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stevekensonThe Malay Coins
Arthur Beaumont, newspaper publisher and business associate of Max Cain, arranges to meet the Midnighters at the Society’s 52nd Ave. mansion so Lilith Gunn might evaluate something he acquired on a recent trip to the Orient. Beaumont is attacked outside the mansion by a gang of Chinese thugs, and the heroes fight them off. In Beaumont’s valise are three antique silver coins, apparently Chinese in style, but matching no known minting of Asian coinage. They trace the man who hired the thugs to a Chinese tea shop in Riverside and make overtures to find out who is interested in the coins.
Beaumont regains consciousness in the hospital, but cannot provide much additional information: he bought the coins from an antiquities dealer in Shanghai, who himself acquired them from a junk dealer, neither apparently aware of their true value. He doesn’t know who would want the coins badly enough to attack him to get them.
A note arrives at the Midnight Society Mansion, setting up a meeting that night at Riverside Park. There the heroes encounter Li-Ming Tzin and Malo, her hulking bodyguard. Li-Ming tries to negotiate for the coins, but when the Midnighters become obstinate, she sics Malo on them and uses a cable-gun to ascend to an airship that arrives overhead. Several more martial arts goons drop from the airship as it flees with Li-Ming on board. St. George takes Malo in a bloody martial arts fight, while Max and Skyler pursue the airship. An attempt to tether the airship to a dockside crane (and a compel of Max’s “Narrow Escape” aspect) results in the crane collapsing and Skyler having to break off pursuit to rescue his friend, damaging his jetpack in the process.
The airship receeds into the distance and the mysterious Li-Ming Tzin has escaped... for now. But the trail of the mysterious coins points to Shanghai.
Note: Thanks to Hero Games’ The Malay Coins for inspiration.
Game Play: Starting with this game session, we decided to cut the characters’ total aspects back from ten to five. With our relatively short (2-3 hour) game sessions, it quickly became clear some aspects were popular, getting tagged and compelled more often, while others languished, some never coming up at all. Since players were really reaching towards the end of the character creation process anyway, it seemed like a good idea to make the characters a bit more focused by paring back the aspects. Coincidentally, this now matches up with the reduced pool of Fate Points they start with (5 and 5).
This session also instituted a limited advancement scheme: occasionally, characters get an “advancement point,” which players can use to either acquire a new stunt or improve a skill, but they have to preserve the pyramid of skills, so to add to the higher ranks, they first need to pick up a new Average skill to “widen” the “base” of the pyramid, then move up to Good, and so forth. We’ll see how this works out.
Arthur Beaumont, newspaper publisher and business associate of Max Cain, arranges to meet the Midnighters at the Society’s 52nd Ave. mansion so Lilith Gunn might evaluate something he acquired on a recent trip to the Orient. Beaumont is attacked outside the mansion by a gang of Chinese thugs, and the heroes fight them off. In Beaumont’s valise are three antique silver coins, apparently Chinese in style, but matching no known minting of Asian coinage. They trace the man who hired the thugs to a Chinese tea shop in Riverside and make overtures to find out who is interested in the coins.
Beaumont regains consciousness in the hospital, but cannot provide much additional information: he bought the coins from an antiquities dealer in Shanghai, who himself acquired them from a junk dealer, neither apparently aware of their true value. He doesn’t know who would want the coins badly enough to attack him to get them.
A note arrives at the Midnight Society Mansion, setting up a meeting that night at Riverside Park. There the heroes encounter Li-Ming Tzin and Malo, her hulking bodyguard. Li-Ming tries to negotiate for the coins, but when the Midnighters become obstinate, she sics Malo on them and uses a cable-gun to ascend to an airship that arrives overhead. Several more martial arts goons drop from the airship as it flees with Li-Ming on board. St. George takes Malo in a bloody martial arts fight, while Max and Skyler pursue the airship. An attempt to tether the airship to a dockside crane (and a compel of Max’s “Narrow Escape” aspect) results in the crane collapsing and Skyler having to break off pursuit to rescue his friend, damaging his jetpack in the process.
The airship receeds into the distance and the mysterious Li-Ming Tzin has escaped... for now. But the trail of the mysterious coins points to Shanghai.
Note: Thanks to Hero Games’ The Malay Coins for inspiration.
Game Play: Starting with this game session, we decided to cut the characters’ total aspects back from ten to five. With our relatively short (2-3 hour) game sessions, it quickly became clear some aspects were popular, getting tagged and compelled more often, while others languished, some never coming up at all. Since players were really reaching towards the end of the character creation process anyway, it seemed like a good idea to make the characters a bit more focused by paring back the aspects. Coincidentally, this now matches up with the reduced pool of Fate Points they start with (5 and 5).
This session also instituted a limited advancement scheme: occasionally, characters get an “advancement point,” which players can use to either acquire a new stunt or improve a skill, but they have to preserve the pyramid of skills, so to add to the higher ranks, they first need to pick up a new Average skill to “widen” the “base” of the pyramid, then move up to Good, and so forth. We’ll see how this works out.
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Date: 2008-07-10 04:01 pm (UTC)Someday I'm going to fiddle with an option that trades off potency with flexibility, and make the mechanical payout of aspects an inverse to the number of them. This also is a nod back to some stuff we did early on with very few, very potent aspects which eventually got replaced with less potent but more ubiquitous ones. If I could put both options back on the table, that would kind of rock.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-10 04:10 pm (UTC)Variants that would be interesting to play around with include a small number of "fixed" aspects and a greater ability to apply temporary aspects to a character (e.g., "My character has the 'Furious With Dr. Sin' aspect for this scene"), which go away when they're no longer needed (but in some cases have the potential to "stick" and become permanent). Also a scheme wherein you can only activate an aspect a limited number of times, forcing players to cycle through all their characters' aspects during play (as was the case in Fate 2.0, I believe).
A trade-off of potency for flexibility (or applicability) would be interesting to play around with, although defining that flexibility can be tough.