Ghosts n'at

We all know that Halloween is the best holiday. There is no holiday mandate other than to give out candy and dress like a monster. Giant plastic spiders inhabit our bushes. It's the time of year for horror movies and spooky tv specials. Cheetos look like skeletons and discount candy is right around the corner. Also I think this is the only time of year you can find bottlecaps, so chalky, so root beer flavored, so much love. Most importantly, it is time to run Halloween one shots!

In the ongoing quest to try new games, and maybe a little bit because of the promise of a prep free game session, I went with InSpectres. If you haven't heard of InSpectres it is a narrative style rpg. The players are franchisees of a low rent paranormal extermination chain, they are normal every day Joes going about the work of getting rid of ghosts and other nasties. There are two big mechanical twists that lie at the heart of IS, one is that the players narrate the outcomes of their successes, and the other is the reality show style confessionals. Otherwise it is a pretty typical ultralight die pool game.

Players taking full narrative control of the results is what drew me to the game. When making a skill check the player rolls a die pool, take the single best result, and if it is 4 or higher, the player describes the outcome. This is an exact flip of the conventional rpg, where the gm narrates the success based on his knowledge of the scenario. The player is encouraged to take the wheel of the story and drive it right off the road. The GM gets to describe the outcomes of failures, and all the the middle in between bits, so it isn't completely up to the players. I could easily imagine running this game GMless with some kind of rotating narrator.

The reality show confessional mechanic is a stroke of genius. I have never seen a potentially complicated game mechanic like this be so clearly understood and embraced. The gist of it is that a player may stop any scene and do a solo cutaway, as if they were interviewing with the producers on a reality tv show. The player can do several odd things during a confessional. One thing is that they can add characteristics to other player characters. Go ahead and tell the camera about how your co-worker botched the job because he was obsessing about his fantasy football team, or how you are so sick of your driver's inability to ever remember anyone's name. The other player is encouraged to role play this characteristic but not required, it is certainly in the spirit of the game to roll with it. You can also use the confessional to help guide an upcoming scene, "I thought this was a run of the mill cat. 2 phantom, but things got crazy when the Russians showed up!"  The players really seemed to embrace and make good use of the confessional.

Rather than genning up characters before the game we went with the recommended method of generating characters and the franchise at the table working together. Being in Pittsburgh of course we gravitated toward a yinzer franchise, Ghosts n'at. Karen ran an ex CMU professor run out for her crazy theories on the paranormal, Scott ran with a mythical Heisman candidate Pitt QB, washed up and living in the past.

We ran two quick jobs, a very short starter job to get the format of the game down. That consisted of going to the court house to eliminate a terrible stink. The gang had busted a ghost there the week before. but it turns out it was ghostly star crossed lovers that they had split up. It was quickly dealt with despite a poorly functioning robot. The second job was a little more involved, the players went to city hall to dispatch the ghost of a corrupt mayor from 100 years ago. The ghost mayor was out for revenge against the family of the white knight DA who busted him. The DA's grandson is the current deputy assistant mayor (Pittsburgh is has no shortage of government positions).  The DA had been sucked into a ghostly dimension. The players busted the evil ghost but didn't bring DA back from ghost world. So I started to wrap the night up.

That's when something unexpected and weird happened. Scott and I were both ok with leaving the night at that.  Karen on the other hand wasn't going to let it stand that they didn't rescue the DA. It was late so we weren't going to run a third job, but we ended up talking through what the potential followup job would look like. It involved time travel, finding the DA, finding out he had become his own grandfather and deciding to stay in the past. It was just a lot of fun to have the investment in the game to do the follow up, and since the game was a one shot the freedom to just brainstorm our way through the rest of the story.

All in all I was very surprised at how well InSpectres went over with the group. There is no way it could hold up as a campaign, but as a pick up game or a one shot I think it works pretty well.  Your mileage may vary depending on your group, but with the right buy in it can be a blast. I suspect that with a few more plays it will be easier to slide into the game's particular style. For ten bucks for the pdf it is a steal.

Session Report: Aftermath!

 

We plan on writing a number of different types of articles for this blog.  Many will be gaming-related, such as the new segment I will be talking about in this post, though we will also delve into other areas, such as film and television, comics, books, and a variety of other things we enjoy (so if gaming isn't your thing, stay tuned and don't hesitate to let us know what you would like to see). 

The new segment I am introducing today is Session Report. In session reports, we will talk about games we have played recently.  We will discuss the game, the system, and anything that we found interesting during play.  These will hopefully give you a glimpse into our gaming lives and also give you a taste of a game you may not have tried, or a different take on one you play regularly. 

This past weekend, I joined friends for a weekend RPG session.  The group has been getting together to play this game for almost 20 years now.  There have been many faces through the years, but a core group has kept the story moving and has helped to create not only a good story, but also a good environment for stories to bloom and grow.  It is the type of game that players love to relive and tell others about years later. 

The game itself is a sandbox environment set in an alternate version of our world where nuclear wars devastated the planet in the latter part of the 20th century, creating the classic post-apocalyptic setting in the system Aftermath!. The setting has plenty of mutants, cannibals, killer robots, and super advanced technologies, though you could play it super low tech if you so desired. The GM for this game uses a heavily modified version of the rules for this game due to the fact that you probably need an advanced math degree to use them as presented.  As it is, the system is extremely crunchy, so having someone who knows the rules well is a must for a group to enjoy themselves.  If you have that, however, you can have some fun with it, though the skills system can potentially drive you to drink with its highly-specific nature and sometimes bizarre prerequisites. 

Our particular setting is an alternate Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  The play originally centered on a society centered on a building called The Citadel.  We began as scavs, the poor saps who earned there room and board by venturing out into the city to face all manner of dangers to find anything useful to bring back.  Life expectancy was...low, though we eventually found out that The Citadel was run by a company that had a heavy hand in cloning, so they had an endless supply of bodies.  Our group eventually got tired of working for the bad guys and made an escape, settling in another part of the city in a community that was a little more forgiving and allowed our group to become a force of its own, complete with a freshly discovered survivalist base. 

Our group has the long goal of moving beyond the city and taking a larger role in shaping the future of the world in which they live.  In the meantime, they are building up their resources and a community to help them.  That means doing what they did before, but with better equipment and larger goals beyond a bottle of scotch or a rickety gun.  In the party this weekend, we had the following characters

• Hunter - Party leader and military jack-of-all-trades (also probably the longest-running character in the game, if you count all of the clone replacements...)
• Tool - Vehicular and demolitions expert (also had a completely separate personality, but he got better)
• Stitch - Psychic mentor to a group of kids with mental powers and seamstress extraordinaire (also the keeper of group momentum...if we take too long planning, chances are he will start something that will make sure we stop talking and start doing)
• James - Mutant with fur, super speed, and silky smooth fur (our own version of an X-Man)
• Luther - Shield man and muscle for the group
• Wraith (aka Tinkles) - Mutant kid with skin so tough he has better armor than many advanced armors
• Freezer Burn (aka Ziploc) - The only character I have ever known in the game to request a rapier as a main weapon...
• Rat Bag - Super young mutant kid with the power to clumsily talk to rats and zap himself when he attempts to do anything psychically.  He is totally 14 and not 9...
• Trigger - My character.  A grizzled weapon smith and sniper.  Also the subject of one of my previous post about whether or not to make my PC an NPC.  Would like nothing more than to be left alone in his workshop.  Never works out for him.  

This weekend we did quite a bit of what we usually do in this game:  plan.  We made plans for where we would head out to search for new and interesting things.  We made plans for our clan's people (lovingly named Meeples), and we made plans for what we would do when we weren't scavenging the city.  My character was able to start crafting suits of decent armor, which we were able to use both for our people and for good trading fodder.  I also made a pretty kick ass blowgun.  After gearing up, we headed to a market area called the Strip District and visited a market area in Mt. Washington that we helped recover after being devastated by an occupying force.  After these visits, we struck out in a new direction and found areas we hadn't searched.  During our trek, we endured a crazy blizzard and sub-zero temperatures, as well as a horde of starving rats that almost ate us before Rat Bag figured out how to make them go away.  Go Rat Bag.

One such new location was an industrial park that no one else had scavenged.  As a result, we were able to find some hugely important items like a warehouse of freeze dried foods, an intact ambulance, lots of car parts, and other goodies.  We encountered a new danger in bugs called Concroaches, big bugs that chewed up concrete and pooped out a quicksand that looked like concrete in order to trap anything walking across it, burying them so they can saw you to death and eat you.  It took us a while to figure out why the concrete was so unstable.  We had a number of crazy ideas.  We didn't consider bugs.  After a tussle with them, we decided they could have the areas they had claimed and focused on repairing vehicles so we could get our goodies home.

We did take a break from the industrial park to search a bit more north and encountered some warehouses that housed various parts to make Terminators.  Yes, those terminators.  Originally controlled by a rogue AI called PAN, we had thought they were done when we nuked the final safe house for PAN in a particularly epic final battle that included a bear armed with a nuke, and two party members making a final dash to ground zero before the nukes they were equipped with went off and doomed the whole party.  There was even an NFL-level spike of a party member as all three went up in a blaze of glory.  At any rate, imagine our surprise as we discovered a new group of terminators being built by our new nemesis, a group of sentient robots called NZT.  On our way sneaking out before they caught us, we encountered a building filled with large, unhappy spiders that took a dislike to us.  No party deaths, though James was poisoned and his powers sapped to mere human levels.  That is until his healing factor kicked in and he was fine. 

The rest of the game involved us fixing vehicles and planning our route home.  We have a plan for the next game session, so that means only 3 hours of planning before we play instead of 4.  In all, it is a great time, though.  People love the setting and the characters, and more than that, we love to get together and play this communal story that is the players to write.  The GM has a plot and is slowly guiding us towards the next major point, but the game and the story are mostly decided by us in a sandbox game that allows us to explore what a post-apocalyptic world might be like.  It ain't pretty, but it is fun.  Spending a solid weekend with a group you enjoy gaming with is never bad, even if it is a lot of planning...Next time we will hopefully see the return of some other players, including my lovely wife, and we will see what happens when you drive an ambulance and a van chock full of goodies through a desolated city intent on killing you for your last Twinkie.