SOTC: Brain-eating bugs on a zeppelin
After whining the other day about how I didn't know what I was doing in Spirit of the Century, I ran the game. This session actually went pretty well, though I was astonished at how fast things went.
Here are the sheets for our brave band of adventurers. Christine wasn't there because she's still loaded up on Vicodin from having her wisdom teeth extracted, but the others were there.
I went in with almost no plan whatsoever. I'd reread Lester Dent's master plot for pulp fiction and realized I should take his advice and have a different murder method for this villain. I decided on brain-eating bugs.
Our heroes were attending a lavish party hosted by the richest man in Cairo. (He never got a name, and the players just kept referring to him as The Richest Man in Cairo anyway.) Naturally, we started with each of the players giving one or two sentences establishing how their characters were behaving at the party. Then we got right into the action, with The Richest Man in Cairo falling to the floor, clutching his head and screaming.
Oantombo, the noted witch doctor and hunter, made a quick diagnosis. The man was infested with flesh-eating insects which had a particular taste for brains. Normally, one would enter the head, lay a bunch of eggs, and then a few hours later the newly hatched insects would eat the brain. (It doesn't have to make biological sense. It's pulp fiction, after all.) Our heroes started worrying that perhaps the insects had entered through the food at the party. Then another man (the fifth richest man in Cairo, in fact) started screaming and clutching his head as well.
Clearly, this was a time for some decisive leadership! But they all rolled terribly on their Leadership checks, and the players thought the ensuing chaos was actually pretty funny to play out, so they chose not to enhance their rolls. Instead, Montana Smith, the gun-crazy pilot, whipped out his pistols and fired some very precise warning shots to keep the crowd huddled together in the ballroom (paying a Fate point to use Guns in place of Intimidation). Oantombo examined the other guests and determined that a few more had the insects in them, which would need to be removed surgically.
A quick investigation revealed that everyone who had been infected with the insects had been to a particular salon earlier in the day to get a skin treatment that was all the rage among the upper class in Cairo. The salon was closed for the night when our heroes arrived, but a quick boot from Charles Wraith, the Man Without Fear, took care of that.
As our heroes entered, they heard a maniacal laugh, which turned out to be a continuous loop of maniacal laughter playing on a reel-to-reel recorder in the back room of the salon. Next to the recorder was a letter addressed to "Meddling Fools." It began, "Dear Meddling Fools," and went on to explain that this was just a taste of the horrors in store. The villain claimed to have already infected "some of the best 'heads' in Europe" with the brain-eating insects, though they had been specially treated to not hatch until some time on Saturday. If he received five million US dollars by Friday midnight, he would provide his secret treatment, which would kill the bugs without the need for dangerous brain surgery. It was signed "VP."
Of course, Oantombo knew it was likely the work of Vladimir Pupin (I didn't make up the name, Wayne did). Vlad was an internationally known expert on exotic insects and had a reputation for putting his knowledge to evil ends. Our heroes asked around the neighborhood and learned that a large Russian man and two female assistants had been seen around the salon over the past week. The police reported that they'd tracked down the salon owner and all the known salon employees, only to find them all dead in their homes from the very same insects in their brains.
Oantombo's excellent tracking skills allowed our heroes to track the villains from the salon to a dock on the Nile, where witnesses reported that a large white man and two women had loaded up a boat and headed north, towards the sea. The wealthy Dr. William von Schuler commissioned the fastest remaining boat along with its pilot, since not everybody could fit in Montana Smith's two-person airplane. That plane still ended up taking three people, as Charles Wraith, being completely fearless, chose to straddle the fuselage and hang on.
Our heroes got out to sea, after a short out-of-game debate about what sort of craft could pass the Nile Delta, and found the villains' boat abandoned and covered in the brain-eating insects, as one of the boxes had evidently fallen and opened as it was being offloaded. They set fire to the villains' boat and spotted a distant zeppelin, running dark and headed away from them.
Montana Smith, expert pilot that he is, managed to land his pontoon plane right on top of the zeppelin. Oantombo and Charles Wraith entered the zeppelin structure and went straight down to the gondola. Charles Wraith actually slid down the ladder headfirst, as he continued to prove he was, indeed, The Man Without Fear. Montana Smith then took off from the zeppelin again and swung around to see how his friends were doing.
I rather expected him to go down and ferry Dr. William von Schuler up to the zeppelin, but the doctor wasn't interested. (I think this has a lot to do with Tim as a player. He plays very cautiously and likes to have minions do all the dangerous bits. Unsurprisingly, he likes Shadowrun, where his cautiousness and careful planning really pay off, but I don't think it serves him well in SotC. I'm not sure how to get him more involved with the fast and furious action, and I don't really want to slow down the game to accommodate his tastes when everyone else seems to be having a great time.)
Oantombo and Charles Wraith entered the gondola and beat up a couple of minions, but not before the minions' stray bullets destroyed the large windows on either side of the room. They decided to head forward, where they encountered one of the female assistants, who turned out to be Australian and, therefore, rather good at using her huge knife. (Stereotypes are part of the pulp tradition, after all.) They ended up throwing her through a window. When she caught the edge, Oantombo stuck her with his spear and she fell. Montana Smith swooped down, caught her, and dropped her off at the boat.
Meanwhile, Dr. William von Schuler used his contacting expertise to arrange for shore-based anti-aircraft batteries, left over from the Great War, to be used against the zeppelin. His efforts to communicate this to Montana Smith went poorly, though, so our heroes on the zeppelin had no way of knowing how little time they had. (Of course, they had a dramatically appropriate amount of time, since there was no set timetable for the big guns to get firing.)
Oantombo and Charles Wraith continued forward, where the encountered the other female assistant, a French woman firing a machine gun from behind a very large and sturdy banquet table. (When you're a bad guy, why not fill up your zeppelin's weight capacity with heavy wood furnishings?) As they were dealing with her, Vlad opened the door on the opposite wall and revealed that he had a grenade. Vlad tried the old "I'm mad enough to do it" routine, but Oantombo called his bluff by throwing a spear into him. Vlad panicked, threw the grenade into the dining room, and ran for the cockpit. Charles Wraith flipped the table over onto the grenade, a feat only possible through his substantial might and a couple of Fate points. The grenade blew a large hole in the bottom of the zeppelin and destroyed the table, but left everyone unharmed.
Oantombo raced for the cockpit and actually made it there first, where he slammed the door. The French woman fired through the door, incidentally killing the co-pilot, and Vlad shouldered the door open. Vlad and Oantombo began to wrestle, incidentally destroying a fair amount of the instrumentation in the cockpit.
Meanwhile, Charles snagged some convenient rope, tied one end around himself and one around the French woman, and jumped out the side window of the cockpit. As he anticipated, she was forced to catch herself on the window frame, providing an anchor for the pendulum that was Charles. He swung around to the far side of the cockpit and caught it. Just then, Montana swung around the front of the zeppelin and shot the French woman. She fell out, now forcing Charles to be the one supporting the two of them. Montana flew his plane under Charles and shot the rope connecting Charles to the French woman, allowing the French woman to plunge to her watery doom. Dr. von Schuler did collect her body, but the players generally agreed that she'd taken too much and was certainly dead.
Then the shore batteries opened up, blowing apart the back of the zeppelin. Charles dropped onto Montana's wing, while the whole gondola tipped sharply. Naturally, this left Vlad and Oantombo sliding towards the big hole in the floor. Vlad caught the edge and Oantombo hung from Vlad. After a little more struggling, it ended up with Oantombo holding the edge and Vlad hanging from him. Oantombo's strength failed him and they fell.
Just then, the shore batteries fired again, destroying the remainder of the zeppelin.
Montana managed to swoop down and catch Oantombo among the falling, flaming wreckage. Vlad fell far into the water, but as he hadn't actually taken a lot of consequences before that, he survived and was able to be rescued by Dr. von Schuler.
Dr. von Schuler made some extravagant promises to Vlad to get him to talk. Basically, in exchange for Vlad coughing up who had hired him to do this, how to manufacture the antidote, and who had been infected already, our heroes promised to not only let him go free, but to give him a substantial amount of money to start a lab in South America. So he did, and they did.
It turned out, as Vlad explained, that he'd been hired by a particular French anarchist, who had never really expected to get the money, but just wanted as many of the upper echelon of European society killed off at once as possible. The French woman had been one of the anarchist's most trusted true believers, sent along to make sure that Vlad didn't go back on his end of the deal. The Australian woman was along because she'd lived among the aborigines and had learned their methods of handling the brain-eating insects relatively safely.
So there we left off, with the next adventure seed (find the anarchist) set up and pretty much everybody feeling we'd had a good, fast-paced adventure.
Thank you for reading.
tl;dr version: It went well.
Here are the sheets for our brave band of adventurers. Christine wasn't there because she's still loaded up on Vicodin from having her wisdom teeth extracted, but the others were there.
I went in with almost no plan whatsoever. I'd reread Lester Dent's master plot for pulp fiction and realized I should take his advice and have a different murder method for this villain. I decided on brain-eating bugs.
Our heroes were attending a lavish party hosted by the richest man in Cairo. (He never got a name, and the players just kept referring to him as The Richest Man in Cairo anyway.) Naturally, we started with each of the players giving one or two sentences establishing how their characters were behaving at the party. Then we got right into the action, with The Richest Man in Cairo falling to the floor, clutching his head and screaming.
Oantombo, the noted witch doctor and hunter, made a quick diagnosis. The man was infested with flesh-eating insects which had a particular taste for brains. Normally, one would enter the head, lay a bunch of eggs, and then a few hours later the newly hatched insects would eat the brain. (It doesn't have to make biological sense. It's pulp fiction, after all.) Our heroes started worrying that perhaps the insects had entered through the food at the party. Then another man (the fifth richest man in Cairo, in fact) started screaming and clutching his head as well.
Clearly, this was a time for some decisive leadership! But they all rolled terribly on their Leadership checks, and the players thought the ensuing chaos was actually pretty funny to play out, so they chose not to enhance their rolls. Instead, Montana Smith, the gun-crazy pilot, whipped out his pistols and fired some very precise warning shots to keep the crowd huddled together in the ballroom (paying a Fate point to use Guns in place of Intimidation). Oantombo examined the other guests and determined that a few more had the insects in them, which would need to be removed surgically.
A quick investigation revealed that everyone who had been infected with the insects had been to a particular salon earlier in the day to get a skin treatment that was all the rage among the upper class in Cairo. The salon was closed for the night when our heroes arrived, but a quick boot from Charles Wraith, the Man Without Fear, took care of that.
As our heroes entered, they heard a maniacal laugh, which turned out to be a continuous loop of maniacal laughter playing on a reel-to-reel recorder in the back room of the salon. Next to the recorder was a letter addressed to "Meddling Fools." It began, "Dear Meddling Fools," and went on to explain that this was just a taste of the horrors in store. The villain claimed to have already infected "some of the best 'heads' in Europe" with the brain-eating insects, though they had been specially treated to not hatch until some time on Saturday. If he received five million US dollars by Friday midnight, he would provide his secret treatment, which would kill the bugs without the need for dangerous brain surgery. It was signed "VP."
Of course, Oantombo knew it was likely the work of Vladimir Pupin (I didn't make up the name, Wayne did). Vlad was an internationally known expert on exotic insects and had a reputation for putting his knowledge to evil ends. Our heroes asked around the neighborhood and learned that a large Russian man and two female assistants had been seen around the salon over the past week. The police reported that they'd tracked down the salon owner and all the known salon employees, only to find them all dead in their homes from the very same insects in their brains.
Oantombo's excellent tracking skills allowed our heroes to track the villains from the salon to a dock on the Nile, where witnesses reported that a large white man and two women had loaded up a boat and headed north, towards the sea. The wealthy Dr. William von Schuler commissioned the fastest remaining boat along with its pilot, since not everybody could fit in Montana Smith's two-person airplane. That plane still ended up taking three people, as Charles Wraith, being completely fearless, chose to straddle the fuselage and hang on.
Our heroes got out to sea, after a short out-of-game debate about what sort of craft could pass the Nile Delta, and found the villains' boat abandoned and covered in the brain-eating insects, as one of the boxes had evidently fallen and opened as it was being offloaded. They set fire to the villains' boat and spotted a distant zeppelin, running dark and headed away from them.
Montana Smith, expert pilot that he is, managed to land his pontoon plane right on top of the zeppelin. Oantombo and Charles Wraith entered the zeppelin structure and went straight down to the gondola. Charles Wraith actually slid down the ladder headfirst, as he continued to prove he was, indeed, The Man Without Fear. Montana Smith then took off from the zeppelin again and swung around to see how his friends were doing.
I rather expected him to go down and ferry Dr. William von Schuler up to the zeppelin, but the doctor wasn't interested. (I think this has a lot to do with Tim as a player. He plays very cautiously and likes to have minions do all the dangerous bits. Unsurprisingly, he likes Shadowrun, where his cautiousness and careful planning really pay off, but I don't think it serves him well in SotC. I'm not sure how to get him more involved with the fast and furious action, and I don't really want to slow down the game to accommodate his tastes when everyone else seems to be having a great time.)
Oantombo and Charles Wraith entered the gondola and beat up a couple of minions, but not before the minions' stray bullets destroyed the large windows on either side of the room. They decided to head forward, where they encountered one of the female assistants, who turned out to be Australian and, therefore, rather good at using her huge knife. (Stereotypes are part of the pulp tradition, after all.) They ended up throwing her through a window. When she caught the edge, Oantombo stuck her with his spear and she fell. Montana Smith swooped down, caught her, and dropped her off at the boat.
Meanwhile, Dr. William von Schuler used his contacting expertise to arrange for shore-based anti-aircraft batteries, left over from the Great War, to be used against the zeppelin. His efforts to communicate this to Montana Smith went poorly, though, so our heroes on the zeppelin had no way of knowing how little time they had. (Of course, they had a dramatically appropriate amount of time, since there was no set timetable for the big guns to get firing.)
Oantombo and Charles Wraith continued forward, where the encountered the other female assistant, a French woman firing a machine gun from behind a very large and sturdy banquet table. (When you're a bad guy, why not fill up your zeppelin's weight capacity with heavy wood furnishings?) As they were dealing with her, Vlad opened the door on the opposite wall and revealed that he had a grenade. Vlad tried the old "I'm mad enough to do it" routine, but Oantombo called his bluff by throwing a spear into him. Vlad panicked, threw the grenade into the dining room, and ran for the cockpit. Charles Wraith flipped the table over onto the grenade, a feat only possible through his substantial might and a couple of Fate points. The grenade blew a large hole in the bottom of the zeppelin and destroyed the table, but left everyone unharmed.
Oantombo raced for the cockpit and actually made it there first, where he slammed the door. The French woman fired through the door, incidentally killing the co-pilot, and Vlad shouldered the door open. Vlad and Oantombo began to wrestle, incidentally destroying a fair amount of the instrumentation in the cockpit.
Meanwhile, Charles snagged some convenient rope, tied one end around himself and one around the French woman, and jumped out the side window of the cockpit. As he anticipated, she was forced to catch herself on the window frame, providing an anchor for the pendulum that was Charles. He swung around to the far side of the cockpit and caught it. Just then, Montana swung around the front of the zeppelin and shot the French woman. She fell out, now forcing Charles to be the one supporting the two of them. Montana flew his plane under Charles and shot the rope connecting Charles to the French woman, allowing the French woman to plunge to her watery doom. Dr. von Schuler did collect her body, but the players generally agreed that she'd taken too much and was certainly dead.
Then the shore batteries opened up, blowing apart the back of the zeppelin. Charles dropped onto Montana's wing, while the whole gondola tipped sharply. Naturally, this left Vlad and Oantombo sliding towards the big hole in the floor. Vlad caught the edge and Oantombo hung from Vlad. After a little more struggling, it ended up with Oantombo holding the edge and Vlad hanging from him. Oantombo's strength failed him and they fell.
Just then, the shore batteries fired again, destroying the remainder of the zeppelin.
Montana managed to swoop down and catch Oantombo among the falling, flaming wreckage. Vlad fell far into the water, but as he hadn't actually taken a lot of consequences before that, he survived and was able to be rescued by Dr. von Schuler.
Dr. von Schuler made some extravagant promises to Vlad to get him to talk. Basically, in exchange for Vlad coughing up who had hired him to do this, how to manufacture the antidote, and who had been infected already, our heroes promised to not only let him go free, but to give him a substantial amount of money to start a lab in South America. So he did, and they did.
It turned out, as Vlad explained, that he'd been hired by a particular French anarchist, who had never really expected to get the money, but just wanted as many of the upper echelon of European society killed off at once as possible. The French woman had been one of the anarchist's most trusted true believers, sent along to make sure that Vlad didn't go back on his end of the deal. The Australian woman was along because she'd lived among the aborigines and had learned their methods of handling the brain-eating insects relatively safely.
So there we left off, with the next adventure seed (find the anarchist) set up and pretty much everybody feeling we'd had a good, fast-paced adventure.
Thank you for reading.
tl;dr version: It went well.