Last Night, I ran Airship Pirates, the tabletop RPG based on the songs of Abney Park. Here's the low-down:
The Characters:
We have the Doll, Annika Sesentay Nueve (translation: Annika Seven of Nine...yeah), who is the First Mate. Then we have Rune, a Neobedoiun Beastdancer and the short Skyfolk Gadgeteer Madgizmo. During last night's session, my elder stepsister who plays Teddy the Misbegotten Cap'n of this crew of Mercenaries had already informed me of her absence beforehand, so I told everyone that the character is still there even if her player wasn't. (I told the group that Teddy will be a “Mark the Red” since everyone has seen “The Gamers”.) Before I go on, their ship is called the Dragon Seeker.
The Session:
We began the session in High Tortuga a few in-game hours after the last session (which included a Pirate Council trial and getting tickets to the huge event that was going to be held that night.) and the crew were heading to the event that was scheduled after sun-down (I reasoned about 8pm or so) at one of the docks since the performers were going to perform on the main deck of their airship. Said airship's gangplank was withdrawn and there were security to check for tickets and to keep those without tickets out of the cordoned area.
I had everyone roll perception, especially the ship's Engineer to detect the small bits that was specific to the performer's airship. They all passed the check and I described the small details of the airship that included the glass bulbs on the outer hull that were filled with pink-ish swirling gasses that were interweaved with small colored lights (I said that out of character, the lights would be Xmas lights that were strewn on the outer hull to make it look less conspicious).
During the event (read: concert [like no one reading this couldn't figure that detail out.]), the performers had a song in which they selected a random member of the crowd to hold a violin. During the announcement, Annika had grabbed the short Engineer and set said guy on her shoulders and jumped around (which they did each and everytime something temporarily broke) and I got annoyed enough at the insistance of Annika's player that I had them be selected to hold the violin and everything.
Since I kept rolling crappily that night (yes, I'm blaming the dice and going off of the Rule of Funny [meaning that if something hits me as funny, I'm likely to just run with it]), Annika sneaked into the darkness and hid below decks and onto the crew decks (I goofed up and thought crew decks was the first deck below the main deck). I had Annika roll a perception and described a sound that sounded like a door opening before I had Annika roll a Hide and Sneak check, which she passed. What followed was a little girl peering out from her door and going “huh...” before going back into her room.
A few songs later, the band goes below decks, talking about which song they'll be ending with and deliberating as the crowd of fans shouted for an encore. When the band got back up on the main deck, Annika decided to find a better hiding spot (she was hiding under the stairs leading to the main deck) and she once again, heard a door opening. This time, said little girl actually spotted Annika, who decided to act as if she was deactivated. The little girl bought the act and started to play with Annika as if she was a life-sized doll (ironically enough), including such activities as playing tea party, “borrowing” Jody's makeup to make Annika up, before I told Annika's player that the little girl returns with a permanent marker (apparently, the player had plans so he reversed time half because of his plans and half because I said the words “permanent marker”), so time got reversed and Annika ran into the second closest room (which I decided was Jody's room where said little girl is putting back the borrowed makeup back). Annika decided to reverse her decision and let the little girl return with the permanent markers (she would have gone overboard otherwise).
At random intervals, I weaved in what the main group were seeing/doing. My group has a habit of calling off actions and taking a long time to think about what they were going to do except for Annika's player. So a lot of the random intervals involved my asking them what they're doing and saying or if they decided. At this point, Annika decided to scare the little girl by suddenly moving and say "boo!". While the little girl is poking the Automaton that just suddenly moved, the funniest thing happened.
The band were heading to their rum storage area (bottom deck since I screwed up) and the first one who had gone down the stairs was Kristina who stopped suddenly at the bottom of the steps and the person behind her wasn't aware of her stopping (it was too funny in my mind) and the two round up on a tangled heap at the bottom of the stairs. The third person down (Nathaniel) noticed two things: the tangled heap at the bottom of the steps (and probably said something like “get a room, guys!”) and saw Annika leaping over the little girl and the heap of two people with the intention of running below decks. I got an awesome roll so Nathaniel wound up leaping over the railing of the steps and chased after Annika, just two yards behind her at the end of initiative.
Annika tried to use her epic social-abilities to convince Nathaniel to hide her right when everyone got to the scene. Annika announced that she knew their secret (aka, she deduced from the lyrics of the songs (perception check) and compared it to the version of history she knew (General Knowledge check) and saw some things not matching up (in hindsight, Post-Apocalypse Punk may have been a wrong song to have them do...). Jody was the only one who saw through the bluff and there was a lot of arguing and Jody trying (and failing) to bull Annika. In the end, the Captain had Annika be turned off and had their two guitarists (Josh and Nathaniel) drag her out onto the decks with Dan making sure nothing happened (he had a pistol in his hands just in case).
So they get Annika turned on and the first thing that Annika says was “they have a time machine! We need it!” They have a long conversation about how Annika would know and such. My crew decides to keep as much of an eye on the Ophelia with the intention of following them. The rest of the session was just one long chase scene, including through a mountainous pass. It got to the point that the Ophelia had to make the pre-planned jump or waste a whole week (or more) of calculating. The Ophelia was 5 seconds from making the jump when the Dragon Seeker hit one of the Chrononautilus bulbs with the lightning gun, shattering the aft bulb.
The session ended with both airships leaving the thunderstorm, the Ophelia having noticed that their persuers couldn't see them and took a hard left turn in the storm. When the ships left the storm, the distance was too great for the Dragon Seeker to continue. No one knows where or when they are (including their GM). We ended because the group wanted to do the light post-dice-rolling roleplaying.
The Result:
Since I've only been running games for about a year with lots of breaks in between, I know I still have a lot to learn. The first thing I learned was to be more patient and learn better ways of describing events (so that maybe Annika would have gotten permanent marker on her). It also helps that when there's a group of NPCs that would appear every so often, to not come up with a random number between 5 and 8 for rolling for said NPCs. But now, I have to scrap every plot thread I had planned on. (this group's doing to me what the gaming group in Darths and Droids did to their GM, but I'm getting better at improvisation!) In the end, I can't wait until I run this game again.
My gaming schedule is looking like I'm not running anything next Friday and on the 28th would be Pathfinder with the next session of Airship Pirates being on the 4th unless the Camarilla schedule changes next month.
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