Session #1
System: FIST
Adventure: Sag
River Cold Research Facility, Alaska
Players: Brendan, Dowens
GM: Me!!!
Session Length: 3h ish
First Thing’s FIST
The first time I ran this scenario, and I decided to use
FIST. Inspired as I was by Onslaught Six’s podcast epidode of it on YouTube, and having
recently purchased FIST but having no opportunity to play it yet, I wanted to
give it a whirl.
The rules are straightforward, it’s a 2d6-with-mixed-success type of deal. I’ve spoken before somewhere (I can’t remember if I said it on this blog or not, it’s been a while) that I’m not generally a fan of the forced drawback thing that you get with mixed success systems. I much prefer to make a ruling in the moment based on what makes sense, rather than be beholden to the “oh, you rolled a 7, so you manage to do the thing but you trip over your shoelaces while doing it” bullshit-loop that you can sometimes fall into with those systems.
But at the same time, I’m not gonna be a pigheaded dogmatist about it. So I ran FIST and had a good time regardless!
Character Creation
This was super fun and flavourful. We had one demon-summoner
/ chef (I believe one of the pregens) and a character who could double her body
mass at will. Together, they were a messed-up pair of misfits with a pair of conspiracy-inducing
codenames. Like something pulled straight from a Metal Gear Solid antagonist
lineup.
Vibe
The adventure has this eerie, quiet paranoia vibe to begin
with. It then escalates quite rapidly with the possibility of meeting zombie
chimpanzees. After that it goes completely haywire and – I’ll not spoil it. It’s
honestly worth reading the original text. It goes places. And it’s beautifully
written. Highly recommended.
The issue I had, though, running this scenario with FIST characters, was that the characters were – as mentioned above – wacky and out-there. One of them could casually summon demons by using kitchen ingredients. The other could change into a giganto titan at will. When the whole point of the adventure scenario as presented is to take some form of grounded mundanity (an abandoned prefab office building) and abruptly turn it upside down – it kind of loses something when you start off with all the WEIRD already turned up to eleven.
Finishing
That said, the game was super fun. The NPC powder keg that
is the second half of the adventure provides so much potential for chaos and tension.
I believe they managed to find the knife and figure out a way to get home. They
didn’t do exactly what was written in the module, but their reasoning
and deduction skills, as well as their negotiations with high-strung NPCs, were
sound, and their attempt was pretty damn close.
They both made it back to reality, with only a handful of casualties and limited reality distortion.
Session #2
System: Violence
Adventure: Sag
River Cold Research Facility, Alaska
Players: Cormac
GM: Me
Session Length: 1h ish x 3
Lunch Time Violence
Given what I said above, I wanted to retry the adventure
using the rules they were initially written for. Luke Gearing’s Violence is something like a single resolution mechanic stretched as far
as it can go. And it turns out it can go really far.
So, I asked a friend if he’d be willing to try some short, 1 hour lunchtime sessions. A way to squeeze in some extra gametime through the week without having to commit to full 3hr+ seshes.
He was on board. He lived and worked in Scotland at the time, so we did it via discord and he was usually driving cross country while we played. Amazingly, it was really easy to play like this. I handled all the dicing, so it wasn’t a big deal. He said it was mostly all straight roads, so I assume he didn’t murder anyone under his wheels along the way. But you never know.
Vibe Check
This time, the vibe of character creation worked so much
better with the overall tone of the adventure. Included in the Violence pdf are
some rules for how to make a “modern paranormal horror” investigator character.
It’s clearly Delta Green with the serial numbers filed off, but that isn’t a
bad thing. It's actually a really good thing.
The characters generated come with a federal agency background, a handful of skills, a family (or not, depending on rolls), and, optionally, a traumatic or paranormal event from their past – the thing they can’t forget, that keeps them up at night. The reason they’re even in this line of work in the first place.
So, straight away, you’re a lot more of a regular person in this setup. You can’t summon demons out of thin air. You’re not slinging fireballs. You might have a gun, though. Or wirecutters. Practical shit.
Violence
As the player and his sidekick got stuck into the game, it
was apparent how much more dangerous this system was. As soon as the chimps
were discovered, both protag & sidekick went down very quickly.
 |
| Ha! Ha! I'm using Violence |
Given this was a one-shot, with only one player, I decided not to end with a TPK and instead have him and his sidekick regain consciousness a while later. The chimps had dragged them down into the basement and left them with a gored eye and a broken arm.
The way things went so quickly from creeping anxiety to outright gore and terror was extremely cool. Exactly what you expect and want from a system named Violence. So from there, they went on to discover all the madness that lay within. Again, I won’t spoil it, so go and have a read. All I’ll say is that this pair weren’t so lucky as their FIST counterparts.
Resolutions
The mechanics for Violence are very minimal. If you’re not dealing
with something directly related to violence or injury, you first try to reason
it out with negotiation and common sense. When there’s still uncertainty, you
roll a d20 and try to hit a target number set by the ref.
Advantages and disadvantages can be added to any d20 roll, via contextual or mitigating circumstances. Obvious examples are if the character is trained in the particular task they’re trying to complete, or if an injury impairs them.
I found these very simple to come up with on the fly, but as The Weekly Scroll guys said on their podcast episode this week, this probably is a system that works best for people who have plenty of experience in making rulings and refereeing systems.
Anyway,
Harry