[PtA] Eiffel City, the worlds' capital

[oliof]

Hello,
a short report on my  experience with PtA on a weekend con.

There was tremendous interest in PtA, and I had a whopping seven players at the table. Some of the problems surely stem from the sheer number of people involved. Since I was demoing PtA to people, I had a lot of explaining to do, which was quite taxing.

As You can imagine, handling seven highly ambitious people during the pitch was quite hard. I took notes of ideas people tossed around. I expected some of the more unusual idea, but none of them resonated with the group fairly well. At first we tossed around some Science Fiction ideas, one based on Alastair Reynold's books which two people knew fairly well, or the classic human/android conflict in one or more iterations, a cyberpunk setting, but all were shot down. A 'running gag' was to try to add to a genre by adding zombies or the undead, but this was a sure sign noone really wanted to do the thing proposed.

An idea coagulated when people began talking about steampunk. This seemed to be the lowest common denominator, and then we looked for a place that could hold all the ideas of steampunk. One player wanted some anime/manga elements, but couldn't quite communicate what he meant by it.

In the end, we had everybody on the same side when we began discussing a flying city/flying fortress, as in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. The military focus didn't gel, and we looked for something bigger, more civilized. I think it was me who coined the series Title 'Eiffel City, a flying city that was built by genius inventor Gustave Eiffel as the epitome of the 1880 world fair.

When we had set upon that, a series structure quickly came to pass. We decided on a short run of 5 episodes, and didn't play the pilot, especially because we wanted to see how the differences in spot light time worked out. We chose the episode above London, and of course the series was about when Jack the Ripper escaped from London to Eiffel City with the help of the London Police Commisioner - but later on that.

The character cast was 'The Mayor', whose spotlight episode we played. His issue was 'Prestige' - he had to present a perfect, smoothly running city, because it was his renown that was on stake. Other characters were the Executive Officer (issue: Continuity), the Machinist (issue: loyalty), the doctor (forgot the issue), the Head of Police (issue: Calm), the Reporter (issue: The Big Sensation!), and the Financial Backer (also forgot the issue). The players of the head of police and the doctor dropped out because it had gotten quite late already, so the group had condensed to a manageable size.

Despite the fact that all of the players involved were experienced as GMs and/or in freeform games, the whole scene framing process was quite awkward in the beginning, and kept being quite demanding for everyone involved. Luckily for me, Kris - the player of the Machinist - was very firm in his grasp of story structure and helped people out by telling them what would be the next step in the story (like,revealing the villain to the audience, but having him get away at the end of the first third of the episode).

After I established the fact that I couldn't give out fan mail, but would when the player of the Mayor did a great scene for everybody, this worked quite automatically. We had a quite smoothly running game at about half of the episode, and I am fairly sure all who stayed in had a lot of fun. One player funnily didn't play his character, the 11 year old aristocratic financial backer, a lot, but had one if the PCs contacts do most of the stuff. At times, this seemed like trying to get around the spotlight time limitation - on the other hand, the story was a mystery, and the contact was a comic relief Sherlock Holmes parody, so it added to the whole experience beneficially.

Kris kept driving the story by pointing out how the plot needed to evolve, and it was quite exciting when Jack the Ripper, in truth Prince George August, once-removed relative to the royal family, threw himself from the platform when the XO tried to apprehend him.

Oh, and the Mayor did succeed in keeping his image clean. The reporter could not prove his story about the Mayor trying to mop up the murders secretly, and we had a nice denouement scene. Also, we had a great 'next week on ...' which really showed everyone where we would go into the shadowy history of our financial backer:

"My son, this secret has been kept by our family for generations...."