This weekend I escaped the house to attend Grogmeet, a gaming convention held by the Grognard Files podcast in my FLGS Fanboy3. It was the first time I’ve face to face game in almost two years! Overall the event was full of happy and enthusiastic gamers, and I didn’t get to talk to everyone I knew because I was always busy chatting with folk. It was an uplifting experience.
On Saturday afternoon, I got to run Brain Dead at the Shopping Mall. This game was my first playtest of this adventure – which is an Early Bird Backer reward. Also, I had an eye on how the extra bits I’ve bolted on the Liminal engine performed. I’ve run Reboot the Future before, but that was a good year ago, and there’s been some tweaking since then.
What was immensely pleasurable straight away was that all the players were backers of the game. It was also slightly intimidating. Would they be impressed by my game which is still a bit rough around the edges? Big sigh of relief that they all took to it . and once I had explained the setup and how the characters worked, they quickly owned their characters and drove the action relentlessly 🙂
The setup came in three pieces.
The Setting: New Oldham is a colony world. Originally a desert world, that was terraformed quickly twenty years ago into an industrial workhouse. Then ten years ago, the cooperation that had an iron grip on it, Imperial Sterling INC, quickly withdrew all their staff and operations in response to the Galactic War and the resulting economic downturn. Many parts of the colony have been reclaimed by the desert, including Paradise Heights, a low-level corporate executive housing estate on the edge of New Oldham City. Imperial Sterling and its black-clad security guards have returned in the last couple of years and are busy reopening their operations. Still, Paradise Heights remains closed for the time being.
The Gang. This unit is the character’s organisation and has a background, goals, assets and premade adventure hooks. It’s almost a character in its own right. If you are familiar with Liminal’s crew, it’s the same setup but modified for the cyberpunk genre. Our Gang was the Stainless Steel Providers MC; an outlaw motorcycle gang made up of cyborg-veteran’s of Imperial Sterlings 5th Mechanised Recon Regiment. There’s a stretch goal on the Kickstarter that every backer will get a copy of this Gang if we reach it.
The Job. The hook for the players, the situation as presented by their contacts, the opportunity to make their money, boost their reputation, get them valuable information or all three at once. This job was a tip-off from an anonymous poster on the local cyberpunk bulletin board about a highly valued hoover bike that the poster had tracked down to a stylish vehicle dealership within Paradise Height’s onsite shopping mall, The Palace of Dreams.
The way the job was presented, it was very much a self-starter. It was up to the cyberpunk to investigate and recon before tackling the adventure itself, or as I call it in Reboot the Future, the Conspiracy. And the players sprang immediately into action. Not only was the gang’s cyberhacker, Lady Killer as played by pookie, straight on the case, and bringing in the deep-intel about Paradise Heights, the rest of the gang very quickly moved on that intel, did recon (which involved cleaver use of their gang’s assets), and quickly plan was formulated and acted. Of course, there were complications, this is cyberpunk, after all, but the players worked as a unit, as befitted their ex-military backgrounds and the set up of their Motorcycle Club, and brought the game to a more than satisfying conclusion.
Everybody said how much they enjoyed themselves and had a great time myself, came away with lots of ideas to polish the final game and a better idea of what the adventure write-up should contain.
