lastly, I told Paulo, “Watch this film like a hawk because I’m giving you a chance to show a tour de force performance of your ability to do voices.” You can hear how well that’s going—I joke, I love that somehow every new character we meet sounds like a Muppet.

And then it was time to let go of the planning and just play. And it has surprised and delighted me in so many ways. I thought it might be a one-shot, but was pleasantly shocked when Earl and Val made their dex rolls to get into Rhonda’s car, and I loved Rhonda’s insistence on finding a time to make and use a Molotov cocktail. And suddenly this Russian intelligence subplot emerged and absolutely cracked me up. Never saw that coming.

Couldn’t see any of this coming, really, which is why this podcast continues to be the gift that gives back. I hope you are enjoying this film as much as I am. I open each recording room with such a sense of joy and wonder at what face-offs might happen, what harebrained scheme they’ll come up with next, and how long our intrepid heroes will survive.

Which reminds me—I can’t believe the Doc is still alive.