Ogwood

Germ of an idea: Run an RPG one-shot in the setting of HBO's Deadwood, using the rules from Og.

 Here's your (insensitive and horrible) word list. You've been warned.

• Dead
• Wood
• Fire
• Water
• Whiskey
• Beer
• Drunk
• Medicine
• Cowboy
• Injun 
• Chink
• Doctor
• You
• Me
• Horse
• Pig
• Gun
• Gold
• Money
• Cards
• Pick
• Axe 
• Dance
• Vote
• Kill
• Ride
• Mine
• Snatch
• Whore
• Mother
• Fuck
• Fucker
• Fucking
• Fucked
• Up
• Bastard
• Cock
• Cunt
• Sucker
• Indignity
• Shit
• God
• Damn
• Ass
• Piss
• Motherfuckingcocksucker
• Truth
• Gratis

Everyone gets their preferred version of the F-word for free, plus a randomly-chosen assortment of other words.

What, you're still here? That was the joke.

Okay, fine, let's pretend I'm serious, as I really do enjoy a good game of Og now and again. Instead of being stupid cavemen, the PCs are fuckin' drunken cowboys. So you use the existing Og rules with a few simple modifications. You'd rename most things, and have to create a few mechanics. Eloquent Caveman becomes Cussin' Cowboy (or perhaps Fuckin' Wordy Cowboy), for example. And it might be worth creating a new class for Sober Cowboy who never forgets how to do things, though I'd strictly limit that class to one PC per campaign.

You'll need twice as many words per character, so 2d6+4 per PC, and the Fuckin' Eloquent Cowboy gets 4 more than anyone else rolled, plus all 4 versions of fuck on top of that. PC's names are of course not on the list, but I'm sure you'll come up with nicknames from your word list.

You have guns, so damage is 1 for a punch (2 for Strong Cowboy) and 1d6 for a gunshot, reversing the default Og unfairness (where Banging isn't nearly as good a Strong). That's a much faster and bloodier combat system too, and all the more so because there's no 40-Unnnggh T-Rex's to deal with. All of which is okay as the length of combat is at times somewhat unfortunate in Og. Replace your dino and mega-fauna monster list with miners, cardsharps, goons, saloongirls and railbarons.

The hardest part would be making the economy work. Og has no economy, but Deadwood is all about the gold in them thar hills. So you let gold buy guns, property, booze and whores, all of which need mechanical benefits. Guns = damage boosts, obviously, and the others could all be mechanisms for restoring Unnnggh, or might give some other bonus (like adding +1, or rolling two dice and keeping the better one). Giving them all mechanical benefits gives the PCs something to fight over, which is kinda the point. So these resources need to be limited and tightly controlled by the GM. The system becomes crunchier than default Og, but characters die so fast once the guns come out that I don't think you'll really feel the heft of the crunch. Some groups will have so much fun cussin' up a blue streak that they won't ever roll the dice.

I just thought up the marketing pitch: "No use big words, fuck Og."   :)

Hammer-Patterned, The Multiplicity of Tongs

This is a story synopsis and play-by-play for a tabletop RPG I ran last night. The game was completely improvised, and the system was 6X, so it ended up being pretty wacky.


Starting premise was essentially "reclaim" mode of the video game "Dwarf Fortress". If you've never played DF, just picture the abandoned halls of Moria from Lord of the Rings… with a penchant for going FUBAR in delightfully slapstick ways. If you are familiar with Dwarf Fortress, you'll get a couple of inside jokes below, but you'll also quickly see that we diverged  from the source material.

For a thousand years the mighty Dwarf enclave known as "Hammer-Patterned, The Multiplicity of Tongs" had stood solid within a rocky mountain at the edge of the empire. But now, several years have passed since word or caravan had come forth from Hammer-Patterned, and the worst is feared.

 A small group of stout Dwarven settlers and explorers has been sent forth to Hammer-Patterned to learn the fate of King Blordok Syrupbraid, re-establish the trade-route if possible, and claim salvage rights should things in Hammer-Patterned turn out to be as bad as they are feared.

An aside about the ridiculous name: Three of us grabbed random words and we mashed them together to come up with a silly title worthy of a Dwarf Fortress. It didn't make any sense to us, either, but it certainly is in line with the bizarre naming conventions employed in the source material.

Our party of stout dwarves explorers is as follows:

• Oredang the Miner (played by Devon, who had a fair amount of Dwarf Fortress). Gender: Female. Skills: Miner, Novice Organzier.  Equipment: Steel Pickaxe, pet Yak calf. Beard: black, long and twisted.
• OIN son of GLOIN son of BROIN son of DROIN son of MOIN (played by Dan), (hereafter referred to as simply "Oin son of blah" to save me a lot of typing.) Gender: Male  Skills: likes Ancestry  Beard: 7 and 1/8ths inches
• Cog Claspshanks (played by my wife, Sarah). Gender: Female  Skills: Stone Engraver  Equipment: Carving Tools  Beard: 9 braids (one per child she bore)
• Brunhilda the Carver (played by Laura). Gender: Female  Skills: Carver, creates statues, curious, good fighter with a hammer.  Equipment: Hammer, Carving Tools   Beard: Has a red beard she wears in two braids.
• Thugnar the Bold (played by John). Gender: Male  Skills: bold, break rock with hammer, drink ale copiously.  Equipment: Hammer Beard: Long flowing blonde beard, braided intricately.
• Mad Oleg (played by Eric). Gender: Male   Skills: Ore-taster  Beard: filled with minerals

Fine specimens of craftdwarfship be they all.

An aside about investigation and skills:   In retrospect, I wish I'd done more with Mad Oleg's unique and flavorful "ore-taster" skill. It's got great potential for an investigative scenario, but since this was an off-the-cuff 6X game (and thus what mysteries there were remained mysterious even to the GM until they were randomly defined), I just didn't really figure out a way to make it matter. Similar things can be said for Oin son of blah's "likes Ancestry" skill that would have been really useful in Continuum or Trail of Cthulhu, but was hard to work into 6X on the fly. I wish I could have integrated these into the story better.

I started the game with some narration about the overland trip. When you arrive at your destination, the food cart has already run out and you've polished off half the mules. That baby Yak calf is starting to look pretty good.

Then I threw in a passing comment about the sad state of the disused trade route and especially the statuary along it, and it nearly took the game in a completely different direction.  I said the ancient statues at the side of the road were overgrown, and someone had put pumpkins or jack-o-lanterns where the statues heads should be, but I didn't really know where I was going with this. It was just color, drawn from an old fantasy illustration I saw once for one of the Lord of the Ring books. The players immediately started blaming the elves, so I said that near one of the statues was a tree with an old ramshackle treehouse in it's branches, and they could hear the slow sad sounds of a banjo on the wind. 

The players debated whether to sneak past what were clearly creepy elfbillies, or just burn the place.  Seemed like a great place for our first card draw.

Card Draw?  We were using a variant of 6X that I'm calling cardX. Instead of making a chart and rolling a die, each player rights a possible outcome on a notecard, and we draw one out of a hat.  Learn more here.

So we get our first result: 

• 1: "Burning down the treehouse starts a forest fire. We have to run quickly and rush the cart along, breaking the axle."

Which I think came as a surprise to the player who first proposed that they burn down the treehouse, as he thought he'd been talked out of it. That happens with 6X.

We threw in a little color narration about dim-witted elven hillbillies having a conversation as their treehouse burnt down around them. One with a banjo, the other a pitchfork. "There they go, setting' us afire agin. An' I was jus' bouts to warn 'em that there's nuthin down that road but the ol' haunted dwarves place."

Escaping past the (flaming) tree line, and hauling their booze kegs on their own backs, our fearless dwarven explorers find themselves at the massive bridge that marks the borders of HammerPatterned the Multiplicity of Tongs.

The bridge was carved of stone and set with cogs and machinery. Dangling from the sides were chains ending with metal Tongs clattering in the breeze. With his knowledge of ancestry, Oin son of blah was able to explain that the local custom was to hang a set of ancestral tongs to commemorate the moment and place of passing of any dwarf. Clearly, hundreds of dwarves had died on this particular bridge. At the far end of the bridge was a mighty lever, so Thugnar the bold ran across the bridge and yanked the lever while his friends were crossing more slowly behind him.

I like to imagine that the other cards in the bag were full of horrible trap-riddled death the likes of which would have made even One-Eyed Willie turn white as a bone, but alas the one the players drew said simply:

• 2: "The cog bridge plays beautiful music!"

The lever set the gears turning, and the chains and tongs dangling from them clattered together in a pleasant tinkling melody, accompanied by the deep bass rumblings of the bridgeborn machinery that powered it all.

Thereafter followed a long section without any cards being made or pulled. There were probably a couple moments where we could have done cards, but each time someone would announce an idea they had that sounded fun enough we all just conceded the narrative ground to them.

The dwarves came to the gates of HammerPatterned, which were huge granite things set with engravings of hammers. The doors looked like they hadn't been opened for some time. We tried speaking "friend" to them, but to no avail. An oversized steel hammer and tongs hung from a chain, dangling out of the mouth of stone grate above the doors. A grate perfect for pouring something down on unwanted guests, like boiling oil.  Most of the party stepped back or to the side.

Nearby was a pumpkin patch, growing in the sunlight beside the gates. Not a particularly dwarven crop, but we all grudging acknowledged you could ferment and brew with them if you had to. Oredang pastured her Yak calf at the p-patch.

Speaking of Yak p,  by this time Thugnar had started knocking on the massive doors with the dangling hammer, and the other players suggested that his greeting should be that someone or something pees on him through the grates above.  Sometimes you just gotta play to your audience.

Wet and smelly but surprisingly undiscouraged, Thugnar decided to yank on the big chain to see if maybe it rang a bell inside and summoned servants.  Instead it made the grates above open up. As i was about to narrate huge rocks falling and call for a card draw, again a player interrupted me with a rather more amusing possibility so I just said yes. A Yak fell from grate, narrowly missing Thugnar and going splat on the ground.

Additional chains and tongs now dropped and dangled from the grates as well, because clearly, any place where a Yak might feasibly drop on you is a place likely to have claimed the lives of many a drunk dwarf (and thus need commemorating per the previously described local custom). So the players climbed up the mesh of chains and into  the inside of the gatehouse.

Inside where the desiccated remains of a dwarf who had barricaded himself into the gatehouse. He'd clearly lived here for some time before passing on when the beer ran out. The grain and foodstuffs he had with sequestered with him were nearly out as well, but had been enough to sustain the Yak until this very day.

Before the booze ran out, the dead dwarf had kept himself busy carving the walls of his gatehouse tomb. Here is an engraving of a dwarf and and elephant. The dwarf is riding on the elephant. Here is an engraving of dwarves and an elephant. The dwarves are holding hands around the elephant. Here is a superior engraving of dwarves and an elephant. The elephant is giving birth to the dwarves. Riffing off of "Boatmurdered" (google it), mostly, followed by one  reference to the Simpsons: Here is an engraving of just words, dwarves runic script in shaky handwriting, "can't sleep, elephants will eat me, can't sleep, elephants will eat me".

Undaunted (and now motivated by the inescapable conclusion that the fortress had been abandoned and thus the salvage rights were theirs), the players took down the barricade, and opened the doors.  Beyond were balconied galleries, overlooking the main hall and gates to the fortress. Far below them the main hall angled downward into the bowels of the earth.

It was at that moment that I told them, "all of a sudden, you hear a terrible noise reverberate through the fortress. Everyone contribute a card to the hat describing a possible noise." Apparently someone liked my engravings, because the card that was drawn said:

• 3: "The Sound of a Mastodon"

There was much debate over how to differentiate the calls of an elephant, mastodon or mammoth from one another, but eventually everyone decided it was indeed a mastodon. It didn't sound particularly close, however, so the players probed deeper into the galleries.

The floor of the main hall below fell further and further down, until at least 7 stories separated the extended balcony they walked upon from the main floor. As they probed deeper into the gloom, they eventually saw a giant Jasper elephant statue. It's head rose to the level of the balconies, so it was 7 stories tall, and equivalently long.

Mad Oleg said something to the effect of: "That is the largest collection of Jasper I have ever seen in all my years of ore-tasting, and the second-largest elephant statues I've seen, too."

The thought occurred to me then and there that it'd be a cool demise for the fortress if they'd had a "Trojan Horse" scenario where the elephant statue had brought some invading force… but the gates were clearly secure and intact, whereas at Troy the gates were torn apart. If I wanted to go the Trojan route, I'd have to give the players another clue… and I'd have to do so quickly, because in 6X you can't be subtle or slow because at any time a player action could derail your plans.

So I said there was a lever nearby. The players pulled it, and the entire top of the mountain retracted, giving them a clear view of everything. This meant you'd be able to drag the 7-story statue in our out of the fortress's 2-story gate. That (plus "the elephant is giving birth to the dwarves") made me feel like I could later go more explicitly Trojan and it'd be deemed foreshadowed rather than contradictory.

Oin son of blah suddenly got the idea into his head that if we can't find stairs down from the gallery, maybe we can somehow find stairs down from an elephant. It was a novel idea, and he approached it with masochistic gusto, suddenly jumping off the balcony towards the head of 7-story elephant. This had some potential to backfire, and we hadn't done cards in a while, so what the heck…

• 4. "The jasper elephant collapses into a pile of bits burying Oin."

An aside about character mortality: I probably would have been justified in killing poor Oin given that result and it's vague statements about his status at the end of it. 7 stories of falling and then being buried under tons of shattered jasper could easily be lethal.  Just like I could have made the Yak, rather than just it's pee, land on Thugnar earlier, and taken him out.  Instead I would just file this away in the back of my mind. Later, when it was time to start kicking the players butts a little, I'd remember that I'd previously gone easy on the two of them.

The statue fell to rubble, and this gave me a chance to reinforce my Trojan Elephant idea. I narrated that it had been a wooden frame with a jasper shell, hollow on the inside, and mostly breaking his fall as it collapsed in upon itself.

Rather than split up the party, I allowed the others to quickly find a ladder down and start unburying Oin son of blah. But as they labored, they could again hear the trumpeting of a mastodon, and the sound was now growing closer. Oh, and something about the cantilevered clockwork mechanisms closing the mountain top again since no one was up there holding the lever any more.

They free Oin son of blah, bandage him up, loot the huge garnet eyes of the crumbled statue, and then realize the source of the mastodon sounds is now only 1 room away from the main gall. It's behind Door #1.  Mad Oleg starts trying to barricade Door #1. The other players start to scatter, and one opens a door across the room (which we'll call Door #2) to make an escape. The remainder of the part started describing various other dubious escape routes, and I decided the best way to bring this chaos under control was to have everyone make a card describing the event they wanted to have resolve first.

• 5. "Inside the door [Door #2] is the skeleton of a mighty elephant. It's eyes light up with a ghostly flame and focus on Oredang."

So whatever the mastodon sound was on the other side of Door #1, it was suddenly back-seat to the Undead Elephant behind Door #2. That precipitated yet another card round.  The card I put in to the pot was particularly nasty, but alas it was not drawn. Instead, we got:

• 6. "The mastodon bursts into the room, shattering Mad Oleg's barricade! The mastodon then crushes the skeletal elephant in one blow of its mighty trunk!"

Combat in 6X (or my cardX variant) is pretty damn swingy. Here we have flaming ghost elephant about to attack Oredang one moment, and then it's obliterated by something else entirely in the very next action.  Why, I don't know. Clearly, with the players having that much narrative power, I needed to stop pulling my punches.

I gave everyone the opportunity to put in one brief bit of flavor narration that didn't change the overall situation, so they could illustrate how they fought or fled as appropriate, and then we did another card round to determine how the fight would resolve.  Hammers and picks were swung, Brunhilda clambered up a ladder to line up a daring leap towards the mastodon's head, and the monster thrashed about. Then:

• 7. "The mastodon impales Oin son of bla on its left tusk, and Thugnar on the right. Both are badly injured and freeing them will take much effort or heroism."

Yep, that card was mine. Major wounds and impairment to two PCs, and specifically the ones I'd gone easy on earlier. I decided to keep running combat for however long it took the players to make up a card that defeated it and get the corresponding lucky draw. As for my own cards in that time frame, I planned to eliminate one PC from the fight per round. Chances are they'd win the day, but we'd see if the mastodon couldn't take a few of them with it.

And wouldn't you know it, the players drew another one of my cards the very next round.

• 8. "The mastodon swallows Cog Claspshanks in a single gulp. Meanwhile, the impaled Dwarves bleed profusely, and Thugnar's weakened arms drop his hammer."

Three PCs down, 3 to go. More color narration for those that weren't swallowed, impaled or immobilized, and then another card-round. But I was not anticipating this result.

• 9. "Cog discovers that this mastodon is also hollow."

That's definitely a good break for the PCs, but a little open to interpretation. Hollow in what way? Well, if you leave it up to the GM, you have no one to blame but yourself.

So, I narrated that Cog drops down into the belly of the mechanical beast, and is immediately sealed inside one of several cages therein. Above her, safe within a metal cockpit with, are two kobolds operating the bicycle-driven mechanisms of the mechamastodon.  They have reinforced windows that let them look down at Cog, or stare out through the "eyes" of the mechamastodon.

Next round:

• 10. "Brunhilda jumps on the mastodon and starts beating it about the head with her hammer. The main effect is that she manages to realize there are kobolds inside. She kills the closer one."

We do some more color narration, and someone mentions that perhaps the mechamastodon, now missing the copilot, could be stuck running around in circles. That's funny enough to say yes to. 
At this point, I decided it was worth dealing with the impaled people. I announced that one of the tusks went limp, and Oin son of blah slid off the end of it. He's now bleeding out on the floor as the mechamastodon runs circles around him. I directed the players that this round of cards should not resolve the overall fight, but primarily determine Oin's fate.

• 11. "Oin dies in a pool of blood and miasma.   Dan's next character may arrive as the first of a wave of migrants sent to aid your colonization."

Dan quickly came up with a brand new character, well, kinda…

• GROIN son of OIN son of GLOIN son of BROIN son of DROIN son of MOIN, (hereafter referred to as simply "Groin son of Oin" to save me a lot of typing). Gender: Male  Skills: likes Ancestry  Beard: 7 and 3/8ths inches

As a general rule, when a PC dies, I usually require that the replacement character be something very different from the previous character, so there's some sense that death has impact, and is a thing to be avoided. Usually. This time, however, it was funny enough, and relevant to the "likes ancestry" mention on the character sheet, that I felt that was actually the perfect way to continue.

Various color narration. Circular mechamastodon chase. Cue benny hill music.

Then: "I am GROIN son of OIN son of GLOIN son of BROIN son of DROIN son of MOIN. You killed my father, OIN son of GLOIN son of BROIN son of DROIN son of MOIN. Prepare to die!"

• 12. "Groin son of Oin swings into the battle on a long tong-chain. The mastodon is still running in circles, however, and Groin son of Oin misses it.  Meanwhile, Brunhilda drops into the mammoth next to the kobold."

Color narration. The kobold shrieks: "Peddle left! Peddle left! Why aren't you peddling? We're going in circles!" and then realizes that Brunhilda has replaced his copilot. He goes for his loaded crossbow, she goes for her hammer.

• 13. "Brunhilda bashes the kobold to mush! Thugnar is saved through the immediate application of dwarven french bread through the wound."

Wow. Bread bandages. Or rather, a bread blood plug. If it didn't very specifically say "saved", I totally would have had that backfire… but the spirit of the cards should be obeyed as much as possible, even if it makes no sense. I mean, everything else in this adventure is logical and sensible.

I'm not sure exactly what happened next. The kobold was dead, the threat neutralized. They must have freed Cog. I remember Devon saying that Oredang had grown attached to her fine steel pick.
Mad Oleg wanted the flaming trunk "mechanism" off the ghost elephant, which was now somehow retroactively also a hollow mecha-skeletal-elephant and not a ghost elephant and I'm not really sure how any of that made sense, but it was amusing and he'd had the unfortunate distinction of not having any of the cards he'd created get drawn by anyone in any of our 13 to-date pulls from the hat, so I just said yes to his crazy idea. Plus, that retcon made at least as much sense as shoving bread into your wounds

… but other than all that miscellaneous insanity, I'm not really certain what the context was of this card, or why we were drawing:

• 14. "We need beer. NOW."

So they all piled into the mechamastodon, and drove it around till they could find the local brewery.
The brewery was guarded by kobolds in bronze armor, carrying bronze whips, and making mastodon calls on bronze french-kobold-horns. They apparently assumed the PCs were just another run-of-the-mill kobold-filled mechamastodon.

The doors to the brewery swing open, revealing dozens of emaciated, broken dwarves, clearly now enslaved to the kobolds.  They are being forced to labor, and brew pumpkin ale for their kobold overlords. It is a truly sad sight, and a dishonor that cannot go unavenged.

Thugnar leaps forth from the cockpit of the mechamastodon, in much the way Athena sprung from the head of Zeus. The mythical reference will matter (sort of) a few cards later. The other dwarves start crawling out of the hole Thugnar leaves behind him, except for Brunhilda and Cog who drive the mech.

• 15. "Thugnar plows into several kobolds, knocking them down. Thugnar plays kobold golf. The mastodon's tusks swing, killing several. Oredang sneaks into the brewery! Another mechamastodon appears!"

The two mechs battle, mastodono-a-mastadono.

• 16. "Our mastodon rams their mastodon. Mad Oleg is thrown from the rear. Sensing his opportunity, he lobs the flaming ghost trunk into the hole in their mastodon. It lights on fire."

More color narration followed. Oredang and Groin son of Oin took up position near the beer.  The battle raged on as they sampled the kegs.

• 17. "Brunhilda drives their mammoth backwards, forcing it through the doors into the walkway over the abyss. Burning kobolds climb onto the top of the mammoth."

There was no previous mention of an abyss prior to this card, but not only is that how 6X works, but it's also perfectly in tune with the subject matter for there to be a big bottomless pit with a narrow walkway spanning it such as one might use to battle a balrog.

• 18. "The hide is burnt away as Cog figures out how to shake off the flaming kobolds into the abyss. The other dwarves have liberated the brewery."

There dwarves bow to their new saviors. An elderly, broken looking, emaciated dwarf steps forward. He identifies himself as Blordock Syrupbraid the Younger, son of Blordock Syrupbraid the Elder, and thus heir apparent to the throne now that HammerPatterned the Multiplicity of Tongs has been liberated. Mainly he serves as a obligatory exposition/wrap-up info dump to explain in case anyone had missed the finer details of what had happened. Kobold siege. Kobolds appear to give up, but leave a giant jasper elephant behind. The dwarves hall it inside, and worship or party around it. When everyone's drunk… well, more drunker than is usual even for a dwarf, the kobolds sneak out of the elephant and deploy mechamastodons to conquer. 

Being drunk, stupid, and beaten-down, these dwarves have started worshiping elephants and specifically the giant jasper elephant statue. They even call the players half-elephant demigods in dwarven form, come to free them from the half-elephant demigods in kobold form who were enacting the punishment of the high elephant gods.

Or something.

At this point, I realize we haven't had anyone go crazy, which is totally a Dwarf Fortress thing. So I start narrating how one of the dwarves here had used the giant jasper elephant as a component in a slightly fancier artifact statue of his own design - mainly by attaching wheels (so they could haul it in) and big garnet eyes to the existing statue. But it's totally his design now, and the pinnacle of his life, and as the players explain that the statue has been destroyed, he goes berserk. 

You thought the previous fights were big and crazy, wait till you get a load of even round one of my big climactic battle with the psychopathic spreekilling craftsdwarf. We pulled out all the stops for this one!

19. "Mad Oleg knocks him out with a single blow."

Nicely done, sir.

All that's left is the "happily ever after" solution, so I let everyone throw into the hat their own personal best interpretation of how this could end.

• 20. "After being honored by the freed dwarves, the party seeks out the next fortress.  However, at their camp that night, Oredang's pet yak calf creeps up on them -- her mouth opening to reveal a kobold crossbow…"

I must say I rather like the idea of a mechayakcalf getting the drop on them. Was it replaced by kobolds when they left it in the pumpkin patch, or was it secretly a kobold spy mechayak all along?

Your Princess Is In 6X Castle

About a week ago I played a short but very enjoyable game of 6X.  6X is a two-page-long settingless RPG rule-set, intended for improvisation and pick-up games. Link to 6X rules.

The core mechanic of 6X is simple, and collaborative. Whenever someone tries to do something that would logically take a die-roll in another game, the group builds a d6 chart for that roll. The player picks what happens if they roll a "1", listing off exactly what they wanted to accomplish if everything goes perfectly right. The GM picks a "6" result, basically the worst case scenario. "2" to "5" are filled in by group consensus, with "2" and "3" being good things but not the full intended success, and "4" and "5" being failures or side-effects you'd probably rather avoid.

Honestly, I was a little dubious about the system going in. I couldn't imagine I'd be happy with a flat 50% success rate for all actions, and I feared the collaborative table-making would slow things down terribly. I'm pleased to say I was wrong. Table-making is super fast and simple, and is at the heart of the fun.

Our game was set in a fantasy kingdom made up on the spot. Since we did all the charts on paper, I can easily transcribe them here as an example of play.

Theme: Medieval Fantasy
Plot: The Princess has been kidnapped

Player Characters:

Captain Midea
Captian of the Royal Guard who hails from an Amazonian land. Good at archery and swordplay. Strong leadership skills.

Fülöp the Transmutor
Duttering old court wizard several years past his prime. Powerful sorcery in a frail body. Very poor eyesight. Wielder of the Sacred Staff of Bitterness.

Bevan Rees
Plucky young annoying assistant to Fülöp. Stupid lucky, sarcastic, underpaid. Magic is not advanced.

Set-up and Pitch:
Ireeki, the Royal Princess, has gone missing, and it's our job to find her… but we don't know that yet. The PCs are all servants of the royal court of a the King of... anybody got a name for a country?  Okay, it's called Walterland. The neighboring Kingdom called... Chevalier... is very antagonistic and may or may not be involved in the kidnapping. Go!

The 3 PCs and a few NPCs are standing outside the Grand Hall of His Majesty's Castle. We've been summoned to a private audience, but then told to wait until The King calls us in. The wait was pretty long, honestly, and the party-like sounds coming from the other side of the door did nothing to make us feel that there was a mystery or adventure afoot. Our interactions with the Royal Court Jester were silly enough to keep us amused even if the plot was spinning it's wheels. I really couldn't tell if the GM was floundering, or just trying to subtly let us know that the King wasn't really too concerned about his missing daughter. We chewed the scenery, developed our character personalities, and turned Bevin's fingers intermittently invisible with a minor transmutation.

Eventually, we realized out-of-character that the King wasn't really getting to us and the plot wouldn't start till we did something.  So that's when Bevin decided to sneak into the Grand Hall.

Bevin sneaks into Grand Hall

1. Bevin sneaks in, and finds a beautiful woman in the royal court that is happy to dance with him.
2. Bevin sneaks in, and finds a slightly attractive woman to dance with.
3. Bevin sneaks in, and is about to dance with a beautiful woman, when Fülöp realizes he's gone missing and casts "summon assistant" to drag him back.
4. Bevin sneaks in, and gets himself slapped by a beautiful woman.
5. Bevin is kicked out by the guards, and it's really embarrassing.
6. Guards catch Bevin sneaking about and throw him in the dungeon.

We rolled a "1", allowing Bevin a fine time dancing with a courtier. But the player of Midea figured she really out to be doing her in-character job as Captain of the Guard. So she heads in to the Grand Hall to drag Bevin out. 

So this was our second roll, and we didn't even know the plot, yet. The rules probably would have had us roll initiative and take interwoven actions, but we figured it'd be faster and easier to just make a contested roll table. Midea's player would chose the "1" result, Bevin's player the "6", and a single roll would resolve the conflict. I feel this was a great way to handle it, and will be my preferred way to resolve PvP conflicts in the game from here on out. There's a bit of abuse potential if the PCs chose results that affected the world more than each other, but I'm pretty sure the GM could easily punish such bad behavior in later charts.

Midea heads into the Grand Hall to get Bevin

1. Midea pulls Bevin out without incident.
2. Midea pulls Bevin out, but the earlier transmutation proves contagious, and now her fingers are intermittently invisible.
3. Midea pulls Bevin out, but stops the party, causing a scene. This is NOT becoming of a guard!
4. The King sees Midea and calls her over to talk. Bevin keeps dancing.
5. "Sorry, Ma'am." The rest of the guards stop Midea from setting foot on the dance-floor.
6. Midea tries to get Bevin off the dance floor. The beautiful courtier thinks Midea is trying to cut in, and scolds her in humiliating fashion.

Looking back on it, the table was kinda stacked against Midea, but at the time it wasn't obvious. The dice favored her however, rolling another "1". She halls Bevin out, and we all now get the joy of waiting patiently once again.

The GM eventually gives us admittance to the Grand Hall, but decides to throw me a little challenge in the form of the King's  Steward deciding my wizard is too old for whatever this mission is.  So I pull a Gandalf on them: "Do not take me for a conjuror of cheap tricks!"

Convincing the King's Messenger to admit Fülöp

1. Fülöp briefly grows to 12 feet tall, wreathed in lightning and emphasized by a dramatic crash of thunder. The steward and messenger as so impressed and terrified, they show me nothing but respect forever after.
2. Minor lightning hits the messenger, who is slightly dazed and somewhat impressed by this. He lets Fülöp in.
3. The light show is kinda scary, they let Fülöp in just to get away from him.
4. Fülöp gets the targeting wrong, making Bevin 12 feet tall. The apprentice runs into the hall and the wizard hobbles after him.
5. Fülöp reverses the polarity, shrinking down to 6" tall and squeaking with minuscule rage that impresses no one.
6. Fülöp accidentally turns himself invisible and the guards cannot find him.

We rolled a "3", which got the job done well enough. The GM, however, was not yet done making things hard for me. Seriously, I can't recall ever having to struggle this much just to be told what the mission was. Anyhow, I suppose I did it to myself by being the only PC with obvious flaws to poke at. Since Fülöp is old and frail, he can't bow before The King. At least, not without magical assistance to overcome his arthritis.

The Bowing Spell

1. Fülöp successfully casts the spell, gracefully bowing despite his aged and stiff spine.
2. Fülöp successfully cast the bow spell, but with the side-effect of turning purple.
3. Fülöp successfully casts the bow spell, but lets loose a loud and undignified fart in the process.
4. Fülöp bows, but the spell haywires and causes him to do some weird acrobatic upside down levitating bow.
5. Power-word: Bow. Everyone but Fülöp feels compelled to bow. His Majesty is not amused.
6. The senile old wizard accidentally confuses the "bow" spell for the "bath" spell. It's not pretty.

A "4" has Fülöp twisting and contorting, but at least not pissing off The King.  After proper respects are paid to His Majesty, we learn the plot.

Princess Ireeki has gone missing, and was probably kidnapped. Her lady-in-waiting was present when she vanished, but The King has held off doing anything about it out of suspicion his daughter had just run away to get attention. Suitors from a nearby kingdom are due in a few more days, however, and we must get the Princess back before they arrive for political reasons.

Midea suggests we interrogate the Lady-In-Waiting. This results in a skill roll that I think came very close to stalling out the adventure before it could even get started. Clearly, there's a learning curve to 6X, and we were about to realize it.

Interviewing the Lady-In-Waiting

1. She gives us a good description of the man who kidnapped the Princess. He has a dark beard and a heavy unibrow, is 6 ft tall, and was wearing a dark cloak. When he put the cloak around the princess, they disappeared.
2. She didn't get a good look at the kidnapper, but she thinks magic was involved.
3. She didn't get a good look at the kidnapper, but he left behind an eyebrow hair we might be able to use for some sympathetic magic to locate or track him.
4. She won't stop crying and has nothing more to add.
5. Her thoughts are muddled. The man doesn't actually have a unibrow, that's just a masking spell that prevents her from remembering what he really looked like.
6. She saw nothing. In truth, she was busy in bed with The King, and not at her post in the Princess' Quarters at the time of the kidnapping. Her description was made up, and His Majesty will cover for her.

Isn't that horrible?  "2" and "4" are both total derailments for the plot with no further obvious direction for the plot to go. They'd be better as "5" and "6" than "2" and "4", given that they represent total failures to follow the clue trail.  Entries "3", "5" and "6" all give a tiny bit of information, coupled with another derailment that's not quite as bad as "2" or "4" but would still result in some wheel spinning.  Only "1" advances the plot or provides useful intel, and even that doesn't really give much of a "lead" to follow. Regardless of what we roll on that chart, it will require another roll just to figure out what direction to go in.  All our tables after this one were constructed to be far more dynamic and less likely to stall out the plot engine.

As it turns out, we rolled "3", and were blessed with a single hair to enchant in hopes of finding the suspect. Of course, our wizard was a bit dodgy and senile, so this was far from guaranteed to work. Knowing it had even odds to go horribly wrong, I asked for something pretty darned advantageous on the "1".

Fülöp's Follicular Flight

1. We are magically transported to the eyebrow man. We catch him with his pants down, sitting in the privy.
2. We are transported to the eyebrowed man's town. He's in a tavern.
3. We get a vision of the unibrow, and know his location.
4. Miscast! Bevin loses all his body hair!
5. The spell transports us half way to the unibrow man. We end up in a swamp.
6. The spell transports all of the unibrow man's extended family to the castle we're in.

I felt the GM was being far too kind to us, and I told her so. I was asking for the moon on the "1" result, and I felt the "6" should be just as punishing. Instead, the "6" on this chart was more directly useful than the "2" on the previous chart.

Not that it matters, since we rolled a "3". The spell revealed his location, and we had to ride all night to catch him. He was in the village of Targethorpe, staying at the Lamprey Inn. Targethorpe was also known for its large monastery full of orthodox bell-ringing monk mystics.

We arrive just after dawn, and attempt to find out from the inkeeper whether or not the kidnapper or princess are still here.

Lamprey Inn

1. They're upstairs sleeping.
2. They left at the crack of dawn, and they're less than an hour ahead.
3. They're an hour down the road, and accompanied by a platoon of soldiers from the rival Kingdom of Chevalier! Those fiends!
4. The owner leads us out back and facilitates us getting mugged.
5. He's not sure what happened to the princess, but the unibrowed one was found dead and drained of blood earlier this morning.
6. The bar keep pours you a drink to answer your questions. You are drugged, and pass out quickly.

A "5" put us back into investigation mode, despite what was almost going to be a chase or fight scene. A discussion follows about whether or not this entry on the card definitively implies that the blood-draining was vampiric in nature. I'm not sure we ever came to a consensus.

Since the only other thing that had been established about Targethorpe was the monastery, we decided to go ask the monks if they knew anything. Gwyon, the bell-loving Abbot, was a wise mystic, and old acquaintance of Fülöp's. So, once the begloved abbot was done deafening us with his bells (another great characterization by the GM), we were able to ask if he'd seen Princess Ireeki recently.

Monastery of Targethorpe

1. Good news! She's actually up in the belltower as we speak, and Gwyon thinks it will only take him a fortnight to cure her vampirism.
2. Your princess is in another temple. She's been sold for a sacrifice to the temple of Nergal.
3. The monk knows of a vampire nest in the hills, and we go to rescue the girl.
4. Gwyon hisses as you realize that he's become a vampire. He sneers "You'll never get her from our nest in the hills!" - and flies away.
5. She was captured by slavers from Solarian Wastes. Their caravan is three days ahead.
6. The Orc leader Gloksnag and his clan have been doing the bidding of the high wizard Dloththal. He has Ireeke.

Apparently the GM wasn't as enamored with the vampirism concept as some of the players were. But she had awesome NPC names, and that's cooler than undead any day. When the die rolled the GM's way, she got to tell us all about Orcish blood magic, and the dred wizard Dloththal.  Clearly, the Princess was in peril and we must ride out to save her.

We didn't get far. The orcs were waiting for us. As they sprung their ambush, mighty Amazonian Captain Midea tries to defend the dottering old wizard and his young apprentice. Yep, that would be another die-roll.

Orcs Attack

1. The orcs are all female, and are mad because the evil wizard Dloththal has stolen their men. Midea convinces them to join us.
2. There's a fight, and Fülöp's Sacred Staff of Bitterness glows so brightly the half-blinded Orcs flee in terror. They'll be back for round two after we get to prepare defenses.
3. Midea wipes out half of the orcs in a mighty battle. Bevin hides. Fülöp accidentally sets the forest on fire, scattering the rest of the attackers.
4. We defeat the orcs, but one of us loses a limb, and another of us is slain. Luckily, the slain hero is magically reincarnated as a sentient talking truffle-hunting pig.
5. The orcs capture us.
6. Fülöp turns the party into mules, hoping that orcs only drain the blood of humans. 

Again, we experienced a bit of trouble getting the 2s through 5s to fit. (Our 2 and 3 should be switched, and our 4 and 5 should probably be switched as well). This time it was my fault.

Not that that mattered, as a "6" came up on the die. We're all turned into mules!  That seemed rather silly and fitting. Plus, it was late. So, we all decided to end it there. Game over - we're mules now! Presumably, hopefully the orcs used us as pack animals instead of dinner. Then there'd be a chance for a sequel next time we're all feeling goofy.


Gotta admit, 6X was a ton of fun. It's easy to run, and great for engaging everyone at once. Even when you split the party, everybody gets to contribute to the possible results of every single die roll. I definitely recommend it for pick-up games, impromptu sessions, and groups that experience a lot of chaos at the tabletop. PCs working at cross purposes, players hogging the spotlight, lack of focus, and many other potential problems for crunchier traditional systems actually work as strengths for 6X. That's pretty cool.

Reading the rules for myself several days later, I see that the game is expecting for fights to be handled with several die rolls. The examples feature NPCs getting wounded at "1" and PCs wounded at "6". That's certainly more conventional and balanced, but I've got to say that for our purposes the wilder results tables worked just great.

On that topic, I must admit that the rules, despite being so minimal and looking ripe for abuse, turned out to be very enjoyable and really well balanced.  I tried _hard_ to break the system every time I was getting to propose a "1" result. That I could just as easily fall victim to an equally-ridiculous "6" (as we all eventually did) kept things from being too easy.  We sometimes had trouble filling in an appropriate "3" or the like, but for the most part that didn't matter as long as the best-case and worst-case scenarios were clear. The GM getting to define the 6 after the player defines the 1 is critical to keeping the game balanced and exciting.

TROOPS: Cloud City

Last night I ran a one-shot based on the cool old Star Wars fan-film TROOPS. This was the second time I'd run such a game, but the last time was way back in February of 2009.  For last night's reprisal, I moved the game from Tatooine to Bespin. Filmed live on the platforms of Cloud City.

Here's a link to my post about the old game.  For those unfamiliar with the general TROOPS concept, here's a link to the very entertaining video that inspired this madness.

We used the classic d6 system, with the PCs assembled quick and easy via the game's template system. The PCs were mostly Stormtroopers, plus one contract Bounty Hunter (an Ewok of all things) and a probe droid operating as embedded journalist / camera crew. Surprisingly likeable PC Stormtroopers, as in the video, with completely dysfunctional shady NPCs. "All NPCs are Guilty - Otherwise they wouldn't be NPCs." A few of the PCs were reprised from the other scenario two years ago, but any who got promoted had since been busted back down to no more than junior officer status so it would still feel like TROOPS.

This time I ran them through the background events of the last third of Empire Strikes Back, explaining why the 'Falcon's hyperdrive is deactivated, how C-3PO got shot, and what kind of trouble you can get into when someone's severed hand lands on your back porch.

At the start of every scene, I handed a random PC a short written script. This was their narrative monologue to the camera, used to set up and lead in to the next scene, and establish background details. For example, to start the session, I had someone read:

We’ve just been recently stationed out here on Cloud City in the Bespin system. I know, you’ve probably never heard of it, neither had I. It’s one of those fly-by-night corporate towns, mining Tibana gas out of the sky. Not sure you can even call that mining, it’s more like sucking. Can I say that on TV?

The local governor is kinda shady, 'cause the place is almost small enough to not be noticed. He’s not even enrolled in the Mining Guilds, and he owes a lot of back taxes and gambling debts. Anyhow, the citizenry aren’t too pleased with the way he’s running things, and there’s been some disturbances as a result.

That’s why we’ve been called in, to bolster the local police force.

Sometimes that ruffles a few feathers with the local big whigs, of course, but in the end everyone agrees quality of life improves once the Empire gets involved, and that’s what really matters. 

"Cloud City, Bespin, 7:00 am local-time" scrolled across the screen. Then the camerabot turned to another one of the TROOPS, who said (read from the telepromter, no doubt) this:

We’re responding to a call from the local Port Authority, seems they need a bit of help here.

There’s a ship that came in for repairs, had a malfunctioning hyperdrive or something, Put it in to dry dock at the local shop, and there’s some sort of animal problem. I’m guessing the owner left his pet on board, and forgot to tell the mechanics.

Normally, this sort of thing would be handled by Animal Control, not by the Emperor’s Finest, but apparently these here Gas Giant planets don’t have much in the way of wild life, so this town doesn’t actually have an Animal Control Guildhouse.

Looks like that fellow over there works here, we’ll start by asking him if he knows what kind of animal we’re looking for.

So the PCs enter the shipyard, where a pissed-off mechanic is bandaging his hand. He explains the owner of the ship has a real menagerie on board, some big fuzzy thing, a bunch of droids, and whatever it was that bit him. For a couple minutes I managed to imply it was Chewbacca that bit him, which was a total miscommunication red-herring. The players were wondering what the guy did that would provoke Chewie to attack, but had to proceed as the arrogant Imperial pigs they were.

The Imperials head over to the ship to check it out. One officer leans into the open hyperdrive port and bangs on it to scare out whatever the animal is, and ends up with a Mynock wrapped around his helmet.  There's a couple more in the engine block, and they start flying around.

It wasn't much a challenge for armed and armored troopers, but I broke out the Star Wars miniatures anyway and dipped our toes in a combat system none of us had used in a long time.. The first two Mynocks went down in the very first round, but the third one was surprisingly resilient. No one could get a decent damage roll on it, and a missed shot with a "1" on the wild-die left the NPC lying dead on the floor.

After the Mynocks were dealt with, the PCs put a "boot" on the Falcon's hyperdrive, broke one of it's tail-lights to justify a few extra tickets, and searched the holds. They confiscated the boxes full of money that Han was going to use to pay off Jabba. Aside from a little trouble with that little zappy ball that Luke used to practice his sabre work in the first film, the scene wrapped up without incident, and without the PCs ever meeting the main characters from the movies.

Next scene. One of the PCs reads:

This part of town has a bit of a reputation as a “red diode district”, if you know what I mean. That is to say, prostitution, mostly droid-related.

We’re just gonna do a little sweep through the neighborhood, mostly chase off the hookers and johns. Let them know the Empire is here now, and that sort of thing won’t be tolerated anymore.  They shouldn’t be out on the streets lookin’ for droid love, that’s what the Twi’Lek Dancing Girls Guild is for.

Of course, if any of the pimps, hos, or sexbots get uppity with us, we are authorized to use whatever force we deem necessary. That’ll send a message, loud and clear. To protect the decency and social welfare of the city, of course.

This lead to a small scene with an "obvious prostitute", I said as I placed a minature R4 astromech unit on the tabletop. When they eventually blasted the sexbot, it responded in the typical R2D2 method, rolling back, head spinning, and dozens of tools and attachments popping out of all the hidden compartments. So now the corridor is littered with vibrators. They question the other nearby bot,  PI-MP, who claims to know nothing about "that slutty little bitchbot".

"You want me to backhand her for you officer? I'm fluent in over 6 million forms of bitchslapping."

Surprisingly, PI-MP doesn't get blasted. He managed to convince them that he was innocent. Some random protocol droid came walking in at that moment, and PI-MP pointed at him. "Look, that's gotta be the pimp you're looking for officers. Look how much bling-bling he's made out of." So they let PI-MP go, and blasted poor C-3PO who just happened to wander in at the wrong time.

Meanwhile, the dirty little Ewok bounty hunter wasn't at all interested in cleaning up the prostitution of Cloud City. Since we were in a bad part of town, he went looking for other entertainment. Before long, he was involved in some illicit gambling with a bunch of Ugnaughts and Jawas, playing some high-stakes game called "Utini!" As their game wrapped up, his fellow little people said they were off to some big protest that was going on.

Which lead right into this scene:

There’s a lot of labor disputes going on lately. Not being affiliated with the Miner’s Guild, the local government is ill-equipped  to deal with it.

An informant told us that there was going to be some sort of protest going on, an attempt by the workers from “Deck Twelve an’ a Half” to unionize or something.

On the one hand you want everybody to be able to speak their mind and improve their lot in life, but at the same time... well, we all know that protests are often just the first step towards Rebellion and lawlessness. We’re gonna see if we can’t get them to disperse, kinda nip that in the bud before it gets too troublesome.

Ah, jeesh, look at all those little guys. They’re kinda cute. Hope we don’t have to disintegrate them. Set for stun.

I got out an actual map for this one, and set up a big cluster of ugnaughts, ewoks, jawas, and various short droids in a picket line. They were complaining about the working conditions on deck 12 & 1/2. Poor lighting, no safety railings, and the terribly low cielings. "First off, who are they trying to kid here? We all know deck '12 & 1/2' is really unlucky number 13. Secondly, why the low ceilings? Are they trying to say we're short? Just because we're not 2-meter tall freaks doesn't mean that some of us don't get claustrophobic! And what did Baron Calrissian do to 'improve' our lot in life? Longer coffee breaks and freakin' door to the brain of Moff Malkovich. I don't think even Moff Malkovich wants to see what happens inside Moff Malkovich's brain. I sure don't!"

Lucasfilm purists might complain about my bizarre choice to work in numerous references in this scene to Being John Malkovich. I know, it was silly, and doesn't quite fit in the Star Wars universe - not even the Expanded Universe. Just like the cameo by Tom Servo in the background in the TROOPS film, so I feel justified. And lets be honest, it's not like you would have been any happier if my references were to Willow or Howard the Duck, so cut me some slack.

The PC Imperial Officer starts making rolls of his command skill, threatening to blow up the protesters if they don't disperse. This gets rid of most of the crowd, except one little power droid who stands his ground shouting "Gonk no, we won't Go(nk)!" Time for some good old fashioned police brutality. The PC AT-ST Pilot chose to have her walker kick the Gonk Droid off the platform. She failed, with a dismal low roll and a spectacular "1" on the wild die.

So now the AT-ST scout walker is lying face-down on the terrain (a parked Imperial Shuttle on the platform, as a matter of fact) and the badly damaged Gonk droid is ominously whistling as if it's going to blow.

It ain't easy justifying this much SteamPork.

That's not nearly dire enough, so I chose that moment to have some of the other protesters return. Including several ugnaughts in a mecha war machine. I put my "Uggernaught" miniature on the table. I've been itching to use this mini in a scenario ever since I opened it in a booster of Star Wars minis a couple years back. Look at that thing, ain't it just ridiculously cool? Usually hard to justify, but this was no doubt the perfect game for it.

So now the PCs are pinned between the fire of a crazy ugnaught death machine, and the whistling overload of a malfunctioning power droid. Now that's drama!  :)

While most of the squad was pinned down, one of the Troopers did manage to use the cover of the buildings on the map to advance without incident and take out the rebel ugnaughts by means of a well-placed grenade. The whistling Gonk droid on the other hand was beyond their ability to multi-task, so most of the PCs took wounds from shrapnel damage that penalized their rolls the rest of the night.

The PC Imperial Officer went to fetch a change of uniforms, and came back with a new mission (and thus another of my short scripted monologues).

We’re responding to a possible domestic dispute. Neighbors called, said there’s a lot of yelling and the sounds of dishes shattering coming from one of the homes here.

I don’t expect too much trouble, though, as you can tell we’re in a nice part of the city. They’ve got a beautiful view of the bottomless shaft, there. That’s a doozy.

 If need be, we can take one or both of them down to the Detention Center till they sober up or calm down.

Dispatch says its the address is the home of one of the local city administrators, so chances are they’ll quickly calm down just to keep up appearances. These local government types are kinda slippery like that.

As it turned out, the home was that of Mr. and Mrs. Lobot. For those of you who don't recognize the name, Lobot was Lando's right-hand man on Cloud City. The bald guy with the computer sticking out of his head who follows Calrissian around, wordlessly directing lesser minions. He holds a position of importance, but he's very formal and not a particularly warm or communicative individual. So, it's no surprise that his marriage is a bit strained. Probably works late nights and weird back-room business deals with his shady boss in gambling dens and strip clubs. Who's to blame Mrs Lobot if she suspects her husband is secretly some sort of mob boss?

Lots of hysterics follow. The place has been trashed. She's in tears, crying and screaming, and he's standing there stoicly telling the troopers that everything is under control. Amidst all her sobbing, they eventually figure out she keeps repeating "it's on the balcony!" There the PCs find a severed hand. Mr Lobot swears he had nothing to do with it, that it must have fallen from somewhere further up the bottomless shaft. Mrs Lobot, however, is certain it's some sort of creepy mob signal, like waking up with the head of a Bantha in your bed.

While they're all out on the balcony trying to sort things out, the rest of a body falls past them. They look upward, and see this narrow promontory extending out to the middle of the chasm. There's someone else up on the damn thing, too, some black-clad Emo kid. Cut to narration:

We’re heading up a few levels, there’s a crisis situation, looks like a Jumper. It’ll be our job to talk him down.

We don’t get these suicide calls too often since most citizens of the Empire are so darned happy. You sure do see it more often out here on the Rim, though.

I remember a couple of planets back, there were these Jumpers just hanging from the ceiling! Hanging there. Wouldn’t come down. Stayed up there so long, they caught their death of cold.

Man, that place sure was chilly. C - O - L - D! You can ask my wife. On a frosty night,
laying in bed, I still say to her “Well at least I’m not back on Hoth!” I’ll remember that place for the rest of my life.

Hey, if you forgave a Being John Malkovich reference, I figure you won't mind me stealing a Bastogne line from Band of Brothers.

In the movie, after Luke throws himself off the ledge, Vader just heads back to his Star Destroyer like its no big deal. That of course is not what the PCs find when they get up there, though. No, I have a "fine tradition" in my TROOPS games that every session must end with a Drunken Darth. So Vader's out on the far end of this narrow ledge over a huge pit, all sad and depressed because his son just jumped. The Ewok bounty hunter walks out there to talk him back in. They end up sharing a few drinks - all those buttons and switches on Vader's chest plate are controls to his built-in minibar.

"I'm not a bad father, am I? I know I wasn't ever really there for him, but lots of people have workaholic absentee dads, right? That's no reason to shout 'you're not my father' and jump off a cliff, is it? I mean, it's not like he didn't know I exist, I left him with family after all. That's better than I had. You know what my mom told me? She said my daddy was a magic space virus!! You know what that does to a kid? Teaches him his mommies a damn liar, that's what it does! So at least I didn't lie to him like that..."

The Ewok tries talking him back in off the ledge, but without a lot of luck. In retrospect, I should have called for some sort of social roll to give him a shot at success, but it was a surprisingly complex scene and I was pretty deep in character, so I dropped the ball there. Not that I wasn't pleased with how it all turned out.

He's out there, waxing suicidally, and would rather down a six pack and a few bowls right here at the cliffs of doom than go back to work or blow off steam at some nightclub.

Someone suggests that the one female Stormtrooper in the squad try to coax him back to safety. She's rather reluctant, because the other time we played this, he made her be his date to his High School Reunion... and let's face it, Darth Vader is kind of a dick. Speaking of which, it's not long before she's ordered out on the ledge, pole-dancing on that vertical pipe or antennae or whatever the point of those weird bits on the bridge to nowhere are. This took a fairly difficult climbing & jumping roll, especially in the armor, but as it turns out she was up to the task.

As Vader is talking about what a great kid he had before he threw himself off the ledge, the PC Imperial Officer steps forward with their evidence baggie from the previous scene. "This son of yours, was this his by any chance?" he asks, handing Vader the severed hand.

I tell everyone that this is too much for Vader, and he feints. Everyone should roll initiative. I'll roll 3d6 for when Vader falls, only people who roll higher than him can act before he falls off the ledge. The first PC to act is also the only one who's too far away to do anything more than shout. The next two PCs try Brawling rolls to grab Vader, but fail and have to make a Dex check to keep from falling with him. The Ewok bounty hunter attaches a grappling hook to Vader, but there's some doubts as to how well a lone Ewok can belay the descent of a rather tall human in battle armor carrying a well-stocked wet bar. Yet another PC rushes out on to narrow promontory to try and grab him, and they also fail, this time with a "1" on the wild die.

Time for some final narration, this time improvised, by the GM:

There's a scraping metallic sound, and the camerabot pivots to see several bolts of the superstructure pop as the narrow platform buckles under the weight. With a sudden lurch, the entire promontory breaks loose and tumbles far down out of sight, taking Vader and the whole squad with it.
"TROOPS was filmed live in Cloud City." The theme music plays as the credits roll. "Bad Droids, Bad Droids, whatchyagonna do?"...

So I guess technically that's a TPK, but I've never seen a group quite that unanimously happy with a Total Party Kill before. TPKs don't usually get applause and laughter.

A good GM can save a bad system.

A good GM can save a bad system. I played several new (for me) RPGS this weekend at the Emerald City Game Fest, and I had a ton of fun. In spite of the mechanics. These games had ridiculous off-kilter mechanics, but the GMs kept the games rolling and provided more than enough color to overcome the flaws in the systems.

The first game was octaNe. The scenario was a riff on Big Trouble In Little China, and I gather that's not the usual setting for the game, but it was a lot of fun. Towards the end, the silliness meter cranked up higher than it goes in Big Trouble In Little China (and that's saying something, isn't it?). Ranma and Sailor Moon both showed up in the final scene, a couple PCs got replaced by their evil twins, things just got... odd.

All of which certainly justifies using some light-weight system (instead of, say, Feng Shui, or d20). Yet, I can't say I cared for octaNe. The mechanics were very unbalanced. The pregen I was playing had a Daring rating of 2, and (since the other pregens didn't) that meant I almost always acted first, almost always succeeded at every task, and ended every conflict with more plot points than I started with.

I can't imagine building any sort of dramatic tension in this system, given that on any die roll the PCs have at least a 71% chance of winning... the whole conflict. Because I was going first every round, I was constantly having to reign myself in, force myself to leave something for the other PCs to fight (or do). It was not easy.

I feel particularly bad for one of the players in our group whose best stat was Magic. Magic goes last each round, _and_ you have to pay plot points to activate it. In theory this is somehow compensated for by being broadly applicable and open-ended, but given the level of narrative freedom that any of the other stats already has, I can't imagine how that could possibly compensate for such drawbacks.

To add insult to injury, his second best stat was Charm... which sits in the middle of the initiative order. Ever try to make a social roll in the middle of the round, _after_ you comrades have already killed half the enemies? Oh, sure, on a success the rules let you narrate a sudden peaceful resolution, but it will rarely pass the disbelief test. "After you ambush and behead most of them, I convince the survivors that there are non-violent solutions to our disagreement." Sure.

Painfully bad system. I think the exact same scenario would have been far, far better with Wu Shu, Risus, PDQ, 3:16, F#, or any of a dozen other "fast and fun" systems. I can't think of any reason why I would want to use octaNe's system. Admittedly, I've never read the rulebook, so maybe there's something I'm missing here... but I doubt it.

Honestly, I'd rather just have everyone roll a single die at the start of a conflict and highest roll narrates how the entire conflict wraps up. It'd honestly be better balanced. As it was, I'd always go first, and nearly always had the freedom to end the entire encounter on that one roll, so spreading that around to the other PCs would have had to be an improvement. I have never, ever in my decades of gaming experience, had to fight so hard to keep myself from abusing a system. The flaws in octaNe are so obvious and horrid, it's amazing it ever made it into print (and even more amazing that there are supplements and expansions out there).

And yet we had fun. The GM did a few really interesting things outside of combat that really saved the game from its own conflict resolution system. His previous plays of the system had indicated that there'd be a plethora of plot points sitting unused, so he came up with a way to make them meaningful. He got these really fancy chinese envelopes and stuffed them with "fortunes". Clues, plot hints, solutions to puzzles, revelations of background info, and some real game-changers like "your character is actually a ghost". So, between scenes, we cashed in excess points for clues, and they really helped coax us along several possible plotlines. He also prepped color photos of all the locations alluded to in the clues (and many of the villains), so there was plenty of instant flavor and atmosphere, and a sense that we were "on the right path" even though it was free-form. Without these clever structural cues being available, I imagine our narrative freedom would have imploded the plot before the end of the second conflict scene. Well done, Mr. GM! I may just have to steal your red envelopes for my own future campaigns.

Leonardo's Microscope

I've tried quite a few different rules-light GM-less games over the years (Off the top of my head: Microscope, Remember Tomorrow, Fiasco, Universalis, Rune, Baron Munchausen, and Pantheon), and I strongly feel that Microscope is the best of the bunch.

Microscope is settingless, and indeed that's really the point of it. In-game, you create a setting turn-by-turn, and then zip your focus around to various eras within that setting for impromptu scenes exploring it. In our experience, it was lively and wild, an excuse for everyone to ham it up... even the more usually quiet and passive players dove right in! I suspect it'd be hard to do an entirely serious setting and find it satisfying at your first go. Aim for humor and over-the-top cinematics in your first testdrive of Microscope, and it won't disappoint.

I read in a forum thread somewhere that Microscope works really well for alternate history since you have a common ground to riff off of, and thus plenty of inspiration. I'd like to submit our game as further confirmation of that observation.  Our setting began as just the concept of "Steampunkish alternate history where all of Leonardo Da Vinci's craziest  ideas work as imagined, and empower the Italian city-states to dominate the world." We opened right up with the cathedral-airship of the Anti-Pope pursuing the floating city of Venice.... and it just got crazier from there.  Assassination attempts against Empress Lucrezia; Sicily colonizing Japan; Napoleon leading the Genoese mammoth corps vs Baba-Yaga's lumbering mecha-bird-hut; analog computers stocking the Pope's personal bordello; and Venetians vs Zulu's at the battle of Beppo's Drift.

Like I said, it was a wild ride. Here's one of the tamer moments:

Click-click click-click. Vacuum tubes glow and fade, gears whir and ratchet. A large loom arm glides over the top of the machine, and then it spits out a punched card with rows of woodblock-printed letters across the top. His excellency The Steam Pope adjusted his lenses and regarded the message at arms' length.

It read: "Airship to Queen's Elephant 3. Checkmate. I am Deep Cerulean."

So as not to entirely disappoint those who expect me to be overly critical of every game system, I have a couple minor gripes I can air here. These are things I wasn't as blown away by as the rest of the system:

• The mechanism that the victim chooses the success and/or consequences of the attack worked plenty well, but didn't exactly motivate anyone to mount an offensive. Some scenes that could have been dramatic or violent lacked tension because of it. We had enough wackiness and scenery-chewing to keep it fun, regardless.
• Some scenes didn't suggest characters naturally. Especially since our group was large (the rules state it's for 2-4 players, but it worked smashingly well for our group of 7). You might think you're introducing a major character and then have nothing to do, or plan to play a background character and realize you're the only person representing one of the two factions involved in the scene.
• The "point" of Legacies is not particularly clear, nor is the "point" of rating every scene as light or dark. Both exist just for thematic considerations, but masquerade as mechanics.  It wasn't until I carefully read the PDF the day after the game that I could be certain there wasn't anything more to them. I think this could be spelled out better in the rules... or that the virgin design space of making such things matter more in-game could be explored.
• I think named characters could end up on cards of some sort. It's not really necessary, perhaps, since they might only be in one scene and have no stats, but I think a bit more to remind us they exist would have facilitated making them recur. Or perhaps we just could have done a better job of titling our scene and event cards to make the characters more accessible later. Without some way to record the characters,  the game definitely favors hamming-it-up and not taking things too seriously. Anything that fosters recurring characters and the time to develop them would help to reduce Microscope's need for grandstanding antics and outrageous humor.

Those are my four complaints, all very minor, and one of them was only an issue because our group was so large. Overall, I loved it, and I imagine it will get even better as we get more experience framing scenes. I'd happily play again without any house-rules, or with either of the following:

1. For a large group, I think it might be a good idea to pack a dozen chess pieces along with the note cards. Four pawns and a king and a queen of each of two colors. When you introduce a character, you grab a chess piece. Pawn vs Royalty indicates whether or not you're a major mover & shaker in the scene. Color indicates which faction you're with for conflict scenes. That way, if you're the last person to introduce a character in a round, you can immediately tell if it's 5-against-1 and then choose to side with the underdog. No restrictions, just a tool for helping spot who your friends and foes are amidst the narrative chaos.
   
2. If you find your group reluctant to take pot-shots at each other's characters given the mechanics, you might test out this variant: Have the person making the attack roll 1d6. On a "1" they get to narrate the results, on a 2 to 6 the target does (per the rules as written). That may make aggressive actions seem more worth it, without too badly subverting the point of the game. If using the chess-piece idea from the previous paragraph, you could even make it that the attacker wants to roll equal to or less than the number of chess pieces engaged in the attack. Just a thought.

Beam Me Up Before You Go-Go

Last night I ran "Wham Trek" at my weekly one-shot group. The mechanics were an extremely light trimmed-down version of Warhammer FRP 3rd. After a brief explanation of the rules, and a tiny bit of clarification that this had nothing to do with George Michael, we were ready to go.

For those still scratching their heads, Wham Trek was an RPG scenario blending of a couple of crazy old boardgames designed by the great Tom Wham, with just a hint of Star Trek parody. The PCs were the crew of the Znutar, and they were responding to a distress call from the backwaters world known as "Snitopia". It would appear there was an unexplained geological upheaval on Snitopia, and an entire mountain range was jumping up and down on the peaceful snits.

For those still scratching their heads, George Michael was half of the 80's UK pop duo "WHAM!"

For reasons I can't really explain, this was a game I'd wanted to run for a long time. I'd been unable (until just recently) to figure out mechanics that would work for it. In theory, it needed to be goofy and light, but able to support random interactions of bizarre weapons and alien biochemistry. I used the board from Awful Green Things as the map of the PCs spaceship. That map shows (amongst other things) where 12 different weapon types can be found on the ship, so I assumed I needed a system that would make these 12 weapons functionally different. I felt that Fudge or Risus or the like wouldn't do that - but in retrospect I probably could have saved myself a lot of trouble.

As it turns out, I forgot to make the PCs specify what weapons and equipment they took down to the surface until they were in the middle of a fight and had already sounded the retreat. As a result, my big list of weapons didn't really matter. I also managed to forget to print one very important sheet of paper - the page with all my NPC stats. Several days had passed since I'd statted out those NPCs, and the morning of the game I'd had a very distracting emergency trip to the vet for one of my cats, so I really had no fuzzy clue what the stats were. Which meant more improvisation, as it turns out was alright.

Dice mechanics were pretty simple, using the dice from Warhammer 3rd as a narrative engine without most of the baggage that game brings with it. I skipped the green and red dice, the fatigue rules, the recharge rates, etc. The "comets" on the yellow dice gave PCs narrative control, the "Chaos Star" on the purple dice meant something really bad happened. In theory I had worked out success, boon and bane results for all the weapons and a few locations internal to the "mountain range" (that is to say, the Bolotomi from the Snit's games) but they really didn't end up mattering as we just improved our way through my missing paperwork. (I wouldn't be surprised if none of the players even knew I was missing most of my GM's notes, since I just kept my error to myself and rolled with it. GMing and grifting have more in common than most of us suspect. If you can fool your players into believing everything is running smoothly, it usually will.)

I replaced the intricate critical hit system from Warhammer with a neat little subsystem stolen from the "New Hope" game I played in last week. Each PC had a handful of consequences - disarmed, wounded, distressed, and captured/killed - they could choose from when a foe got a hit on them. A critical success (lots of hammer or eagle symbols on the dice) let the attacker choose which consequence they suffered, otherwise it was defender's choice. In addition to the common consequences, every PC had one custom consequence unique to that character. The captain could be seduced by aliens, the chief engineer could avoid personal injury by having the engines go offline, the doctor could get cranky and drunk, the communications officer might start speaking in tongues, etc.

It worked well enough for a one-shot, but probably would have been better if I'd had my carefully-balanced NPC stats on hand so I would have felt more confident throwing real challenges at the PCs. As it played out, there were very few injuries and no real PC fatalities. I was probably too easy on them to really capture the proper Tom Wham feel. No one seemed to complain, though.

The best developments of the night started when the Pilot (played by Peter) engaged the warp drive while in the atmosphere of Snitopia, and thus slingshotted around to an hour before the scenario started. You know, the classic Star Trek trick of bumbling into time-travel. This gave them the opportunity to actually cause the problem they'd responded to. When things went poorly and the 1st Officer was lost, they just flew out to where their ship had been half an hour earlier, and kidnapped the younger self of the 1st Officer, thereby disrupting the time line. Transchronal ripples spread throughout the universe as they continued to mess with their previous selves and engage in more time travel. In one time line, they contaminated the Snit gene pool with xenomiscegenation and converted them into a Fremen Fedaykin army that spread across the cosmos destroying everything in the name of the 1st Officer (who, along with the ship's mascot, was revered as a God). Then they undid that timeline and prevented themselves from ever visiting the planet in the first place. Good clean stupid fun.

All in all, we had a blast. I sort of regret the amount of work I went to trying to customize the game system. I made Ook and Leadfoot (the mascot and the robot from Awful Green Things) into followers akin to the "Small But Viscious Dog" in Warhammer, and created small deck of random weapon affects, none of which probably needed the level of detail I'd prepped for them. The game was a big success, but probably would have been just as successful with 1/3 the prep work. Hopefully I'll learn that lesson one of these days.

Cyberpunk F#

Last night I ran a sequel to the old Cyberpunk "MOC" campaign, using F# instead of the clunky old rules for CP2020. I really like F#, it scores highly in the flexibility, elegance, and collaborative story-telling arenas.

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Tone and Themes:
The setting aspects were:

• "Dark Comedy" would be the prevailing theme.
• Cold, harsh world where life ain't fair, the rich abuse the poor, and cybernetics is cheap and dirty.
• The PCs are crazy enough, or desperate enough, to join a gang that indulges in random mayhem.

It was a lot of fun, but didn't quite capture the feeling of the old campaign. I think that is because the GM doesn't have any real fangs in F#. The GM can give out negative aspects as a form of damage, but the rules strongly encourage only doing that once per session per PC, and you really can't kill off a PC at all. There's no fear of death, which for many settings is actually a good thing, but probably isn't in keeping with the tone of Cyberpunk. In the old campaign, when the big fight broke out at the end, the PCs would have run and probably scattered - heroism in CP2020 gets you killed. Instead, the PCs stood toe-to-toe with the badguys, and there was nothing I could do to really make them sweat. They had fun, and got to be courageous, so perhaps I shouldn't complain.

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Plot, such as there was:
Despite that tonal difference, the game was a lot of fun. The PCs were loser punks in a bizarre little gang that gets together for random mayhem rolled up on Morton's List. The List told them that this week's adventure would be to commit a major act of vandalism in another gang's territory. There were hijinks (involving the night city transit authority officers) on the bus-ride into enemy territory, a dead body in the park-and-ride, and then a big gang-vs-gang conflict at the soup kitchen.

The enemy gang was the Kennedy's Posergang. They faced off against cybernetically-enhanced duplicates of JFK, RFK, MLK, Jackie O (in pink), old Teddy Kennedy and Mayor Quimby. Okay, Quimby I probably never would have done in straight-up CP2020, but the improvisational nature of these light systems just takes me over the edge.

JFK had retractable head armor that (once deployed) was described as dinged up and chipped such that you could tell people liked to play Oswald on him. He was the gang leader, and eventually unleashed a very anime-style attack, where he shouted "CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS!" and launched a dozen micro-missiles. Jackie O had souped up Cyberlegs and did a ballerina attack. The "Vote Quimby" sash had a built-in monowire. Teddy's weight problem was actually enhanced Skin Weave. Etc. Governor Connolly was driving the get-away convertible. It was pretty stupid, but quite enjoyable at the time.

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Character Sheets:
F# gives PCs 6 Aspects, which I've found is probably more than you need. Most PCs end up with some that overlap, and since Aspects don't stack, there's not much benefit to be gained with it. I tried to mitigate this a bit, by restricting the Aspects into categories to encourage diversity on each PC. It also let me ensure all the PCs were properly CyberPunk. The blank character sheet looked something like this:

Rating	Aspect	Category
+2	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	Useful piece of cyberware, cool gadget, or bio-implant.
+2	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	Bizarre useless cyberware, or just something that defines the look of your character.
+1	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	What type of hoodlum, criminal, ganger or loser are you?
+1	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	Other background element or character backstory
+1	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	Catch phrase
+1	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	Your choice, this can be anything.

Most characters had one major piece of cybergear, some managed to squeak a second out of the bizarre / fashion category, and everyone had the option of using the last category for one more major tech bit if they wanted.

Were-Ostrich and Iguana Boy

I played in a hilarious and completely awesome game of InSpectres last night.

InSpectres is a very light RPG where the PCs lie somewhere in the spectrum between Ghostbusters and Ghost Hunters. It's a very simple system, and allows for a lot of narrative power in the players hands, so I really like it.

An aside about silliness:
I've played InSpectres half a dozen times over the past year, and have come to the conclusion that it handles goofy, almost slapstick, adventures better than more serious ones.

Everyone gets very different ideas in their head about what's going on, and given each players narrative power, it's easy to end up with a disjointed and somewhat contradictory story. If you go in with the intention of being goofy, you're not alarmed when someone pulls a completely random bit of nonsense out and makes the plot take a sharp turn. Scooby Doo endings, Big Bads behind seemingly disparate events, Werewolves in Spaceships, by embracing wackiness you're freeing up the plot (and players) to surprise you. You never know when someone's going to say, "Your stake breaks against his chest, but it does tear open his artificial flesh - it turns out the vampire is actually a robot!"

A more serious game of InSpectres is harder to pull off, because it only takes one moment of wild improvisation for another player to completely destroy your suspension of disbelief, and thus "ruin" the session without doing anything "wrong". Better to go in with your eyes wide open to the truly bizarre nature of the game.

Goofiness all around last night. We were playing the creators and staff of a little monster-hunting show on the internet. I was constantly adding in-character statements like "I know were-ostriches sounds pretty strange, but this is from a reliable source. The same source that gave us our lead on that episode in season 1, remember the vampire armadillos? The same guy. That sounded unbelievably bizarre then, but John's still got the scars to prove it was true. Were-ostriches will play out the same." Other folks started getting in on the joke, though I'd been it's main instigator for the first half of the session. By the end of the night, it was established that our show was in it's 4th season of investigating mostly supernatural versions of otherwise mundane animals.

We ran two mini-scenarios during the course of the evening.

• The first had to do with a possible were-ostrich killing the workers at an ostrich farm. Investigation later revealed it was actually ostrich warriors of some rare African mystical tradition.
• The second scenario began with a Fortean rain of cursed coins from 1923, and ended with Iguana-Human hybrids who were being held captive by a witch. I can't really summarize the plot of the second scenario. You had to be there.

I really liked that the game's extremely light rules and quickly-resolving narrative structure allowed us to pack two self-contained scenarios into a four-hour block. If most RPGs sessions are Novella, and long campaigns like a multi-book Novel series, then last night was a short-story anthology. It's was a nice change of pace, very unlike most other gaming experiences.

Another aside, this time about the sudden resolution of plot arcs:
The hardest part of InSpectres is pacing. There's a mechanism that determines how far you are from completing the scenario, and it's really easy to accidentally blunder into what should be whole-hog resolution while you're just trying to narrate your way past what you thought was just a minor hurdle and unrelated to the main plot.

After half a dozen sessions of the game, I don't feel our group has gotten any better at keeping our eye on that and adapting our narration to match. One of these days I should really sit down and do an exhaustive mathematical analysis of the core mechanics, and different scenario length possibilities.

Bride of Stankenfreen

On vacation a few days ago, I found myself GMing some improv roleplaying. Since I'd had some fun with my recent Stankenfreen's Monsters one-shot, I reprised it for a different group. Much as with the first play-through, it proved to be great fun, but somewhat hobbled by utterly flawed mechanics.

Before reading further, you might want to view my post from the first game of Stankenfreen's Monsters.

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Bad Mechanics:

Weird thing is, the mechanical flaws were different this time. In the previous play, the PCs were under-powered. Their skills didn't overlap much, and it was a rare roll that got +4 (the bonus from two bodyparts/skills on a single card). In this second game, the opposite happened. Most of the body parts were really broadly or metaphorically defined. As a result, nearly every roll a PC made had +6 or higher. Stop to consider the odds of rolling 11 or higher on 2d6+8... roughly a 97% chance of success. I'd say at least a third of the rolls were at those odds. Meanwhile, human NPCs were rolling 1d12+2. In all our various conflict scenes, I only managed to hit like four times.

The crit system for the game is flawed as well. In both sessions, curiously enough, double 1's were rolled twice. In the first session, John rolled double 1's twice. In the second session, Rob rolled double 1's twice. In neither session did anyone roll double 6's. For this second game, I increased the penalty of the critical failure, but it proved to be no better - despite getting two ticks on every card he had, Rob never lost a part.

I even tried to make the final conflict more interesting by putting them up against a boss monster - a rogue Stankenfreenian creation that had turned evil. While he took two parts off of one PC, he lost all 9 of his body parts before he could get a third action.

Beyond a doubt, this is the worst set of mechanics I've ever crafted. Yet both games have been incredibly fun, and the character creation process is a winner. One of the players told me this session was the most laugh-out-loud fun she'd ever had roleplaying.

I'm thinking that I may run it again sometime, but if so the die mechanics would need a major overhaul, probably a complete replacement. I'm thinking F# might be the way to go - but with Stankenfreen's character creation system.

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Amazing Characters:

The real joy of the game was, as with the first session, the player characters. I sadly don't have character illustrations this time, but here's the lists of bodyparts.

April's PC:

• The Feet of the Waiter
• Legs of a Dancer
• Vulcan Brain
• X-Ray Vision
• Hitler-style Face w/ Mustache
• Tusks of a Woolly Mammoth

April went to a great deal of trouble trying to get rid of her Hitler face. She kept trying to justify using it on rolls, so that she could assign ticks from rolled 1's to it, but never ended up with enough ticks to lose the face. The tusks apparently annoyed here as well, because she had one of the other PCs trim them. X-Ray Vision, on the other hand, was definitely appreciated and utilized.


Carrie's PC:

• Trunk of an Elephant
• Wings of a Bumblebee
• Vampire Fangs
• The Mustache of Luigi
• Heart of a Lion
• Lion'sheart

You'll note that Carrie was given the heart of a lion by two different players. Parts were created and assigned blind - nobody knew what anyone was going to get. Since she got two Lion hearts, she got +4 at a minimum for every roll where bravery or predatory instinct were beneficial.
During this session, I reused the Corwin-in-the-dungeon gimmick 'cause I thought it was cute. Carrie ended up using her Vampire Fangs to drain him, so I gave her the new part "Blood of Amber" which was rather potent.

Jeremy's PC:

• Lizard's Brain
• Toes of a Chimpanzee
• Breasts of a Prostitute
• Hands of a Pointilist Painter
• The Teeth of John Tesh
• Weight of a Feather

Poor Jeremy had probably the least-useful set of parts, and the least focus/overlap, but he was able to make them count in the final battle. Weight of a Feather was fun, even if rarely useful. He was constantly being blown around by the other PCs.

Sarah's PC:

• Elbow of a Tennis Player
• Amazing Spring-Like Jumping Ability
• The Spleen of Roger Rabbit
• Raven's Tongue
• Voice of the Siren
• Tentacles of a Squid

Jumping Ability wasn't really a body-part, but I was cool with it. It combo'd well with Squid Tentacles for acrobatic tricks. Voice of the Siren combo'd with Raven's Tongue (since Raven is a Trickster God) for potent crowd-control and smooth-talking. As a result, it won her:

• Ears of the Romanians (as in "Friends, Countrymen, Roman...ians, lend me your ears")

She then got in a fight with a crazed townsfolk that was trying to burn down the castle. From him she got the:

• Singed Scalp of an Arsonist

but lost her squid tentacles in the conflagration. In the final battle with the Big Bad, she lost her Voice of the Siren as well.

Christie's PC:

• Lips of a Latin Lover
• Super-Strong Hair
• The Claws of the Sloth
• Legs of a Giraffe
• Princess Sparkle Pony's Horn
• Owl's Eyes

Princess Sparkle Pony is this Unicorn that keeps showing up on Blank White Cards at Jeremy and Christie's house, so she was able to use the Horn to magically heal people (but not the Undead). One of my favorite images of the game was the idea of this 12-foot-tall giraffe-legged unicorn-horned character constantly leaning in with her lush latin lover's lips to make the other PCs a little uncomfortable.
At some point, the tips were trimmed off April's "Tusks of a Woolly Mammoth". After that happened, these tips were braided into Christie's Super-Strong Hair. It was part Wilma Flintstone, party improvised weapon.

Rob's PC

• Ears of a Bat
• Hyper-extending fully-controllable Tongue
• Hyena's Jaws
• Buddha's Knuckle
• Eye of the Tiger
• Eyes of a Child

Most of us pictured Rob's character with 4 eyes. He described himself as just having 2 - the eyes of a tiger cub. Turning a critical eye at the card now, I realize by the rules he'd have 3 eyes - two children's eyes and just one eye of a tiger. Speaking of Rules, Rob can rules-lawyer and munchkin-out like no one else I'd ever willingly game with. He makes it entertaining enough that we tolerate it, even appreciate it, at least in one-shots. I mention this because Rob was the only person I had to say "no" to during the game - he kept coming up with spurious ways to use 4 or 5 bodyparts on a single roll. The justifications were entertaining, so I usually let it fly.

Gene's PC:

• Skin of a Chameleon
• Legs of a Centipede
• Arm (just 1) of a Body Builder
• Liver of a Drunken Japanese Stockbroker
• 360-degree swiveling Neck
• Pouch of a Kangaroo
• Moebius' Splint

Moebius' Splint needs a bit of explanation. Moebius was the brand-new puppy that Jeremy and Christie got a few weeks ago. Within half an hour of getting this puppy, he'd broken his arm. The free puppy has cost them $1,500. Currently, Moebius is wearing a bright purple cast/splint. It makes one of his legs seem longer than the others, and it's a rigid object that smacks into people when climbs into their laps. All day, we'd been referring to it as his secret weapon. Gene interpreted this combination of cards to mean that 50 of his character's 100 centipede legs were in splints.

In addition to the PC's parts listed above, someone got this off an NPC:

• Strong Arms of a Pitchfork-Wielding Farmer

but for the life of me, I can't remember who got those arms.

The Big Bad
At the end of the game, the PC's had to do battle with Dr. Stankenfreen's Most Evilest Creation EVER. So, I gave everyone another blank card, and had them generate the body parts of the Big Bad. Thus did they face:

• Dragon'sbreath
• Vader's Helmet
• Mouth of an Asp (poison included)
• Picasso Face
• Blowfish-like Inflating Body with Spikes
• The Black Sulpherous Void That Was Dick Cheney's Heart
• Hung Like a Walrus
• Whiskers of a Kitten
• Will of Oberon
• Soul of Evil Incarnate

Despite having 10 body parts (3 of which overlapped - Evil, Oberon, and Cheney), and initiative, he went down in the second round. I got to deliver a post-modern monolog and use the dark sides of both the Force and Cubism, but to no avail. He went down with only minor injury to the PCs.

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Link to photos from the game. Probably not of interest if you don't know the players.