[Mob Justice] So long, Milo Blue

[Gregor Hutton]

OK, here is the AP of Mob Justice from GaelCon 2007.

I got 4 players who had signed up and they were all interested in playing and having a good time. We had two guys and two gals, and we were placed around a large table. (The table had been perhaps too big for some of the other, more intimate games, but was perfect for Mob Justice and much later in the weekend Umlaut.)

I briefly explained Mob Justice: modern-day Mobsters in an America where prohibition never ended. '20s cool in the 2000s. They really liked the hook and had a good idea of how they'd play their characters.

I had grabbed the 4 pre-gens from Iain's old GenCon 2005 (!) demo and there are two points out of that: (i) can we have a demo for MJ online?, (ii) even these bare characters were more than enough to show off the game.

The players all grabbed a random character and they got to add: (1) a loyalty to another PC, (2) another code of their choosing, (3) a skill at 3. I also told them that they could flip their characters from male to female if they so wished, but they didn't choose to do this.

I then drew a card from the deck to find out the level of their loyalties and codes one by one.

Everyone was now pretty happy with their characters and we started play.

I framed the scenario: their Boss has killed someone and a witness was an old guy called Milo Blue. Milo didn't want to rat on the Boss, but the Boss had ordered him to be killed, so Milo split and got protection from the Police.

The PCs were called and told to meet a mobster in the park, where they'd get further info. Two elected to turn up on time, and two were late (one finishing a good hand of poker, the other a drink or two at a speakeasy). Some nice playing "in character" and interaction as they get briefed on what they've to do.

A cop has ratted on Milo and told the Boss where they're keeping Milo tonight. A beach house up the coast, and there are 5-10 cops there. The Boss wants Milo dead and the message is that they are not come back until he is.

The gangsters get in the car, get tooled up, then drive up the coast. They're looking to pass the house and park further up the coast then head back on foot for the kill.

Conflict: I think the police are watching the roads to see anything suspicious, while the PCs try to avoid being seen. I throw in a chip and draw a hand, 7 cards discarding down to 5. One of the players throws in a chip and draws cards, discarding down to 5 too. Back to me and I raise. I drop two cards and draw two more. (You can discard as much of your hand as you like can't you? Or up to your "skill"?) The player folds to howls of abuse from the others! I show 4 Kings and the folding player gets to act smug for folding! The result is a win for the cops, and it's quite a lot of success. I say that the cops know: who they are, what they're packing, where they're going, and so on.

A player spends a story chip to add that the ratting cop knows too, and word will get back to the boss (kind of explaining why everything was blown if it goes wrong).

Very nice. The PCs drive on oblivious to this and then park their car a few miles up coast where I have them attacked by a couple of cops with a headlight and guns.

Conflict: The cops ambush the PCs and want to shoot them up, the PCs don't want shot, and at least one of them wants to shoot out the light. One of the PCs wins and gets a pile of chips, they also narrate the shots missing, everyone getting out the car and the light getting shot out.

In a follow-up conflict the PCs get rid of the two cops...

The PCs reach the beach house and I throw a chip away to state that one of the cops they can see is one of their brothers in law! Sarah responds by throwing away a story chip and says he's the ratting cop. Great!

The final climax scene is pretty cool. I add 3 story chips to my pile for it, and I have another 2 to add when they get to see Milo. The PCs battle the cops in a few interesting ways, one runs straight in guns blazing, another rams a car through the porch, Sarah's mobster sneaks in a side window, a molotov is thrown and bullets are flying on both sides. The play was very intuitive with people throwing in chips, seeing, raising and folding. The damage worked well too, we could have done with a few cheat sheets of poker ranks though!

The chips ebbed and flowed and in the end chips flowed my way as the cops got some good hands (just went that way) and the players bet on me having a hand of crap each time (maybe they should have folded and played for better hands?). Anyway, it ended up with two PCs chipped out and in the next conflict they put everything on one last attempt to kill Milo, which failed. (Everyone was aiding Two Punch Correlli who went all in, guns blazing. He walked into a lucky straight for me as I spent most of my accumulated story chips to get extra cards.)

The last PC had one chip left but didn't want to conflict with the cops getting Milo away safely, so we ended there. It was very enjoyable and it was pretty fair, sometimes that's just the way it goes. Everyone had the way to play figured out pretty quickly and it was fun not knowing what we had in our hands and knowing that the outcome depended on it.

Great stuff, and as I said elsewhere one of the players was wanting to order the game online the next day.

For info: the map I used was from my Lola Martin scenario