Sign In Stranger- Life on Zharm

[Willow]

So, we started up our game of Sign in Stranger today.  We used the playtest pdf from 2007 I found on the web, but used a few updates I recalled from Forge Midwest- particular using the folding paper for planet creation.

Our colonists were:

Sylvia, a late-20s, punk tattoo artist and recovering heroin addict.  (Me)
Malaki, a bald, overweight ex-con, failed bank robber, released from Waupon prison to go to space. (Tim)
Isador, a Brazilian door-to-door Bible and Encyclopedia sales man, fascinated with the sexual habits of aliens (Brendan.)
Cor, a former minor-league baseball player.  (Sabe)

Out of the initial four planets, we chose the planet Zharm, inhabited mostly by Skendar with pockets of Corpulons.  Zharm is a gas planet, filled with small floating islands.  The Skendar extrude Hallucinogenic Pheremones, which they keep in check by wrapping themselves with layers of multicolored scarves- but they are also slovenly and messy.  The Corpulons are large fat, oozing creatures, that have a powerfully noxious stench, but at least they're very generous.

Zharm needs Voloreks, which roughly are Exterior Designers and Landscapers.  It involves in someway small pose-able statues.

Our strangers made landing at the spaceport.  Looking for an information booth, Cor and Malaki got lost in some sort of Corpulon bathroom/sewer system/mass transit system??? where Corpulons jumped into a drain filled with bodily fluids.  Sewer monkeys ate various things, Cor and Malaki lost the box of money (strange colored coins), and were flushed away.

Some time was spent getting comfortable in their lodgings- there's no bedrooms, but everyone has their own luxurious bathroom.  The neighbors are very strange- Sylvia went next door, fell in a big pit, started yelling 'fuck,' so they assumed she wanted to have intercourse.  She didn't, and got the heck out of there.

We've decided we're going to do blog posts for the personal logs.  Here's mine:  http://inkstranger.wordpress.com

[Emily Care]

Hey Willow,

This is great! I love the contrasts in the world of flowing, etherial nature of the islands in the layers of the gas giant, with the squelchy, fluid sewer chutes and the oozy Corpulons.  Hallucinogenic pheremones.  Wow, that is quite the ride you're in for.

Isador should have a good time on the planet--a born salesman with a penchant for the xenokink.  I'm curious to see what the down and outers, Sylvia the heroin addict and Malaki the ex-con, do with their new start. And how they rub along with Cor the minor league'r.  All-American, flushed away into this crazy alien place.

Some time was spent getting comfortable in their lodgings- there's no bedrooms, but everyone has their own luxurious bathroom.  The neighbors are very strange- Sylvia went next door, fell in a big pit, started yelling 'fuck,' so they assumed she wanted to have intercourse.  She didn't, and got the heck out of there.

Oh, man.  Are the neighbors Skendars? At least that means they are friendly. Right?

best,
Em

[Emily Care]

The weblog for the personal log is a great idea. I'm super-curious about this:

Our house is wierd.  There's a pit, a kitchen, a living room, and four badass bathrooms.  These are like the best fucking bathrooms ever.  We're sleeping in them.  Maybe we'll build some beds and put them in there.  THere's enough fucking room.

What are those bathrooms like?

[Willow]

The bathrooms are the most perfect bathrooms ever.  It's like the Skendar asked the Xsians what the bathrooms should look like for humans, so the Xsians found some mansion or CEO model or something.  When everything else goes wrong, at least we have our bathrooms.

In game terms, we nervously asked what the bathrooms look like... and pulled "nirvana" from the cup.

Yup, neighbors are Skendar.

[Willow]

We played a second session of this tonight.  I'm going to hold off on doing a full plot rehash here; the big talking points were that the colonists distributed the manequins across the planetoid, with varied results, Isador tried to have sex with a Skendar-manequin, a possible Skendar religious-cultural divide was encountered, Cor got the Corpulon environment suit cleaned up and went out exploring, and ended up working a day with the other Corpulons trying to evade parasitic cookies, and later teaching them to play baseball.

Overall, the session wasn't as compelling as our first.  I think there's a number of reasons for this- often it seemed we were rehashing the same information, with less opportunities to explore new areas.  Also, we tried to engage the rules more, which created some confusion.  Third, the questions really seemed to drag on.  I felt like we were fairly generously awarding ourselves check boxes, and we reached the first turning point on many of our questions, but it feels like we can't resolve anything, and we're still at the same place we were at the start of the session.

Some rules questions:

It was confusing when to go to Investigation, when to go to Conflict, when to pull cards from the jars, and when to just author stuff.  Pulling words seems to be the most fun, so we did that the most.  When colonists were interacting with aliens and aliens were being played, it was hard to not author world elements while speaking as an alien.  The card-based forms of resolution seem less fulfilling so far.

It's hard to find some rules elements.  Impairment vs. Injury, for example.  Speaking of Injury, three of the four colonists, including the doctor, got injured, so if I read it right, the fourth one is the only one who can do Investigation or Conflict until Sylvia gets healed (which will be soon.)
Another hard point to find is Assimiliation.  The only reference to Assimilation increasing was as a result of long term injuries, which is a little funny.  My gut reaction is that it seems like there should be another way.

In general, we had fun, but it was a lot more work this time around.