The Forge Archives

We started off a bit later than last time, but the following things happened... The whole session pretty much consisted of a single scene.

We added the following tenets:
We must keep ourselves in suspense (i.e. Not reveal anything until it becomes relevant)
A picture for a component counts as a trait that the component can draw on in all complications


To recoup, at the end of the last session, we had left our intrepid heroes traveling through the desert on their way to silver City to talk to the old miner.

While traveling, they saw six Crackshins keeping pace with the steamcoach. Skaz screamed "Crackshins!", since he has already had some crackshin action in his past.
Crackshin
Size of a Horse
Fast
Not Lupine
Not Reptilian
Six Limbs (all for running)
Large Serrated Beak
Can rip through steel
Pack Mentality
Scorpion Tail
Cunning
Scared of Fire
Single-minded
Master Component

Steamcoach
Fast
Armored

The crackshins divided themselves into three groups of two. The first pair rammed the coach, crashing it, and flipping it over. One of the crackshins injured its front leg in the process. The heroes managed to keep their cool, and for a couple of moment everything was quiet, as the crackshins circled the steamcoach, and our heroes waited.

Another pair of crackshins decided to open the tin-can to get to the tasty morsels inside, and in doing so, they started rocking the steamcoach, throwing the occupants off balance. They then started slicing through the walls of the steamcoach, and a claw caught the kid in the process, cutting off both of his legs. Both skaz and the girl were shocked by this, but Zodiac, as always managed to keep his cool.

The Cracshins completelly shredded the steamchoach, but in the process, they damaged the boiler, spilling burnning coals onto the scrub underneath, so that it caught alight. The crackshins were scared off by the fire, and two of them met their end by Zodiac's bullets as they ran away.

The heroes were now surrounded by a green blaze, and they realised that they were surrounded by 'hellscrub', a rare type of scrub that burns longer and hotter than coal, and very expensive.

Zodiac tried to pick up the kid, but a clump of hellscrub went off in his face, giving him first degree burns, and causing him to drop the kid. Seeing as they could only save themselves, Zodiac and skaz started running.

The girl belie4ved that her suit would protect her, so she tried to approach the flame. She did not know that the suit is prone to malfunctioning when exposed to high temperatures. As she did so, she slapped in one of the buttons, hoping that it would help in the situation.

As she got closer, the suit began malfunctioning, and she got badly burned, but the chip sh plugged in released a whole lot of endorphins and andrenaline into her system, so she did not notice. She did realize that the suit had started acting strangelly, and decided to run for it.

As she ran, they noticed that she left a clear trail behind her, which would not burn (What had happened: Since the suit was damaged, it started its self-repair routines, and absorbed what materials it could from the ground.) They used this to create a firebreak, and have a safe place to wait out the fire.

After the fire, they could not recover the kid's body, since it had burned up completelly in the blaze.

They started walking towards silver city, which they could see on the horizon.

Sometime later, a steamcoach with unidentified occupants drove past the burned wreckage.

About twelve hours outside of silver city, the three travellers, badly dehydrated by now (The suit tried to get what moisture it could from the air, to keep the girl hydrated), saw an ornithopter. They managed to get the pilots attention.

He landed, and shared what little food and water he carried with him among them. Fortunatelly for Zodiac and Skaz, the ornithopter transported burn ointement, because a huge explosion had happened at a mine outside Silver Creek.

The ornithopter could not take any passangers, but the driver promised to send some help when he got to town.

Commentary: As some of you may have realised, the entire session consisted of a series of Complications, which actually made for a fun session, very different from the first one, though. In this one, we did not progress the story by much, although we did flesh out the main characters a bit.

Cool tenet. Did you find that it helped? I've used something similar, where you can't create anything, except when it appears in the narrative flow (makes things even more purely storytelling).

Also, I've played sessions that were actually one big complication. This was using nested complications within it, but the idea is that the overall structure was set by the first complication, and the others built up to it. The point being that, while in this case, it didn't seem to advance the plot, that was just how you guys decided on the outcomes - it can be use to advance the plot if you like.

What I'm wondering, overall, is if there's any tentativeness with the new tenet towards advancing the plot? I've seen games sorta stall out like this, temporarily. Or were you all just more interested in stretching things out? Equally as plausible.

Mike