Pirates of the Spanish Main Session Report 10

The most recent session was played after a trip to the wineries of the Texas Hill Country, so the whole gang wasn't there because the whole gang doesn't drink.  I feel slightly bad about this.  The player characters in attendance were Nana, Elias, Silas, the Mad Arab, and my GM PC Kit Rackham.  Kit sat out most of the action (as a good GM PC ought to) so I won't bother to mention him any more.

The crew learned last time that the evil snake man they had brought to Tortuga had corrupted the pirate brotherhood by tempting them into worshiping the vile serpent god Set (herein played pretty explicitly as Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age Set and not the real-world Egyptian god).  Captain Blackheart had declared himself king of the pirates, Ben Franklin clone Richard Poore had built himself a big Frankenstein-looking tower, and the majority of the pirates had joined the cult.  The crews' anarcho-syndicalist commune sugarcane plantation was safe, but there was a lot of pressure to join the Scientologists Setities.  

(It turns out that classical mythology records an enmity between the crew's patron Dionysus and the real-world Set due the Greeks equating Set with the Titan Typhon -- Dionysus' occasional murderer.  Absent PCs Commodore Wendy and Johnny McSliceathroat were dispatched to Neverland to get Dionysus' aid.)

The players were convinced they had to be extra-sneaky and reconnoiter the tower, so they bought out one of the brothels near the tower, set up an escape route to the port, and had their ships standing by to bombard the town if needed.  And then they accepted the invitation of Setite missionaries to go to the next midnight mass.  Whatever...

The unholy ceremony was held inside Poore's tower.  A braided copper wire hung down from the tower's upper reaches all the way into a hole in the ground floor and into the depths of the earth.  When a cloaked figure with Poore's face -- but not his voice -- took the stage to preach, an electric current began to run down the wire, causing it to jump and sway.  The sinister figure began to preach the word of Set, encouraging the pirates to avenge themselves on the upper classes and start a crusade to conquer the Caribbean.  To be honest, what the sinister figure preached wasn't so terrible, but it became apparent pretty quickly that he was just telling the pirates what they wanted to hear in order to open their minds to Set's psychic influence.

The sermon was actually a summoning ritual, and the copper wire unbraided to open a portal into the outer darkness.  One of the heads of Set poked through as a black nightmare figure of eldritch energy -- and Nana finally got the hint that this multi-headed serpent god was the same damned thing as the Orochi her personal god Susanoo battled in Japan's mythological past, so she spilled some sake on her blade and jumped into battle.  Meanwhile, the Mad Arab dashed up the stairs of the tower to confront a leather-masked figure (the now-faceless Richard Poore) and blow up the machine with a few grenadoes.  Elias shot the snake-man wearing Poore's face (and the Hag of Tortuga who died shouting "I'll swallow your soul!"), Silas helped Nana, the sanctified blade and grenadoes did their work, and Set was banished back to his dark dimension... after devouring a bunch of the cultists.

But Blackheart wasn't ready to give up his title, so he drew his cutlass and challenged Nana, Silas, and Elias at once.  Nana aced her first first attack and cut off his head with one swipe -- which means that four out of seven of the "Legends of the Spanish Main" from the PotSM rulebook are now dead.  Calico Cat and Jack Hawkins were killed off-screen by serpent men, and Blackheart and Governor Lynch were killed in fights with PCs.  This also means that if Blackheart was acknowledged as king by the pirates of Tortuga, then logically Nana can claim the title of queen.

Depending on player preferences, the next game will either be a siege of the snake-men stronghold in the Caymans or a return to straightforward piracy.  I'm inclined to have Dionysus visit his divine wrath on the Setites and get back to more realistic adventures, but I'll leave it to the players.
   

A Fragment

Man, I wish somebody with more time on their hands would finish this for me...

Ikonia – a mind-bending world of savage science and stellar sorcery! 

Lost in the depths of time and space, the planet Iconia is a world torn between good and evil.  Half the world is blighted under the tyranny of Nekrosis, Lord of Rot, while the other half stands fast through the leadership of Adam Prime, Lord of Strength.  Bold heroes and vile villains strive to defend or control the Treasures of Awe that can grant the power to conquer the universe!  Join them in their spectacular adventures!

Requires the Savage Worlds Super Powers Companion

Inspired by the genre-bending “sorcery and science” cartoons (“Thundarr the Barbarian,” He-Man and the Masters of the Universe”) and “heavy metal” fantasy films of the 1980s (“Krull,” Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn”), Ikonia is a setting of super-powered action freed from the genre restrictions of superhero comics.   It is a world of larger-than-life heroes and villains with

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"immortality riesling transylvania"

I want to know what this dude was searching for when he hit my site.

A Daughter of Gascony – John Boehner Ruined My Musketeer Game

My New Year’s resolution this year was to make no public resolutions or promises on this blog.  Changes at work and the delicate balance of writing about gaming versus actually gaming dramatically cut down on the time I could spend writing on the blog as 2012 progressed and a lot of promises I made went unfulfilled.  I decided I would simply write what I could with no promise of more and make peace with my reduced output.

(In fact, I promised myself I wouldn’t even reveal this resolution, so I’m already breaking promises.)

I should have kept this all in mind before I posted about the start of “A Daughter of Gascony” – my attempt at playing an almost-authentic 17^th Century musketeer campaign – because it crashed and burned quick.  There are a lot of reasons it didn’t work – delays between sessions early own that stole its momentum, differing expectations between myself and Robin on what behavior was expected, etc – but what really killed it is that I quickly realized a central part of musketeering is toadying to the aristocracy.

I loathe the aristocracy.

My usual choice of swashbuckling era is actually the 18^th Century – the time of the Golden Age of Piracy, home of the great fakes and swindlers (Casanova, Cagliostro, and D’Eon), and era of democratic revolution and conspiracy (the Illuminati were the good guys, dammit).  I never consciously understood just how much I hate the entitled rich until I tried to play a game about bickering royal couples and noblemen who don’t pay taxes.  Robin doesn’t like playing ambitious scoundrels like Aramis so that nixed the only way to keep true to the setting and get back at the entitled jackassses in charge, and the idea of staging an early French Revolution just undermined the whole point of playing a pseudo-historical setting in the first place.  With certain events in American politics reminding me uncannily of the socioeconomic mess of the the 17^th Century, it just seemed better to quit.

(I must admit that if I used the actual All For One: Regime Diabolique setting with its demons, monsters, and anachronistic conspiracies, this wouldn’t be a problem.  I might return to that in the future when the stain of this failure is washed away by time.)

Pirates of the Spanish Main Session Report 9

The most recent Pirates of the Spanish Main session went way, way off the map. 

Actually, no, that isn’t true. 

I’ve never played the PotSM constructible ship-thingy card-ish game, but when I was preparing some player aids early in the current campaign’s history, I familiarized myself a bit with the WizKids game.  It seems it started as a pretty straightforward knock-off of Pirates of the Caribbean, but by the end of the line it had veered into steampunk and the American Revolution.  It therefore seems appropriate that this Pirates of the Spanish Main RPG campaign now involves me blatantly stealing from “Conan the Barbarian,” Dino-Riders , and G. I. Joe: A Real American Hero.  (Though I honestly didn’t recognize the G. I. Joe influence until after the fact.)

The crew this time was out in full force.  Every player (except the jackass who used to play Gunter) was present: Nana, Elias, Silas, the Mad Arab, Captain Commodore Wendy, Johnny McSliceathroat, and my GMPC Kit (Brother Seamus is not a GMPC; I still haven’t made up stats for him).  The plethora of player characters meant that we had to curtail in-character dialogue more than I’d like, but we still got a lot of crazy stuff done and everyone got a chance to shine.

(Do you ever find yourself knowing there’s a word you want to use but not remembering what that word is?  I had to look up “The Three Amigos” on IMDB to find “plethora.”)

In London, I gave the crew 1d4 days to figure out how they were going to get out of losing control over their lives to Dr. Watt and his Invisible College marines.  Nobody really had any intention of leading the doctor and his unit company back to the snake-people’s secret base for a pitched battle in the subterranean depths, so they began scheming to get out of it.  Elias bought a letter of marquee while the rest of the crew made sure they recruited the rudest, crudest seamen available on the London docks – men sure to turn pirate as soon as they got the chance.

Months later (I'm estimating the whole round trip took about six months), the Bountiful Lady (the crew's new four-master) and the Golden Girl (the disguised and be-steamshipped Bloody Revenge) began closing in on the Caymans.  The Mad Arab rowed over to the Golden Girl with Silas and Nana; while the charismatic members of the crew distracted the marines, the corsair engineer... did something to the cannons that I've forgotten the word for.  He rigged them to not fire instead of blowing up, so he didn't spike them.  What's the word?  Starts with an "s."  He also tampered with the marines' gunpowder.

The next day, the pirates lured Dr. Watt over to their vessel and took him hostage.  They immediately fired a brutal barrage of grapeshot on the Golden Girl and forced the marines' surrender.  Then they were attacked by snake-men riding a tyrannosaur with energy cannons (REALLY INEFFECTIVE ENERGY CANNONS). 

I never owned one of these.

It was a bit of a stand-off for awhile, but finally Commodore Wendy landed a cannon shot that took care of the dinosaur.  The pirates immediately hightailed it out of there, choosing to ignore the burned-out hulks of Calico Cat's and Jack Hawkins' vessels, the presumably large subterranean snake-men complex, etc.  Elias, however, gave an impassioned speech and managed to convince a notable number of marines to join his workers’ paradise cane plantation/rum distillery back on Tortuga.

When the crew got back to Tortuga, though, they discovered it is now under the influence of a mysterious cult of snake worshippers who wear a snake tattoo on their biceps (that sneaky G.I. Joe influence I mentioned).  Captain Blackheart has changed his named to King Blackheart (an influence from my half-assed knowledge of the CSG), the Hag of Tortuga is running amok, and Richard Poore has built a big, sinister-looking, lightning bolt-generating tower.  I switched tenses because that’s how the game ended.  The PCs’ home base is in the hands of the cult of Set.

As I put it to the crew through Kit, it’s time to strip down to their loincloths, paint their bodies, and sneak into the tower.