playtest – Page 2 – Sean Nittner

Actual Play – Thieves’ Cant (3/23/2017)

GM: Sean Nittner
Players: Hakan Sayalioglu, Karen Twelves, and Kathryn Hymes
System: Blades in the Dark (mash up with Dialect)

Our second and final episode of Thieves’ Cant. We picked up from the first session (where we played Dialect) and continued the story with Blade in the Dark. Playing the Grey Cloaks (for reals this time) we saw one of their early scores on the docks as they were still trying to find their footing in the Doskvol underworld.

Our Language

Here’s our Thieves Cant!

Our Characters

Since we had a short session we made up our characters before hand, they were:

Usa Waydrind – A petite Severosi ex-soldier who thought she could use her skills to better ends on the streets of Doskvol.

Aiz Anserekh– A disgraced Iruvian noble who still keeps him mustache perfectly groomed despite other effects falling by the wayside. When he arrived in Doskvol he joined the Bluecoats (and gained many scars in the process), which he left alongside Nessa and Hutch.

Vond Comber – A natural born street urchin, tall and guant, but very much at home on the docks. Vond still carried a coin with the symbol of the Weeping Lady to remember where he came from. Vond used to do work for Long Strangford (one of his many street level agents) but run afoul of Needle, a vicious Bluecoat

My Prep

Prep, what is this thing? What is it doing in Blades in the Dark?

Well, I knew we had two hours to game and I wanted to make sure we weren’t spending all of it just figuring out what score to go on (very easy to do). I also wanted to make sure that the Grey Cloaks were surrounded by people at all times, so they would need to use their cant to communicate if they didn’t want others to overhear them.

We talked some online about possible scores and settled on “lets’s mess with people on the docks”, which still wasn’t very specific but it game me a start point, so I started jotting down notes about what was going on at the docs, both the status quo, as well as the scores that other factions were pulling off, which some enterprising scoundrels might pick up on. First, the status quo:

Chief Helker runs the docks. From his warehouse office perch he can see across nearly all of them and with a constant stream of reports from his clerks as well as other informants, he keeps pace with the hundreds or thousands of transactions that happen daily at the docks. Diamond, a tough old wold who hires day laborers to fill in and do the work that the union dockers don’t want to do.
Lord Strangford‘s leviathan hunter, the Nightbreaker, is in dock getting repaired from it’s last hunt. A bevy of Bluecoats and dockers alike stand around near the boat doing security and making sure only the right people make it on board. Eager to abuse his power whenever he could the rough Bluecoat Needle paraded around the docks as though he owned the place (which wasn’t entirely untrue).

Crime aplenty. Here were the various scores happening on this sunless day:

The Red Sashes, disappointed with their share of the extortion rackets the Crows allocated them had sent members to fleece merchants on their way off the docs. If they could get to them before they paid their bribes to the Crows or the Lampblacks, they cold cut in on the action. And if someone was foolish enough to pay them, they got what they deserved. Zora Hakar, a Red Sash who is dangerous but looks authoritative enough to get people to cough up bribes, was on the dock, pilfering from whoever she could!
Strangford’s Bluecoats were intentionally interrupting the transport of leviathan blood, and blaming everyone else for their delays, so that they could sneak it into a warehouse and dilute it. The Nightbreaker didn’t bring enough to make it’s quota, so they were covering up for it. Needle as in charge of keeping this operation secure.
The Grinders, eager to derail imperial supremacy have a plan to get on-board the Nightbreaker as “workers” and sabotage the repair operation, while also trying to rob from it’s coffers if they get a chance. Derret, tough, smart, and willing to take risks, got in line with the other day laborers to get himself work so that he could get close to the Hunter and find out how to get his crew on board.

I figured with four accessible characters (Diamond, Needle, Zora, and Derret), each representing larger forces (Dockers, Strangford, Red Sashes, and Grinders respectively) we’d have plenty of opportunities to interrupt other scores or plan one of their own!

The Play is the Thing

In short things went well for Aiz and Usa (they made off with Zora’s take) and very poorly with Vond (he was last seen entering a boat house and Needle following after him. Gunshots were heard, Needled walked out and Vond didn’t).

But for all the juicy details, I recommend checking out the show. I’m pretty proud of the production quality this time:

What Rocked

We used our cant, it was so cool. Derret was trying to figure it out and didn’t get it. Needle knew what it all meant but wasn’t close enough to overheard. I loved it.

This group was great, they honed in on place they could rob the robbers and went to town. I love that it ended in a duel.

Poor Vond. I wonder if it was bugskot for him or if he made it.

Having the prep for a short game like this was definitely helpful. It’s not my style normally, but I was glad that we had lots of low hanging fruit to pick from.

What could have improved

Oh, several things, some more important than others.

I thought it was novel and fun to have the scoundrels take actions just to get day work, and it did offer a lot of opportunities for me to reveal the setting to them through complications. I just felt bad that we spent the first hour with them just trying to earn a few slugs for carrying boxes. It was about the lowest stakes I’ve ever seen in Blades and I was concerned both for the players and the the audience that patience for it might have been wearing thin.

At the end, because we were well over time, I asked them to wrap everything up with fortune rolls and then that determined the outcome. The trick there as that when I assigned consequences to the results, chat (correctly) suggested that they could resist those consequences. Which normally would be totally true but I wanted these fortune rolls to reflect the sum total of all the actions. It didn’t matter that much in the end but I think that when doing one roll resolution, I may elect not to allow resistance rolls and abide just by what the fortune roll tells us.

Ship names are hard.

Someone said something offensive in chat, which I wish I just deleted, but I was caught off guard enough that I just said it out loud. This was clearly the case of me needing to hone my chat moderation skills and not be as quick to blurt out something I read. We were pretty quick to move past it. Next time hopefully I’ll catch it before I open my mouth!

Actual Play – Thieves’ Cant (3/11/2017)

GM: Kathryn Hymes
Players: Hakan Sayalioglu, Karen Twelves, and Sean Nittner
System: Dialect (mash up with Blades in the Dark)

This game was like woah. So many new things. A mash of of Blades in the Dark and Dialect. Playtesting a new backdrop. Streaming on Twitch! Woah!

To make this happen we coordinated a fair bit ahead of time to suss out:

The Doskvol Setting
What events we’d set the game around (we chose the forming of the Grey Cloaks)
Our three aspects (see below)

Aspects

To define our community we picked three aspects that were very particular to our crew.

Bluecoats, because that’s what we are. But the aspect has a lot of nuance to it. It stood for keepers of the peace and the legalized thugs. We are a cogs withing a system of oppression, being shit on, and shitting on those beneath us.

Crushing Debt, a few weeks ago our patrol had gotten in a fight with a few sailors and pushed them around. We took it too far, and then only realized after the fact that they worked for the Leviathan Captain Lord Strangford. He might night have noticed under other circumstances but we slowed down his launch date and found who we were. After that, we were constantly having to pay up to him to keep him from making things official. And the payments due, they just keep growing!

Extortion, because, of course. I mean, this has always been our livelihood, but now it’s more important than ever. We’ve had to step up our graft to pay our new debts!

Characters

Claive aka “Needle” – Our zealot leg breaker who believed above all other thing that extortion is what we we’re here to do. Needle doesn’t even make a pretense of doing his job as a Bluecoat. He just cleans his coat on a daily basis (we’ll be defining that in a bit)

Stev Templelton – Our oracle who had been in Blue for a decade and could see the writing on the wall. Stev believed that our extortion racket was going to be our downfall.

Braeden Vale – Our healer both literally and figuratively. Vale’s temperate and enduring nature frequently put him in the position of patching us up. Of all of us, Braeden identified the most with being a Bluecoat, and believed our extortion rackets were causing us pain and misery.

Syra “Bug” Haig – Our jester and ne’er-do-well believed that calling ourselves Bluecoats was a joke. She was always happy to run down a business for money, but hoped people would see that we’re no better than any criminals on the streets… we are the criminals on the streets.

Our Language

In Dialect we create a language, and our language was a thieves cant. So cool.

The rule we made for our game was that our language has to use common words that wouldn’t draw attention that would mean other things. That way they could be used in front of our watch commander Krop or other Bluecoats without raising suspicion. This was a great justification for twisting words around and making cool phrases. Thanks chat for helping us out with them!

Here’s our Thieves Cant! Since we’re going to try and use it in a follow up Blades game, and we may develop more, here’s the living google doc.

Our Story

I’m keeping this short, because I really want people to watch the VOD because it’s my first VOD ever! Woot.

We were terrible Bluecoats under the thumb of Lord Strangford. To get out of his crushing debt we tried ever more extreme actions (starting with extortion, then stealing from our own coffers, then trying to stick up one of Strangford’s Leviathan Blood caravans) until we finally burned down the that had evidence against him and blamed Nessa and Hutch, our fellow Bluecoats, for the fire.

The end result was that we earned Strangford’s favor, became his cronies exacting his will, and Stev was promoted to watch commander and took over command in the new barracks. This was a big twist for us as we expected to play the Grey Cloaks, but it turns out we were the assholes that created them!

Here’s the VODs:

What Rocked

Oh my, this game and these words were so great. Bad Weather. How’s your coat? Strange Devils. I loved how the language we made formed our story and the larger narrative of what our scoundrels did with their lives.

The twist at the end was huge. We walked into the game expecting that we would play the characters who eventually became the Grey Cloaks and then in between the third and fourth hour, Karen pointed out that what made more sense is if we were the group that framed the bluecoats and burned down the watch tower ourselves. I mean, afterall, we had a flamethrower! There were a few mininutes of hesitation, we were all holding onto the the original idea, but once we went for it and killed our darlings, the story was so much better and make so much more sense. Plus that allowed for me to have a…

Great scene with Needle and Hutch. In the third act you can bring in NPCs and since Bug was dead, I framed my scene with Hutch trying to overpower Needle but failing terribly. One detail was his blue coat covered in grey ash. I loved getting to put that bit in!

One top of the game and the streaming, we were also playtesting a new backdrop for Dialect, which is also great because it means Kate and Hakan got to take back some good playtest results to boot!

Without really planning for it, we ended up fitting our story into the fiction perfectly. It wouldn’t have made much sense for Krop, who hated our rag tag group, to frame the Nessa and Hutch, but it totally made sense for us to do it. So when Stev was made watch commander, that was even better. Also, I didn’t realize that the Grey Cloaks had there HQ in the old watch tower (I could have just read it, but I missed that part) so it was doubly good to have the confrontation with Needle there!

Talk about killing your darlings. I respect Kate so much for letting Stev change fundamentally. She started out as the one who tried to get us off the path of extortion and ended up the watch commander running a precinct of Bluecoats entirely dedicated to carrying out Strangford’s dirty work. I am genuinely scared of the Bluecoats in the Docks now!

Chat. Thanks chat for both helping me with some technical issues, letting other folks know

What could have improved

The big one is video quality. Because our bandwidth at home is really poor, and because both Karen and I were using the same connection for Zoom (plus streaming) the dropped frames were massive. I had set the bit rate way down (400) which helped but it was still choppy. Thankfully the local recording is much smoother. We order a faster U-verse plan which hopefully will improve performance in the future.

Other thing (thanks Jon Edwards for catching some of these): Our audio levels were off for a while. I thought I had the all dialed in but then I leaned back and was too far away from my mic, and Kate was coming in louder than I expected. I couldn’t label the stream while it was running. I kept getting a language error when I tried to set it, despite selecting English. Luckily I was able to name it after the show.

I didn’t have any bots installed so there was a lot of repeat copy and pasting of links. Moobot is installed now.

Mostly I was just nervous about it all coming crashing down and the performance being intolerable. Thankfully everyone in chat was understanding and we got through it fine. I was exhausted by the end though!

Actual Play – Hastings 52 (1/7/2017)

Facilitator: Hakan Seyalioglu
Players: Karen Twelves, Nathan Black, and Sean Nittner
System: Dialect
Backdrop: Worcester School, 1950 (by Graham Walmsley)

After many rounds of Doodle polls trying to sort out when the Computer Age would arrive, it was finally Tea Time!

First game of the year and what fun. Getting together with Nathan, Hakan, and Karen was delightful, if somewhat tricky from the technology perspective. Our setup at home doesn’t work great for having both Karen and me on at the same time, but we persevered and played a great game.

The Backdrop

Graham Walmsley is writing a backdrop called Worcester School, 1950. Somehow we missed the name of the setting and so ended up calling our school Hastings, but I think we got the rest correct. Our remote school, a few hours walk from the nearest town, was not only a place for children to become productive members of society, it was also the place where the first computer in England was being built (at least in our alternative History it was).

Fresh out of World War II and still shaken by it’s affect on the world, every student in Hastings looked to the creation of the first computer as the sign of a new ere, of a Computer Age!

The Characters

Harold St. James (Nathan), a highly regimented young man with a silver spoon neatly tucked and polished in his breast pocket. Harold was a strict enforcer of keeping a tidy life and following the rules to the letter, or at least the rules that he approved of. (Leader)

Lind Grassley (Hakan), a young woman from a rustic family. Her understanding of technology was more intuitive than studied, though she had great aptitude for computing, as well as a love of animals. (Protector)

Catherine Barlde (Sean), a young Jewish refugee who had been adopted by the computing class professor Ms. Bardle. She had spent the last few years since the war, in the presence researchers and scientists and had a fine analytical mind herself. (Oracle)

Florence Rogers (Karen) attended Hastings though she always knew there would be more to life than just civil service. She was fond of taking long walks in the brushes and by the bog, because from there it was easy to slip out of sight and make the long walk to town where she could procure supplied that were in great demand at the school (Scrounger)

Aspects

Regimented – Not only were classes on strict schedules but as students we were also privy to national secrets (or so they told us, in truth students were rarely trusted with more than bread crumbs).

Drive to Succeed – Each of the students were only allowed into the school because they showed a strong aptitude for computing. They were expected to seek a life in public service after they graduated.

Mr. Bardle’s Computing Class – Though we took many other classes the most important of them by far was the computing class, in which we would write proto-bits of code on punch cards, that would eventually be the core programming.

Our Language

A few of the words that we defined and came to define us…

Dr. Hughes – A jovial greeting that started when Florence sneaked up behind Harold in a pub and said “Hello Dr. Hughes” to scare him. That greeting became a common jibe between students, much to the confusion of the actual Dr. Hughes.

Final Stack – The last punch card entered before the computing engine was engaged. When Lind made a last minute correction on the punch card and handed it to Catherine on their first class presentation, they each said “Final Stack” to each other, wishing one another good luck before pulling the lever.

Computing Age – Our dreams of both the the next era, when England would have it’s first computer, and the world would change. It was also, for the students, the age of majority. The age when we would be adults and enter civil service. Catherine thought it would mean peace for humankind, Harold thought the Computer Age would herald the next weapon of war.

Tea Time – Third eighth when we had tea, it meant a time to look forward to.

False Stack – In their final exams, Harold stole the punch cards from Lind and Catherine and replaced them with gibberish card that did not compile. A False Stack. A betrayal!

What Rocked

Since my last playtest I see there have been a number of refinements to streamline the game and simplify or reduce options, which I think is REALLY good. Given limited choices people will do amazing things.

The conversations were great, probably the strongest part of the game (besides the actual playing out of scenes) because they were sheer world building, and by extension language building. They were all about how we as players envision our characters relating to the world. I loved them.

When we were talking about how to define the the word for traitor Nathan stepped up to be the False Stack! I was leaning towards this myself but didn’t want to shoehorn him into it. When he volunteered it made my day.

What could be improved

What I’d still like to see is strong direction on each of the steps (Make of Connection, Build a World, Have a Conversation). We talked about this somewhat during play with the idea of reference cards that told everyone the steps to take, but I’d also like to see the rules take firm hand in that.

We intended to play through our high school career and did so but it was heavily weighted toward the beginning (age one) and the end of school (age two and three). My suggestion for this particular playset is that the school year be divided a bit more evenly. Age 1 was start of school, and Age 2 and 3 were both end (or near end). I’d suggest moving Age 2 to be closer to the middle and making Age 3 about the final exams and the fallout from them.

I’m a stickler for rules. There were several times when folks where jumping form meaning to forming a scene without first connecting the meaning to an aspect or creating a word. I think it’s fine to be flexible with your conversation but it’s important not to forget about important steps before finishing.

Actual Play – Housebreakers (11/21/2016)

Players: Sean Nittner and Daniel Wood
System: Housebreakers (playtest)

These are my playtest notes. Some of them won’t make any sense unless you’re Jackson Tegu, or someone else who is playtesting this game right now.

Setup

My setup time was about 40 minutes rather than 10. 20 of that was spent getting to an appropriate place and back, and I spent another 20 reading the setup and answering the questions.

As soon as I started reading the text, I started feeling watchful of my surrounding and like I had something secret that nobody else knew. This was a contrast to my experience just before playing when I told the cashier at whole foods that I did need the receipt for my cookie because I was going to use it in a game about breaking into my own home.

When I was reading I looked around me for sources of inspiration. A man a few tables over had a yellow jacket with SECURITY written on it. There was a napkin being blow around by the wind and stuffed into a corner. My dog was on the bench next to me sniffing at something. I wrote down these notes: “Security”, “Lost in a corner; fluttering in the wind”, and “Smelling a mark”.

Those were my sources for my thief’s identity.

I didn’t remember to bring sunglasses or another object that would make me feel more hidden, so I flipped up my collar instead. That worked well.

As I was walking back up the hill, I texted Daniel, with just this text. “The search will being at 3PM. I will call at 3:07. I’ll be the Call. You’ll be the Answer. Confirmed?” He texted back just with the word “Confirmed” a few minutes later. If felt very conspiratorial.

I also noticed that everything seemed more suspicious as I walked. Like everyone and everything was hiding something. I saw a sign that said “no unauthorized parking” and I thought “I wonder who is authorized, and what they had to do to secure it?”

Across the street from me walking in the same direction was an elderly couple. The man was holding his hands together behind his back and whirring something with his left thumb. I couldn’t tell if there was something in his hand or not, but it looked like a nervous tick. The woman wore a smile the entire time I saw them. I noticed that even though they looked 30 years older than me, they were almost keeping pace up a hill. More spry than I would have expected.

The landscaper who walked past them has a large bag of tools. I wondered if he passed anything off to them that I didn’t notice.

Time between:

Then I went back to my normal work and soon forgot about my suspicions.

Search Phase:

At 3PM my alarm went off and I realized I was late. I should have already been outside on the street corner. I grabbed Emmett’s leash and quickly made it out to the corner.

There I looked around, waited until nobody saw me and walked quickly to the door of a residential apartment building.

I examined the lock and noticed that the engraving didn’t match that of the key. It was newer than the key as well. I wondered if the old lock had been broken into in the past.

When I got in the building I looked back outside, the coast was still clear.

I made my way down the hall and unlocked the door to the only apartment there. I didn’t notice that the deadbolt was already unlocked. It was a mistake a I made as I locked int on my way back out.

Inside I noticed the creak of the floorboards and the sounds of neighbors above. I was glad this apartment didn’t have anyone below it.

I saw a room with two beds that had been stripped of their sheets and clean folded sheets on top. I thought the inhabitants were preparing to have a guest over. Some part of my mind knew I was wrong, but I didn’t listed to that for long.

I inspected things. Noticed which things were covered in dust, and which were used. I spun the globe exactly 360 degrees. I looked at the rock collection in the jar, the lid also had a thin layer of dust.

I found a receipt on the counter. I flipped it over, unfolded it and noticed that it was for two tickets to see Dr. Strange the day before. Two people went together. I folded it again and flipped it back as it was.

I had my faithful hound at my side. Never did he err from me, nor was he distracted by a bone the inhabitants had left out. He always stayed close, always quiet.

I passed by a pair of forged dice and looked at them for a long time. I saw many other personal artifacts as well.

At 3:07 I called my partner. It rang once. There was silence for a moment. He said “hello” which I thought was a mistake, but realized that he was waiting for me. We each said our script perfectly and then I hung up.

I felt a rush of exhilaration. What I was doing would be punished if I was caught, but it was not wrong. I was an explorer on a mission more than thief.

Quickly now I looked at the room again found myself drawn towards the dice. Touched them, they had dust around them, but on on them. I was concerned that they would be noticed but knew they were what I came for. I took them and then said my first works to my canine companion “let’s go.”

We left quickly and made it outside and around the corner before I looked at my prize. Two forced dice, faces 5 and 3. I put them in my pocket but missed. My unerring companion walked with me.

Sean again

I stopped, realized Emmett might have to pee on this walk and let him sniff a bush. Then I said lets go home and turned toward the house. There I saw my dice on the ground and Emmett did too. He went and stood between them. The had the faces of 5 and 2 and I thought “oh, that’s either a winning or a losing roll at craps”.

I went inside and texted Daniel. “My search is complete. Debrief at 3:25?” I wasn’t sure if I should be formal and secretive or not. He replied back “Sounds good” which felt casual, so I felt casual too.

Debrief:

Daniel and I talked for about 20 minutes. We had a lot of similar experiences, but many different ones too. Neither of us were very interested in who the thieves were, nor did we feel remorse or guilt when we played them.

We kept cutting each other off while talking because we were very excited.

We noted that we weren’t sure what to read and when to read it. Neither of us carried a copy of the game with us during the search phase and thought it would have been distracting to do so, so we weren’t sure we answered all the questions, or followed the procedure completely after the phone call, but felt okay about that.

Pictures I took while playing

Lost in a corner; fluttering in the wind

Actual Play – Ghost Court, Marion County (8/4/2016)

Players: Many, living and dead
System: Ghost Court

As Hot Guys Making Out wrapped up we quickly transitioned into a game of Ghost Court!

All Rise! Again!

As always Ghost Court was silly and fun and silly. James had managed to round up a wig, and we used a black tablecloth as the judge’s robes.

As expected… Ghost Court was wonderful, thought that case of the half-ghost child custody still confuses the heck out of the plaintiff! (Perhaps as intended!)

What Rocked

Jerry’s amazing Brittish accent as judge… and with the shroud over him!

Kristin’s great life coaching (or in this case death coaching) for the plantiffs and defendants.

Ross. Judge Cowman is imposing indeed!

What Could have Improved

Kate and I were supposed to have a trial with each other but she had to run out and take a call. My case ended tears. Coincidence? I think not!

Actual Play – Big Bad World Playtest (8/4-8/7/2016)

Players: Many
System: Big Bad World

Yay for the wonderful Games on Demand community at Gen Con. Because of all these awesome peeps, I got a chance to playtest Big Bad World. What is Big Bad World you ask?

Nathan Black, Community Coordinator for Big Bad Con and my self were sitting on a Google Hangout months ago talking about our community standards, and what we could do to make them less as list of “Thou Shalt Not…” and more a list of “We will love you if you…”

In the middle of that once of us said “When you introduce someone new to a group, Mark XP” and then our minds exploded! What if we could gamify social interactions? Reward positive behavior, and better yet give people an alibi for positive behavior? C’mon, I’m a social guy, but there are plenty of times I’ve been at a con and seen someone I recognize but was too shy to introduce myself. Heck, this year even I saw Eloy Lasanta three times before I finally got up the nerve to break into his crowd of people and say hi. And he’s a contributor to Baba Yaga’s gift box!

Bwaaahhhh. So we started making these little playbooks, and we got some insights from Jason Morningstar as well, and we were off to the races. This is what the playbooks look like when placed behind a standard badge:

I printed a few of these up, and thanks to Kristin Firth for going out and helping me find a FedEx Office that sold badge holders (I had forgotten that Gen Con just uses lanyards) we were able to playtest it at the con.

What Rocked

My star players (Kristin Frith, Andy Munich, and Jenn Martin) all returned multiple completed playbooks back to me with suggestions for how to improve them. Thanks alpha playtesters!

In addition we had at least 20 more people who tried it out, and as I walked around Games on Demand, I frequently saw people with playbooks behind their badges. Peeps were so great. I just love how eager folks were to try something new and how quickly everyone who played just “got it”.

What could have improved

My reward for completing a playbook was…getting another playbook but the intent is to make the reward a pin or a ribbon. I like both options and will have to weigh them against each other. The ribbons are cool, but since there are four playbooks, getting four ribbons could add up. Pins are also cool (I love me some pins!) but I worry about them getting lost in the sea of pins we already give out. Must ponder more.

I wish I had been more organized about soliciting feedback. What I received was mostly about clarity and making sure the moves were approachable/doable, which was great, but I wish I had a better method to solicit all the feedback out there (Note: if you’re reading this and you played, please let me know what you thought of it!).

Actual Play – Atlas Reckoning (7/10/2016)

GM: Stras Acimovic
Players: Lucian Smith, Tomer Gurantz, Ross Cowman, and Sean Nittner
System: Atlas Reckoning

I almost missed this game. Stupidly, stupidly, I almost missed it. Stras specifically offered it in the only slot I didn’t have a game so I could play it (as I had asked him to run it for me before). I gave Stras this half-ass “maybe” answer because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to geek out about cons with Jonh Powel, or have a late dinner, or otherwise just relax after all the great games.

In the middle of dinner though, my senses came back to me. I had asked Stras to run Atlas. He was running it in a slot I could play in. I WANTED TO PLAY THIS GAME. I AM VERY GLAD I PLAYED THIS GAME.

Questions

Because he’s a genious, Stras starts the game off by telling everyone we’re going to pilot giant mecha to fight off some threat. And we all, understanding modern science know that using giant robots is probably not the most cost efficient or effective way to do anything, but that is what this game is about, so the game starts off asking:

What is the thing which threaten humanity and why are giant fighting robots the only way to stop it?

It’s baked right into the game. Before we even start playing we, as players, have invested in why we’ell be doing this thing. There are a couple of other questions, but those were the big ones for me. In our case water levels had rises and most of humanity was underwater. The kaiju that attacked us would irradiate any place they died in, if not for the Atlas core engine that could absorb the energy as it bled out of the. YES!

Character Creation

There are a lot of playbooks that look exactly how you’d expect them to. The Rookie, The Scientist, The Engineer, and The Hotshot are the ones we picked. Each playbook has it’s own moves (as would be expected) but they also have moves tied to how they fight in an Atlas. Some lean towards offensive builds, some towards defensive, and some towards tactical. Within each of those trees, there are special abilities that reinforce the theme.

I could tell already that Stras took some of the principles from Apocalypse World when developing the game but specifically dialed the focus back so that the character was not the entire focal point of the game. The characters relationship with their fellow pilot, the Atlas itself, and the world they were saving were all integral parts of the game. So much love for all of this.

We had the grandson of the creator of an atlas. A hotshot pilot who was a genetic experiment and her much more cerebral daughter, and the rookie Kevin, who just made it onto the team.

Atlas Creation

It’s like gun porn without counting the bullets. Each Atlas could be equipped with various sensors, defensive equipment, and, weapons, each of which had cool mechanical effects when used in play. They could even be doubled down on for more delicious goodness.

When all the goodies were picked, the two pilots (a Atlas must have two pilots who’s brains are synced during the piloting) simultaneously said one word, and combining those we got the name of our Atlas. Ross and I piloted “Dagger Dragon”. Sweet!

Kicking off the game

The game starts with all us doing our opening montage. Describing our characters. What we do, what the base looks like, how we interact with others. Then the alarms go off and we suit up, which is another montage of how we get inside our Atlas and in our case out into the water!

The sync

This part is super cool and I’d like to see more of it throughout the game. Each pilot that shares a mech draws a hand of cards (normal playing cards) and then passes two cards to their co-pilot. Without talking then each pilot plays a card. If the card does not match at all they have no sycn. If the cards match in color only (back or red) they have weak sync, if the cards match in suit they have normal sync, and if the number of the cards match, they get strong sync! This effects how much you can do with your mech once you get out there and start fighting.

Also, possibly more importantly, whichever of the two pilots plays the highest card gets to ask the their co-pilot a questions based on the suit of the card. The question is answered by a memory that is shared between the two pilots as they sync. So many damn feels here. I love it!

Fighting monsters

The card mechanic of the game is more complicated that I can capture now but hands down it’s one of the more extensive and well thought out card mechanics I’ve seen for representing tactical combat maneuvers. Between the cards themselves, our own moves, special equipment on the Atlas, and the monsters special abilities…. wow, there is so much there. And none of it feels clunky!

We finished off our foe talking only minimal stress to ourselves and bringing our fighting robots back in tact. We didn’t kill the tentacle monster as quickly as we could though because I, playing the hotshot, held off a moment so I could deliver the killing blow, and earn a new move for my shenanigans!

Downtime

Back at the base, each player picks a location like sick bay, the war room, engineering, etc. and frames a scene there. They have a few questions about the location they have to answer, which helps flesh out the world, and they are also rewarded for taking certain acts (like lashing out at someone for no good reason) by either allowing them to recover stress, gain additional cards in a future fight, or otherwise tend to their narrative and mechanical needs. Since each player in each scene can satisfy different requirements, the game encourages players to frame scenes with each other so everyone can benefit from them. This remind me a lot of the recover phase in Agon, Downtime in Blades in the Dark, and Player turns/Camp in Mouse Guard/Torchbearer. Go figure Stras has some awesome sources of inspiration!

We ended the game with downtime complete, and all of us ready to go back into the fray, even though we knew some pretty grim things about each other…and the monsters we were fighting.

What Rocked

A whole heck of a lot, but specifically:

The Sync mechanic. I want to see more of this!
Building your Atlas. Gearing it out, picking your moves and your focus.
The fight mechanics were fantastic. Lots of really great options for different styles of play.
The character focus into offensive, tactical, and defensive options, which all led to cool moves. Most notably the defensive moves didn’t just negate attacks/damage, which is how they usually work in a lot of games and is also why I never take them, because negation is super boring.
The artwork and graphic design for the Atlas. There is a lot of information there and it’s displayed really clearly!
The feels! Asking each other deep dark secrets as the way you power your Atlas is fucking awesome. So good.
Our character tension. I felt like even in a fighting game I had a lot of personal investment in the other characters. My co-pilot the Rookie wanted to impress me. My daughter the scientist was avoiding me, and her co-pilot the engineer infuriated me so much I almost broke his jaw because he was paying attention to the tech instead of the fight at hand and had put my daughter in danger because of it! Good stuff.

What could have improved

Like a lot of games in development, play was very paper heavy. A sheet for our characters, a sheet for out Atlas. A sheet with how the various equipment works, and a sheet for every location we could frame scenes in. I think this is natural part of game development and as you play more and more, you figure out how you can run with fewer pieces of paper on the table at any one time.
Tomer pointed out that downtime presented too many options to try and capture and that a starting mission might benefit from a truncated version where there were few options available until the players became acclimated to the game.
Ever since talking to Ross about component based design, I keep looking at games and wonder how they components could improve play. In this case I think there as specifically things like having cards for equipment that can be placed in specific slots so its clear what fits where, as well as linking some of the moves to physical components so that their effects were visible on the table. I really, really want Stras and Ross to sit down together over this because I think that Ross could take this beautiful system Stras has created and make it even more accessible to players.

I really want to play this game over and over. Like a lot. As soon as we were done with the mission I was like, lets do it gain! I had the same kind of enthusiasm for it that I did when I played Dungeons & Dragons in high school. I just wanted to keep playing and see what happened. I wanted to learn mastery over the mechanism. I wanted to find out more secrets. More, more, more, more!

Actual Play – Nightsegur (7/9/2016)

Facilitator: John Aegard
Players: Victoria Garcia, Sean Nittner, James Lawton, Adrienne Mueller
System: Nightsegur (mash up of Night Witches and Montsegur 1244)

Wow, this game looked great, and it delivered on that promise! Here’s John’s pitch from the forum:

This is a GMless tabletop freeform game with rules based on the game “Montsegur.” It tells the story of the “Night Witches” — heroic young Soviet airwomen caught between the terrors of the Nazi war machine, the paranoid Soviet secret police, and the institutional sexism of their own military.

The game covers four years of history, from the dark days of 1942 through the ultimate triumph of 1945. It deliberately de-emphasizes the military action. We know the war only through the very sudden absence of its casualties, some of whom we will be forbidden to mourn.

This setting is loaded with awful stuff — brutal violence, paranoid and bullying military cops, sexism, queerphobia. For safety’s sake, we will be playing with an x-card

As with Montsegur, all characters are premade and preloaded into a relationship map. Each player will play an airwoman and a member of the ground crew.

From talking to John, we shared this in common. We love Night Witches but the game is best done over a campaign. Multiple missions, multiple waystations. He wanted a game that not only played through the whole war, but also focused on the lives of the airwomen and the ground crew almost exclusively. The extent of the missions played out “in game” was that each turn you selected a scene (from a list of three available) and if the scene card you replaced it with had a skull on it your air woman didn’t make it back after that night’s mission. Simple and brutal.

The Story by Adrienne Mueller

Adrienne did an amazing write up on the GPNW forums, which I’m going to copy in full (with permission) here. Her write up is on the GPNW forum here.

Story:
– Rada is a young idealist who promulgates the democracy of the people whenever she gets the chance. She earns many medals and eventually leads the regiment. She ends the war as a hero and continues to tow the party line for many years thereafter.
– Valya barely had a chance to fly before she was run over by one of our own aircraft – flown by Rada, no less. The loss of Roman had hit Valya hard and whether her blundering onto the runway was intentional or caused by drink, we’ll never know.
– Yana likes her vodka and likes Zoryana too. She advocates for stealing from the men and for burying the bomb. She avoids Zoryana for a while after Valya’s death, but eventually they kiss and make up. But then Yana also kisses Agafonika and their relationship never recovers.
– Polya staunchly insists that Rita is too near-sighted to fly; but she is persuaded that Nina should be given a plane again and leads a ‘salvage’ mission to get the parts. She also lays in to the useless poet Konstantin – to everyone’s amusement except Sonya at the NKVD. Eventually, after the slaughter of several POWs before they can be interrogated, the NKVD takes her out.
– Färidä is pushing to get her sister back on flight-duty from the get go. Once Polya is out of the picture and Färidä is granted the finest medal Russia has to offer, she succeeds. Her plane goes missing after Rita fails her, but she makes it back alive. One of her darkest moments is when she needs to shoot one of the prisoners she’s trying to loot – and then watches them all get slaughtered by Arkady.
– Rita pushes to rat out Roman and helps Nina pick up NKVD documents from the mud. Eventually her sister gets her her chance to fly again, but she’s so tired from still also being a mechanic that she fucks up. Also, turns out she was too near-sighted to be let in the air and she doesn’t make it back.
– In the beginning, Taline urged the other members of the ground crew to protect Roman and then urged Spartak to get us more uniforms, or at least some soap. By the time we got to the Balkan she was delivering lackluster pre-written sermons on cleanliness. She tried very hard to stop the runway workers from requisitioning our food, but had to cave.
– Zoryana was obliged to clean the bloody uniform of Valya. Much later, she and Yana rekindled their passion, but that was cut short when Yana betrayed her. Zoryana was also sent to the NKVD, but she made it pack only a little worse for wear.
– Nina had no problem giving info to the NKVD – she knew what happened to people who didn’t comply. She worked her butt off for them. Her reward came when Färidä persuaded Polya to help rig up a plane for her. She even got a spiffy looking replacement-leg. She was a source of inspiration to the troops. But the NKVD got her in the end. Maybe it was the coverup from the unexploded bomb. Maybe it was her pointing fingers at a dead woman. Who can say?- Spartak helped Zoryana wash out Valya’s blood and then helped Nina pick-up papers. She was disgusted by inefficiency and by people lacking the right information and used her power to make things better for the women.
– Konstantin was a young, rich, poet who got brutal lessons first when Polya dressed him down, then when she sent him up in a plane, then when she forced him to clean a frozen, overflowing latrine.
– Arkady went crazy when he was confronted with some German prisoners. He was never seen again.
– Agafonika had some fun with Yana and then tried to cover-up the affairs in the regiment. Eventually she had to throw Zoryana under the bus, though.Game:
Nightsegur is a hybrid of Night Witches by Jason Morningstar and Montsegur 1244 by Frederik Jensen. It takes the theme of Night Witches and applies it to the one-shot delivery system of Montsegur. Players each play two characters: a pilot and a groundperson. We follow them over four successive acts which span the period of World War II. There is attrition as time passes; either from the Germans or from sentencing by the Soviet NKVD for crimes against the motherland. Each player uses a scene-card, with a bit of evocative description on it, to help set a scene that would take place against the backdrop of a given act. Characters have the opportunity to rat out their fellows at the end of every act. In the end, epilogues are delivered for whoever has survived.

Thoughts:
EDITED – Decided I wanted to strip out some of the more play-testy feedback so that could go straight to Johnzo.
– Loved how the NKVD took out more of us than the Germans.
– Unlike Montsegur, the story-arc goes kind of goes from negative to positive instead of positive to negative. We’re winning the war. So really things could be more hopeful at the end; but I’m so used to narrative one-shots like this ending in tragedy, it’s hard for me to do.
– Love the NKVD incrimination and draws.
– Sorry I made Roman into such a jerk. It’s the way I chose to interpret the question on my card, but I think he was maybe supposed to be more of a clown character.
– We usually used our turn to set scenes for other people’s characters and left our own characters out. This was great because we had a lot of latitude for what scenes to do. It was less good, for me, because I also wanted to talk about things my characters were feeling/thinking and I wanted them to interact with other characters in particular ways. But – I wanted to hear about other characters that I hadn’t seen in a while more. Later in the game we use our stored ‘scene cards’ to add in more scenes that could help flesh things out, but by then precious setup/characterization time had been lost. Don’t think this was an issue for other players and doubt this would happen in most games.
– Loved the map and flavor.
– We didn’t narrate around the deaths so much, though I think we were supposed to. In hindsight was kind of missing that.
– Someone please make a tiny plane figure as the map token – that perhaps can lose wheels and propellers and wing-pieces as the war progresses.
– Wished Rita had had a scene with her sister! To at least thank her for getting her back in the cockpit.

Favourite Bits:
– When Sonya reminded us that we had just been lectured about cleanliness, after the latrine overflowed.
– The gentle touch on the wrist from Agafonika. (Took me by surprise and I loved it!)
– The suspense of who would be drawn from the envelope.
– The deeply disturbing swimming hole scene. Not because I relished the content, but because I don’t think I’ve ever gotten such a strong feeling of foreboding in a game.
– Zolyana telling Yana we should live in the moment because it’s all we have.
– Färidä advocating so hard for Rita!
– Spartak telling NKVD to draw a grid. So smart. So commanding.
– Polya tearing into the poet about how useless he is and how he should get himself a gun, or get in a plane, or get to shoveling shit.
– Nadia’s plane-leg! What a cool touch and how wonderful that she was overcoming her disability in this shitty place in this shitty war.
– That Rada was able to be persuaded by Färidä’s argument to let Rita fly! Stuck to her morals!

This was a great experience, people! Check it out: http://john.aegard.com/!
Thanks so much for making it and facilitating it for us, Johnzo!

What Rocked

Back to Sean’s voice to add in a few favorites of my own (thought Adrienne covered most of those as well):

The horrors of war felt so real. People just died and you moved on. Between the missions and the NKVD killing us, it was really clear that this wasn’t a story of some plucky heroes, it was a story of loss and of looking for beauty among wreckage.

We played through the whole war, which was amazing. I loved watching our characters struggle and flourish and die. Having two characters per player is really smart.

The denouncement system is amazing. Denounce another air woman and they may be arrested, don’t and you might be!

In one scene when we had a number of Germans captive, Färidä shot one of the captives for fear of them breaking out (and because he had just done something extremely rude). When they brought Captain Arkady to the captives to see if he could put them to use in his labor force one of the Germans, who was an SS agent started yelling at him. Adrienne began speaking in German saying something over and over, which sounded like “she shot him” (and think that was pretty close to it). Having that language barrier be real at the table was some kind of magic!

Nina was very fun to play. In the beginning, relegated to a typist she was very cowardly. She would turn anyone in for fear of getting in trouble herself. Later, when she was back in the air though she was re-emboldened, had no fear… and then was arrested, shot and dumped in an unmarked grave by the NKVD. Tragic and beautiful.

I had a blast playing NKVD office Sonya Petrovich and tearing into Polya for the disgusting latrines that they knew they were required to keep clean. Then having Konstantin accidentally blow the entire thing up trying to help clean it. Priceless.

There was a scene which was going to a place that I felt really uncomfortable with. An escape for the dirt and grime when all the women found a pool and got to bathe and really get clean for the first time the entire war. The scene was one of joy until several trucks full of male soldiers appeared and then it suddenly took on a very dark tone. It seemed like there was this moment of uncertainty at the table and then I tapped the X-card, and we cut right past that scene, describing no more. I was so appreciative of everyone at the table for just rolling that along without further description or detail. Thank you all!

What could have improved

This game is really strong. The few improvements I can think of which we talked to John about were:

It’s entirely possible for a player to lose both characters (I did). In that event, I think someone with two characters left should just give them one. I doubt it would detract from immersion at all.
The denouncements were initially one per characters but that quickly seemed overwhelming and John switched it to one per player, which I think is much more manageable.

Actual Play – Sync (7/8/2016)

GM: Ross Cowman
Players: Steve Nix, Colin Cummins, Johnstone Metzger, and Sean Nittner
System: Sync

I really wanted to play Sync at Origins but ended up running in the same slot that Kira was. I thought I had lost out and wouldn’t see it again until who knows when. And then I noticed a G+ post where Ross asked if he could run it and then woot, it was on the Go Play games list forums. Yay!

What is Cyberpunk

After introductions at the table, our first activity was to define what cyberpunk meant to us. I didn’t catch them all, but here were the themes I jotted down:

Style
Transhumanism
Corporate Power
Individuals as commodities

Some pretty cool stuff there and none of it, except maybe style, felt all that different from today. Creepy.

Who are we

Angel, the Apex physician who was broken when their company required him to extract the organ of a living person in order to allow testing of synthetic organs and because one of the top chrome wanted a new organ for themselves. After that, Angel, who had already viewed the body as the most feeble part of a being, snapped, and did all they could to divorce themself from the biological weaknesses most morals must endure.

J-Rom, a well paid and well protected citizen of the Pacific Autonomous Shipping Territory specialized in carrying product housed in his body. Sometimes data stored deep in encrypted memory banks, but also and far more frequently recently, biological organisms. Preserving and growing living tissue in your own body takes a toll, so J-Rom is often sent with a rigorous regimen of medications and treatments to perform.

Fox is an analyst that has been ground down by one job after another. She’s found that Big X doesn’t want to get the truth, even a subjective truth, out of data, they just want their corporate slogans sung across the waves of digital noise. She used to do sex work in the Violet Room, but that’s behind her. The only memory of it was her now bedridden father, kept alive by machines.

Zona is an angry punk. They just had a fight and broke up with their girlfriend at the bike collective, where Zona previously worked. Zona was now out of a job and out of place to live, and they slept in the tent city under the expressway trying to figure out what the hell to do next and how to stop the twin powers of Razorteeth and the MegaMart who are seeking to turn The Dockside District into a gentrified adventure zone full of fully radical extreme sports and energy drinks.

Our Neighborhoods

The places we lived

The Play is the Thing

Our establishing scenes showed that:

Zona needed to find a play to live…her tent got washed away in the rain. Maybe Fox could put her up for a while.
Fox was terrified by her boss and was sure he was going to ask her to do something she didn’t want to do…and that she’d probably do it. Maybe J-Rom, who she was in trouble for covering for could help her out?
J-Rom had something inside him and the medication he was taking was really messing him up. He needed either to get it out of him, or to get a fix that would stave off these side effects. Maybe Angel could brew him up something.
Angel was obsessed with finding the woman whose liver they removed. She had dropped off the grid. Was she still alive? She was connected with Zona somehow, maybe they would know where to find her?

All in all, some pretty good connections!

Play proceeded as we dug deeper into each others’s business and discovered our fears were worst than we expected

Zona couldn’t stay with Fox. Her father’s obsession with porn and caustic nature drove her out of the apparement. She also was going to have a real hard time making up with her ex after said ex realized that she knew J-Rom, who epitomized the everything she hated.
Fox was indeed caught for her subterfuge and not only asked to remain complicit with the human cloning and organ farming Apex was part of, she was also asked to round up a large group of homeless people to forcibly do experiments on. Rather, they had already rounded them up, she just needed to verify their genetic makup was compatible with the progress, and 75% of them needed to qualify.
J-Rom found out he had a human fetus growing at an accelerated rate inside him. Taking the drugs might kill him. Not taking the drugs would be worst. Removing the fetus early wold be a breach of contract.
Angel probably fared the best of us. They learned about the woman, realized she could be contacted throgh J-Rom or if not him through Zona. They never met up with the woman, but maybe they felt a little better appearing like Jesus in a crown of thorns in front of Fox and giving her some ammunition to use against her Apex boss Bullet!

What Rocked

Angel’s depiction of hacking everyone else’s augmented reality to make their avatar appear like an angel to any onlooker was pretty awesome.

The basic moves served us really, really well. Well enough that I never actually used a playbook move and I got everything I wanted out of them. I don’t have the move sheet to remember what they were called but I just remember feeling like “hell yeah, that’s what I want to do!”

During our establishing scenes Ross asked Johnstone what J-Rom does to settle in when he’s in a hotel room. Every hotel, no matter how nice he goes to, has crappy sheets. So when he first arrives he stripps the bed completely, then pulls out these vacuum sealed plastic bags filled with compressed silk sheets and down (or microfibers that are actually softer and bouncier than down) duvets, rips them open and makes his own bed. Every time. He just leaves the sheets behind when he’s done.

Ross did a great job of gently nudging us towards each other. Cyberpunk as a genre has something of a pitfall that is similar to fantasy. Everyone wants to look like the baddest ass there is. So many players spend a lot of time preening (read gearing up) and peacocking (read describing their character being cool and awesome) rather than paying attention to each other. In fact, I think John made a game that is just about doing that. Ross kept asking those leading questions that forced us to pull ourselves out of our augmented reality, our own mirror shades, and our own wells of depravity to look at one another for answers and for validation.

Wow, I felt for Zona. They were is a fix and there weren’t a lot of good ways out of it. We didn’t really play of Razorteeth or the MegaMart, but knowing their home was being gobbled up and seeing that as they fought for it they lost those closest to them was pretty rough.

The Group Moves! We didn’t get a chance to use them but I love how they moved past all the “we pull a heist” business and frame that as “yep, spend those resources together and you all did it!”. The things about the world that you can change are awesome!

What could be improved

There is a lot of character and campaign building steps that are currently distinct, but which I think could be integrated into play. Here’s the steps I was tracking:

Define Cyberpunk
Make Characters
Form bonds with other other PCs
Describe How the system has failed you personally
Draw a map of your neighborhood along with notable features
Lists of threats/adversaries (Apex, PAST, Razorteeth, MegaMart, etc).

As I’ve been running Blades, I’ve noticed the same kind of steps. Build a character, pick their heritage and background, choose an ally and an enemy, create a crew, decide who they have positive and negative faction status with, etc. All of these steps are fantastic for a campaign game where you want a larger sandbox, but for a one shot they have two deleterious side effects:

They take a lot of time. We spent about two hours on character and campaign creation and while I that time is play, I wanted to find out more about what we would do rather than who we are.
They give players fodder to splinter off into different parts of the world which can either result in the GM doing a lot of corralling to get the PCs all involved in the same thing or in lots of separate adventures. In this case Ross did some good work keeping us focused around a few individuals (yay for PC-NPC-PC-NPC-PC-NPC-PC heptagons) but even so we had several loose threads .

I think we had some confusion about character knowledge. Mostly about whether Angel knew that Zona’s ex was in fact the patient that they obsessed over and why Angel would wonder if they were dead, when J-Rom knew they were alive. It didn’t break the game but I noticed a few moments of “what, who is that – what now?”.

Our characters had some pretty different levels of humanity and empathy. Angel on one end, who viewed the organic as weak and fallible, sought to dissociate them self completely. Zona on the other end just needed a place to sleep and wanted to reconnect with their ex. They were strong but vulnerable. This vast palette of humanity all fits withing the Cyberpunk genre, but I don’t know if all fit within our game. Had we another hour, I think could have put that disparity under the microscope and seen how those two creatures could exist in the same world and in the same story.

The girl who is hard up and has an abusive parent that pimped her out as a child but who she now cares for is a tired trope and I wish I had some something to flip that with Fox. In fact the woman acting as caregiver for the man in general wasn’t something I was really happy about once I introduced it. Tropes, per se, aren’t a problem, but those tropes aren’t ones I want to reinforce.

Actual Play – Fate of Cthulhu Alpha Playtest 1 (6/24/2016)

GM: Sean Nittner
Players: Sophie Lagacé, PK Sullivan, Stephen Blackmoore
System: Fate of Cthlhu (pre-alpha playtest)

So… we’re doing this thing. We’re asking the question “What if Skynet was Cthulhu?” And what if it was? What if someone came from the future and told you that the world was going to end in 2035… that is when the Deep Ones take over. Would you believe them? Would you if something else came back to stop them?

This was our first playtest game. Since I’m not on the development team, I’m GMing it so the devs can see what it looks like. I’m not sure I really helped them out with that too much though. A lot of the game was about setting up the premise, so we didn’t touch the mechanics much. That will be for next session. I did, kill three of their characters and leave one of them stranded in the sweltering heat of a Guadalajara summer naked and surrounded by narcos. How did I kill three PCs and still leave one PC alive, when there were only three players? That a problem for future-now you to figure you!

FoC on Air

We’re recording our games for reference. If you’re interested in watching, this plays less like a game and more like a brainstorming session, but you might get a few kicks out of it.

Design Notes

The game was fun (yay!) and left us with a lot of questions and ponderings (more yay!). Questions like how we’ll handle multiple versions of the same character, and what kind of baddies should be coming back through the void? Should we be playing at the 2035 timeline to start, or the 2018? Should the characters in the earlier timeline be younger versions of themselves or different characters all together? Some good stuff for us to noodle on!

2035

Alfredo Garcia, Guerilla warrior from the future, Driven to Save his Sister. Corrupted by exposure to temporal radiation, corrupted further by time travel.

Sophie +3 (we didn’t actually name a lot of the PC). Saw the temporal reactor core in 2035 (three days from now) go haywire. Came back from the future present 2035 to warn everyone, however, that was the first time time travel had been successfully completed. And it wasn’t enough time to stop it.

PK +0 the scientist operating the bunker (A Mayan style modern pyramid with a nuclear reactor at its base), believed based on what he learned from Sophie +3 that his theory (presumably tested by PK +3) would work and that he could send all of them back, as early as 2018 to stop a cascading chain of events.

As they planned however, something breached the bunker’s defenses and they had to quickly enter the machine. Sophie +3, Sophie +0, Alfredo, PK +2, and two lab assistants all entered the machine and were ripped through time like a thread being forcibly pulled out of the cloth it was woven into. Unfortunately something else also came back with them and tore everyone asunder except Alfredo, who managed to push himself “away” during the quantum tunnelling.

2018

He exited the stream in Mexico desert, rolling down a hill and covered in the viscera of his companions. At the bottom he rolled into a rusted old Ford pickup and startled the hell out of the meth cook that was inside it. The runner, who had been tasked with both watching the cook, who had a habit, and picking up the drop heard the loud thump and came running, gun drawn hastily from an ankle holster.

Aspects on the scene

We’re Already Late
Blazing Hot Day

Not featured in the game but referenced, El Hefe Juan Rodrigo Perez.

Corruption

Because Alfredo is inhumanly flexible, he can:

Always escape ropes, chains, or manacles that bind him.
Gains +4 to overcome obstacles by squeezing through tight spaces
Walks with an inhuman gait.