Played on 27 Oct 2026
Alongside The Deepest Dark, Mud Ghost Estate was the other game that I knew I wanted to bring to the table in October. I grew up on TVB dramas and am visiting Hong Kong at the end of the year, so thought it'd be fun to play a game set there.
Characters
GM: Me
Fishball
Little Sin (also the mud ghost in Act 2)
Sam
Session highlights
The newsagent stand as a first encounter, which helped set the tone for the game. The headlines of today's papers started to morph, featuring each of them as deceased victims in unfortunate events.
The family meal and the mother who cajoled the characters into joining them for dinner. As Sam tucked in, her image was outlined in the framed family photo nearby. The group eventually satiated the family with some joss stick offerings.
The kid whose mom was shouting at him for not finishing his homework, and each character using their own approach to help him with different subjects.
Fishball and Sam taking a photograph of the darkness, using the camera's flash to illuminate what's below
The cinema as our closing encounter, where the creature reached out from the screen to grab Little Sin.
Facilitating the game
The main resolution mechanic uses a tumbling block tower but as I was playing online, I used the variant rule provided that replaces the tower with dice: you roll dice and remove any '4's. When the dice pool runs empty, the tower collapses. I think it was partially due to how we were rolling, but the dice created a lot of tension in our game. In both acts, we got down to 1 die pretty quickly. The players spent a fair few turns just rolling the 1 die and hoping it wasn't a '4'. The last few rolls of the game were nerve-wrecking, when we knew that the characters just needed to survive one last encounter to exit.
We tracked the dice pool and cards flips via playingcards.io. Here's our .pcio file.
We spent a fairly long time with our first Encounter, while I was trying to figure out when to consider an Encounter 'resolved'. Once it clicked that inaction e.g. cowering in fear is a viable response and things don't have to make logistical sense (e.g. rooms could vanish and return the players back to the corridor anytime), we were progressing through Encounters smoothly.
We thought the Encounters were thematic, and really reinforced the group's identities as teenagers. The school related encounters probably unearth some trauma for players.
The game provides multiple endings to read aloud. I could have done a better job tying this to our narrative ending. Once the group resolved seven encounters and escaped successfully, I should have immediately looked at the remaining card that wasn't drawn during the Interlude and figure out if there was a mud ghost amongst us, so I could weave the relevant ending in nicely. I left players role playing leaving the estate for a tad too long, and didn't make it clear to the mud ghost player when or how to reveal themselves.
We enjoyed the uncertainty of whether a mud ghost was in the group, and talked about which decisions characters made that roused our suspicions. It was definitely trickier to sabotage the group with digital play since you don't have the option of fumbling around with the tumbling block, but our mud ghost did a great job with their character choices.
I want to play this in person next time, with a tumbling block tower!