octaNe: thought we'd give it a whirl

[elderdan]

Played it at DunDraCon a couple of weeks ago (using Against the Reich material, apparently) and liked it ton, so I bought a copy and, when one player in our regular Thursday night work game couldn't make it, I wrote down a page of notes for an octaNe adventure and we pounded the crap out of it for about 3.5 hours (not including character selection and completion time). In my DDC playing experience I had already seen about a half dozen things in the rules I thought I might want to handle differently; by the time we actually put the pedal to the metal, the "mechanics" of the game were almost entirely different, and I tampered with a couple of the world setting bits, but the core experience was unchanged. I'll post the summary first (as provided to my gaming group the day after), with a couple of editorial comments, and then some more notes afterwards in a second post. We were playing in Psychotronic mode.

--The Elder Dan

Episode 1: "Empire of the Ants"

Four-man Casio-Punk band "Flame On" (think early Big Black) returns to its suburban-wasteland Pad after a round of gigs in Shangri-L.A., eager to see the New Sonic Amp their resident technician and booking agent, Doc, has been working on while they were away.

[ED: Before the game, I told the players "You're all going to be in a band together. Do not feel obligated to take any skills or gear related to musical skill or talent, however."]

But when they arrive, they find that Doc and the Amp are both missing, and someone has completely trashed the place, busting everything up and spray-painting it! Not only that, but there is a giant dead ant in the always-empty swimming pool in their backyard! Sure, the occasional ant wanders into Shangri-L.A. through the aqueducts, but what is this one doing here?

Agent Taft (straightlaced G-Man at loose ends, drummer) uses his crafty sense of forensics to determine that some sort of band of ruffians on giant-ant-back came here with, apparently, the specific intent of acquiring something from the Pad-- probably Doc and the Amp. Ant tracks lead north.

[ED: This was entirely the creation of the Agent Taft player, Mike, and at this point the story facts already began to deviate from my notes and the epiphany began to settle on the players that maybe I didn't care what random smack they threw at me.]

Master Sprinkles (kung-fu monkey-monk from Alcatraz, bassist) meditates on the dead ant, wondering why it is here (why are ANY of us here?), and comes to understand that its final minutes were filled with dazed confusion, poor thing. And the charming tag-team of Ashitaka (self-absorbed asian speed racer, guitar and vocals) and Discomatic Fantastic (money-grubbing robot gigolo, dancer) canvass the surrounding neighborhood to see if any of their neighbors (a fairly shifty and generally transient bunch) saw anything. It turns out they did! A little kid saw the ant-riders leave, apparently pissed off about something, and they didn't have the Doc or the Amp with them at the time. And one of the neighbors turns out to be an ex-girlfriend of the bikers... er, ant-ers... and says they like to hang out at a bar up North called the Hogtie.

The band piles into its three cars. Agent Taft and Master Sprinkles get into the Black Windowless Government Crack Van (BWGCV). Ash has his convertible jetcar (which only seats two-- Ash, and his guitar). And Discomatic hops into his late-70s Saturday Night Fleetwood with plush interior, taking along a neighborhood girl he suspects has enough money to pay for his drinks later.

At the Hogtie, all the parking spaces are filled with useless junker cars except two-- the unused handicap space, and one space down at the end of the lot that contains a cherry-red ultra-sleek Firebird Trans-Am. The pack of "antcycles" are tied up and tied down out behind the bar. Agent Taft, mindful of the vehicle code prohibiting use of handicap spaces by vehicles not displaying proper stickers, finds parking out at the curb. Ash immediately skids his jetcar in, taking up the handicap space and half the sidewalk in front of the bar. Discomatic double-parks the Firebird into its space, figuring the owner is probably a hot woman with money, and therefore of interest to him.

The bar is a busted-up cinderblock bunker with rowdy noise coming out of it. The band decides to go in smooth: Agent Taft, posing as the band's manager, informs the staff that the band that was scheduled to play this afternoon-- all-girl punk ensemble "Pretty in Pink"-- is unable to make it and so they're here to entertain instead ("at the pre-contracted rate, of course"). They give "The Flamers" as their band name, a clever ruse to avoid having any trouble come back to them later on. The first set goes terrific-- not because the band does all that well, but because Discomatic's platform shoes with the fish-aquarium screensaver playing on the sides fascinates the ant-riders (which just so happens to be an all-girl gang).

The band takes a short break, riding high on its success. Agent Taft lays out the agenda: "Let's take this opportunity to pump these ladies for information about Doc and the Amp. But make sure you're back in ten minutes for the second set." Master Sprinkles immediately goes out the window to set the gang's pack of giant ants loose; what he didn't anticipate was the high-pitched keening noise the ants would start making once their blinders were off. Inside, Ash gets on the mic to offer to buy all the ant-girls a drink, but something comes over him and he can't help but sound condescending about it. Plus the mic squeals with feedback, and then the sound of the keening ants comes in. The crowd goes from worshipful to enraged almost immediately.

[ED: The only "1" result rolled all evening.]

Agent Taft, intent on learning information from the gang's leader, instead gracefully slips out the back door to go get his shotgun from the BWGCV. The ant-girls jump up. Master Sprinkles comes flying in through the window and immediately kung-fu's most of them into submission. A well-placed shot from Agent Taft collapses the center beam and drops the rafters on the rest. But the threat of the ant-girls is replaced almost immediately by the equal threat of the ants themselves, which begin coming in through the busted roof. A judicious combination of paint-thinner, gunfire, and some rodeo-style ridin' by Master Sprinkles finally wraps things up, with half the ants dead and the other half driven away.

The defeated and humiliated leader of the ant-gang coughs up what she knows: they were working for the Mummy Kings of the Yucatan, sent to get the Amp and Doc, but when they arrived at the Pad someone else had already been there and taken him. She has failed her Undead Masters; her only hope is to flee into the Wasteland. "Witness protection isn't my department," Agent Taft informs her. Then the mysterious owner of the red Firebird makes her appearance: hot blonde in a leather jacket who was sitting at the only undamaged booth in the corner the whole time. "Your Doc has been taken to Vegas," she says, then smoothly exits the bar. Her Firebird jacks itself up on elevated tires and hops the curb, neatly escaping Discomatic's double-parking trap. Looks like the band is going to Sin City!

On the dry dusty highway, Ash runs point a mile or two ahead, but skids to a stop when he nearly hits two giant ants in the road. They pay him no attention at all; they are shuffling along very strangely, silently, on an unwavering slow line of direction. When the others arrive, they quickly realize something is luring these ants, controlling their minds, drawing them... towards Vegas! It must be an unanticipated mind-control side-effect of the New Sonic Amp. No wonder everyone wants it.

Their musings are cut short by the appearance of a sand-slug, drawn by the rhythmic thumping of the twelve ant feet. It snaps one of the ants in its jaws and then turns to the humans. After some back and forth, Agent Taft is able to run over it with the BWGCV. Discomatic's mighty strength is enough to roll the body off the highway-- "Never Leave the Road Blocked" are words every man (and android) should live by-- and Master Sprinkles does some magic to burn the remains away. The rest of the trip to Vegas is uneventful.

In Sin City, the band poses as giant-insect exterminators and begin searching for any signs or news of giant ants. Master Sprinkles' keen sense of smell detects the formic acid of ants and sure enough, they see a couple of ants disappearing into a large storm-drain culvert that leads under the Jules Verne, a big new casino based on science fiction of the 19th Century, heated and powered by a tap drilled all the way into the center of the Earth.

[ED: This is one of the things I really like about octaNe. My notes on this part of the adventure simply said, "When they get to Vegas, they somehow figure out the ants are being lured into the Jules Verne." How do they do it? Not my problem!]

Nobody wants to go into the storm drain, so they decide to head into the casino proper and find their way under it from inside. When they get in, the lights and sounds stun Master Sprinkles' senses for a while. Discomatic begins chatting up the richest lady he can find-- it turns out to be the owner's wife! "My husband is so busy these days," she says over drinks. "He has some secret lab in the basement, not that I know where it is, and he's always with those scary mobsters, not that I know what business they're in, and they're collecting all these giant ants, not that I know what sort of experiment they're doing, and they have a scientist guy held prisoner, not that I know where they got him from." Discomatic nods understandingly and keeps ordering drinks. Agent Taft goes to the front desk, posing as an ant exterminator, and asks for access to the subterranean levels. He's so official-looking, they give him an all-access card key; he heads downstairs to check things out "for just a minute". And Ash goes right up to a Family wiseguy, one of the many mobsters whose organization controls Vegas, and taps him on the shoulder. "Hey, buddy, where are my ants?" he asks, and the guy, it turns out, is so sick of this "secret ant business" that he's more than happy to make someone else take his place. He takes Ash downstairs.

Unfortunately, both Ash and Agent Taft get captured, because it turns out there are a bunch of Family men down there. Ash manages to catch a glimpse of Doc and the Amp in a lab before they drug him; Agent Taft witnesses a giant tank full of dozens of giant ants before someone clocks him on the head.

[ED: The only time when I hijacked control of the plot and did something to the players without them getting so much as a roll, pretty much.]

Upstairs, Master Sprinkles and Discomatic Fantastic bump into each other and wonder where the others are. They split back up and go looking. Master Sprinkles finds a monkey-sized tuxedo and, posing as a waiter, makes his way through the kitchen to a dumb-waiter shaft that leads him down to the secret levels below. Discomatic convinces an elevator operator that he's a repair tech, here to fix the Giant Laser in the basement that recently broke. "It broke?" the eager but not too bright operator asks. "Well I'd better get you down there pronto, they're gonna need that laser if they're gonna kill those two guys they just captured."

Downstairs, Agent Taft and Ash wake up to find themselves stripped of their equipment and tossed, unarmed, into the giant ant tank. The ledge all around the top is full of Family mobsters with tommy guns, waiting to see the ants tear them to pieces. Danger abounds!

[ED: I posited three separate "danger" situations-- a group of Family goons guarding the nearby lab at threat 0, the mobsters with guns at threat 1, and being inside the tank of ants at threat 2. As characters moved around, they would face one or another of these threat situations, but not more than one at a time. As the battle raged on, the threat values shifted back and forth.]

Master Sprinkles emerges from the shaft onto the lighting grid above the tank, where he finds a master switch that shuts down all the lighting. Chaos ensues in the darkness and a tremendous battle takes place. Agent Taft finds an access crawlspace hatch in the floor of the ant tank and he ducks down there to buy himself some safety. Ash sees the exit door of the tank and the guy on the other side who is supposed to keep him from getting out; a few well-chosen words about the guy's mother gets him to angrily open the door, and in all the chaos it's easy for Ash to slip out as the guy slips in and the door closes again. Moments later, the guy is ant-chow and his tommy gun falls down into the access space where Agent Taft is.

The goons are upset at this turn of events, but the just-arrived Discomatic is suprised to see that there is, in fact, a giant laser with an OUT OF ORDER sign on it, and he picks it up with his robot might and tosses it up onto the goon ledge, scattering them.

[ED: The threat-1 mobsters become two packs of threat-0 mobsters.]

Agent Taft pumps tommy-gun bullets into the ants' underbellies but it's not quite enough. Discomatic tips the tank partway over and many of the goons fall in... but many of the ants manage to now escape out!

[ED: The interior of the tank is now only threat 1 but there's a threat 0 ant situation outside the tank as well.]

Ash tries a stunt involving cannisters of jet fuel and his guns (which he finds on a table right outside the tank) but it nearly backfires on him.

[ED: A new threat-0 is created by the resulting fire. Everyone avoids it initially.]

Agent Taft finds an exposed power conduit in the access space; thank goodness those mobsters didn't take his insulated gloves away! He short-circuits the power cable into the ant tank, but still the battle rages on. Discomatic then realizes there must be a way the mobsters have been using to pacify the ants when the Amp isn't luring them-- perhaps some sort of sleep gas that only works on ants-- and with the help of a sexy female research assistant who came in to see what the noise was, he is able to release the gas and put the ants in the tank to sleep. That just leaves some surviving mobsters in there, but Master Sprinkles is able to work up a magic spell using the jawbone of one of the ants to turn the mobsters into more ants! The sleep gas puts them out as well. And, finally, Agent Taft is able to bust open the side of the tank so that the remaining sleep gas pours out of it to get the ants that had previously escaped, while Ash climbs daringly up to the top of the room to trigger the spinkler system with a flick of his personal brand of cigarettes. The sprinklers put out the fire that had been spreading.

That only leaves a handful of guards in the lab with Doc, but where Master Sprinkle's kung-fu is not enough to chase them off, a few kind words from Discomatic, and an offer of tickets to see tonight's Vegas performance by "Pretty in Pink", finally convinces them to leave their post.

Doc is freed. "I never would have guessed this Amp would have had such an interesting side effect," he says. "Thank goodness I didn't turn it up past 1.5; if it lures ants from the Big Empty at this setting, it might have lured giant beasts all the way from Monster Island at a higher setting!" Agent Taft reminds them all that, in addition to the Vegas Family Mob, the Mummy Kings of the Yucatan at the very least are interested in acquiring the Amp. "It's a weapon of mass destruction and it can't be allowed in the wrong hands. It must be destroyed." Ash can't believe what he's hearing: "We should take this Amp straight down to the jungles of the Mummy Kings, lure the monsters from Monster Island, and let them go head to head until nothing remains of either!" The other team members seem to agree, so finally Agent Taft shrugs his shoulder. "I guess sometimes you just have to do the right thing." And with a smooth draw of his pistol, he takes aim at the Amp. Will his teammates move to stop him?

[ED: Ah! A chance to try out PvP..? Sadly, it was not to be...]

Ash considers for a moment, but it might jeopardize the unity of the band and the band comes first. Discomatic announces that he takes a bullet for no amp. Master Sprinkles looks zen: "It would be wrong to raise a hand against a teammate." The Amp is blasted into pieces. Anyway, the band realizes that if they change their mind later, Doc can always make a new one.

As the team heads back to their Pad, they tune in the radio as Frankie Blue Eyes (one of the two worst-kept secrets in the West is that he's the leader of the Family) issues a public statement in his role as official spokesman for The King (who hasn't been seen in public in years; the fact that he's been somehow usurped and Ol' Blue Eyes is really running Sin City is the other worst-kept secret), relaying the shocking news that one their most trusted casino owners was trying to build a giant-ant army with, apparently, the goal of staging an invasion of Shangri-L.A. Unsurprisingly, there's no mention of the fact that the Family was involved up to its ears, nor is their any mention of the brave souls who fearlessly stepped in to stop the evil plan. But the band doesn't really care about that; they're more concerned about where their next gig is gonna be.

The identity of the mysterious blonde girl with the red Firebird remains, for the time being, a mystery...

[RaconteurX]

Hot damn, Dan... have you sold the film rights yet?!?

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I'm very interested in the extensive tweaking of the rules that you mentioned. I'm especially interested in whether you preserved or discarded the concept that dice outcomes only determine who narrates, rather than whether in-game actions/conflicts succeed or fail.

Best,
Ron