octaNe at SteveCon V

[GB Steve]

I decided to keep it silly so the game was psychotronic. The characters I made up too, to save time but the players added in the extra skills.

We had:
Stefan Simon, a plucky kid who loves Playstation and St Avril Lavigne (Adrian)
Tensui Umagata, Stefan's kung-fu monkey friend (Paula)
Margery "Punky" Simon, Stefan's sister and drag racer for Team Go-Go (an NPC)
Sister Conceptua, Gun totin' nun and cheerleader for Team Go-Go (Emma)
Righteous Fernandez, Mr T clone and muscle for Team Go-Go (Michael)
Igugogoke, Alien tourist and mechanic for the team (Max)
Theodore "Damned" Mullins, high-plains drifter (Leif - he made it hurrah!).

The game started in Stefan's apartment and a run in with the landlord. Punky not being around, Stefan and Tensui dropped flour bombs on the landlord's head.

Meanwhile Team Go-Go were fixing up their racer with strange techno-wizardry, but their driver is missing. They go to the flat and find out that Punky is missing. A pefunctory search turns up a card for Baptismal Unit 5, the local HQ of the Sutra Aspect, some all woman cult.

Our heroes break into BU5 with a combination of stealth and trickery from the monkey, whilst Righteous just shags his way in as it turns out to be a brothel. Righteous' might overcomes and Sister Conceptua makes a convert of one of the fallen women. It turns out that Punky has been sent to the HQ near Lost Vegas.

The team have just enough time to win the drag race and $200 (just enough to cover the rent). This involves installing a playstation control so that Stefan can drive with an R2D2 pod for the monkey. In fact the whole windscreen is replaced with a VDU so that Stefan thinks he is playing Gran Turismo. This works fine until Aliens attack on the screen (a problem with some residual software) but Stefan despatches them easily (entirely narrated by the player). They also disguise their front door so that the landlord will go to the wrong apartment.

Tooling across the desert, they encounter "Damned" being dragged in a cage by some Sutra Aspect women. These are easily dealt with by some crazy driving from Righteous and sermonising from the Nun. They convert the fallen women who all discard their beehives. The cage is attached to the back of the van and the ex-prostitues do the go-go dance of repentence. Damned joins in to help find Punky

Arriving in Vegas the fallen women get separated from our heroes who hit the strip with the drag racing prize. In the Golden Nugget, the Alien rigs up a probability device with positive gain. Suddenly, all the slots pay out! Pandemonium reigns and the casino send out gorillas to retrieve "their" lost loot. The PCs manage to salvage thousands of quarters that the alien despatches through time to appear when they are needed.

Meanwhile at the bar, the monkey gets drunk and gets into a fight with a mirror, he vaults across the bar into a box of peanuts and gets thrown out (entirely narrated by the player).

They go to the local Sutra Aspect temple, a casino called Baptismal Unit 4. There's a bit of a fight and the Nun subdues the locals. The monkey tries to find a map but ends up with patterns for the Sutrans uniforms. Damned applies to join as a henchman and finds the Sutrans' base address on the return envelope.

At this point there's some madcap scheme involving armoured gyrocopters that ends up with the alien being captured in this big beehive complex that seems to be the base for some bee women. Where are the Sutrans?

Damned gets in for his henchman test and is beaten into submission by the largest woman he has ever seen. His bruised and battered body is rescued from the cells by the alien who confuses the guard so much that he escapes. The other prisoners here seem to be dried husks of men who are used up and discarded as they wear out.

It turns out that there is a secret subterranean drag strip stadium and that the bee-women are just a cover for the Sutran's real plan - taking over Lost Vegas with their drag racing tanks. Needless to say our heroes put a stop to this, which involves a coke powered Dr Pepper firing tank, the alien summoning his tentacled nemesis race through a self-made black hole and lots of silliness.

In the climax, Sister Conceptua confronts the giant scarlet demon women who runs the Sutra Aspect, only to find that it's a great big hologram created by a man (very cooly narrated by the player - I had put a demon there but she used narrative control to twist the end entirely). This break's the will of the women and the complex burns down.

Punky is saved! Our heroes return to find the landlord finally breaking into the right flat, there is a flash of light and all the quarters reappear an bury him.

It took a bit to get used to giving up the narrative control, by basically biting my tongue but it's very easy once you get used to it. Players with absolute control narrating their own downfall was very nice, they also tended to interpret not having total control by introducing less favourable elements - not necessarily in the way that the game should be played but not really a problem.

All in all, a pretty cool game. Everyone should play it at least once.

There were 21 people at SteveCon V, if you include David who turned up first and was told by the thick fuck of barman that nothing was on, so he went home. Some people only played the first game, about 6 went home at half time.