Today at a local geek picnic fest, I started a game of Universalis. Four of us hadn't played it before, two of us had.

My friend Sandy, the other one besides me who had, kicked us off with another great opener, which might make a good demo starter in much the same way as the infamous "Orion needs to be saved."

"Knifflers must never be seen."

After that, the suggested tenets were that it is the 1970s in Great Britain (I contributed a "No Austin Powers jokes" social contract tenet), guns are legal, and then someone threw in as a tenet "Sid loves Nancy." Then someone else kicked in "Johnny Rotten is a government agent." It grew from there.

Ten years ago a mysterious virus genetically mutated a significant fraction of the human population into anthropomorphic animals and also granted paranormal powers. Knifflers anthropomorphic animal art and artifact thieves and are wanted by Interpol; they're stolen Big Ben and stored it in an alternate dimension to protect its steel infrastructure from abuse by anthropomorphic dogs (when I protested, the tenet proposer allowed as how this was what they gave as the reason but they might not necessarily be sane), and Sid has a device that will allow it to be recalled. He wants to give it to Nancy. However, Nancy doesn't love him; she had an affair with Johnny Rotten and is still sweet on him. Another character, Kiki, has guns, is a Kniffler, but has double-crossed the Knifflers (and Johnny Rotten thought he'd killed her) and, in play, was revealed to have teleportation powers. There is also a group called SKAT, for "Stop Kniffler Art Thefts," a civilian protest group thought to have government instigators. Johnny Rotten has the mission to retrieve Big Ben. Sid Vicious is an anthropomorphic weasel, and Nancy was later defined in-game as being an anthropomorphic bear. (There were a number of other tenets, too, but most of them turned out not to come up in actual play.)

The session started with Johnny, on a rooftop, attempting to shoot Sid, which immediately started us off with a complication. I introduced a character named Farrah, a Cockney anthropomorphic tigress SKAT agent provocateur with pyrokinetic abilities, to come into the conflict on Sid's side, and we rolled off. Farrah knocked the gun from Johnny's hands with a fireball, then leaped onto the roof with him. Nancy, on the street, saw Johnny and Farrah together and started coming up at the same time Johnny and Farrah started coming down. Meanwhile, Kiki went into Sid's flat to retrieve the device from him, another complication (to which I contributed "The device is sticky" to Sid's side). She got it away from him, but it started to activate before she got it shut down again.

In the other building, Farrah and Johnny encounter Nancy, try to push past her but fail. Sid falls out his flat's window and lands in a manure truck, then runs after Nancy and tried to get her to come away. (A large unintelligible Scot comes out of an apartment, hits Sid with a frying pan, and yells in Gaelic with only one understandable word: "bath". "But I'm not for Bath," a bewildered Sid says.).

Kiki takes the device to the roof, it gets too heavy for her, she drops it, it lands in the street, and it turns into Big Ben. Which chimes noon. Then the originator of the scene ended it, and it was time to pack up and go.