GM: Shaun Hayworth
Players: Sean, Omar, Travis and Kristin
System: Free Market
Omar and I were being introduced to Free Market; the others had played at least once before. Shaun went over the basic premise of how you gain and spend flow as well as a basic run down of the challenge system. Here’s what we came up with:
Tommy Two-Fingers the Gas Station Gangster, Holly Hate Fuck the Amazonian Death Metal Diva, The Potato Farmer and the Roast Beef Assassin (sorry T and Omy, I forgot the names).
Our characters clearly had some violent streaks in them, so we opted to base a MRCZ on Celebrity Impersonation Death matches in Thunderdome!
Our antics involved trying to hire would-be-fake-celebrities and failing. Then we made our own video (ephemera) which was an awesome slumber party turned kung fu fighting fiasco. I had a lot of fun playing on the high octane and highly flammable aspects of my genealogy. The video was a success and there are people now running around with short term memories of Holly Hate Fuck as Joan Jet slaying us all with her guitar of wrath. Finally Tommy wanted to built a place for us to have these fights properly and the MRCZ got together to create a Thunderdome by “recycling” our steel bed frames and stolen neon lights on top of a parking structure. It was a tough challenge and the potato farmer ended up burning out all of his interfaces to make it happen but after nearly falling to his death himself Tommy called the job done. Woot, the Thunderdome of Social Engineering!
What rocked
There are lots of character ideas that don’t really fit into any game that can find a home easily in Free Market.
The fact that MRCZ are formed out of a common interest rather than actually knowing or liking each other makes for a great group dynamic.
The experience system is cool. I really like that memories become your skills. Makes total sense.
We fricken made Thunderdome!
What could have been improved
It took us a while to figure out what we should be doing in the game. As freeing as “do whatever you want” is, it also leaves people to flounder a bit as they figure out what they want. I’d like to see short term (or maybe long term) memories serve a little more like beliefs in that they should guide the members to specific actions.
