Tuesday, February 5, 2008

2020 last night

Despite the EDIT, 2020 happened anyway. MOC, with two players. Sarah was playing a totally new character. Amy played Face, the character Jenn had made (but never played) for the original MOC campaign.

Two old gang members were portrayed as NPCs: Capt. Chaos (Eddie's Netrunner) and Ruby Cham (Jeremy's MedTechie). I used a die roll to determine which old PCs showed up. Chaos was pretty much just a cameo, whereas Ruby Cham was in every scene.

(Tangent: Ruby had a really distinct and thus replicatable personality. His presence really added a lot to the game in the old days, and thus I was able to act/fake him well enough for this. Please don't take that as saying Jeremy was replaceable, when what I actually mean is that his character was so entertaining and memorable I was able to emulate him a year later. Jeremy would have done it better, but I caught the flavor passably well.)

Morton's List spit out directives for the gang to go give a motivational speech. They chose to go to a factory and try to rally the workers. They brought some picket signs and molotov cocktails. An incredible forgery roll (tens explode, and Amy rolled two of them on one skill check) allowed them to produce a faux corporate memo "from the home office" indicating that the plant was to be closed. A riot ensued. All in all, it was a lot of fun.

The hardest part was dealing with the police response to the riot - I knew rubber bullets would bounce off Ruby's metal-gear, but I wasn't sure of the impact on the PCs. I improvised and, as a result, went way too easy on them.

While I want to keep the improvisational nature of things (especially the plot), and don't relish the notion of having yet another full-production game on my plate, I will definitely do a little prep work between now and the next time we do this.
  • If I'm going to use the item decks from the old campaign, I need to make item cards for the things the new PC bought.
  • I need a couple of basic NPC sheets/templates. Rival gangers. Typical cop. Average civilian. Maybe even 2 different versions of each of the above.
  • A list of 20 (or 50) cool "in a nutshell" character descriptions I can apply to those templates. It's cyberpunk, so those descriptions can be strange/memorable cyberware/techbits in addition to the usual mannerisms, personality traits, etc that I might consider. The reason I need a list is because the 'ware will have rules, and I don't want to go looking cyberstuff up in chrome books mid-session.
My favorite part of the session: The ridiculous picket signs they made.
  1. "You deserve better pay!" (As opposed to 'we')
  2. "Bring down the Man and he will comply"
  3. "MOC fo' Prez"
  4. "Workers in fact***inkstain***
    need to eat ***inkstain***"

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