Good Monday, Gamer!
Back before the great lock-down I use to run a quarterly Indie Game Day here in Kansas City. A full day of mostly indie games complete with donuts and BBQ (or pizza). The Roleplayers Guild of Kansas City predates that, and they are still alive and kicking!! We overlapped events in the past which was awesome, it was good to catch up and play in this months game day event right here in my town of Lee’s Summit.
I ran Free League’s Twilight: 2000 with six players!! I listed a max of 5...which is normally one too many! We made it happen. These survivors of the fall of Kalisz:
Uluvund, an Israeli combat medic, (leader?)
MO(Missurah), a machine gunner from the Mighty MO,
Rick, an American intelligence officer
Johnnie B, army mechanic,
Sgt Jake Mandrill, a SpecOps sniper with intel
Dodger, an extreme sports kid & military brat. This is the first time I’ve seen The Kid archetype in play.
This was a teaching and playing experience. I hard frame the farmhouse map as our starting place and set us in the second half of the day with only the evening and night shifts left. Making camp is the first dice roll, and we walk-n-talk through it so everyone sees how the core mechanic works. Then, everyone else selects their tasks for this evening shift and the night shift. There's a little retconning as they solve the who sleeps and who watches mini-puzzle. I grab five encounter cards to start the next Day cycle, and the fuse is lit!! Plenty of nice inter-party jockeying to figure out who's really in charge and the plan of action. They get into a small fight during a salvage run. We end on a cliffhanger battle vs those other salvagers that showed up to the farm.
I made reference sheets and need to make some updates to make to my GM reference sheet, but the player reference sheet on the back of the PC sheet was perfect! The T2K weapon cards are almost required. There were a couple of military vets at the table, and they shared my love and feel of the "quantum bullet dice." I felt super validated when another vet explained what IRL looks like and how T2K's ammo dice are a nice feel. I always love when there's a discussion then a party agreement on the battle plan.
"We're gonna wait until enough of the enemy comes into the yard, then we shoot."
But when we walk through the initiative turns, initiative by initiative —someone always deviates! Then it's all shenanigans!
Six people is too many, for sure. But everyone was sooo enthused to play, I couldn't say no. We ran over the time slot, and I'll run it again next month by request! That'll give me time to figure out how to make it a shared campaign across games, but the games remain episodic.
This week’s consumables:
Politicking in games by the Indie RPG Newsletter
On X, Mr. Banks himself has settled a question: Cortex was a house system, not a generic system. Pay up; you know who you are!!
From my guitar life, Beato interviews Stewart Copeland ( Sting and Summers in other videos)