Press The Beast

Violent City Session #2 Reflections - Vs. Violet Snowblood

The Cast:

Sadly, Havoc could only join us for the start of the session.

A bit of a rough start on this session. I had thought it was to start at 10am, the time which my previous campaign began, and was about a half hour late as a result. The players are all major chillers so it was no big deal, but I came into the session a little bit frazzled.

The session itself followed the basic method outlined here by Retired Adventurer. Freak, a friendly but dopey mechanic, approached the party while they hid out in Dingo’s cargo crate pad. The party killed an enforcer from the region’s biggest faction, so they were hiding out. Because Dingo is a chiller, though apparently a misogynist, they chose to let him in. Here began the series of decisions: would the party accept the job? A kid ran out into the desert after being jilted by a woman with an artificial face, and a reward had been put up to find him.

I assumed the party would accept this, if they did not then I had some alternative ideas based on other expected moves. I knew these because the party had discussed them beforehand:

In each of these cases I had enough of the world sketched out and enough procedural meat (weather, enounter tables, etc) to figure things out regardless of the path taken.

The party did, however, take the job. Because they rested for a while another search party went ahead in advance, so it was a bit of a race. I use very punishing healing rules (1HP per day for humans) so one of the party’s pointmen was already beat up. This sort of decision making (rest more or risk losing the job) is very interesting to me.

The actual search for the kid was trivial: it’s a desert, he went south and the only place that way are the Harpy Towers, a demon ruled apartment complex filled with half living humans called Scarmen. Indeed, the party found a kid named Bingle, who had been left behind by the lost child, pretty quickly, and he just told them where to go. In effect this wasn’t a mystery or anything, just a track to follow (An ability Dingo specializes in). So where is the gameplay here? The decisions to come were:

For the various elements that could be drawn up to complicate or colour the adventure I had no need to prep those specifically, as I had a strong enough idea of the setting and region to draw freely on relevant elements.

Things worked out differently than planned, however. I rolled the Harpy, Violet Snowblood, herself on the encounter table while the party rested overnight. She dropped one of the children that had gone with the original lost boy on the ground and his head giblets splattered all over the place like spilled diced tomatoes. The party tried to stay quiet, but the child Bingle screamed and alerted the Harpy. Things got dicey and the party, a group of 1HD homies, decided to try their luck in a fight.

This could’ve killed much of the party. The Harpy had 8HD and numerous special abilities: necromantic powers of an undefined scope, the ability to use her feathers as weapons (using Whitehack’s miracle system), and extremely fast flight: fast enough to be out of range in a round and travel the area of a hex in minutes at top speed.

Instead the party had luck and pluck enough to win. Basically, Madonna Delicious pissed off Snowblood, who prides herself on being the most beautiful in the world, by voguing every round of combat in hopes of drawing Snowblood’s attacks, thus keeping her on the ground. Dingo, a Deft character, used his attunement to his pet demon dog to leap off the dog’s back, then made an attack roll to snag the harpy’s ankle with his whip. Meanwhile, Zero waited below to catch Dingo should he fall.

Nice pluck! The luck came in when Dingo successfully hung onto the flying harpy (A dexterity check) and then landed a critical attack with his sword, thus mangling the wing of the Harpy. Shrieking, she made her feathers into spikes that impaled Dingo, leaving him at -7 HP. Zero caught him on the way down.

Next round she dove toward the voguing Madonna Delicious and, while mid-dive, Molars nailed a critical hit with his shotgun that almost killed her, then next round the party won initiative. With her wing injured, she couldn’t effectively retreat, and Zero landed the finishing blow in his Devilman form.

I had thought at least half the party would die. Dingo did fail his death save but I decided to extend the death timeline from 1d6 rounds to 1d6 days because I like Dingo a lot and he’s sort of the main character of the party. Therefore he was granted plot armour. Zero ate the Harpy and then used his Strong ability to take her flight, and used that to deliver Dingo to Dr. Spoof, the least competent doctor in the world. With Dingo at -7HP, he’s out for at least a week. Thus, the Gourd Dwarf played as the pet dog for the remainder of the session.

The party approached the tower directly and Madonna Delicous, holding the severed head of Violet Snowblood, demonstrated her superior beauty to the Scarmen. They immediately became super fans, and she now has like 50 zombies under her control. Because these guys were held together by Snowblood’s magic, they are going to disintegrate in 10 days (rolled on a 2d10).

They found the kid, who sucks and is a sociopathic prick who wanted Violet Snowblood to kill the woman who jilted him, and the party found some treasure in the harpy’s nest. Huge win!

Now the party plans to throw a party at the Towers, which Madonna has renamed the Delicious Towers. We’ll see what angle they’ll take. There was talk of inviting Prodigo’s faction and burying the hatchet, and Jewel spoke with Dingo at the end of the session hoping to get his help. She wants an introduction to Prodigo, and feels like the party ruined her chance by fighting Prodigo’s gangsters in the first session. We also know that the brother of the slain enforcer is going to arrive at Warhod Liner, the village where the party was holed up, in about 6 days time.

Nice session! Three major takeaways:

Whitehack is basically the Shounen Anime system. Characters all have such broad and flexible powers that they can get away with a lot. Party victory in the battle against Snowblood was mostly down to fate (and luck), but that victory would have been out of scope for an equivalent OD&D party without more planning or situational advantages.

Linear adventures are totally fine, there just needs to be meaningful choices. If the party is just following a straight line then they need a means of intel (i.e, the kid Bingle had information, gunshots from the search party, etc) to inform decision making and there needs to be actual decision points. It is fairly trivial to figure these out based on the fictional context but I implore referees to spend time figuring these out before the session starts. Even though things went completely off track, all the decision points I planned helped create shape and solidity in a session which, otherwise, could have felt very nebulous.

I really like thinking about campaigns as multi-modal. I have a hexmap, point crawl, travel procedures, and used a more or less “trad” formulation for the session. Each of these tools can be meaningfully applied based on instinct earned through running years of sessions and playing campaigns that used these modes separately. Next session, assuming the party goes through with throwing a ball, we will have a much more sandbox affair where the team needs to get drugs and food and decor to make the party pop, otherwise who the fuck would show up. Running a game is one session at a time, building a toolbox is better than slavishly following a particular method. This is sort of what I was trying to get at in this classic and famous blogpost.

The main anxiety I currently have is that the amounts of money I’ve been rewarding are probably too high, and more or less random. I think I will change the value of the rewards from this session before we go into the next one. Things should be quite scarce in the world of Violent City. The various treasure tables in Gearing’s &&&&&&&&&treasure are a good start for this sort of game, so I’ll go ahead and roll bones on those tables.