Experiments in Progress (Part 1 of 5)

So, I'm running a series of games at the local gaming store.

A string of mini-campaigns, each 5 sessions long. Each session 2 hours. Each string of games will be a different system and setting. 

The first  mini-campaign was Cyberpunk 2020/Red, and the setting was the Bronzewing tower complex, just over 100 stories tall, 50000 people living in the tower.

 This time I offered to run a Warhammer 40K experience, and told the players it would be an investigation by the Inquisition. I like running with systems that promote the type of story being told, and really thought something like Gumshoe (2009-2013) or Cthulhu Dark (2023) would serve the purposes I needed...then I looked at the various games that were focused on the Warhammer 40k Inquisition.

I generally hated them.

For theae purposes anyway. Every system seems to be filled with fiddly details and multiple systems that worked to cross purposes, or which sruggled to maintain elements of the tabletop battlegame, but didn't fully capture the translation across to a roleplaying game. Inquisitor (2001), Dark Heresy (2008), Rogue Trader, Imperium Maledictum (2023), Versions from Fantasy Forge, custom versions of games that people had worked on fanaticially, I also took a quick look at 3:16 (alpha version here), because it fits the vibe and it's simple... I even had a look at some of my old experiments converting the Inquisitor game to a more streamlined system. I kept running into the problem I mentioned earlier in this post. The things these games do well aren't necessarily the things I want the game to be about...and the things I want the game to be about are in games that don't necessarily fit the flavour and mood of the game I'm after. 

The checklist I'm after is:

1. Grittiness (which is where the investigative systems seem to fall flat)
2. Quickly generated characters (which is where the licensed W40K games fall flat)
3. Scalable (both types of games seem problematic here, with the investigative games struggling against the potentially crazy gonzo levels of 40k, while the 40k games tend to focus on heroes and veterans) 
4. Quick but meaningful combat (the licensed 40k games tend to try to emulate the attack/defense/saving-throws/death-saves of the battle game and don't seem fast at all)

As I go further through the list, I realise that it isn't a perfect fit and it certainly needs to be reskinned, but Sceletus could be a good fit that only needs minor tweaking to get what I'm after. I had a chat with Erin, and she thought it could be cool to try reskinning the game, maybe to provide an alternate setting for the system if we strip the 40k barcodes off the setting and just make it a game about some other generic horrific human imperium. 

Everyone involved in the game shop sessions has been made aware that the first session would be regular citizens facing mysterious horrors they don't understand, while later sessions would be like the "Alien" franchise, with military grunts coming in to clean up the mess, then finally pivoting to experienced veterans who will confront the horrors at a power level that might actually make a difference.

Two total party kills in the first session. Which is to be expected from regular citizen facing even the weakest entities that might arrive on the battlefield. I've basically described the things they've faced as biomechanical fusions of crystalline fragments and metal. This has been encountered by a mining operation, some kind of shadowy corporation who contracts to the Imperium, a but like a rogue trader might, or like the Weyland Yutani company in Alien. It's a useful trope to work with. The company sends out expendables, and doesn't want the military to come in because that's often an expensive proposition (the military tends to blow things up and there's a lot of collateral damage). We all knew the civilian citizen miners of the corporation would die dramatically and just ran with it. 

Annoyingly, the PCs kept rolling really well, and I rolled terribly for the entities they were facing, so they actually lasted longer than I expected. I didn't want to just do the Cthulhu Dark thing where any creature of the mythos simply obliterates anyone it faces. I wanted the players to feel like they had a chance against whatever it was they faced, but just waited for the bad roll to come, and everyone knew it would. 

It begins with a blazing red meteor falling from the sky, it lands near an encampment for the mining company, and the character's are sent out. It might be worth something, it might be trouble, but it needs to be reolved before the local Imperium catches news of it. As indicated at the top of the post, I sued my modular terrain tiles to set out the map for the session. The mining company's local outpost is one one side of the map, and the landing site of the meteor is on an island offshore. They reached the site, as a storm swirling around the site of the meteor crash. One of the players follows the mining hook, and digs a trench to the meteor site from the edge of the island. I describe that he has dug through fragments of glowing red crystal and other metal. He keeps going... this will be useful later. Another character is a wannabe psyker, so I play with that a bit. as they find a red crystalline throne at the centre of the meteor crater. It beckons him to sit in it. That's two potential methods I can used to make a twist during one of the later sessions of the campaign. I don't need to come up with too many ideas, I let the players do it. In attempting to get back to the mining company, with useful information, two of the characters died on the rough seas... the third character was grappled by tentacles as her sat in the chair and it implanted psychic telemechanical tendrils into him. My thoughts are that it might some kind of old relic from the tech-priests of earth, perhaps something akin to the Emperor's golden throne... or some kind of ancient Necron technology, like a soul essence exchanger that the C'Tan used to transfer the former living race into their current Metal biomechanical shells... an original idea was that the chair was a beacon to be sat in by a Genestealer cultist to summon a splinter fleet of the Tyrannids (since that's appropriately "Alien" and Giger-esque. I also considered the idea of the characters finding some kind of webway gate, but I'm not so sure this still fits into the story. I don't want this to just be a kitchen sink sequence with anything an everything, so I'll narrow down the options over the next session or two as the characters explore further.

With the first round of characters dead, and since the characters worked for a mining company, giving the new batch access to demolition explosives was going to be a reasonable request, it was also going to have the chance of going horribly wrong when the time came. I also let them have some bolters, and a servo skull will be drifting along with them to archive the activities.

They decided to head in and blow up the chair. A combination of successful and unsuccesful rolls, the chair exploded and the shrapnel took them all out as our time for the session reached a conclusion. 

The session closes with a fade to black. The characters from session 2 have been watching the data-tapes recorded by the servo skull. This way the knowledge is carried forward and our militia soldiers can have the information gained by our civilians in the first session... it also has the feeling of a sci-fi twisted Cthulhu mythos story, with the video footage substituting for the journals and diaries that are often read by investigators in that setting.

Apparently I'll have more players next session... we'll see how things go.