Red Markets Campaign: Mystery Inc

[Teapot]

Mystery Inc, Gummy, McLovin, and Doctor Diesel based in Troutfitt (though if it goes full on campaign we'll do our own enclave generation.)

Gummy was a cop, made detective then The Crash ruined everything. He, his husband, and his 6-year-old niece made it to Troutfitt where he was a fenceman until a bit ago when he had a bit of an episode and got relieved of duty. Since his husband's kind of a useless professor of Swahili and unrespected teacher, Gummy had to go over the fence.

McLovin was doing pretty good as a firefighter then there was The Crash and then the bite and then the pariah status. That smarts. He and his Chihuahua named “Chihuahua” live in a drafty shipping container next to the fence where he has precious few options for company. With only one small dog to care about going over the fence isn't so bad.

Doctor Diesel was a mechanic, when the crash came he kept on keeping on, fixing broken things and helping people coax extra miles out of dead cars. Somewhere along the way he figured that the human body is just another machine. He gets a lot of the terminology mixed up but the basic idea seems sound. He lives with his pet bull snake “Kaa” and he may be a LALA larvae.

Our story started with vignettes where Doctor Diesel read to his snake and remembered the horrors people did to each other during The Crash. Gummy took his husband and daughter to see a movie, “Left Behind” was showing, after they discussed how god is either dead or never existed and capitalism is the cruel machine that runs their lives. Then they had ice cream. Lastly McLovin lost his chihuahua and searched the latent ghetto for him. After a while he found Chihuahua who had squeezed through the fence into the nicer part of town and bribed him back with some meat that wasn't totally expired. Then McLovin sat quietly with his chihuahua in his lap and listened to the drunk latent next door swear at a TV that didn't work. The Chihuahua shivered in the spring cold of Montana.

It was job time now. The players rolled (I gave them extra research actions) and learned of a job with Boner Hitler the local drug dealer and two jobs over the Ubiq. They went with the train job (“Derailers”) because I wanted to test it out. The job started at 7, Gummy fumbled through the negotiation but did manage to turn down the offered bicycle, while McLovin scared off competition and Doctor Diesel researched the train (out of Trabajo!) and assistant conductor Ramirez. They ended up with expenses which is pretty good and just from pay alone McLovin was profiting. The other two were not.

But they had a blockage to clear and few days to do it. So they were off hiking through the Montana wilderness. Come mid-morning Gummy saw some kind of tower poking above the treeline and they went to investigate. Finding a fire lookout tower and 2 casualties on the other side of it they chose to investigate there was the place to jump over the gap in the stairs and the casualty attractor on the roof which the Takers cleverly disassembled and stole the solar charger. A bit later they figured out how the place worked but didn't bother to do anything about it*. They looted the three broken casualties on the ground and were on their way. Biggest disappointment they didn't ignore the machine and I was unable to have it go off when the were leaving.

The next two legs were lackluster mostly because I rolled them as we went and wasn't prepared and didn't pick/make good ones. They all failed awareness rolls so they missed a bunch of semi-trapped casualties and the weather turned colder.

At last they reached the jobsite. There were three Amtrak passenger cars and one boxcar lying in a low point on the tracks. It's only about two meters of elevation but it'll take half a mile or more for the trains to be level again. The crew spent some time clearing casualties from the tracks and cars, McLovin taking a bad mauling to the leg in the second car. They left the third car locked with some still in to deal with it later and looted the mail and luggage in the boxcar.

Now that it was time to actually do their job, they spent some time researching trains and found a depo just a few miles off that should have a track truck. With that they realized they could even sell the cars to the coming train if they cleared them out.

And session one ended.

*So this is encounter XX on the table, the tower where a dude is card farming the lazy way. The thought I've had with it is what's to stop the Takers from just making it a regular stop? I mean even better to put the place under camera and try to figure out the pattern the owner uses and then just show up a couple days early and nibble on their take.  Plus it'd be a pretty good hook for future consequences when the farmer figures out who's chiseling the take.

So thoughts: My players keep wanting free stuff, they don't like how the machete costs 2 bounty. I think some of it is they haven't completely bought in to the premise/themes of the game. Character creation is super easy and fast, it works well. I'm still confused about some of the Tough Spots but I am sorry for complaining about them. Also I wish someone in an RPPR game would take another taker as a dependent so I could better understand that. The game is moving slowly because new work hours are happening and while my daughter is three months old, another of us just had a son and he's going to keep daddy away from the table a bit. Also I got a lot of Troutfitt wrong but we're going to do maybe a semi-revamp of it.

[Teapot]

Derailers Pt. 2

The truck located our heroes set off for it. Also another member joined them, so fire the retcannon and Apps the immune scout was always on the team. Along the way Gummy (his name) noticed a scratched up tree and the team went in expecting bear. They found the rail post, a prefab garage and dilapidated shack. McLovin climbed onto the roof of the garage, noticed a foul smell from within and saw the pickup, he banged his head getting down though.

Meanwhile, Doc Diesel went a few hundred meters down the track and banged on it with a rock, two casualties popped up and he ran back. He then began making a harness with a downed power line so he could capture the casualties and make them pull the train. … While McLovin was opening the garage up, the cougar that had made its' home there pounced on Apps, she saw it coming but got her leg scratched up (again with the legs). Doc Diesel ran up and flung smelling salts all over making Apps unappetizing to the big cat, she shot the cat and Gummy shot it too. The cat having had enough ran right away.

Then Gummy shot one of the two approaching casualties, Doc Diesel was not happy. He convinced McLovin to try and lasso the remaining one, it kind of worked in that the loop went over the head but didn't get the harness in place. Doc Diesel asked Gummy for help and Gummy helpfully shot the casualty. Neither had bounty but that's life.

While Doc Diesel boiled the water out of the truck's gas, Apps and McLovin looted the shack finding stuffs. Then they drove back to the train and hooked the pickup up. Doc Diesel drove the cars slowly up, Gummy opened one of the doors and made noise, he then watched the casualties walk out and fall down, they made grasping gestures at him as the train slowly moved away. At the switching post Apps wasn't strong enough to switch the rusty track and McLovin was too strong and broke the rusty lever. So they kept on going to the next point near Troutfitt. There they made the check and got the traincars off the track. Apps was secretly looting one of the cars.

Then the group had a big old conversation and decided that instead of selling the cars to the oncoming train they should build their own enclave with blackjack and hookers. And thus ended the job, they got paid and that was good.

So yeah, their new plan is to build a new train enclave, a trainclave. They designed a score (a rail yard full of train cars and sellable cargo). Next game we'll do that* and I'll redo the retirement plans. What I'm thinking is each of them has to do two milestones then the train is going, after that they need to finish their last milestone and run Mr. JOLS, which I kind of just want to make clearing a way out to California on the tracks. But that's not how it works, I know.

Also during discussion of the trainclave “Watch Snow Piercer and make sure that the things that let the poors get further up can't happen on our train.”


*Why hasn't anyone taken the score yet? It's out of the way. Nobody's thought to. No. Also for complications the two useful suggestions were hundreds of casualties or nearby rebels.

[Teapot]

They've done one more job, but that writeup is going to take a while. However I want to make a shout out to the encounter table. Specifically the family with latent daughter in a covered wagon. I dumped the DHQS chopper because I wanted them to be new neighbors, and because that way the takers could get back just as the parents were going latent themselves. The takers came to the house with the sobbing daughter and solemn father while the mother writhed in pain while going latent. A lot of detachment and stress was lost with that. The game ended with the promise of listening to the father change the next day.

So 10/10 would use again.