If you’ve been a fan of Spirit of 77 for a while, chances are you’ve played our free adventure, Cruise Ship of the Damned. If you haven’t, we highly recommend it – the premise is a celebrity cruise ship that’s plagued by what appears to be a zombie outbreak (there’s more to it than that, but for the sake of brevity, that’s the gist). The game comes with several pre-generated celebrity characters including one of our favorites, the glorious glam rocker, Gemini.

Gemini is unique, because anyone can play the character however they want, even gender. Much like Bowie himself in the early 70’s, the character is specifically androgynous – If you want to play Gemini as a male or a female or a mix of the two or even neither if you really want, Gemini is a character that allows that. Oh, here’s an interesting aside – Cruise Ship has three male characters, three female and Gemini. Totally available to anyone. (And by the way, Gemini is listed on pg. 91 in the Rocker 8-track List in the core book, along with Tino and Rozz from Cruise Ship, along with a lot of Easter Eggs. If you’re curious, we’ll tell you someday).

Anyway for whatever reason, Gemini really opens up players to do things they wouldn’t normally do in-game. I’ve seen extremely quiet players open up and become full-on, raging sex machines (in-game of course), using Gemini as their opportunity to really come out of their shells (kinda like a Rocky Horror thing).

Now one time I was running Cruise Ship at a convention, and a player had walked by who’s original game had been cancelled and we invited him to sit down and play. He wasn’t sure at first if he wanted to, but the other players coaxed him into the game and soon, he was playing Gemini as his introduction to Spirit of 77.

Like all good 70’s movies, there was, of course, a group of cheerleaders on-board. You know. It happens. And for whatever reason, Gemini went back to his hotel room and after missing a dice roll, was confronted by a snarling, slobbering cheerleader zombie. I of course ask the question, “What do you do?”

“I seduce the zombie.”

Now I believe in player agency, mind you. But my mind paused briefly. The visuals really took a minute for me to wrap my brain around. Luckily though, I’m pretty bent so we went with it.

He rolled the dice.

Solid 10.

After thinking about it for a moment, I described to the table how a disco ball descended from the ceiling, low seductive Barry White music started playing…. And then a soft fade as we switched to another group in the party.

And ever since then, I have always kept Barry White music queued somewhere on my musical soundtrack iPad when I’m running a game, because you never know… When a zombie might come into the game. And you need to seduce it.