Road Trip AP - part 1

For the last several years I've been GMing a Genius: the Transgression game.  Genius is a fan-written game for the World of Darkness setting. Like the other WoD games are about monsters, Genius supports playing mad scientists.  We call our campaign We Don't Use The M-Word.  It's been a gonzo adventure of punching nazis across the globe, throughout time and space.  All at the request of a (possibly Jewish?) dinosaur landlord.

Earlier this year I began feeling creatively tapped out and stepped down from the GM role.  One of the players put his hand up to run a Suicide Squad game that lasted several action-packed weeks.  A combination of family business and a holiday recently took him away overseas for a month.  During the interval, I thought it would be fun to go back to Genius and run a short game.  Even less serious than the nazi-punching.

I tend to lean towards medium-crunchy games.  G:tT is at the high end of what I'd be willing to run.  With this game's short duration, I didn't think we'd need the full mechanics.  Instead, I opted to run the game in a Genius/Cthulhu Dark mashup I wrote: They Called Me Mad!   It's light enough that a full character write-up fits on an index card with space left over.

I put the ruleset together out of a fascination with the world of Genius and the mechanics of CD.  G:tT is a game with personal horror elements - as your power increases, you have to work to keep your human morality.  CD is explicit horror.  If your investigative career lasts long enough, you're almost guaranteed to go mad.  In the mashup, they're two sides of the same coin.  As your knowledge of universal secrets grows, your concern for humanity diminishes.  But this is a fun game, so we set aside the consequences of that evolution.  Instead, the characters get quirkier as they advance.

The premise of the game is a Wacky Races-style road race across the continental USA.  The organisers are a faction from the Genius sourcebook.  A club of Chinese-American mechanics fascinated by speed.  They race single-person vehicles across land, sea, air and space.  To join the club, prospective members must have a win in one of these races.  Their problem (in my game) is that the same people tend to win year after year and the club has had no new blood for a while.  There have also been disqualifications from some of the recent races for cheating.  It's a well-resourced club which is generous to its members.  Some of the entrants are more interested in its lab space than friendly competition.  The solution is the club's first team race.  All members of the winning team will gain membership.  

The race is in a series of five stages.  Each morning, the club will give every team a car.  Nothing out of the ordinary, just a second-hand car in reasonable condition.  The team will have four hours to mod it as they see fit, with both mundane and mad engineering.  Then all teams present their car at the starting line and the day's race begins.

The club's stepping up its usual scrutiny against cheating.  Messing with another team's car is against the rules.  Messing with another team's members, on the other hand...  There's an old and respected tradition of playing practical jokes on rival drivers.  Slashing an opponent's tyres is uncool.  But having pizza delivered to his room every hour on the hour to keep him awake all night? Legitimate psych-out tactic.  That's where we expect the game's fun to be.