Having marked 30 exam papers today (40 in total so far, with another 50 or so to go before another 25 roll in tomorrow), I'm treating myself by having old Columbos on in the background while I rejiggy my game (the new ones, like Highlander 2 and the Star Wars prequels, never actually happened). Still not sure about the altered mechanic, so I'm going to do all the edits that would be common to old and new, then create a new file for the new version. Sometimes I think I'm far too organised for my own good, then I look at the state of the sitting room and the piles of stuff everywhere.
Anyway, as threatened, the rest of the play test report is hiding under the cut below. If you want to know what the title of this post is about, you'll have to read it. Unless you knew a certain Isabelle from the Company of Crimson, of course, at which point you'll probably be able to guess.
Scene 2 - Slipping Between the Cracks
Knowing she needed somewhere forgotten, Issy headed back to her former home at the missionary station. It was all boarded up (what hadn’t been rogued away by her and the tribe) and the air of loss and neglect was palpable. Making her way to the room that she’d slept in, Issy stood and concentrated, searching for the light that was her essence (Between the Cracks, with Brass). Rich narrated this in a very Time Machine type way, which worked beautifully; the mission station was taken down around her and the jungle grew back until she felt she was in the right time and stepped out into the past.
Issy felt it would be best to avoid her tribe if she could; after all, it might be a bit awkward when she returned to her own time. She nearly got discovered after a screwed up Lie of the Land roll, but she managed to get away with it.
She got another fright when she realised that the Leslie expedition was not that far behind her on the trail. Now if there’d been other players, Issy would have wandered into the camp to interact with them so that the other players would have had roles to take (and Rich also mentioned that he would have given the tribe’s people in the previous brief encounter to players as well). But, seeing as there was just the two of us, she decided to double her efforts to get there first, which also nearly led her to a sticky demise.
Technically here we go to scene 5a
Scene 5a - Jungle Perils
What’s a Pulp Victorian jungle adventure without dinosaurs? Exactly.
Rich asked me to roll my Spirit of Africa (and we decided that if a GM asks/forces a roll of a Talent, the player doesn’t have to spend Hope to activate it but can still spend Brass). Issy got a really bad feeling about this, because the whole jungle was silent. Something big was out there hunting, something that Africa recognised but she didn’t. So she sat tight in her little bivouac and thankfully whatever it was wandered past (although she could hear it as it moved near by). Somewhat nervous, Issy used Spirit of Africa to make sure the damn thing had gone before she crept out to examine the large, bird-like tracks it had left behind.
(Coincidentally, one of the best LRP experiences we had was at a League of Crimson event, set in 1920s darkest Africa with an elderly Issy along for the ride. The dinosaur effects on the Saturday evening were fantastic, all achieved by sound and shadows as we quaked inside our tent. The fake blood that splattered up the front of the tent after one chap rather foolishly announced “just off for a slash!” was a wonderfully sticky highlight, as was the ref under the table doing the old Jurassic park table-wobbling thing in time with the footsteps.)
Scene 6a - The City
Being very, very careful, Issy made her way to the lost city and scrambled carefully down into the mile-wide crater it was hidden in. Even with an extra dice, I failed a Spirit roll and walked round a corner into the line of sight of another big lizard (player knows raptor not T Rex, character doesn’t really care; its big and was eating something but is now heading for her instead; Rich was going to give the dinos to players to control, had there been anyone else playing).
It’s amazing how critical successes know when you need them, because that’s what I got on a rather panicked Shadow’s Veil roll, disappearing at high speed through a wall into darkness accompanied by the satisfying sound of the dino smacking its face into said wall somewhere behind me. But fate is fickle and Issy completely failed to strike a spark in the velvet blackness of the building she was now in and was reduced to fumbling around, feeling her way along the walls (failed Lie of the Land, successful Song of Ice).
To cut a long story short, she found the skull and just touching it drained the Starlight back into her, catapulting her consciousness out in the heavens and then into blackness. Back came all her Hope and Brass and she was alone in the city again. (I’d spent 5 Hope and 8 Brass by the time I got to the skull; possibly I was being a little cautious with the Brass but I was interested to see how well two dice worked on their own)
Not fancying her chances against the big lizards, she used Shadow’s Veil to “feel” her way out of where she thought their range was. Problem with that was that when she got there, she couldn’t use Between the Cracks in that location because it was too well known and used by her tribe.
So off she went, back into the range of the dinos, definitely an abandoned region (at least she knew now why no-one really hunted these areas or went to the city; they had more sense). Rich narrated that it was much more difficult for her to pinpoint the right time on her way back because the place had no meaning for Issy, unlike the missionaries’ house (that and the fact she kept feeling dinos walking past her; he can be properly evil, my husband).
On her return to the village, the tribe greeted her happily (it wasn’t unknown for people to wander off for a bit after their coming of age ceremony), but something was distracting her. One of the young hunters has a book, the book Charlie was reading, and it was whispering to Issy. Wandering over, she flicked through the pages to find a poorly rendered sketch of a creature with a glowing horn…
(So, yes, next time we’re after Mokele Mbembe, be it dinosaur, rhino or unicorn. Apparently Rich has nearly a whole campaign mapped out for me already!)
All in all, a fairly traditional game, but very good fun. It was odd playing my own game and I was potentially more passive than I should have been, but I didn’t want to trample all over Rich’s vision of what was going on. It must have been fairly odd for him running it too.