AP: A Series of Casual Encounters

The original intent of ASoCE was to get new people to GM, or to get experienced GMs to experiment. So when I’d found that most of my time this year had been taken up with a rather standard game of [Diaspora][diaspora] (not that there’s anything wrong with Diaspora) I thought I’d better turn things up a notch.

The original intent of ASoCE was to get new people to GM, or to get experienced GMs to experiment. So when I’d found that most of my time this year had been taken up with a rather standard game of Diaspora (not that there’s anything wrong with Diaspora) I thought I’d better turn things up a notch.

I’ve been looking at some pretty hippie indie story-telling type roleplaying games over the past few months, at least partly due to joining the excellent Story Games forums. I decided that it was time to kill two birds with one stone – I’d bring along some low-prep games, get a GM by means of a dice-roll, and test out the various systems.

So far we’ve played a couple of these, both by John Harper. Both are completely free and available for PDF download. Both use only six-siders, so you can even draw your non-gamer friends (or flatmates) into the game without having to spend the required five minutes telling them that yes, these dice have twelve sides, yes, they are cool, no, no one actually uses them for anything.

Ghost/Echo

Ghost/Echo is a simple two-page game using the Otherkind system. The system is pretty simple – whenever you come up against an obstacle or do something dangerous, you must name a goal and at least one danger. For each goal and danger, you roll a dice. You get to roll a bonus dice if you’re well-prepared for it. High rolls are good, but you must decide which roll goes on your goal (where high rolls mean success) and which roll goes on the danger (where high rolls mean you avoid it).

Anyway, enough about the system, more about the story. The lineup:

• GM: Mike Madamba (second time running a game!)
• Players: Myself, Ursula, Rachel, Sam, Alistair

Our story was one of paranormal investigators. We were sent to retrieve a valuable manuscript from an old estate in rural New York, abandoned and rumoured to be haunted. We got our first taste of the supernatural when, as most of the party looked for the manuscript in the library, IDemon (myself) noticed the room darken. He went to look out the front door (that our resident gothy magick girl, Grip (Rachel) insisted was cursed) when the chandelier fell on him and monsters emerged from all the exits. We beat a fighting retreat and Grip set up a quick ward on the door. We decided to get the hell out of town, only to find the bridge we crossed before had gone, so we headed to the nearby town of Cathedral Hill.

The place was abandoned, so we headed for the Cathedral. Grip told us of visions she’d had, of someone being lowered into a fire in this cathedral. We were about to enter when suddenly a number of hawks landed nearby. One stared at the forest below before flying off. Vixen (Ursula) took a look through her binoculars and spotted a trail of smoke from a small clearing. We piled back into the car and made our way, but halfway there we got mobbed by a number of large men, their heads covered in sack-cloths and wielding hatchets. We escaped on foot, and managed to make our way to the clearing.

We were met by an ancient American Indian, who called himself the Warden. He told us that we were in the Ghost World, which was inhabited with the souls of the damned and the cursed. The Cathedral had once been the site of a ritual sacrifice, as the owner of the estate tried to gain immortality. The sacrifice was interrupted by an American Indian tribe, who wiped out the inhabitants of the estate and laid the curse on the place. The gate between the world was the front door of the estate – but we had to hurry back as he didn’t know how long it would stay open.

We rushed back, and hid in the bushes on the edge of the estate. Looking out at the buildings, Vixen saw a shape in the window, pointing as us – we’d been found out. Demon stayed behind, using the jerry-rigged ghost-detecting equipment on his laptop to provide a distraction. It turned out too effective – just as he set it up, he was grabbed from behind and a bag shoved over his head.

The rest of the party got to the door of the estate to find a host of cursed souls waiting for us. Demon was hanging from a rope, above a fire-filled pit. As the fight broke out, Vixen managed to rescue their comrade under the cover of Hull (Alistair), Coil (Sam) and Grip. Demon wrestled with one of the souls, a lady with a twisted and distorted face, but in a moment she’d drawn him close and kissed him, sucking his soul out. As his last action, he grabbed her around the waist and toppled into the flames.

The party mopped up the rest and got through the door, into the real world. After that, they just had to flee the estate, down one party member and with nothing to show…

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Where to start with this? This system is wonderful for making things happen. Every roll has a danger, and you always get to choose what the danger is. If you don’t want your character to die, character death is never a danger. If you want to go out in a blaze of glory, make that a danger. It also means that players influence narrative – if I want a particular bad guy to get the spotlight, I just make all my dangers revolve around him. The system is fast and loose and even without having skills or traits or anything we fell into particular roles. You can always say that someone who’s skilled is prepared for the task, granting an extra dice, but in general is just works. Mike did a great job GMing this, especially given he had about five minutes’ preparation. He kept the suspense going throughout, and provided us with more than enough weird monsters to occasionally shoot at and generally run away from.

Lady Blackbird

Lady Blackbird is on the run from an arranged marriage to Count Carlowe. She hired a smuggler skyship, The Owl, to take her from her palace on the Imperial world of Ilysium to the far reaches of the Remnants, so she could be with her once secret lover: the pirate king Uriah Flint.

HOWEVER, just before reaching the halfway point of Haven, The Owl was pursued and captured by the Imperial cruiser Hand of Sorrow, under charges of flying a false flag.

EVEN NOW, Lady Blackbird, her bodyguard, and the crew of The Owl are detained in the brig, while the Imperial commander runs the smuggler ship’s registry over the wireless. It’s only a matter of time before they discover the outstanding warrants and learn that The Owl is owned by none other than the infamous outcast, Cyrus Vance.

How will Lady Blackbird and the others escape the Hand of Sorrow?

What dangers lie in their path?

Will they be able to find the secret lair of the pirate king? if they do, will Uriah Flint accept Lady Blackbird as his bride? By the time they get there, will she want him to?

• GM: Rachel (first time GM, also only have five minutes’ prep time!)
• Players: Myself, Sam, Ursula, Alistair

We started in this case in Captain Hollas’ quarters as he ran our registry over the wireless. This soon devolved into a fight, and once we’d tied up Hollas, Cyrus Vance (myself), captain of The Owl, and his engineer Kale Arkam (Sam) donned the uniformed of a couple of captured guards. As guards, we escorted Lady Blackbird (Ursula) and the goblin pilot Snargle (Alistair) to our ship, which we managed to escape on.

While the Hand of Sorrow gave chase, we were able to lose her in the corrosive Lower Depths. We emerged several hours later, our instruments in bad shape, and limped along to the smuggler’s haven of Nightport. Once there we took on supplies, with Vance commanding Lady Blackbird to stay on the ship at all costs. As Vance and Arkam looked for supplies for the ship in the town’s many markets, Lady Blackbird grew bored and eventually convinced Snargle to show her around the town. While Vance learned about the dark secrets of Uriah Flint and Arkam arranged for supplies to be delivered to the ship, Snargle and Lady Blackbird dined in a goblin inn just off the docks of Nightport. When Vance got back, it was to find the ship empty. When Lady Blackbird returned, Vance blew his top, yelling at her and eventually retiring to his quarters to fume in private. Lady Blackbird was caught off-guard by this, completely unaware of the secret love Vance harboured for her. Snargle and Arkam, meanwhile, kept well away from the captain’s quarters for the next few hours.

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I realise upon writing up this adventure, that we didn’t do nearly as much in this as in Ghost/Echo. But boy, did we get some interpersonal drama going. Admittedly, Lady Blackbird’s cast is written to encourage this – Vance secretly loves Lady Blackbird, but his engineer feels a duty to deliver her to Flint. Lady Blackbird’s bodyguard, Naomi Bishop (who didn’t appear in this game) would of course take her mistress’ side, and in general things will get ugly as soon as this comes to the fore.

There are two system things that I find cool or interesting, and that I’ll talk about here.

The first is the idea of Keys. Simply put, keys are motivations for your character. Vance, for example, has the Key of Hidden Longing. He hits this key whenever he does something because of his feelings for Lady Blackbird. Whenever you hit a key, you gain XP. Whenever you hit a key and it puts you in danger, you gain two XP. Each key has a buy-off – the dramatic scene where you shock everyone with stunning revelations. The buyoff for the Key of Hidden Longing is when Vance reveals his love for Lady Blackbird. This buyoff nets you 10XP, but loses you the key. (For reference, buying any new keys or skills in the game costs you 5XP).

The second interesting trick is the refresh. Simply put, you don’t recover until you have a refresh scene with someone. Then you get to refresh your dice pool, lose conditions like being injured, and even regain some of your awesome one-shot abilities. A refresh scene is a “down-time” scene, where you ask questions about each other as a way of bonding as a group. Of course, sometimes you just want to have a refresh scene to plant ideas in another character’s head, or to try and get them on-board with your plans. The idea is great, but I think it suffers depending on the pace of your game. If people are eager to get to the next scene, sometimes you’ll be left hanging as you try to set up a refresh scene, and have to start the next scene with conditions hanging around.

This adventure, incidentally, is probably going to be a two- or even three-parter, and if the GM wanted to they could probably stretch it out into five or six sessions. The characters in this have so much room to grow (and the ability to sacrifice keys to gain advances means that as long as you have some suitably dramatic buyoffs you can take your character in whichever direction you want) that I can see them developing wonderfully over the course of a few months real-time. Unfortunately, due to time constraints on two of the players (Ursula is returning to Germany next Wednesday, and I will end up in Australia for a few weeks later this month) we’re likely going to finish this game soon, which means that Vance’s intricate plans won’t be as intricate as he’d hope, and the simmering sexual tension between himself and Lady Blackbird will reach boiling point before too long.