Facilitator: Karen Twelves
Band Members: Karen Twelves, Matthew Klein, Dale Horstman, Sean Nittner
System: Metal Showcase 11PM by Jason Morningstar
The Metal Showcase is coming up, and you need to win. But first, you need to assemble a band, whip it into shape, and defeat the most bone-crushing lineup the stage at Randy’s Show Club has ever seen. This unique half-book half-game allows you to forge your own destiny in contests of skill and luck. Do you have what it takes to win the Metal Showcase – or will your rivals feast on your bones?
Though this is a solo game, Karen made a brilliant “Inside Out” hack where we each played different personas of Bass players driving our single bass player. We played Still Waters Run Deep (Karen), Doesn’t Get the Genre (Dale), FX Master (Matthew), and The Hot One (Sean). In this write up “our”, “we” and other plural pronouns are used in place of and often interchangeably with singular personal pronouns mile “my” and “me”.
$1000
CASH. $1000 CASH. Split four ways.
What dire circumstance were we in, that we needed $250? Our girlfriend who was in our last band Fratricide said she needed money. We stole the money from our parents kitty with a promise that it would be returned before they noticed. She took the money and disappeared. Now we had no girl and no cash and a hankering to prove ourselves worth something. Gear 2 (that were there rest of the money went), Chops -1 (loud is good right?), and Style 2 (The Hot One indeed).
Drums
Our first addition was Pancake. We agreed of offer him unlimited supplies of fried food with no reservations. He kept the beat at the Teddy Bear Christmas Holiday Review like a staff sergeant and we needed some who could lock down the rhythm section.
Guitar
Cooh was the obvious choice, just don’t call him that. Chris Cuccinello is probably too good to play with us, but we offered to steal our older brother’s edibles for him, and that sealed the deal. Still no regrets.
Vocals
This is where the insides thought. Half of use wanted the metal menace of Craunch, but the other half wanted a woman as our front man and felt pretty bad about setting Resnick’s dad’s shed on fire last summer. Look, it wasn’t our fault he wired it himself and we blew a circuit with the light show. The burning shed just made the pictures all the more epic. The fact that her vintage college of jigsaw puzzles was also in the shed though really made that fuck up sting.
We made a deeply unwise promise and told her that her dad (who also played bass) could join us for a song at the Showcase and co-bass with us, whatever that meant. Our mouth was use to writing checks our ass couldn’t cash.
Deeper in the Grave
Up to this point we’d made a lot of desperate offers and though we didn’t feel especially remorseful, we knew were digging ourselves deeper and deeper in the grave…and so that became the band name! If we had anyone with art skills the “I” in “in” would look like a coffin. METAL.
We decided our weak link was Resnick. After we’d done all that work and made all the promises to get her in the band, she didn’t have the presence we needed. We ended up buying her a wireless mic, which upped her gear from 1 to 2, but it was her style we really cared about. She was still furious with us though, so it wasn’t like she was going to listen to any pointers we had about dominating the stage..
Upon reflection, we thought our name was true to life, dark and terrible. So we bumped up our Chops. Most of the rest of the band wasn’t hurting in that department, but we were, so we took the bump with gratitude.
11PM at Randy’s
This was it. The night of the Showcase. Randy’s place was a dive, but it was our dive. Here’s our map of the joint.
A point of pride
There was a moment where we had the choice to fuck with the other bands gear…so tempting. But our pride won out. We wanted to win this on our merit.
Choke on this
Force Choke came up with their Dark Lord gimmicks and Bounty Hunting bass, but we thrashed their ass. “Suck my butt, McNutt!” The Force was weak with this one. In truth, we both sucked, but they sucked worse (even score, we both rolled 1s, but we win on ties!)
Sticky Bits
Between sets we had a chance to reflect on why we needed this money. Was it for sex, drugs, or rock-n-roll. Sex. Definitely for sex. Which was a bummer because as soon as we gave the money to our then girlfriend she bolted to Ohio or some vowel state like that. Or so we thought.
Suddenly Righteous
Last year Gantua was a bunch of posers with their voices cracking as they tried to channel their inner vikings, but in the last year they grew into their names and now looked like Norse Gods of Thunder on the stage. They had grown righteous, as we grew scared.
In the first gear challenge they trashed us, our machines could not keep up.
In that moment of seeing the end in sight, we wondered if it was all worth it. Did we have regrets about the deprivations and desecrations we had committed to get here? FUCK AND NO! We still had a chance that meant every promise we made was worth it.
Our bass and drums thrashing against their guitars and vocals. THE COULD NOT HANDLE OUR HEAT.
Failing and Flailing, in the third face off with these lords of thrash we all felt sweat pouring and our souls sapped by the effort…but we would not rest. Probably our weakest set yet, but theirs was weaker still. Which meant.
WE WENT INTO THE FAINALS AGAINST BLACK IBIS!!!
Resnick’s Dad Bernie
To our great surprise, Resnick’s dad Bernie show up and got on stage with us. Our rhythm bass, sure, that’s a thing. Was it cheating? Randy didn’t stop us so we didn’t care. 40 (aka ancient) but he thrashed a mean bass solo.
Black Ibis
These macho proto frat boy narcissists thought they had it in the bag. The trashed us last year and they were going to trash us again.
And then we saw the strangest thing, in the reflection in the mirror behind the bar we thought we saw our ex in the crowd. There for a sec and then gone when we looked again. Ohio my ass, we were going to show her what she was missing.
We faced the cocaine fueled hate machine of Black Ibis and we CRUSHED them! 🤘
We were so high on life we started thinking about what our next band name would be after this. Skin of our Teeth? Nailed it by Five, a metal cover of Take Five? Maybe, but now it was time to rock.
And rocked we were. The whole band seemed filled with venom as they played and Pancake simply could not keep up. Now it was 1v1 and the last song would determine the winner…
Fuck yeah, you can’t even spell ABYSS you wangrod tools. WE WON THE METAL SHOWCASE!!
I’m particularly proud of my notes for this game, taken on scrap paper that had first been used to gripe about the Marvel Multiverse.
Here was the rest of the pics, including the amazing board Karen made for the game and what we left at the end.
