luvcraft (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} luvcraft) wrote,@ 2009-03-08 14:20:00 |
|
very very few people will care about this
I ran a roleplaying game yesterday, and it went smashingly well!
It was a "1920s pulp adventure" game, and I used a system of my own devising called F#. The setting was inspired by the setting of another RPG called Spirit of the Century, and the system was based on the FATE 3.0 system that Spirit of the Century uses, but super-streamlined to the point that the player characters' only "stats" are six "aspects", unique to the character, that the player has to adapt to the situations at hand. (A better explanation of this can be found by reading the F# rules via the link above.)
I GMed, naturally, and joining me as players were Paul, Kouri, Jess, and Cameron.
There were three aspects to the setting, which set the tone of the game:
The characters were:
Then the adventure began with a newsreel:
"June 28th, 1921! It's the second anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles, and a parade is held in New York City to celebrate the brave heroes of the Great War! Here's President Harding, shaking hands with female flying ace Hal Jhonson! And here's super-genius Albert Einstein, hamming it up with the famous French engineer, Loren Lamont! A cocktail party in honor of these luminaries is being held tonight atop the Woolworth Building, tallest skyscraper in the world!"
At the cocktail party, the PCs rubbed elbows with Einstein and his wiry intern "Bobby", who tried to excitedly explain his ideas about atomic decay and nuclear fission to Loren and Dr. Chi using a seltzer bottle as an analogy. After that, Dr. Chi wandered off to talk to his fellow-occultist The Disillusionist, a local masked crimefighter, and Loren Lamont bent Andrew Mellon's ear about ideas he had to improve the process of steel refinement. Meanwhile, newly-weds Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford cornered Hal Jhonson, and pressed her for details on her and her late husband's myriad adventures, explaining that they had been slated to co-star in a dramatization of the daring husband-and-wife mercenary team. Lucretia fluttered from conversation to conversation, soaking up information, gossip, and new ideas that could prove fruitful later.
Four hours later, everyone was mildly sauced, since president Harding had declared the 57th floor of the Woolworth Building an "extrajudicial sovereignity", exempt from the recently-passed Prohibition Act, for the night. Harding said his goodbyes and headed home, a beautiful blond with an Irish accent dragged Dr. Chi out onto the dance floor, and Hal discovered her 14-year-old daughter getting drunk in a corner of the lounge with Einstein's intern Bobby and the Disillusionist's sidekick, "The Convincing Kid", who had convinced the bartender to give him a bottle of Kentucky Bourbon. Bobby and the Kid were hauled off home by their respective wards, and Hal sent her daughter back to the family airship, the "HMS So Much for Subtlety", which was tethered to the spire of the Woolworth Building for the night. Just as Hal returned, the waiters all produced guns, and one of them shouted "this is a stickup! Everybody lie down on the ground and nobody try no funny business!" Dr. Chi gladly complied with the request, while Lamont, fortified and impaired by bourbon (and creating, in the process, the new aspect "Bourbon is stronger than wine") tried to start a revolt against the robbers by swinging drunkenly at one and ending up on the floor. Fortunately, Hal and Lucretia were able to take advantage of this distraction to disarm the robbers nearest them (Hal with her fists and Lucretia with a combination of her disarming beauty and a hatpin-to-the-eye). Meanwhile, the robber pilfering Dr. Chi's pockets discovered the hard way that Dr. Chi was "keeper of the spirits of Amon-Tha", when he pulled a silk handkerchief from the doctor's pocket that immediately turned into a poisonous asp and attacked him. Hal opened fire on the robbers, only to discover that the gun she'd wrestled from one of them was empty, from which she surmised that ALL of their guns were empty, and announced this fact to the party. At this point there was a whistle from the door leading out to the observation deck, and the players looked to see the blond that Dr. Chi had been dancing with, with curly red hair, waving her blond wig and shouting to the waiters that it was time to clear out. Hal and Lucretia both instantly recognize the woman as Emerald Rose, but neither had time to say anything more than "that thieving bitch!" Most of the waiters escaped, rappelling down the side of the building, and Dr. Chi had a flashback.
During "the business with the spirits of Amon-Tha", Dr. Chi had visited a tiny Himalayan village were all the men had been wiped out by Ottoman forces, save for the village elder, who lay dying. The elder told Dr. Chi that the area had, in ancient times, been plagued by the goddess Kulka Gunda, a courtesan to Amon-Tha, but that the village shamen had bound Kulka Gunda in a conch-shell-shaped phylactery with long-forgotten magics. The magics were powered by the souls of men, so the shell had been passed down through the men of the tribe for generations. If it left a man's possession for too long, then the spirit of Kulka Gunda would begin to break free, and the worst possible circumstance would be if it fell into the possession of an unsuspecting woman, because Kulka Gunda would take over her mind and corrupt her feminine soul with her dark power.
Since then, Dr. Chi had constantly worn the shell on a cord around his neck, until now, of course, because Emerald Rose had just taken it.
Each with their own strong reasons for following Rose (except Lamont, who was just looking forward to a fun adventure), the characters all jumped in Hal's airship, dragging along one of the incapacitated waiters to question later. There was a low-lying cloud bank covering the city, but the airship dipped low enough to see that the crooks were now on motorcycles, headed southeast toward the Brooklyn Bridge. The airship pulled back up, and raced forward, managing to beat about half of the waiters to the bridge, and Hal blew them off their motorcycles using an improved mine that Lamont had cobbled together on the way over. Hal jumped in a plane and disengaged from the airship in an attempt to catch up with the other motorcycles, weaving her plane between buildings down at street-level under the clouds. As the motorcycles jumped off the end of the Fort Hamilton docks and deployed pontoons, Hal passed them and discovered that they were heading for a ship out in Sandy Hook Bay. She radioed back to the airship to rendezvous with her there, and Lucretia passed the message on to the port authority, hoping to blockade the ship. After Hal had made a couple of strafing runs on the ship and even dropped a small bomb on it, the ship was still in pretty good shape and firing back at her when the zeppelin arrived. Dr. Chi dropped an improvised flash-bang grenade onto the deck of the ship which managed to momentarily disable the gunners long enough for the players to land on the ship, but also accidentally blinded Hal temporarily. Dr. Chi with a welding torch, Lamont with a package of thermite, and Lucretia with a pair of pistols dropped onto the deck of the ship, only to discover that the deck was empty and the topside doors were sealed. The deck began to take on water, and the characters quickly determined that this was a German U-boat, heavily modified and cleverly disguised as a surface-going vessel. Lamont managed to burn a fist-sized hole through an outer bulkhead with his thermite before the ship submerged and they were forced to climb back up to the zeppelin. At that point the port authority showed up, just in time to catch a normal ship, but too late to catch a U-boat as it slipped underwater.
Six hours passed with no sign of the U-boat, and rather than questioning their prisoner (perhaps an earlier, failed attempt at questioning him when he was half-unconscious and the-other-half-drunk had convinced the PCs that he was useless), Dr. Chi decided that the situation was dire enough that he should try a dark and dangerous ritual that bound all of the artifacts of Amon-Tha together and might give him an insight into where the U-boat was headed, if it didn't drive him insane first. He managed to pull it off, and using the cryptic clues he received in a vision the PCs were able to ascertain that Emerald Rose had just arrived in Devil's Cove on the south coast of Jamaica.
During the trip, Hal and Lucretia explained Emerald Rose to Lamont and Dr. Chi. Rose was a self-styled "pirate queen" whose modus operandi was to steal things of great sentimental value from powerful and/or adventurous people, regardless of those items' monetary value, simply because she loved the thrill of the chase. Both Hal and Lucretia had been previous victims of Rose's little "game", and neither of them had been able to retrieve their property from her. Neither of them, however, would reveal what that property was.
Arriving in Devil's Cove, the players discovered a number of ships under tarps moored out past the docks, any of which could be Emerald Rose's ship, but more importantly they found four of Emerald Rose's unique "pontoon cycles" lined up at the door of Sampler Sam's, a combination inn, pawnshop, and bar, that was the only real point of interest in the entire cove. Inside, the players discovered that Sampler Sam's was split roughly in half, with the pawn shop on one side and the bar on the other side, hanging out over the water. The bar was taken up by a raucous drunken brawl between two dozen random pirates, and at the far end of the bar, the players could just make out four of Emerald Rose's men, huddled together in a booth and crying into their rum.
Dr. Chi called Sampler Sam -- a man with one eye, one tooth, one hand, and one leg -- over to the pawnshop side of the establishment, and asked him about Emerald Rose. With a little bribery from Lamont, Sam revealed that Rose had been in that morning, and had sold him all of her random crazy loot, except for a shell she had on a cord around her neck. He also mentioned to Dr. Chi that he hadn't remembered Rose's eyes being quite so green and glowing before. At this point, Hal noticed that Rose had sold Sam the item that she had stolen from her; a stack of love letters to Hal from her late husband Maxwell, the stealing of which had been a great nuisance while Maxwell was alive, but had suddenly meant the world to Hal after Maxwell died. Those letters were now sitting in a neat little bundle under the glass counter in Sam's pawn shop. Overcome by sentimentality, Hal adamantly refused Sam's attempts to bargain for the letters, and resorted immediately to threats of violence, despite the appearance of Sam's bodyguards -- two hulking voodoo zombies who shambled out of the shadows to lean on her a bit -- and despite the pleas of her teammates. When Hal went so far as to radio the zeppelin for an airstrike, Sam's hand (or, rather, hook) was forced, and he informed everyone in the bar that he'd provide a free half-rack of his famous barbecued ribs to anyone who killed one of these would-be shoplifters. Sam then disappeared behind a bulkhead along with his bodyguards, leaving the players with two dozen pirates staring hungrily (and drunkenly) at them.
Lamont had the forethought to improvise a molotov cocktail out of a bottle of bourbon on the bar (proving, again, that "bourbon is stronger than wine"), and with a nice fire blazing between them and the pirates the players managed to escape by the skin of their teeth, leaping onto the zepplin's ladder as it passed overhead, as the fire rapidly spread and consumed the entirety of Devil's Cove. They'd lost their chance to talk to Emerald Rose's crewmen who were mysteriously mourning over in the corner of the bar, and they'd lost their chance to pump Sampler Sam for further information, but with the information that Sam did provide Dr. Chi was able to surmise that Kulka Gunda was now in full control of Rose's faculties, and she was headed back to that poor doomed little village in Tibet!
Time was up for the game, so thus ended the day's adventures.
Everything went quite well overall, although unfortunately Lucretia Barnswallow ended up with a lot of aspects that didn't come into play very often during the session, and the few times they did come into play she was defeated by bad die rolls. I plan to work with Jess and see what we can do to broaden some of her aspects before the next session. Otherwise, I'm very pleased with how well my new system worked; it's designed to make games exciting and dramatic without getting bogged down in mechanics and number crunching, and I think it did that very well; despite having two big battles, a chase, a daring escape, and lots of other stuff, the session only ran three hours including character creation. I probably could've finished the adventure in another half hour, but we'd agreed beforehand that we'd end the game at 5 because people had places to be right after that. It was 4:45 when the PCs fled Devil's Cove, leaving it ablaze behind them, and that seemed like a good point to wrap for the day.
Fortunately, all of the players came up with characters who fit perfectly with the adventure I'd designed for them, and I only needed to make a few minor tweaks (moving the native village from a tiny island off the coast of Argentina to the Himalayas, for instance).
Hal Jhonson's sudden and violent change of character when dealing with Sampler Sam and the letters totally bamboozled me, and I should have triggered her "mom always comes home safe" aspect to force her to back down and stop being so suicidally brash, and I should also have pointed out that her behavior wasn't in keeping with the "courage, honor, and dignity" theme of the setting. However, I was able to roll with the situation fairly well, and a fight in a burning bar with two dozen pirates followed by a nick-of-time escape was a lot more exciting and fun than my planned conversations with Sam and Emerald Rose's crewmen would've been. It also adds some great inter-PC drama, because she just almost got everyone killed -- and derailed their quest to save the world from unimaginable evil power -- over a stack of lousy letters that nobody else knows the significance of. So, I handled it clumsily, but in so doing it actually ended up better than it otherwise would've been, and creates a lot of great opportunities in the future.
Hopefully we'll be getting back together in a couple of weekends to wrap up this adventure. After that, I'm not sure what'll happen; I'm hoping that one of the other players will want to GM the next adventure, but if the players want me to keep going them I'll see if I can throw something together. I also left out the "aspect improvement" rules this session for the sake of expediency and flow, but I explained them to the players after the end of the session, and I told them that when we sit down for the next session we can quickly do the aspect improvement from this session before the next session starts.
I ran a roleplaying game yesterday, and it went smashingly well!
It was a "1920s pulp adventure" game, and I used a system of my own devising called F#. The setting was inspired by the setting of another RPG called Spirit of the Century, and the system was based on the FATE 3.0 system that Spirit of the Century uses, but super-streamlined to the point that the player characters' only "stats" are six "aspects", unique to the character, that the player has to adapt to the situations at hand. (A better explanation of this can be found by reading the F# rules via the link above.)
I GMed, naturally, and joining me as players were Paul, Kouri, Jess, and Cameron.
There were three aspects to the setting, which set the tone of the game:
- “In the eye of the hurricane between the two World Wars, adventure, opportunity, mystery, and danger lurk in the dark corners of the Earth that civilization has yet to tarnish!”
- “We alone keep the evils of this world at bay, and it is our unflinching courage, honor, and dignity that let us do battle with monsters without becoming monsters ourselves!”
- “The best dime novels that never existed!”
The characters were:
- Hallelujah "Hal" Jhonson, ace pilot and mother of five (played by Paul)
- Loren Lamont, French mechanical genius (played by Kouri)
- Lucretia Barnswallow, international spy and mistress of the wireless (played by Jess)
- Dr. Reginald Chi, doctor, chemist, and dabbler in the occult (played by Cameron)
Then the adventure began with a newsreel:
"June 28th, 1921! It's the second anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles, and a parade is held in New York City to celebrate the brave heroes of the Great War! Here's President Harding, shaking hands with female flying ace Hal Jhonson! And here's super-genius Albert Einstein, hamming it up with the famous French engineer, Loren Lamont! A cocktail party in honor of these luminaries is being held tonight atop the Woolworth Building, tallest skyscraper in the world!"
At the cocktail party, the PCs rubbed elbows with Einstein and his wiry intern "Bobby", who tried to excitedly explain his ideas about atomic decay and nuclear fission to Loren and Dr. Chi using a seltzer bottle as an analogy. After that, Dr. Chi wandered off to talk to his fellow-occultist The Disillusionist, a local masked crimefighter, and Loren Lamont bent Andrew Mellon's ear about ideas he had to improve the process of steel refinement. Meanwhile, newly-weds Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford cornered Hal Jhonson, and pressed her for details on her and her late husband's myriad adventures, explaining that they had been slated to co-star in a dramatization of the daring husband-and-wife mercenary team. Lucretia fluttered from conversation to conversation, soaking up information, gossip, and new ideas that could prove fruitful later.
Four hours later, everyone was mildly sauced, since president Harding had declared the 57th floor of the Woolworth Building an "extrajudicial sovereignity", exempt from the recently-passed Prohibition Act, for the night. Harding said his goodbyes and headed home, a beautiful blond with an Irish accent dragged Dr. Chi out onto the dance floor, and Hal discovered her 14-year-old daughter getting drunk in a corner of the lounge with Einstein's intern Bobby and the Disillusionist's sidekick, "The Convincing Kid", who had convinced the bartender to give him a bottle of Kentucky Bourbon. Bobby and the Kid were hauled off home by their respective wards, and Hal sent her daughter back to the family airship, the "HMS So Much for Subtlety", which was tethered to the spire of the Woolworth Building for the night. Just as Hal returned, the waiters all produced guns, and one of them shouted "this is a stickup! Everybody lie down on the ground and nobody try no funny business!" Dr. Chi gladly complied with the request, while Lamont, fortified and impaired by bourbon (and creating, in the process, the new aspect "Bourbon is stronger than wine") tried to start a revolt against the robbers by swinging drunkenly at one and ending up on the floor. Fortunately, Hal and Lucretia were able to take advantage of this distraction to disarm the robbers nearest them (Hal with her fists and Lucretia with a combination of her disarming beauty and a hatpin-to-the-eye). Meanwhile, the robber pilfering Dr. Chi's pockets discovered the hard way that Dr. Chi was "keeper of the spirits of Amon-Tha", when he pulled a silk handkerchief from the doctor's pocket that immediately turned into a poisonous asp and attacked him. Hal opened fire on the robbers, only to discover that the gun she'd wrestled from one of them was empty, from which she surmised that ALL of their guns were empty, and announced this fact to the party. At this point there was a whistle from the door leading out to the observation deck, and the players looked to see the blond that Dr. Chi had been dancing with, with curly red hair, waving her blond wig and shouting to the waiters that it was time to clear out. Hal and Lucretia both instantly recognize the woman as Emerald Rose, but neither had time to say anything more than "that thieving bitch!" Most of the waiters escaped, rappelling down the side of the building, and Dr. Chi had a flashback.
During "the business with the spirits of Amon-Tha", Dr. Chi had visited a tiny Himalayan village were all the men had been wiped out by Ottoman forces, save for the village elder, who lay dying. The elder told Dr. Chi that the area had, in ancient times, been plagued by the goddess Kulka Gunda, a courtesan to Amon-Tha, but that the village shamen had bound Kulka Gunda in a conch-shell-shaped phylactery with long-forgotten magics. The magics were powered by the souls of men, so the shell had been passed down through the men of the tribe for generations. If it left a man's possession for too long, then the spirit of Kulka Gunda would begin to break free, and the worst possible circumstance would be if it fell into the possession of an unsuspecting woman, because Kulka Gunda would take over her mind and corrupt her feminine soul with her dark power.
Since then, Dr. Chi had constantly worn the shell on a cord around his neck, until now, of course, because Emerald Rose had just taken it.
Each with their own strong reasons for following Rose (except Lamont, who was just looking forward to a fun adventure), the characters all jumped in Hal's airship, dragging along one of the incapacitated waiters to question later. There was a low-lying cloud bank covering the city, but the airship dipped low enough to see that the crooks were now on motorcycles, headed southeast toward the Brooklyn Bridge. The airship pulled back up, and raced forward, managing to beat about half of the waiters to the bridge, and Hal blew them off their motorcycles using an improved mine that Lamont had cobbled together on the way over. Hal jumped in a plane and disengaged from the airship in an attempt to catch up with the other motorcycles, weaving her plane between buildings down at street-level under the clouds. As the motorcycles jumped off the end of the Fort Hamilton docks and deployed pontoons, Hal passed them and discovered that they were heading for a ship out in Sandy Hook Bay. She radioed back to the airship to rendezvous with her there, and Lucretia passed the message on to the port authority, hoping to blockade the ship. After Hal had made a couple of strafing runs on the ship and even dropped a small bomb on it, the ship was still in pretty good shape and firing back at her when the zeppelin arrived. Dr. Chi dropped an improvised flash-bang grenade onto the deck of the ship which managed to momentarily disable the gunners long enough for the players to land on the ship, but also accidentally blinded Hal temporarily. Dr. Chi with a welding torch, Lamont with a package of thermite, and Lucretia with a pair of pistols dropped onto the deck of the ship, only to discover that the deck was empty and the topside doors were sealed. The deck began to take on water, and the characters quickly determined that this was a German U-boat, heavily modified and cleverly disguised as a surface-going vessel. Lamont managed to burn a fist-sized hole through an outer bulkhead with his thermite before the ship submerged and they were forced to climb back up to the zeppelin. At that point the port authority showed up, just in time to catch a normal ship, but too late to catch a U-boat as it slipped underwater.
Six hours passed with no sign of the U-boat, and rather than questioning their prisoner (perhaps an earlier, failed attempt at questioning him when he was half-unconscious and the-other-half-drunk had convinced the PCs that he was useless), Dr. Chi decided that the situation was dire enough that he should try a dark and dangerous ritual that bound all of the artifacts of Amon-Tha together and might give him an insight into where the U-boat was headed, if it didn't drive him insane first. He managed to pull it off, and using the cryptic clues he received in a vision the PCs were able to ascertain that Emerald Rose had just arrived in Devil's Cove on the south coast of Jamaica.
During the trip, Hal and Lucretia explained Emerald Rose to Lamont and Dr. Chi. Rose was a self-styled "pirate queen" whose modus operandi was to steal things of great sentimental value from powerful and/or adventurous people, regardless of those items' monetary value, simply because she loved the thrill of the chase. Both Hal and Lucretia had been previous victims of Rose's little "game", and neither of them had been able to retrieve their property from her. Neither of them, however, would reveal what that property was.
Arriving in Devil's Cove, the players discovered a number of ships under tarps moored out past the docks, any of which could be Emerald Rose's ship, but more importantly they found four of Emerald Rose's unique "pontoon cycles" lined up at the door of Sampler Sam's, a combination inn, pawnshop, and bar, that was the only real point of interest in the entire cove. Inside, the players discovered that Sampler Sam's was split roughly in half, with the pawn shop on one side and the bar on the other side, hanging out over the water. The bar was taken up by a raucous drunken brawl between two dozen random pirates, and at the far end of the bar, the players could just make out four of Emerald Rose's men, huddled together in a booth and crying into their rum.
Dr. Chi called Sampler Sam -- a man with one eye, one tooth, one hand, and one leg -- over to the pawnshop side of the establishment, and asked him about Emerald Rose. With a little bribery from Lamont, Sam revealed that Rose had been in that morning, and had sold him all of her random crazy loot, except for a shell she had on a cord around her neck. He also mentioned to Dr. Chi that he hadn't remembered Rose's eyes being quite so green and glowing before. At this point, Hal noticed that Rose had sold Sam the item that she had stolen from her; a stack of love letters to Hal from her late husband Maxwell, the stealing of which had been a great nuisance while Maxwell was alive, but had suddenly meant the world to Hal after Maxwell died. Those letters were now sitting in a neat little bundle under the glass counter in Sam's pawn shop. Overcome by sentimentality, Hal adamantly refused Sam's attempts to bargain for the letters, and resorted immediately to threats of violence, despite the appearance of Sam's bodyguards -- two hulking voodoo zombies who shambled out of the shadows to lean on her a bit -- and despite the pleas of her teammates. When Hal went so far as to radio the zeppelin for an airstrike, Sam's hand (or, rather, hook) was forced, and he informed everyone in the bar that he'd provide a free half-rack of his famous barbecued ribs to anyone who killed one of these would-be shoplifters. Sam then disappeared behind a bulkhead along with his bodyguards, leaving the players with two dozen pirates staring hungrily (and drunkenly) at them.
Lamont had the forethought to improvise a molotov cocktail out of a bottle of bourbon on the bar (proving, again, that "bourbon is stronger than wine"), and with a nice fire blazing between them and the pirates the players managed to escape by the skin of their teeth, leaping onto the zepplin's ladder as it passed overhead, as the fire rapidly spread and consumed the entirety of Devil's Cove. They'd lost their chance to talk to Emerald Rose's crewmen who were mysteriously mourning over in the corner of the bar, and they'd lost their chance to pump Sampler Sam for further information, but with the information that Sam did provide Dr. Chi was able to surmise that Kulka Gunda was now in full control of Rose's faculties, and she was headed back to that poor doomed little village in Tibet!
Time was up for the game, so thus ended the day's adventures.
Everything went quite well overall, although unfortunately Lucretia Barnswallow ended up with a lot of aspects that didn't come into play very often during the session, and the few times they did come into play she was defeated by bad die rolls. I plan to work with Jess and see what we can do to broaden some of her aspects before the next session. Otherwise, I'm very pleased with how well my new system worked; it's designed to make games exciting and dramatic without getting bogged down in mechanics and number crunching, and I think it did that very well; despite having two big battles, a chase, a daring escape, and lots of other stuff, the session only ran three hours including character creation. I probably could've finished the adventure in another half hour, but we'd agreed beforehand that we'd end the game at 5 because people had places to be right after that. It was 4:45 when the PCs fled Devil's Cove, leaving it ablaze behind them, and that seemed like a good point to wrap for the day.
Fortunately, all of the players came up with characters who fit perfectly with the adventure I'd designed for them, and I only needed to make a few minor tweaks (moving the native village from a tiny island off the coast of Argentina to the Himalayas, for instance).
Hal Jhonson's sudden and violent change of character when dealing with Sampler Sam and the letters totally bamboozled me, and I should have triggered her "mom always comes home safe" aspect to force her to back down and stop being so suicidally brash, and I should also have pointed out that her behavior wasn't in keeping with the "courage, honor, and dignity" theme of the setting. However, I was able to roll with the situation fairly well, and a fight in a burning bar with two dozen pirates followed by a nick-of-time escape was a lot more exciting and fun than my planned conversations with Sam and Emerald Rose's crewmen would've been. It also adds some great inter-PC drama, because she just almost got everyone killed -- and derailed their quest to save the world from unimaginable evil power -- over a stack of lousy letters that nobody else knows the significance of. So, I handled it clumsily, but in so doing it actually ended up better than it otherwise would've been, and creates a lot of great opportunities in the future.
Hopefully we'll be getting back together in a couple of weekends to wrap up this adventure. After that, I'm not sure what'll happen; I'm hoping that one of the other players will want to GM the next adventure, but if the players want me to keep going them I'll see if I can throw something together. I also left out the "aspect improvement" rules this session for the sake of expediency and flow, but I explained them to the players after the end of the session, and I told them that when we sit down for the next session we can quickly do the aspect improvement from this session before the next session starts.
