Endgame (Roleplay)

A boffer LARP set two years in the future, in a small New Hampshire town After the End. The apocalypse happened because a fringe group of New Age cultists wanted to bring magic back to the world - and unfortunately, they succeeded. Now magic works again - and the world is overrun with zombies, plagues, ghosts, several types of nasty aliens, brain-eating viruses, evil clowns, giant radioactive cockroaches with guns, and benevolent dictators pretending to be Aztec gods. Also velociraptors. Most of these, in some way, serve or come from godlike beings called Entities, none of which want good things for humanity.

The only thing standing between these Entities and humankind is a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits - namely, the player characters and their allies. Using alien space-time twisting magic, the ghostly power of the underworld, death rays, and baseball bats (not to mention The Power of Friendship, the players have managed to buy earth time for four years now. With the threats growing ever greater, how much longer can they keep it up?

This game includes examples of:

 * Action Girl: Darwin, Angela, Eve...
 * Aliens Are Bastards: Earth's been invaded by something like a half dozen different alien races, and while some of them are pretty chill (the Caramahz are a notable exception), a lot of them just want to colonize our planet, use us as slave labor, destroy our brains and go joy riding in our bodies, dissect us For Science, or just eat us.
 * Awesome McCoolname: So many of these. Peregrine, Liv Lockheart, Skye, Rayth, Dr. Slashblight, Beirut, Winterborne, Tesla, the list goes on.
 * A World Half Full: This is heroic horror. It's the end of the world, but the good guys keep winning.
 * Badass Normal: Any of a number of characters without any sort of wibbly magical nonsense - Blackjack, TJ, Fox, lookin' at you guys.
 * Badass Pacifist: Ingve, the town's Amish herbalist, is terrifyingly tough.
 * This troper remembers the first time he saw Ingve come out of the kitchen with a shotgun and blow the head off a Kudzu who strayed too close to the porch. She then came back with a plate of cookies soon after, and I knew then true respect for the Amish.
 * I suppose the fact that a Kudzu is a plant preserves the "pacifist" label. Kind of like the vegetarianism of apocalyptic alien hunting.
 * In fact, it was pointed out by Ingve that she can shoot Kudzu because it's considered the harvest.
 * Badass Preacher: The mayor of the town, who is called Preacher. Kicks ass for the Lord in hockey pads and a collar.
 * Badass Longcoat: Dr. Slashblight. Not a lot of doctors get to wear a silver PVC trenchcoat while doing their rounds.
 * Badass Longcoat: Connor, sort of a modern day wandering monk, wears a long black duster and fights with a staff.
 * Also Ian, Peregrine, Arthur... practical, extra pockets, and badass!
 * Berserk Button: Do not take the radio away from the players. You wouldn't like them when they're angry.
 * Big Bad: Mashala, Salismandt, Chalithac, etc. The players typically spend each campaign year more or less focusing their ongoing efforts on a primary villain, and defeating him/her/it/them at the finale - if only temporarily.
 * Big Creepy Crawlies: Chalithac's cockroach minions.
 * Bizarro Universe: The town got kicked into an alternate timeline where many characters had made different choices at critical times; the end result was that Temple wasn't the shining beacon of hope it used to be, but an outpost of brutal alien sellouts dominating the surrounding locals. The situation was immediately dubbed "Bizarro Temple."
 * Black Magician Girl: Karen.
 * Canada Eh: Gord Hodgkinson, the town's token Canadian, pretty much exemplifies this trope, right down to the tuque and fighting demons with a hockey stick.
 * Chef of Iron: Joy Mc Masters.
 * Combat Medic: Doc Sue, Beirut, Z'denko, Helen, Aeron, Marc, Nicole, Slashblight...pretty much the whole med staff, actually.
 * Conspiracy Theorist: TJ.
 * Creepy Child: Spence, Stitch.
 * Crowning Moment of Awesome:
 * "Get off my fucking lawn!" - Helen O. Byrne to Chalithac
 * Crowning Moment of Funny:
 * "Charlie Brown fucked us." (See also: Oh Crap.)
 * Dark Action Girl: Grace.
 * Dark Is Not Evil: Skye, Ian, Samson, Peregrine, Rayth, and a host of NPCs.
 * Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu: The town's defeat and banishment of Chalithac.
 * Dressed to Heal: Doc Sue still wears her (bloodstained, tattered) lab coat, years after the fall of humankind. This may be the apocalypse, but we have standards.
 * Energy Weapon: It's good to be an Artificer. See also: Lightning Gun!
 * The Eternal Churchill: Every single boss fight has plenty of rousing speeches to go 'round, so this fits.
 * Everything's Better With Dinosaurs: Spectral velociraptors! Why the hell not!
 * Gadgeteer Genius: Pretty much any Artificer character fits this trope.
 * Science Hero is also pretty applicable to every single Artificer in town.
 * Genius Bruiser: Robbie. He's a biology teacher! He's a supersoldier! He's BOTH!
 * Genre Savvy: Some of the decisions in the Haven plotline were made thoughts along the lines of, "we are seeing a story through," and "in a story, we need to let him be redeemed," and other such things.
 * Gentleman and A Scholar: Alfred, the town's contact with Lorem Ipsum, a group dedicated to the preservation of knowledge. He fits the trope figuratively and literally, including the neat grooming and the tendency to avoid direct physical confrontation when possible.
 * Government Agency of Fiction: Project Chimera. See also Government Conspiracy.
 * Girls With Guns: Liv, Kitty, Doc Sue, Meg...
 * Heroic Spirit: Basically the definition of Resolve right here.
 * High Octane Nightmare Fuel: This game is basically one giant oil gusher of Nightmare Fuel, usually with a good dose of Body Horror thrown in.
 * Angels of The Unsated One - an entity of all-consuming hunger. Two beautiful angels, wings and all, completely soaked in blood, lovingly tearing off strips of each others' flesh and eating it. GAH.
 * Players once ran to try to interrupt an evil ritual, and arrived too late to find the sacrificial victim with yards of his intestines pulled out his body and strung up into the tree branches. The players had to reach into the intestine-pile (which was made of stuffed sausage casings and fake blood) to retrieve the ritual scroll to determine what happened. One player, who works as an EMT, described the scene as highly accurate.
 * Early on in the game, some people (a doctor, an emt, a tavernkeep, a bio teacher) went to a nearby town to mercy-kill the residents to prevent them from incurably becoming ghouls due to cannibalism. Not only were there real OOC nightmares, but there was real OOC throwing up afterwards. For several of the folks who went, that was a character defining experience.
 * How Dare You Die On Me: And it gets 'em back every time!
 * Improvised Weapon: With firearms hard to acquire after the invasion, baseball bats, steel rebar from broken buildings and other unusual candidates for weaponry were all survivors typically had left to fall back on. But, despite the abnormal nature of these items, they work really, really well at killing Invaders.
 * Imported Alien Phlebotinum: Basically how Artificing works.
 * Improbable Weapon User: Related to Improvised Weapon above, Buddy characters specifically are allowed to use any weapon as long as it looks improvised - leading to some fairly hilarious signature weapon styles. Gilligan and Gord and their hockey sticks, Micah and her kayak paddle, Adam and his stop sign shield...
 * Journey to The Center of The Mind: of Fox, Grace, Meg, Rayth, possibly Canada...
 * Kick the Dog: At one point, the Spectral Accord kidnapped Sgt. Cross, the town's moral support/comic relief/cavalry. When the players found him, he was tied to a chair, covered in bruises, in his skivvies, in a room that was (for real) about 45 degrees Fahrenheit. He was unable to recite more than his name, rank, and serial number. The rescue party went berserk.
 * Lightning Bruiser: All of Ninja Squad.
 * Mental World: The Astral Plane.
 * Mooks: Every Big Bad has their own style. Examples include Dominated humans, cultists, various flavors of zombie, skeletons, Kudzu, and Caramahz (at first).
 * Nerds Are Sexy: Dr. Bryce. Who hasn't had a crush on Dr. Bryce?
 * Also Meg, when she goes on a weird science rant. Sure, the creepy biohair is offputting, but in Temple who cares?
 * Nuclear Option: What happened to Atlanta and Los Angeles. Also, the Malish anti-viral nuke.
 * Only Mostly Dead: as opposed to "gone to the Crucible," when you can still be brought back to life with epinephrine or The Power of Friendship.
 * Our Zombies Are Different: The world of Endgame has, like, 39 flavors of zombie, all created through different means (biomechanical implants, plague, several types of dark magic). Depending on flavor, they can be slow and dumb - or fast, smart, and armed to the teeth. None of them can be killed with a headshot.
 * But, the Zombie Hunter class can utilize a skill that hits Zombies For Massive Damage with the least amount of effort.
 * Plant Aliens: The Kudzu.
 * Pregnant Badass: Emily. Who says you can't balance being town war leader with motherhood?
 * Psychopomp: Chalice and the Lantern Bearers.
 * New band name found!
 * The Power of Friendship: How Buddy skills work.
 * Puppeteer Parasite: The Malish.
 * Redheaded Hero: Fox, Karen.
 * Religious Bruiser: Winterborne.
 * Anyone seen him charge up Frigid Waves? That'll put the fear of God into ya.
 * Robe and Wizard Hat: Peregrine wears the modern equivalent: broad-brimmed leather hat and duster.
 * Schizo Tech: Given that society and industry collapsed at the same time that aliens introduced physics-bending technology to Earth, there's a fair amount of this going on.
 * Sealed Evil in A Can: How the players temporarily dealt with one Big Bad, Salismandt: they sealed him in a box where he had to count grains of rice for a year and a day.
 * Sickly Green Glow: Chalithac, the Entity of Radiation, had this going on in spades.
 * Small Girl Big Gun: Meg.
 * Someone Has to Die: Usually NPCs, but was also meant the final end for Skye, because No One Could Survive That...
 * Space Base: Toma's moon base. Considering it was equipped with a a mass driver, it also doubles as a Kill Sat.
 * Sufficiently Advanced Alien: The Do Sha Kaa.
 * The Conscience: A few people serve in this capacity, including Darius, Winterborne, Preacher (the town's resident Badass Preacher), and others.
 * The Reason You Suck Speech: Samson pretty much has a doctorate in this.
 * The Underworld: Basically what it says on the tin.
 * Villain Protagonist: Ian, Samson.
 * Win One for The Gipper: "By my voice, heal to Temple by Inspiration!"
 * Woman in White: The Lady of the Haven.
 * Wrench Wench: Aeron.
 * You Have No Chance to Survive: Salismandt offered the players, who were completely out of offensive resources and on the brink of destruction, a chance to surrender. Of course, they refused, leading to a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
 * You Fail Nuclear Physics Forever: Pretty much anything Meg ever says, considering she's a nuclear physicist played by a film major who is ad-libbing her lines based on one skimming of the Richard Feynman lectures.
 * Zombie Apocalypse: Need we say more?