Grifting - 20 years on

After watching the sizzle reel for Slingers

I decided I wanted to do a Leverage style game about grifters who are probably 20 years past their prime. 

A group of characters with probably too many links to each other on the relationship map. 

A group who's skills are all out of date and more liability than asset.

And a group that really really needs to pull off one more job.

So my first question is what system to use.  PTA would be a natural, but I want the possibility of PvP conflicts so I'm actually thinking of use PDQ#.  I've read Zo, and T&J, and parts of S7S, and I ran a short lived but really fun game of Zo.  So PDQ isn't a problem, but the free PDQ# pdf seems really muddled to me.  LIke it was mashed together and not really organized.

Guess I'll need to do some organization and make up a cheat sheet.

Also need a setting.  Fantasy is out, so possibly modern day or sci fi.  Haven't ruled out steampunk on a zepplin, but that may be amshing too many genre's together.

And do I try to get it together for Dreamation in Feb, or save it off for Dexcon and possible loos momentum.

It is a puzzle.

Steel City Strike (campaign concept)

Steel City General Strike (Mouse Guard + Burning Empires)

What's the Big Picture? The Great War is over, and the port city which has grown around the industry of building steel warships is changing. Strict wage control during the war had been a necessity, but now, in a new era of peace and prosperity, the capitalists are unwilling to grant pay increases to the legion of steel workers in the city. Ten percent of the city’s populace, members of more than one hundred labor unions, begin to organize a general strike. And the industrial leaders refuse to negotiate, calling for federal troops to clamp down on suspected Bolshevik activities.

What's the world's culture? Parallels to the Seattle general strike in February 1919. Strikes in the previous months to protest U.S. aid sent to the White Russians engaged in the Civil War. The city's culture is mired in expansive industrial growth but limited comforts for a hard working & under compensated workforce.

What's the conflict in which the characters are involved? What are the sides? What's wrong? The characters are social activists, union organizers, communist sympathizers, Bolshevik instigators, even industrialist spies or saboteurs. Workers versus the capitalist bosses. Wage controls were in place during the Great War to assist the effort of building war ships, but now the war is over & the workers expect pay raises.

What physical place does this conflict take place in? What ecology, environment, place? The streets of Steel City, particularly the industrial district along the waterfront where the workers live, most of them never seeing the sun overhead, inside the printing press rooms of union offices and the bar rooms of local haunts and on the street corners where newspaper boys announce the latest headlines.

What's the name of the most important place in this setting? Belltown: a working-class neighborhood of cheap hotels, busy bars, labor union meeting halls, and lively dance halls.

What's the name of a faraway place that folks talk about, dream about or mutter under their breath about? Moscow: a place where the dream of socialism has taken root. And Paris: a place where expat Americans live & write about a new world order.

Who are the antagonists? Who is opposing the goals of the characters? The Capitalist Bosses & the Weasels who work for them to enforce the status quo.

Imagine all of the characters are standing a room/ruin/field with the antagonists or their minions. What do the antagonists want from that meeting? What do the characters want from that meeting? The antagonists want the characters to disband the labor unions and continue working as before. But the characters want change and a new order of society where decisions are made by the proletariat masses rather than the moneyed capitalists.

Alternately, imagine the characters standing at the scene of some great disaster or calamity clearly caused by one of the antagonists. What's the disaster? How did it happen? What are the characters going to do about it right now?A labor union meeting hall is looted by drunken sailors looking for cash, a rumor spread by capitalist saboteurs hanging out in dockside bars on a Saturday night. The characters can confront the sailors, trying to engage them in a duel of wits to convince them of the true struggle or stop them with plain violence.

What type of magic exists in this world? The magic of technology where international communication is only a few clicks away, where leaflets are printed and handed out on street corners to instigate labor rallies, where faith in science trumps all superstitions of the past. But, some still resort to mystic arts in pursuit of truth and justice.

What character races are in play in this world? Workers (mice?) as the proletariat, working quiet lives of desperation in the factories, shipyards, and bar rooms of Steel City, ready to support a new social order. Weasels as the capitalists, living large in their mansions on the hill and smoking their cigars, wanting to build on the profits made during the Great War.

What cultural traits apply to the characters of this game world? Pick three character traits for each culture.
Workers: hopeful, democratic, ordinary.
Weasels: established, superior, ruthless.

What's your Resources cycle? Fortnight, two weeks, is the usual pay period for shipyard workers. Rooms are rented by the fortnight. The only shift off for a worker is the morning after pay day. Three stages as in Burning Empires: Propaganda, Planning, and General Strike. Similar scene structure with epic scale maneuvers modified by character scenes.

Material world: What weapons and armor are available? Are some weapons and armor restricted to certain cultures or character stocks? What property is available? Are resources and gear otherwise restricted? Weapons are limited to baseball bats & meat hooks for the Workers. The police carry batons, the army carry rifles & side arms. The workers make Molotov cocktails & one might carry a pistol. Few workers own vehicles of any kind, and the streets are crowded more with carriages than with automobiles.

Pregnancy of Situation

So what Fiasco does really well is set up situations ready to pop.  And that really drives the game forward at a tremendous pace.  So how does it do it.  First before character creation you put index cards between each adjacent player at the table.  From some very cool tables of potential plot elements, each card is now filled with a relationship or other commonality between the two players' yet unmade characters.  Then the players make their characters to fit within the relationships already laid out.  Splendidly ready to burst with story.

"Carry : a game about war" does something similar but more implicit.  Each player defines a burden for their character, but gets input from each player on their right and left in defining the burden.  Not specifically an in game relationship, but player input to player.  It then sharpens everything with the lens of war/life and death struggles.

Ganakagok does this with its explicit relationship map.

PTA, the way I do it, also has a relationship map.

And BW/BE/Mouseguard defines beliefs and instincts.

IAWA has its Oracles.

But aside from Fiasco, which mandates what the relationships are, all the rest rely on the player to choose to have one of these relationships, and if they choose not to, then the GM has to push the game to put something in place.  Fiasco neatly avoids this by  make the relationships before anyone has attachments to their characters (and by having no GM).

I think this is probably why games with pregen characters and conflicting beliefs are always more lively than most of the GM driven StoryNow games (where the GM doesn't pick a direction and drive as hard as possible towards it).

I know this is tangentially related to Bangs, but bangs seem only focused on one character.  I think you get better story when one of the elements in play relates to more than one character.

What I really want is a mechanic that would allow me to get this kind of group link before play in other games, especially PTA.

scenario-wri-mo day one

Today's rough outline for 3 linked adventures.  Folowing the nanowrimo method of just getting it out there on the page and looking back later.


3 adventures for Steampunk/1890-1910s SotC game

Adventure 1 - Into the aether

Electricity stars opening up a gateway to the dark
up to out heros to close it
it moves with/centered on something

mobile airodrome refining lightning into fuel for its new ?weapon?

main villain - looking to strike fear into the british empire?  perhaps and enraged indian?  or other colony dweller
really a puppet for the actual villain - Edison.

scene 1 - posh party where the zepplin makes it first appearance, shattering the night with high potency lightning
then disappears

scene 2 - research where the zepplin comes from gets them to a weird occult shop, social combat with proprietor over a tome about aether engineering

scene 3 - workshop of the aether engineer, fight with mooks who have come to kidnap/kill the crazy professor and remove his equipment

scene 4 - finding/boarding the zepplin

scene 5 - climactic battle, with clues that the zepplin launched from a base in ?Nepal? Everest



Adventure 2 - A cold wind blows

travel to the Nepal, fighting with the elements, evil possessed yeti, avalanches, ice

think south pole explorer jumbo sized, possibly an evil base under a protective dome
some feats of unheard of engineering.

villain here is some professor possessed by a dark spirit that has passed over
possbile cthulu-esque vibe

scene 1 - approaching the base by land, evil possessed yetis attack

scene 2 - possibly stranded on the mountian, fight with the elements, climbing/exploring

scene 3 - finding a temple complex built into the mountain, crazy cult of dark possessed mooks, fight

scene 4 - finding the main base, engineering of lightning derrigibles, think u-boat base inside a mountain

scene 5 - having the real villain appear but escape, zepplins launch on mission of world domination


Adventure 3 -  Dark and light

Finding a way to shut down the portable gates on the derrigibles, possibly all linked to one central gate

either ending derrigible domination, or end of the world itself

scene 1 - lightning derrigible over london,  infiltration/destruciton of the blimp but a key clue

scene 2 - approaching the main villain in a social setting (do the Mr. Bond thing) to get some vital info
Villians girl approaches for help, wants out (or does she)

scene 3 - chase/dogfight/capture after the party.  Probably fight ?in mech suits? too much? this is stema punk after all?

scene 4 - Telsa with the key technobable, perhaps a social thing to extract the right info/ maybe he has his own derrigible with tremendous weapon capability

scene 5 - ship to ship battle, boarding, and final villain battle or defeat.

The SpiriGraph

One thing I had imagined for my own setting was based on COMSTAR from the BattleTech universe. Telegraph communication in the late 19th century is still possible but quite different. Telegraph offices spring up everywhere, but they aren't connected by wires. Instead, a kind of Seer operates each telegraph station; a person writes out a message on a slip of paper, pays a fee, and the Seer cranks up the SpiriGraph, contacting a spirit to deliver the message to a particular SpiriGraph at another station. Of course, widespread use of this technology carries the consequence of SpiriGraph operators going mad....

So, I was thinking in terms of Dune which features a modified race of humans which communicate with the dead in this way. Each airship, for example, carries a Communications Officer which is a guy sitting at a typewriter & a SpiriPhone; his leg, by the way, is chained to the airship frame so when he falls to the floor in convulsions with his tongue lolling out of his head nobody else on the ship gets hurt. Of course, he's also relegated to the "SpiriPhone Shack" which is a tiny enclosed room adjacent but very separate from the bridge of the ship. But, with this Communications Office, the airship is able to access supernatural intelligence about the weather, enemy ships in the area, maybe even a hint of precognition. And I had imagined even certain deceased spirits linked somehow to certain ships. Anyway, it's certainly a very different setting than just a modified alternate history of our own world.

Speculative Timeline

For an alternate timeline we must begin in the 1880s when practical applications for electricity were being developed. By the 1890s we saw electric subway trains in London & the first hydroelectric power station in Niagra. Interesting, however, was the infrastructure of piped gas during this time--cities all had night lights supplied by natural gas, and most homes & apartments had gas supplied for lighting; it wasn't long before this infrastructure was replaced by electric wires, but let's consider that the gas supply & use could continue for a bit longer as it was so life would generally remain the same into the new century.

We could still see cars with internal combustion engines, only we're talking about diesel engines which don't require electric spark plugs. And it might be interesting to consider a car with kerosene headlamps.... The problem with the turn of the century is things were developing so fast. A telegraph network already encircled the globe operated with DC current; trans-atlantic telegraph cable was in place & working by the end of the American Civil War & in following decades was a big part of how Great Britain managed her huge empire, including India & parts of Africa. So, really, let's start with the ACW for possible twists in our timeline, a time when our respective NPCs were still boys....

1860: Early experiments with electric current never leave the lab setting as destructive results put laboratories in flames, and few scientists are mad enough to pursue such inquiries.
1864: The Carnival of Spirits opens in New York, which draws thousands of citizens curious about relatives killed on the battlefield to the advertised notion of speaking with the dead; show results in massive implosion which kills thousands & leaves a sinkhole of destruction in the city.
1865: New England secceeds from the Union, Texas secceeds from the Confederacy.
1866: ACW peters out, Union fragmented, Lincoln goes inexplicably mad (from exposure to telegraph operations) & is removed from power by Congress.

Fast forward 50 years: The British Empire dominates the globe. Slavery has come to an end in the Confederate States which remains largely an agricultural supply for GB. The Northern States still attract immigrants from Europe, mostly as a gateway to the gold fields of the West. There is some manufacturing in the North, but on a limited scale, mostly guns to supply the Empire or those rebellious to the Empire. The world is basically under the British thumb or fighting against it. Can we imagine a 20th century without America's Great White Fleet, the Spanish-American War actually the Spanish-English War? Is this too much alternate history?

There is a good history book about the rivalry between the two men starting their respective power companies, although I had thought Tesla was the DC champion & Edison for the AC, and it was Edison's company which was victorious which was part of the reason why AC is the common method of current we use today. Although this could be my simplified remembrance of the book.

Anyway, the setting I had imagined was more fantastical rather than alternate history, so I like that your proposal uses the basic concept but with something new. But my original idea revolved around electromagnetic fields, the kind which are generated around any electric current despite power source--it's the electromagnetic field which opens a gap in the fabric of reality & allows 'bad things' from another dimension to peek through.

But, the really intriguing part of your proposal suggests that one man intends to open up these portals into another dimension while the other might think his method does something different or better when really it does about the same thing.

All right, but there are plenty of possibilities here. The first to suggest itself is the idea of rural electrification. Maybe the cities have already been electrified, but our story takes place in the rural Midwest where folks are concerned that everyone in the cities have gone completely mad: there are stories about mad operas in city performance halls, factories building great machines of war, music created by this electric current. And now the government wants to build power lines across the Midwest & bring this thing into our homes! Time to get out the shotgun.... I was going to say get in the truck, but without electricity our generic farmer would get on his steam tractor instead. Maybe too comical to work....

Steampunk??

Steampunk idea #101

Aaron described a world where electricity never developed because generating it let the "bad things" in.  Be they cthulhu or demons or whatever, so steam was the main mojo everywhere.  Very cool idea.

Game scenario idea
Game : SotC
Genre : Steampunk, twinged with horror
Format :3 linked scenarios, each suitable for con play alone, but run better in sequence.

Main antagonist : an evil version to Thomas Edison (1847-1931) inventor (specifically in this case looking at DC Current, that lets the bad things in).  Insane, tainted by evil, overly powerful.  Throw in something evil about either sound or video recording.  Remember that Edison was a telegraph operator, and they used "spark generators? to transmit (early infection?)




Main NPCs - crazy Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) with his AC that may just save the world for real.



Needed :

Persistent villainous organization (at least one)
Overall plot for each episode, with meta-plot traveling through all 3.