Brett, the guy who’s been running the Shadowrun game, is going to be studying abroad next quarter, which means that Saturday marked the last session of that particular campaign. It ended pretty damn well, all things considered, with Jack Yavin (the man responsible for the death of Spencer’s character, Steven Colt) getting shot in the face by Colt’s pistol, which Kal had snagged before we buried him. He went down alongside his personal guards, half a dozen snipers on the roof and a couple hapless Shiawase employees who decided that today was the day they were going to stop a pissed-off shadow strike team from blowing up their servers and killing their boss, thus finally snagging that coveted Employee of the Month award. The team earned a quarter mil, got some overdue vengeance and flew off into the Neo Tokyo night while the credits rolled. Cue the players recounting a dozen moments they loved from the game and (in my case at least) wishing they could play more of it.
Also, apparently I’ve been spelling Kal wrong in every single post I’ve written about the game, which I kind of felt maybe should have been pointed out to me sometime before the final session.
Meanwhile, life goes on, and we started looking for another game to play next quarter. I suggested Spirit of the Century, since it seems to me that the rest of the group would enjoy its particular pulpy style immensely. They all fell in love with the copy of the rules I passed around, and we just completed chargen a couple hours ago, so it looks like that’s what we’ll be up to when we get back from break. Which gives me a reason to be writing things that might get posted to this blog again , which I am happy about.
One of my first posts on this blog was one called Chandler’s Table. It was named after Chandler’s Law, which is a very simple idea courtesy of pulp author Reymond Chandler, that simply states “When in doubt, have a man walk through a door with a gun in his hand.” I wrote up a table to try and determine who, at any given point, was kicking down the door to get at the party that my D&D group was in at the time. What follows is that table, reworked for the two-fisted action of Spirit of the Century.
Who is kicking down the door, and why?
WHO
01. Gangsters with tommyguns!
02. Ninja!
03. The walking dead!
04. Enraged tribesmen!
05. The police!
06. Old-school robots!
07. Prussian army remnants!
08. Bolsheviks!
09. Desperadoes!
10. Beings from the Negative Dimension!
11. Cultists!
12. Sinister government agents (Bureau of Investigation? Secret Service? L’Armie Noire?)!
13. Proto Nazis!
14. Intelligent apes!
15. Mad warlord and his small army!
16. Assassins from mysterious (insert foreign country)!
17. Mind-controlled mindslaves!
18. Molemen!
19. Science experiment gone horribly wrong!
20. Last named NPC who might conceivably be an enemy!
WHY
01. Bent on attacking the players
02. Wants to get to somewhere behind the players, will attack them if they impede progress
03. Wasn’t looking for the players, but now that such a tempting target is right here we might as well go for it
04. Just killed someone and wants to eliminate the witnesses
05. Claims that they’re here to help the players, then attacks at earliest backstabbable opportunity
06. Looking for the same thing the players are, but for nefarious purposes
07. Thinks the person they want dead is disguised as a member of the party
08. Actually someone else disguised as whatever the Who? roll says, for sinister purposes
Skyler ,
If you’re looking at Spirit of the Century, you might want to take a look at the new Fate Core stuff. IMHO it’s a pretty solid update. Of course, I was coming from Dresden Files more than SoTC.