Possession! at the Gym: a Misadventure in Three Sets of Six

Your gym buddy is posessed by a demon. Blood, guts, and gore ensue. Possession! at the Gym is a jock-positive, pun-positive horror game for fans of the Exorcist and/or the Evil Dead franchise.

Long Description

Pick up powerlifting, they said. It will be fun, they said. Training for a marathon will give you something to do with your time now that you've retired, they said. Sick party tricks like muscle-ups and cartwheels will distract you from the gnawing worry that your life is going nowhere, they said.

Actually, nobody told you any of that. Nobody had to. You got bored with your default stats—and hubristic enough to pour hours each week into maxing them out—all by yourself.

Had you known that it would lead to getting doused not only with sweat, but also with blood, projectile vomit, and other fluids...

... you probably still would have chased that endorphin high, but you like to think you might have just gotten into drugs instead. There are no drugs here today, though. Nope. Just you, your gym friend's head spinning around 360 degrees, murder in their eyes, and two locked steel doors.

Let's up the weight, baby. PR or ER.

Possession! at the Gym is a horror-comedy game heavy on improv and medium on puns. It aims to please fans of the Exorcist and/or the Evil Dead franchise. Exercise is role played, which is to say no actual exercise required. It does help to be jock-positive.

Our characters are gathered in a gym. They mill about from machine to machine, trading in their sleep and protein for sick gains and evangelizing their favorite sport like it's any other day.

It's not any other day, though. Somebody's set turns into bloody mayhem — and that's just the start. When the session opens, only one athlete is possessed by a demon. If said demon gets their whey, the rest of them soon will be too.

Any character may become possessed. Any character may die, for a certain value of "die."

Possessed characters earn the right to spread their possession by describing grotesque body horror and singing creepy chants. Human characters earn the right to exorcise — or kill — possessed characters by demonstrating charming heroics.

Player-versus-player combat is resolved by guessing which hand a frightening prop is in.