GM: Allen White
Players: Clark Valentine, Sean Nittner, Peter McDonald, Oliver Scholes
System: Black Vein
You are part of an engineering firm that have been hired to determine the cause of a coal mine disaster. Sort through clues, investigate, and analyze possibilities to find the answer in is a game where RPG tools and learning simulation meet.
This was an RPG designed as a classroom exercise. We created our contractors Mike D, Mike Wilson, Mike Fontaine, and Cody. There’s always one. We got the report. An explosion happened that killed 21 miners. We arrived less than 24 hours after the fact to tell our client what happened and whether or not we they should pay the insurance claim. What we found was nothing less than lives lost to benefit corporate greed.
Feedback
This was a great fact finding and argument building simulation. I think the ways it works as an educational tool (lots of reading an deduction) occasionally chafe with the desires of a roleplaying game (talking to people and making mistakes) but I think this would be fun to play for students and educational for gamers.
More than anything this felt like it would be a better larp than a tabletop rpg. The dice mechanic (borrowed from mutant year zero) weren’t do a lot for the game (dice we barely rolled) but the prolific amount of information offered would be wonderfully placed in the hands of NPC players who could dole it out as the PCs investigated.
If done on tabletop a map of locations and changing positions of NPCs would also give the players a good reason to split up to cover more ground and come back to put their heads together to figure out what happened.
The helmet sticker table (inspired by patches from Mothership) is spot on. I rolled “FIX ME FIRST” so I decided Mike D was a foreman who had seen a lot and knew people were full of shit most of the time.
