Actual Play - Mu's Bed One Shot

[Judd]

I ran a one-shot set in Marr'd, home of Mu's Bed, with the guys I began gaming with.  These were the guys who had long hair and wore Iron Maiden patches in Junior High and showed me my first gaming books.  Well, Rob wore an Iron Maiden patch...

Everyone who I've made up a character in Sorcerer with has said the same thing as I showed them the character sheet, "This is it?" and then spend their energy on making shit up rather than adding shit up.  It does its job.

There were frequent jokes about this being "hippie gaming" that Judd found on the net.

We talked about the world a bit and they asked about the tech level.  Jay commented that it was a "Masters of the Universe" tech level and I more or less agreed.  We talked about guns and having just gotten through most of Princess of Mars put in Radium pistols, more or less the equivalent of black powder weapons but as cool rayguns.

Jay had just read American Gods by Gaiman and was hyped to play an Odin clone.  Well, we worked it out and he was Odin himself.  Memory loss had set in (both of his Ravens were M.I.A.) and he wasn't sure but he figured that he had run from Ragnorok, looking for a place for his pantheon to reside.

His Demon was Loki, who was hiding in his eyeless socket in a tiny glass ball.  Jay told me he didn't want to know what Loki's powers were and so he left it up to me.

Rob made up a character he scrapped and then made up a Wild Desert Raider with a blood hungry parasite Demon with no voice, only a savage hunger for violence and bloodshed.  

They linked their kickers to Odin having just been nailed to a tree on a bet.  He bet a man that if he could live seven days crucified to a tree than he would get to hang him.  The man, Tomas, leader of an ambitious local bandit gang, took Rob's Desert Raider's lover, a Sorceress in her own right, into the Waste and welched on the bet.

So, they both wanted to chase this guy.  Once I had their kickers I sat down for about 20 minutes and wrote down some notes, about six encounters/landmarks and NPC's who they might or might not run into.

Loki possessed a kid in town and made the kid jump into a dry well after a neat conflict with Odin and for the rest of the night it was a constant tug of war between them.

They tracked the bandits, called the Nine Hell's Riders, to a series of caves and interrupted a few of the bandits as thy held a gun to the Sorceress' head and forced her to summon a Dragon.  The Dragon was coalesced and in its protective circle but the Binding wasn't complete but it had one of her severed arms in its mouth...

The battle was brutal as they ambushed the bandits and the summoning wnet awry.  One of the bandits was thrown to the Dragon and the Sorceress was killed by Rob's Desert Raider when he heinously missed a knife throw when one of the bandits was hiding behind her.

The combat was fast and fun and the unbound Dragon in the midst of it all made for a nice tension.  The only problem was that this should have been the final battle.  This fight was kick-ass and launched the game off well but all of the other combats afterwards suffered in comparison.

They found out that Tomas was not among these bandits but had left these bandits to summon the Dragon as he went forward for other goodies.

Exchanging a few words with his life as she gurgled out her final words they left the cave...but not before finishing the ritual and Binding the three-horned Dragon to Odin.

Next they came upon the Oasis town of Deep Well, a walled town that is built around the ruins of a bridge that ran over a Canal that had since dried up.  The Dragon wanted to run into the city, go through the wall knock over the towers and demand they pay tribute to his master.

The Desert Raider wasn't so sure this was a good idea and Odin was having a hard time convincing him.  Loki convinced his father that if he could control his tongue for but a few minutes he could convince the Desert Raider...

While holding sway over his father's tongue, Loki told the Dragon to wreak havoc on the city.  They watched in mute horror as the Dragon did its work, destroyed a wall and one of the towers fell in the distance.

What was left of the local law told them that they had killed their Lord, who went by the name of Hiemdall, who was dying under the wreckage even now.

To be continued...

[Zak Arntson]

Man, you don't know how happy I am drawing for this supplement. Oh, and Masters of the Universe tech-level. That's the best explanation ever.

So why would you have stopped with the death of the Dragon? And why didn't you?

[Judd]

The Dragon wasn't dead.  It ravaged the little town of Deep Wells and then strolled back out with hot stardust trailing out of its nostrils and blood on its horns.

The Wild Desert Raider was nothing short of pissed about the destruction in a town where he often watered his riding Worm.  They strolled in to assess the damage and there was Heimdal, under a piece of the bridge, dying.

He greeted Odin as the Highfather, asked if he could die fighting and so the Desert Raider handed him a sword and then slit his throat wth a knife.  His Demon was pleased and Loki was laughing.

Together, right there, they banished the Dragon.

That night Odin got drunk and told stories about Heimdal and how he was the best of them all and the Raider just got edgy.

Tomas and the Nine Hells' Riders?  They had left town a day prior, riding east on Worms, having just been hired to guard a caravan of water merchants heading into Lemuria.  He was shocked to find the cannister was filled with sand...no water.

When they found the caravan they waited until night and the Desert Raider snuck into camp while Odin tried to Contact his other son, Thor.

He got into camp and made quite a ruckus, turning over a water cannister onto some sleeping guards before making a mistake and being caught, five Radium Pistols pointed at his chest.

Odin called out to his son and failed.  Loki laughed again.  Before the Highfather was captured Loki talked to him about the fact that his story didn't make any damned sense.  If he was alive after Ragnarok, wouldn't that make him a coward, having run from the Final Battle?  Why was he on this other planet?

Odin told his son that the idea that he was Odin was all that he had left and Loki told him that it wasn't the whole truth but it wasn't far from the truth either.

Then the Riders caught him too.

In the end they discovered that the riders were waiting for their friends with the Dragon so they could take the caravan.  It wasn't water they were after but the Radium Cannon buried int he sand-filled water cannister.  The Nine Hell's Riders were going to take over this part of the Red Waste and declare themselves Lords.

Odin and the Desert Nomad were being sold to slavers and the adventure ended wtih them being carted off to Black Rock, to fight and die for the amusement of the worst Marr'd could offer.

As they were carted away Odin noticed some runes on the side of the Radium Cannon, it said, "Mljinor."

The End

(More system stuff later, I feel like I missed a bit here and there.)

[Robert Bohl]

I'm the guy who ran the wild desert raider.  His name was Sek Tithaine.  I gotta say one thing about this sytem:  It made combat really fun.  The "bonus" for describing your attack cinematically encouraged me a great deal and made for a visceral, bloody, funfun evening.

It may be a hippy system :), but it was a lot of fun.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

On the one hand, it's kind of a bummer to lose the hot sorcerer NPC babe to a failed roll, but on the other, it's the perfect solution to make a "miss" significant, and it has the You Fucked Up element of the Norse mythology written all over it.

I'm thinkin', though, I'm seeing a lot more omniverse and a lot less Marr'd/Mu in all of this. Probably that's the Odin influence; to me, especially after reading the draft of the Demon Alphabet for the Marr'd mini-supplement, it came way out of left field. I guess I would have liked to see the Atlantean whatnot developed rather than all this Norse stuff.

You sure hit that "villain kidnaps chick and flees across the wastes" Barsoom thing right on the head, though.

Best,
Ron

[Judd]

Yeah, admittedly Marr'd wasn't explored as much as I would have liked.  Looking back, I should have told the players what I wanted more clearly.  If I had stated my goal, to explore and adventure deep in the thick of Marr'd, it would have gone smoother.

As it was, exploring Marr'd was secondary to my primary goal: Play the Sorcerer System.  I know that next Friday I will run a game with a kicker or three that will put the group right in the heart of Mu's Bed, ready to rock and roll.

Jay's Odin and Loki combo really side-tracked me.  I dug the idea and spent mayhaps too much time on it.  

More to come as friends get red sand between their toes.