After a couple posts, my Libra game's on the road with a group of new-to-the-OSR players (which is fun, given my normal playerbase of obsessives from the various Discord servers). Our PCs are:
- Joe Normal, potentially undercover agent of OSIRIS.
- Moon Dan, who retired from fighting Sumerian mummies just in time to get abducted by aliens.
- Toka, a Ynnbringer who's decided to make ends meet with murder-for-hire.
- Valrel, elven scion of the Vampire's Head.
- and the Finance Optimizer, who crossed to earth from the planes of law and decided to start gambling.
The PCs woke up with pounding heads and bleary eyes in a pitch-black room with someone hammering on the door. Moon Dan stumbles up to peer at - oh, it's a cop outside - while Valrel smears her hands around the walls to hit a light switch.
She reveals a ruin of lost bottles and obliterated furniture in a trashed hotel room, and drops a basketball-sized stone on Toka as the fan's juddering start dislodges it from the ceiling.
The Philosopher's Stone. Lead to gold. Eternal life. Where did you get this?
Joe Norrmal flings open the curtains - third floor window, it turns out - to find two armored vans and four SWAT guys milling around in the parking lot.
The cop outside is insistent. Where's the Stone? Open the door. Hand it over. I'm calling the Haruspex.
The PCs panic in all directions. Moon fails to talk down the cop, Finance Optimizer decides to embed the Stone in his body, Toka scours the bathroom (no clue what she was looking for, to be honest), Joe barricades the door, and Valrel considers just jumping out the window.
Then the door turns transparent. The Haruspex is here, an OSIRIS psychic in a long white coat. With a snap of her fingers (and a cast of Telepathy, and a. mishap.) she reads Moon's mind. The infral has the Stone. Kill them.
Valrel decides she had the right idea, leaps from the window, and between an Acrobatics skill, a lenient ruling, and excellent luck, lands heel-first on one of the SWAT guys' heads, fatally. Moon pops a smoke grenade, Toka exposes the Haruspex and the cop next to her to the fire of the Sun, and the party hustles down the stairs.
Outside, Valrel is immediately shot like 20 times, makes a billion rolls on the death and dismemberment table, and winds up OK :)
Joe hucks furniture from a second-floor window while the rest of the party crashes into melee with the cops and routs them. As the sirens of a second wave of cops approach, the PCs pile into a stolen SWAT van and drive.
Valrel drags them to the home of her patron, the Vampire's Head, to plan for just a second. She talks to the Head (very pointedly not mentioning "the cops are after me" to instead extract compliments for getting the Philosopher's Stone) while Joe loots the SWAT van and throws a brick on the throttle to get it Away and Moon calls друг to do... something, about the Haruspex, and undoes all the Theurge's coverup work by deciding to steal a car for no clear reason except wanting a car.
The PCs expect that... maybe? Nobody will be after them for a second? The news report on "an infraspatial, a vampire, three freaks" massacring a squad of police officers makes them... less optimistic.
Joe throws up his hands - maybe друг can help with this too. The voice on the phone says sure, I'm always happy to help, I just need something in exchange.
There's this car in a Walmart parking lot - green Civic, license plate CFE-7912. It should stick around long enough for you to get there.
Cut the brake lines.
Analysis
The first session of these city sandboxes is always the most difficult. The faction turns aren't ticking along, the PCs barely know anyone, and you really need to give them a kick to start the game off running. Usually I do this with two things - a pre-set long-term goal, and an immediately provided short-term one. (In Go Away this was "get a ticket to the rocket" and "go shoot the technomonarchists and find out where they keep their money".)
Here I got experimental - the long-term goal is "??? I'm sure you'll find something to do with the Philosopher's Stone" and the new patrons replaced a clear contact to give out jobs. So, I put them directly into A Situation instead, trusting that they'd run to their patrons to give them a hand with the cops.
From here, it should keep itself spinning as the faction moves start up.
Or, well. It should do that, but my standard operating procedure of starting a game and then doing prep has finally caught up to me.
 |
| thanks gokun and vik you're both a big help |
Now that I'm on a time crunch I think I'll be turning to the generators in Cavegirl's modern occult game, Esoteric Enterprises - which'll be fun! It's nice to have an excuse to use something off my shelf.
No comments:
Post a Comment