[Actual Play] Trenchcoats in LA, Session 2

[drnuncheon]

We got a late start this time as John and I went biking Saturday afternoon (and Mel slept!).  Only three scenes, but the second one was huge.

Scene 1 (John) - Stor-4-U
A short scene where Courtney (Kate's sister) tails the trio to the Stor-4-U. (John sketched the Stor-4-U logo and we got into a brief discussion of the cheezy commercials and the jingle: "We've got something good in Stor-4-U.")  While Damian fills out the paperwork to get his $100 deposit back (and is unplayed for the scene), Kate and Renier get ahold of the security tape of the incident, leaving Courtney still in the dark.

I was dismally short on story tokens, which is why I decided to play Courtney, but I didn't have the mechanical impact I needed to get the other two to stake debt (and thus produce tokens).  In fact, the way I was rolling, all I did was give the other two some nice inspirations. That's OK, I got my revenge in:

Scene 2 (Jeff) - a nightclub owned by Joseph
Kate goes to face down Joseph to find out why he's so interested in Damian.  He claims that he's not, but he's certainly interested in her.  Kate threatens him to keep him away from her sister, and he tells her she's bluffing.  We find that Gabriel turned over the contents of the Stor-4-U to Joseph.  And the players find (although Kate and Joseph do not) that he is also working for Director d'Alliac, the local head of Homeland Security - and one of Renier's fellow Grail Knights.

When I laid down the first goal of the scene (Seduce Kate), Mel said "You bastard."  I knew I was on to something, and I played it hard, deliberately not claiming my side and keeping it in play for several pages before eventually losing (and getting 6 Love debt for Joseph plus three story tokens.)  I also won the free exemplar conflict of "Kate agrees to Joseph's proposal", which in this case was "merely" some investigative work.  John racked up some inspirations by setting goals and resolving them while Mel and I were busy with the Joseph-Kate interaction - I'm not sure if that was his plan, but one of these days he's just going to bust out with a whole string of turning dice to '6'.

Scene 3 (Mel) - Damian and Renier go to the new Stor-4-U, where they find a woman in Damian's new unit.  He protests innocence: "I was not keeping a woman in my storage unit! I have no idea where she came from!" It turns out that she's an emissary from Vriknu (remember Vriknu? Personally, I'm starting to think he's the demon lord of self-storage units) who wants to selflessly (ha!) help Damian recover the power of his birthright that his father doesn't want to see him get.  Damian falls for it, but he manages to get the woman's True Name as part of the bargain.

I don't remember a whole lot mechanically from this scene - I think there were only one or two goals.


One thing I'm noticing about three-player Capes (at elast for us) is that scenes tend to be very short. The starter will throw out a goal, and our group will tend to want to roll on it immediately instead of spending their action to put out another goal.  I think this session was the first one where one of us played a story token for an extra action (after I reminded the others it was possible.)

We also were so into the roleplaying and the actual rolling of dice on the conflict that we forgot to claim more than once.  I think I'm going to make a "turn order" cheatsheet and keep it handy for session 3.

J