Intro

Intrigued by the recent discussions about drills and having some time to spend with my mother and two brothers, I suggested a "quick" game of The Great Journey, by Bill Masek.
My brothers occasionally play RPGs with me or with friends, but my mother had never played. They liked the idea and since I presented it as an exercise, my mum felt comfortable to "learn" RPGs with a gentle start.

As my experience tends to show, complete newcomers to RPGs have no trouble whatsoever with "story" games. This was yet again evidenced by my mother taking the initiative to start and thus frame who the character would be and where his journey would start.
She decided we would play a certain Hike Morn trying to reach the north pole in the perpetual night of the arctic winter.

Actual play

Play proceeded smoothly for some time, with the kinds of obstacles people are expected to meet at the north pole. But soon, the game took on a silly bent, to our great rejoicing, with Hike Morn having to help a mother ice bear give birth under difficult conditions (my mother is a nurse...), him getting lost in a labyrinthine ice cavern and getting outside again by burning bits and pieces and following the smoke and having to cross an ice wall.
That's when it really took off. My mother confirms he mood for wackiness and narrates our multitalented explorer digging a hole through the wall and arriving in... Australia! Immediately he was assaulted by barking kangaroos (!) and we continued with a fantastical trip up to Mongolia, Hike Morn falling in love with a woman explorer in the Australian desert, swimming across the ocean up to Borneo, getting captured by man-eaters, having to outrun the Singaporean mafia, getting out of a nervous breakdown thanks to an exiled Falun Gong master, bribing Chinese border guards and surviving the flooding of the Three Gorges dam.

At some point, our character was sprawling in complete exhaustion in the Mongolian steppes. Florian had to continue and narrated him falling to sleep and drifting into a restless sleep of delirious dreams... waking up again in the ice cavern! The toxic smokes after having burned all the crap he had was responsible for the whole trip outside the arctic.

The explorer then continued his journey onwards. After nearly an hour of playing, we were getting tired, so my mother narrated him being bolstered by the memory of his dream-world explorer love and finally reaching the north pole. He then activated a distress beacon and was saved at the last minute by a rescue team (the distress beacon was a recurring element).

Conclusion and observations

What I've got to say is: wow! holy shit! What an absurd and amazing story we just told!

I'd like to play the game again, perhaps even using it regularly to introduce people to RPGs, perhaps making the rules a bit more restrictive or enforcing them in a stricter way.

For instance, we used very similar threats more than once (hunger & thirst for example). We also had our explorer be saved on a number of occasions by outside agents. I now realize that the rules as written don't allow these two things anyway.
I also noticed that we didn't heed the general rule that there must be an escalation event after event. This would have been more difficult and made for a shorter game (or it would have brought us into silliness of cosmic dimensions...)

We also broke the rule of consistency in a subtle way, when Florian countered Michael's ingenious use of smoke to get out of the labyrinth by giving it a whole new interpretation. Nevertheless, we thought the plot twist was really interesting and would lead to a more plausible end, so we decided to go on anyways.

All in all, I think the game's structure works very well: it is easy to understand and use and furthermore makes perfect sense. I can also see how it qualifies as a drill and recognize the use of such play to train our imaginations. I will play this or other drills with my regular group as well.

Nice shot Bill!