Starting this February me an a friend of mine decided to conduct a series of monthly RPG demos - witch we named "Abre O Jogo" (because of our RPG/Boardgame Portuguese Portal) Demo Tour 2007 - with the purpose of trying to attract new gamers to the hobby and show old gamers new games.

Last month I ran a demo for SOTC.

Players/Characters
For reference, of the 4 players only one had bought the book and the other 3 had read the sample pdf. I had already GMed a couple of games but unfortunately neither was concluded.

Following Fred's advice I used pre-gens up to the 2nd step of character creation, with stunts and skills included. For this I used the iconic characters that are available in the Evilhat website, Grey Ghost, Sally Slick, Jet Black and Mack Silver.

Our first order of business (after a brief explanation of the rules and setting) was to make the novels, since there was 4 players we got to do the random casting thing and everything was great, I think the biggest complication was in the creation of Story Aspects (StA) Vs. Situation Aspects (SiA), foreseeing this I had already put a couple of StA in fazes one and two, but I still had to push a bit out of some of the players in order to get more (I don't think that this is a game flaw).

Anyway I think that this was really productive in order to get the players into the mindset of the game's pulp action atmosphere.

Game
Afterwards I asked them to fill some cards with what they thought were cool StA to use in the adventure and then randomly picked one from each of the players.

Stupidly I didn't wrote those down, so I don't remember specifically what they were, but it gave me something along the lines of a ancient cult being manipulated by Madame Gravity that revered a race of high-tech alien beings from another dimension (they were pygmies, yeah, alien high-tech pygmies from another dimension \m/) that they wanted to control in order to provide India with the technological resources to dominate the world!

The game play broke down into 3 scenes, since I was making everything on the fly somethings came out well, others... not so much.

Scene 1 - The players were all in a reception that the British appointed Indian ruler (BAIR) was giving in order to show of a recently discovered ancient and invaluable artifact, the player of Grey Ghost had a close relationship to him due to one of his previous novels and he invited the rest of his team mates with him. There was nice a brief scene were Mack Silver was trying to get his Indian Passion (StA) - a concubine of the BAIR that was promised to marry some other Indian Noble - out of the party in a stealthy manner, while Sally got pissed of at him and Jet tried to "comfort" her and at the same time sabotage Mack's attempt, Grey Ghost stood in a corner just going "oh my god..." about all of this.

Then the windows shattered and following the GMs advice in the book, MAD INDIAN NINJAS came crawling out of the woodwork, lead by a strange figure dressed in black wearing a powerful jet pack (better than Jet Black's has I made it very clear over and over again to the player).

They wanted to take the artifact, because it was important to their cult, and it gave me a good opportunity to use Minions and an NPC. Mainly from what I've gathered from my other games sometimes the players don't get to use a lot of Faith Points (FP), so I wanted to give them a good challenge in order to make them spend a lot of it and then I could get leverage for compels.

When the dust settled they had beat the NPC and the ninjas and were aware of the cults plans to open a gate to bring the aliens into our plane, they also new were their home base was and went for it.

Scene 2 - This one started great but it was, in my opinion the most fumbled one, mainly because I got GM block and didn't really knew what to do with it.

The compel fest started with Jet Black being First On The Scene, getting himself captured in a Hypnotism Machine (battle of resolve), when the others were rushing to save him Grey Ghost went for hi Marked For Death to get some of the cult members intercept them and go after him (they hated him from one of his novels).

Mack used his Contacting Stunts and skills to get the some soldiers of the British Army help them raid the compound, so they did by holding of the cult members who were defending it and the ones who were chasing Grey Ghost.

It then came down to the players facing a cult leader, an NPC who was using an artifact that allow Mysteries in stead of weapons to fight them, they interrogated him with a one-shift success and he spilled the beans about the giant fortress flying in the skies of Calcutta were the ritual was to take place. I should have used this one shift to tell them that once they were face to face with the portal they had one turn (more shifts meaning more turns) before the aliens started pouring into their dimension.

Scene 3 - I thought that they would wanted some scenes before the Big Fight to resolve some of those personal problems, like the Jet-Sally-Mack love triangle but they didn't went for it.

After gathering some support from the R.A.F. the storm on the Flying Fortress, witch was in fact the Tower Of Babel located on a platform held in the skies bye giant zeppelins (because you know, you really can't have an alternate history story without zeppelins) began. We had a nice minion battle against the flying jetpack squadrons of Madame Gravity and then the final show down, were they tried to disengage the dimension portal and fight her off at the same time.

Once that was done Madame Gravity activated the self-destruction mechanism, but Jet Black using his Nick Of Time aspect stopped her, and this was when I felt bummed (?, I don't really know the correct english expression for this feeling). I thought that it would be pretty cool to have the Fortress crashing down on Calcutta and the PCs having to pull some sort of wacky-last-second-hero-style-save-the-city-plan, but since he won the roll we had none of that and I didn't felt like pulling my GM ranks and say "Yeah well, this happens any way, so there.". Maybe the way we handle it was right, but I still can't shake it, any thoughts/advice/suggestions on this?

Remarks
The players reeeeally engaged the whole compel/invoke system of the FP, I mean at a certain point they were like "ok, I tag this aspect to give me a +2 bonus" to witch I replied "yeah that's cool, but don't you want to roll first to see if you need it *wink/smile*?". I think I tried to "bribe" them just one or two times because after those they were all for it and kept asking me to bribe them instead and created really cool scenes, like Jet's "ok, bribe me for my First On The Scene" witch I did and that lead to Sally "ok, then I tag my Jet's In Trouble... geez!" they did this like 2/3 times, really great.

So system wise I think they all got it and enjoyed it.

Afterwards one player said that the game was cool but that D&D was better, he's an old time D&D fan so I wasn't really chocked by his reaction especially because I got the feeling during play that this kind of pulpy setting wasn't his favourite dish, or maybe I just didn't presented it well enough. Another one I think still has mixed feelings, he enjoyed the FP mechanics but on the other hand this style of indie gaming isn't really were wants to be, so it could be worst. The other two players liked it a lot and - my personal favourite moment - there was this guy who came just to see the demo and stayed the entire time also had a lot of fun and we semi-arranged a future session for him to play.

So all in all it was a good gaming afternoon, maybe some things could have gone better, especially if I had some previous SOTC-on-the-fly experience (and yeah, the StA sure gave me a lot to build with, couldn't have done it without them) but it's definitely a game I'm bringing with me for those "just in case" events and that I'm showing to every first time players.

Diogo Curado