[RPG] Thrilling Tales of the Midnight Society #2

[stevekenson]

Warning! Potential spoilers for Adamant Entertainment’s Thrilling Tales: The Steel Legion ahead:

The Steel Legion

Arthur Sinclair and Lilith Gunn are on board a train headed back to Freedom City. They’re talking with Dr. Jean-Claude LeBec, a Quebequois scientist attending the opening of the 1936 World’s Fair in Freedom. Suddenly, the lights on the train go out and everyone is rendered unconscious!

When the train goes speeding past its intended stop at the North End Station, Max, Jason, and Skyler spring into action. Max Cain and Jason St. George leap onto the speeding train while Skyler Hawkins fires up his jet-pack and flies up to the engine to find out what’s going on. Max finds a hole punched in the roof of the train car where he finds Sinclair and Ms. Gunn unconscious and brings them around. Dr. LeBec is missing. Jason and Skyler manage to get to the engine and brake the runaway train just in time to keep it from colliding with another train on the tracks. The heroes find another hole torn in the roof of a freight car, and Dr. LeBec’s equipment missing.

The following day at the opening of the World’s Fair, three giant robots attack the hall! They’re armed with strange ray weapons that render people unconscious and electrical devices useless. With several of the heroes overcome by them, the robots snatch Hawkins’ friend Dr. Hammond and Hammond’s daughter Addison and fly off. Skyler pursues them, but has to break off when one of the robots drops Addison! He rescues her and gets back to the fairground.

With some sleuthing, the Midnighters triangulate the robots’ flight path with the source of the train robbery and several unexplained blackouts in the northern outskirts of Freedom City. This leads them to a small airfield, where Dr. Otto Von Eisen is constructing a much larger version of the Steel Legion’s electrical disrupting weapon with the aid of the kidnapped scientists. Captured by the robotos, St. George uses his Eastern disciplines (and a Fate Point) to overcome the effect of the disruptor by placing himself in a deep trance. This allows him to remain conscious while Von Eisen rants to the scientists, then to act when Sinclair (the one hero who evaded capture) knocks the control box out of Von Eisen’s hands.

The heroes battle the robots. Lilith shoots Von Eisen to keep him from reaching the disruptor cannon, while Skyler wrecks it. The German scientist rants at the heroes about how the cannon will now overload, so they gather the kidnapped scientists and run for it. Max Cain tries to get the wounded Von Eisen out but is too late; he has to use his “Narrow Escape” aspect to get out of the blast alive himself, riding the explosion out of the hangar building. No trace of Otto Von Eisen is found among the wreckage of his Electrical Disruptor or the Steel Legion, but surely no one could have survived such a blast...

Game Play: Cutting the number of Fate Points the players got in half worked quite well, providing enough points to play around with while creating more of an incentive for compels. There’s still not as much in the form of player-suggested compels, but there were a number of opportunities to use the compel mechanism to keep the story flowing smoothy and nudge the players in a particular direction.

Comments

[cassandra-e.livejournal.com]

I always enjoy reading these accounts. We have a modern-day Champions game going on, but your adventure descriptions always make me think that a pulp campaign could be a lot of fun.

[senatorhatty.livejournal.com]

I know I should be asking Fred this because he's a friend of mine, but he's also biased. How hard is it to introduce new players to FATE? Would a one- or two-shot be possible for folks with no familiarity with the game if I've never actually run one myself?

[xomec.livejournal.com]

My players didn't seem to have any trouble picking it up quickly, but we're all long-time gamers. The trickiest parts seem to be the idea of tagging aspects (particularly free tags for maneuvers and such) and remembering to suggest compels, although players tend to remember that better when their supply of Fate Points gets low.

[wyldelf.livejournal.com]

I've introduced it to quite a few people (those who have RP'd traditional games for years, and those who have never roleplayed) and the closest thing I've had to a problem was one person who didn't quite jump into the over the top pulp we were going for. But that was only a hold up during character creation. In play there were no problems, in fact the rules helped him meet the target and have a blast.