Horrible House playtest

I've written a procedural OSR-style adventure in the vein of Emmy Allen's Stygian Library. Having just come off a Shadowrun campaign, my Tuesday night gaming group are letting me run a playtest game. We're playing via Roll20 at the moment, our rooms at the local university having been shut down as a coronavirus measure.

The idea is that the characters enter a generally normal-seeming Victorian mansion with a chained angel at its heart and things get stranger and more threatening as they move further inside. I copied Emmy's depth mechanic almost unchanged.

This is all being done using Ben Milton's Knave as the system, with a few houserules. The characters are starting the adventure at level 3 because I'm not sure the players are ready to embrace the cheapness of life in OSR games just yet.

The characters are:

Maximus (Max) Johnson, played by James K. A student, mostly of ways to make other people's property into his property. Has been exiled in the past.

Adelaide, played by Tim. A gambler, who has been disowned.

Iris MacLeod, played by Theo. A herbalist who is suspected of crimes.

Castor, played by Mila. A poverty-stricken magician who carries around a hen named Eggrietta.

Karros Shepherd, played by James C. A tracker who has been replaced in his job.

The party started on the front porch. They needed to enter the house to find out what happened to the delegation of clergy they were supposed to accompany as a cover. They also had instructions to retrieve the magic tome Ivan Vantig (the owner) used to snare an angel.

There was no-one visible from the porch, just a swing seat creaking in the morning breeze. Adelaide and Iris approached, and the seat cast Charm. Adelaide successfully resisted but Iris sat down and the swing seat launched her into the air, inflicting 1d6 damage. She picked herself up and the party entered.

At depth 1 they found themselves not in a foyer or entrance hall, but in a portrait gallery. Max tried taking one of the several brass candelabra lighting the paintings, but it squirmed out of his grip. It backed away from the party, but stayed close, helpfully attempting to illuminate whatever they looked at. They were distracted from examining the paintings by their shadows, who were doing their own thing rather than mimicking the characters' actions. The shadows were miming their normal morning routines, so the characters wrote it off as odd but harmless. They proceeded into the next room.

Depth 2 found them in the house's private theatre, which the Vantig children had clearly been using as a playroom. There was a small pile of toys on the stage. Looking through them, Iris and Adelaide found a pair of earrings and a necklace. They might be costume jewellery, but they have the weight of the real thing, so they split the pieces between them and wore them to save inventory space. They also found a sheet of paper which had symbols scribbled on either side. The characters recognised one as a name in angelic script: Nelphael. The other is the demonic glyph AGA, meaning confinement.

(I made a mistake here. I made the players roll to recognise the symbols when I should have just given Castor the magician's player the information.)

There were a couple of (non-creepy) dolls in the pile, one with a button eye hanging loose from a thread. Castor repaired it as a gesture of good will in case the dolls came to life and tried to stab them in their sleep later. That took long enough for a random encounter roll and they found themselves attacked by three Wig Beasts. Springing from among the costume equipment, I gave the beasts surprise. It took two full rounds to put them down, during which Iris took more damage. (I took the Wig Beast damage die down to 1d4 when I realised these creatures which I intended to be just an annoyance were a genuine threat.)

Iris and Adelaide (who were co-incidentally the front line for the battle) both lost big tufts of hair to the beasts' attempts to sink tap roots into their scalps. Iris was hurt badly enough to take 10 minutes to prepare a dose of her healing herbs. There was no encounter during that turn. The candelabrum, which had followed them from a previous room, accidentally set the stage curtains on fire. They managed to pull it down and stamp it out before it spread.

It was a game with a lot of prep, so that was as far as we got. Tonight's session continues from there.

Wizard Squad AP and an adventure

Recently I got a chance to playtest Wizard Squad with my usual group and give them a chance to break my game. The lesson for me in this is 'be careful what you wish for'.  The scenario we played was The Doom that came to Springhill.  Click the name there to download a copy. 

Character creation

The usual suspects were present: Tim, Theo, James 1 and Mila.

Character creation was relatively straightforward, but I had difficulty explaining the magic system concepts: your techniques and forms describe the magic your wizard knows, you can custom-build any spell that draws on those practices, each morning you choose the spells that will be available to you to cast for that day. Effectively it's Vancian magic, but it eliminates pre-written level-based spell lists. The players seemed to like that idea.

Tim rolled up Smith Johns, a relatively hardy wizard with magic techniques in Harming/Diminishing and Person. His specialty was Bureaucracy and his advantage was Reputation. We decided that he was quite a legalistic magic user who had successfully taken a number of minor nobles to court.

Theo created Desmond Aster, Des to his friends. His techniques were Summon, Transform, Spirit and Beast. He immediately created a spell to turn people into sheep. He also asked if it was possible to interpret spirits as distilled spirits and create a spell of summon whiskey. We agreed that it was only logical. His specialty was languages and his advantage Official Contacts, so he came from a diplomatic background.

James 1 made The Great Kazaam. His techniques were Heal/Enhance and Person. Unfortunately he rolled the lowest possible HP, so he wouldn't be doing much healing. His advantage was a spirit companion named Fred, who no-one else could see or hear. They just thought The Great Kazaam was kind of weird, but knew things.

Mila rolled up Me Reana, a sorceress with magic for Move, Element, Person, Beast. She immediately created a spell to give flight to flightless animals, a second one to suck spirits into jars to capture them and another she called Earthbending. Her specialty was investigation and her advantage was a minor magical item. After some negotiation we agreed that she had a bag of holding, but the opening was too small for anything larger than her fist.

Des then asked me if it was possible to create a spell to transform spirits into whiskey so they could be sucked into Me's bottles and stored as a refreshing drink in her pouch of holding. I reluctantly admitted that the rules could be interpreted to allow it, but I planned this as a serious game and meant to veto any magic that seemed too ridiculous. Everyone agreed, knowing full well that my games turn ridiculous no matter what my intentions are.

The squad was dispatched to the tiny isolated village of Springhill, where children were vanishing and monsters have been seen in the woods.

The game

The party arrived in Springhill where the mayor’s man failed to meet them as arranged. They headed for the pub, where they learned that talk about monsters abducting or eating children made the innkeeper nervous and he clammed up. At least they got their drinks for free.

They found the mayor, who was riding back into town from negotiating with a mercenary company encamped by the main road. There’s nothing for miles around, so the concern is that the company is here to sack the town. The mayor gave them details about the missing children and their families and the squad went off to investigate.

Talking to the families they learned that all three of the vanished children spent their free time around a swimming hole upriver, and also that a season earlier there had been a late-night display of weird lights over the hill that gave the town its name. They checked out the swimming hole and saw nothing unusual until Me earth-bent the river bed to rise and show itself above the water line. Then they found a number of fish with pig-like features and river weed that seemed to be budding pig fetuses instead of seed pods. The squad theorised that the disappeared children had become the monsters seen in the woods, and it was something in the water that changed them.

Smith issued the river a ticket for concealing evidence, and a receipt for the items they seized for investigation. The other sorcerers began to understand why a successful wizard like him got sent on an investigation at the arse-end of the kingdom.

They travelled upriver, looking for the hillside spring that was its source. All of them struggled inside the cave mouth against the water’s flow, but Smith lost his grip and got swept nearly a mile downriver before he could leave the water. He issued it a ticket for impeding an officer of the law in his duties. The others pushed on, but soon found the way impassable. Kazaam had the idea of letting Des change him into spirit form so he could continue through the spring. [Ordinarily I would have said no to this because Des didn't have that spell on his prepared list, but the game had a fairly strict time limit and I felt like we needed to move things along.] Exploring in this form, he soon found himself halted by a barrier of invisible force. He called the others up and with Des’ help he had the power to force his way through. That weakened the barrier enough for Des to follow. Me earth-bent an alcove next to the force wall where someone could work out of the water flow, and went after them.

Smith arrived, recognised Me’s alcove for what it was and pushed on. The barrier could only offer token resistance at this point. He scrawled a hasty ticket and dropped it as he hurried past.

Moving ahead of the squad, Kazaam entered a large dry room with unmistakable old-kingdom construction. He spotted lights and raised voices in the distance. Des used a spell to give himself the appearance of a spirit - invisibility - and joined him. They found the room was a grid of stone vats filled with a milky fluid in which a herd of pigs were growing to maturity with unnatural speed. The voices were a trio of men slaughtering and butchering full-grown pigs.

Kazaam flew close and ordered them to stop. The oldest man waved a hand through his immaterial body and told him that no, he didn’t think they would. He sent one of the younger ones to fetch help. Kazaam sent Fred the spirit to follow him, but he lost track of the man in the darkness and twisting pathway out of the hill.

Des recognised enough of the old-kingdom glyphs on the walls to have a good chance at deactivating the room without destroying it. He went for it, and successfully turned off the controlling device overhead. The vats hardened into milky glass and went inert. The two remaining men tried to make a fight of it, but Des turned them into sheep.

The session ended there, but in the postscript the wizard squad went on to arrest a local farmer and his two sons, along with the mayor and the innkeeper. Deprived of the supplies they needed to cross the northern wasteland and attack a keep from the blind side, the mercenaries threatened to sack the town, but Des offered to fix their provisioning problem by turning the first half dozen men to reach for their weapons into mutton. The three missing children were rounded up and after several months of intensive research, returned to human form by the wizard academy.

Conclusions

Playtests never take place under ideal conditions, have you noticed? In this case we didn’t have our usual rooms at the university, so we played outside in the courtyard. The weather was good for it, but the sun went down and we were reduced to squinting and using our cellphone lights to read character sheets until the overhead lights came on - after we finished. With the venue problem, transport issues and character creation, we didn’t get started until late. It was only intended to be one session, so it had to be a 90-minute game.

I threw out a whole bunch of clues, some useful and some not. I intended to curse the players with an overabundance of evidence and force them to sort through it all. Instead (perhaps because they chose to investigate the spookiest clues first), they bypassed most of the mystery and headed straight for the problem’s source inside the hill.

By running Wizard Squad I learned that:

• Players suffer from the blank page problem and need some prompting to start coming up with their own spells. 
• But once they get into the swing of things you can’t stop them inventing new spells and wanting to try them out immediately.
• Players with a D&D background got the magic system immediately. Other players needed more of an explanation. Is it still a one-page game if you bundle it with an adventure, an extended bestiary and a couple examples of play? 
• The game is unplayable without houseruling, which is pretty much what I expected. 

House rules

These were all developed through play.

• The standard die for magic is a d4. Healing? D4 + level HP. Transforming? D4 + level minutes at base cost. 
• Some effects revert back after the spell wears off, some don't. Rule of common sense applies.
• Some spells require a roll to cast, some are automatic. Once again, rule of common sense.
• Players want to experiment with new spells as they come to mind, even if they're not playable that in-game day. The compromise I came up with is to allow a flashback to the wizard academy, where the character tries the spell out for the first time. The player must make a roll. If they miss the target by three or more, it's an undershoot. Roll a d6 and consult this table:
  
  1 - 3 - spell fails and accidentally ruins another student's experiment.
  4 - 5 - spell fails and the PC looks foolish, under-prepared, or over-confident in front of academy staff.
  6 - spell misfires and there's property damage or injury.
  
  If they exceed the target by three or more, it's an overshoot. Roll a d6 and consult this table:
  
  1 - 3 - spell succeeds and the PC looks organised, confident and in control.
  4 - 5 - spell succeeds and the PC impresses a senior wizard.
  6 - spell succeeds and reveals a hidden truth that solves a question the academy has been struggling with for months.

The Golden Sea AP (part 2)

Link to part 1.

It was late when the skiff approached the Drugtown docks and there weren't many people around.  There was a sign advising visitors not to leave the area without making arrangements with the dock master, so they went looking for him.  They found him in his office, high as balls and dead to the world.  One of the characters had an ability that allowed him to remove stress from another character, and we agreed that it could be used in this case to bring him down from his high and make him responsive.  The character did, and the master woke up, angry at the world because of his dissipated buzz and ready for an argument.

He told them he couldn't give them a permit without sampling their cargo for contraband.  "Contraband?  What's contraband in a town that manufactures drugs?"  "Trouble-maker, huh?  I'll keep an eye on you."  They briefly considered giving him the contaminated chocolate as a sample, but decided against.  He sampled an entire bar, then asked for more samples, to be checked over at a later time.  Instead, they showed him their dead bandit leader.  That changed his tone a little, and he agreed to let them proceed into town.

Sherlock made a roll to figure out where in town they were likely to get the best bounty for a dead bandit.  His roll was at +3 for Mental stat, +2 for an ability and +1 for the hometown advantage.  It was a good result, he remembered the details of the different gangs running the town from his childhood there, including one who particularly hated raiders.  He went by the name Dr Feelgood and his headquarters was up on the hill.

They headed up that way and managed to get in to see Dr Feelgood's secretary, who went by the name Butthead. He was a big guy in leather and a mohawk, so it wasn't immediately obvious what qualified him to be a secretary.  Maybe he was the only one in the gang who didn't eat the pencils.  Butthead told them the doctor wasn't seeing anyone today, and the smartest thing to do was leave the bandit with him and come back for their reward later.  The party immediately pegged that he was trying to cheat them out of the reward.  Yu Tuu tried to intimidate Butthead by opening his coat to show a brace of grenades underneath, but failed the roll.  The room was lined with ratty curtains and they immediately heard the click of a gun being cocked from behind one of them.  Sherlock talked to Butthead like a fellow Drugtown boy to tell him it was all just a stupid joke and the tension eased.  He negotiated a deal by which the party got to see Dr Feelgood immediately and Butthead got 10% of the bounty.

The doctor was brusque with them at first, but once again Sherlock used his hometown advantage to turn the interview into a performance, making him laugh with the story of the first bandit's failed attempt to climb their railing before getting smacked off his bike, and the sideswipe that killed the leader.  Some good rolling increased the bounty by 50%.  The reward turned out to be four bullets suitable for Sherlock's gun, some ancient army field rations (still in original foil packaging) and a set of matched Garfield-print coffee mugs.  They left the body with the doctor and left, paying off Butthead as they went.  He was happy to have something from ancient times to trade at the big market two days from now.

The party went back to the skiff to sleep.  Before turning in, Idonou fired up his ancestral heirloom laptop and created a spreadsheet to figure out profit percentages, putting together a plan to maximise their return at the market.  The crew went to sleep in the cargo hold, leaving Nameless on watch with a pair of night vision binoculars borrowed from Sherlock.  That was a good plan because near the end of his watch he spotted a couple of figures in black sneaking up to the boat.  He yelled for the others, waking them immediately, but also alerting the two skulkers.  They rushed him, pulling knives as they came.  He knocked one off the ramp with his pole, but the other reached him and dealt a minor wound with his knife.  After that, the others were on deck and Sherlock won initiative.  He made a difficult called shot and killed the raider with a single bullet in the forehead.  Nameless jumped down to the sand to threaten the second one with his pole.  That one considered the odds and surrendered, dropping his knife.  They tied him up.

Yu Tuu did a good job of intimidating him by pretending to pull a grenade's pin and dropping it in his lap.  He swore that they weren't working for anyone, a guy in the bar sold them the information that there was a skiff in dock with a valuable cargo and they just meant to steal.  Nothing more complicated than that.  It seemed like the truth, so Valium untied him and told him that since he wanted the chocolate so bad, he could have it.  He brought up the box of contaminated bars and informed the bandit it would cost him all the barter he had.  He went pale but reluctantly agreed to return home and fetch it all.  Yu Tuu and Idonou went with him to keep him honest.

It turned out that 'home' was a grotty flophouse where the town's poorest citizens sleep.  The bandit admitted that he didn't have any barter -- but he'd talk to his friends and they'd be sure to loan him some.  Yu Tuu and Idonou got his mark on an IOU, which meant that if they didn't see him again, they could sell the debt to one of the town's slavers.  They made sure he took the chocolate with him.

They returned to the skiff and all was quiet again until the third shift, when a rumble of approaching hoverbikes woke them all.  It was the three remaining bandits from earlier, coming at them from the desert side.  They didn't bother with stealth, they darted closer and threw molotovs, occupying the crew with putting out the flames.  They drove erratic circles around the skiff, ducking and weaving to make themselves harder targets for Sherlock's pistol.  Nameless smacked one off his bike with a pole.  Yu Tuu tossed a grenade and managed to take out the remaining two in a single explosion.  Idonou chased the downed bandit down to the sand, only to find he was wriggling underneath the skiff.  He called the information up to the deck and Valium took the skiff's controls, cutting the antigrav.  It settled to the ground, squishing the bandit under its prow.

The crew buried all the body parts they could find in shallow graves under the dock and claimed their hoverbikes.  One was in good shape, and the other two were repairable.  The session ended there, but the characters made a good profit off their chocolate and salvage at the Drugtown market and finished their trade run covered in glory.

The Golden Sea AP (part 1)

I'm part of a gaming club that uses rooms at a local university.  This is the time of year the university gets an influx of new students, so the club puts aside campaigns for three weeks while the students are on orientation and runs one-shots to let new gamers try out roleplaying.  This week just past I ran a one-off of The Golden Sea.

Golden Sea is a one-page microgame written by Grant Howitt.  Every month he writes a free 1PG and releases them via Patreon.  Grant is the name behind other games like Drunken Bear Fighter, Honey Heist and Pride And Extreme Prejudice.  Most of them lend themselves well to quick, light-hearted sessions.  Golden Sea is one of the more serious examples. (If you want to try it yourself, I really have to recommend J. Wagnaar's redesigned version.  Grant releases games as an angled photo of a collage document.  It's a unique look and I guess it's his signature style, but I personally find them difficult to read.)

Characters get three stats: Physical, Social and Mental.  Numbers are generated by rolling 5D6 and removing both the highest and the lowest.  The remaining numbers get assigned as the player prefers.  There are also eight Paths which each have three Abilities.  Each player selects two Paths for their character and chooses an Ability from each.  It's a very simple system, but the Paths and Abilities make it possible to differentiate characters well.  Task resolution is by rolling 1D20 +stat +any Ability that seems applicable vs a target number.

The setting is post-apocalyptic, but so far past its apocalypse that it's retreated into myth.  My big mistake of the evening was not communicating that aspect of it to the players.  When I described it as post-apocalyptic, they imagined a Mad Max-style chase across the desert.  There were five characters: Idonou, Yu Tuu, Sherlock Holmes, Valium and Nameless.  If you think the names reflect how serious the game was going to be, you would be right.  I went with it, although it would have been nice to explore the implied setting and I might suggest it to my regular group the next time our current GM is out of town.

As well as the Golden Sea rules, I had an oracle app for my phone to give me random ideas, and a copy of Joel Priddy's Knave Fancypants document which includes the Buildings Are People hex exploration rules.

I started the session by informing the players that they were a company of traders,with an antigravity skiff loaded up with chocolate bars from the last working factory in the area and their job was to travel through the characters' home towns swapping the chocolate for barter and returning with a load of water from the only river in the desert.  The players all marked the characters' towns on the map, and the logical choice for first stop was Sherlock's town.  I asked him what the settlement's major resource was:

"Drugs."

Well, okay then.  During the final discussion before starting the players introduced a couple of complications for the characters which I was happy to adopt.  First, they had to keep the chocolate from melting in the desert sun, and secondly they couldn't move diagonally across map squares, only horizontally or vertically.  That meant that drugtown was the only settlement within reach of the company's skiff with the provisions they had.  Valium suggested rationing their supplies to reach a second town (on the map its resource appears to be 'volcano') but the other characters vetoed that idea.

Before starting I consulted my oracle and informed Valium that one of the company owners took him aside on the final night before they were scheduled to leave and told him that one carton of chocolate (subtly marked on one corner) was from a production run that got contaminated in the machinery and it could potentially make people sick.  They still had to sell it, but it was his responsibility to make sure it went to a customer far away from the home town so they'd be less likely to make trouble.  Valium instantly told the other characters, because they were all in it together.  None of them objected to making the sale.  Margins were tight, they needed a profit.

I rolled for weather and got a result of 'worsening from yesterday'.  I ruled that meant clouds and wind, with the potential for a sandstorm to develop if it picked up further.  The characters were cheerful enough, clouds made it that much easier to keep the chocolate solid.  They left early in the morning, had no encounters, and enjoyed an uneventful day.  The weather steadily worsened over the next few days, but the threatened sand storm never arrived, and eventually there was a sudden change back to sunny skies.  That raised the prospect of the chocolate melting, so they rigged a cover out of white sailcloth to keep direct sunlight from hitting it.  That worked and they were able to proceed.

That same day the dice ruled for an encounter and they noticed a column of smoke in the distance.  Sherlock had picked a set of binoculars as his starting equipment.  He checked for the source, but found it was below the horizon.  If they wanted to know what it was, they'd have to turn aside from their route and maybe add an extra day to their trip.  They were on their last day of supplies, so voted to leave it and continue on to drugtown.

They never saw it, but the smoke was from another trading skiff that had been brought down by desert raiders on hoverbikes.  On the map, they were now on a direct line between the crash site and drugtown.  Sherlock had described it as a town run by opposing gangs.  That make it seem like a reasonable destination for the raiders to be headed to trade their plunder for a good time.  I asked the players if they altered their route at all.  No, they decided to stay on the most direct path to drugtown.

The skiff had nice big sails to catch the wind and attention from any observers nearby.  The approaching bandits easily noticed their vessel.  The characters spotted them on the approach and Idonou tried to sharpen a couple of poles into spears.  He rolled badly and failed to put a point on them, but handed them out anyway.  A pole is better than no weapon.  The bandits overtook and separated into two groups of two and three, approaching on opposite sides of the skiff.  Their leader made an obvious 'pull over' gesture.  Instead, Sherlock showed his pistol.  That group of raiders dropped back, and one of the two on the other side threw a burning molotov onto the skiff's deck.  The rag fuse went out before it hit and the petrol failed to burn (a bad roll by the GM).  It made a fairly good distraction though, and the bandit who threw it used the opportunity to try climbing onto the skiff.  The going was difficult (another bad GM roll) and Nameless kicked him off before he managed it.  He went tumbling into the sand.

The riderless hoverbike wobbled away and toppled over, kicking up a fountain of dirt.  The second got closer to throw another molotov, but Nameless fended him away with a pole. (Nameless had 6-5-4 for his stats, and would be the hero on more than one occasion during the evening.)  Sherlock made a difficult called shot and smashed his remaining bottles with a bullet to the saddlebag.

With one bandit dispatched and other disarmed, the party thought the fight was over.  That was when the bandit leader swooped up from his position directly behind the skiff and threw a molotov.  This one splashed burning fuel across the deck.  The characters scrambled to smother it with a tarp, while Yu Tuu swerved the skiff and knocked the leader off his hoverbike.  At the same time, Sherlock shot the other bandit in the head.

Yu Tuu saw two dismounted hoverbikes ahead and discovered that the last two bandits had stopped in order to throw molotovs in tandem as the skiff passed.  He swerved again, but at the speed involved he was only able to get out of one bandit's range as they passed.  A molotov smashed against the skiff's hull and they were on fire again. Yu Tuu brought the skiff low and turned it in a tight circle, scraping the burning fuel off against the sand.  They were scorched but undamaged and turned back to claim the dead bandits' hoverbikes as extra barter for drug town.

Link to part 2.

Road Trip AP - part 10 (conclusion)

Session 8:

Dawn arrived and a lot of racers who spent the night around Team Alabammy's fire were wishing they'd drunk less and slept more during the night.  The morning also brought Chad with it, looking ten years older and mumbling that no-one should get involved with Ziggy's family issues because it could never be worth it.  Ziggy stayed behind to try and sort things out.  (The player moved to another city to start his new life as a barista.  We wish him good luck.)  He was shocked to hear about George's fall from grace, and late night return.

Fred was wandering the camp looking for Judith, who couldn't be reached by phone.  WTF didn't know anything.  (They'd last seen her reluctantly taking their insane friend away, but the players decided that Judith is some kind of action hero and has a personal teleporter so she clearly doesn't need their help.  If we were playing the full ruleset of Genius: the Transgression, they'd all take Obligation hits for that, but we weren't.  My players are terrible people.)

The other Geniuses were packing up their camps, and found themselves treated to the sight of Arthur stomping away, yelling that Howard and Samantha should just get their parents to buy them the race like they did everything else, and they could both just f--- off.  It seemed like Team Rocket had lost their main driver.

WTF received their car, and it needed plenty of work to get it raceworthy.  Eve attended to that, while Chad, Dmitri and Leroy put their efforts into installing Kevin the gearbox.  This was the final race and they were so far ahead on points that they could come in dead last and still win.  The only thing that could keep them from taking the race is if something prevented them from finishing altogether.  Every other team would now be targeting WTF.  The possible exception was Alabammy, who had failed to finish a previous race, which eliminated them from the win.  They were only competing to try and achieve a personal best.  Edith used her time to try and earn some planning dice in George's place. In the end they had to forget about go-faster paint and ziggyfuel and concentrate on Kevin.  They only had to finish, and Kevin seemed like an important tool for that effort.

The race got off to a subdued start, with all the drivers seeming to have their eyes on each other more than the road ahead.  Chad, Dmitri and Leroy hopped the train as usual.

Leroy went to buy snacks and Dmitri shut himself in a toilet so he could drink without being disturbed by a conductor.  Chad dozed in his seat.  It had been a long, sleepless night.  He woke up when someone dropped heavily into a seat opposite.  He was an older man that Chad hadn't met before, but his features marked him as a close blood relative of the Alabammy team's twins.  He introduced himself as their father Bobby-Earl.  He was here to make a proposal: Team Alabammy couldn't win the race any more, but they were still in it, and in a position to help out WTF if the WTFers would agree to stand aside for them in the next race, and maybe return a little help when it was needed.

Chad heard him out, but didn't think WTF needed the help, and wasn't comfortable with the idea of getting into a race-fixing arrangement.  He politely told Bobby-Earl thanks but no thanks.  Bobby-Earl seemed to take it in good humour and got up to leave, commenting that he hoped Chad didn't come to wish he'd decided differently.

Moments later there was the sound of an explosion and the train screeched to an emergency stop.  Looking out a window, Chad saw that the rail ahead was buckled and smoking.  There was a man who could be Bobby-Earl blasting away on what looked for all the world like a saddled cruise missile.

The train wasn't going anywhere, so Chad called an Uber.

In the race, Eve and Edith discovered Team Rocket's car in their rear view, which was a disappointment.  They'd hoped losing Arthur would put them out of the race.  They were shocked when Edith's phone told them "Hi girls" and the dash cam swivelled to look at them both.  It was George, driving Rocket's car.  Next moment, the WTF car's brakes activated, throwing them forward in their seats and dragging their speed down. 

Eve cracked the console open and started ripping out wires, hoping to break George's control over their car.  It worked, and Edith kicked it down into low gear to build up their speed again.  She activated Kevin as a precaution and they pulled away from the Rocket car.  George wasn't as good a driver as her, and without an Interdimensional Phasing Gearbox of his own, he couldn't ignore the road's bumps and dips the way she could.  He shrunk in their rear view until he couldn't be seen any more.

Then there was a thump and a bang and they realised that George's car takeover was at least partly a distraction.  Looking in the rear view again, Edith discovered they were leaving a trail of oil behind them.  Something was wrong with the engine.  Yelling at Edith to keep it steady and not stop, Eve climbed out the passenger side window onto the front of the car and released the bonnet so it came free and sailed away over the roof behind her.  Looking down into the engine bay, she saw a star-nosed mole in aviator goggles looking back up at her in surprise.  She grabbed it by the scruff and tossed it over the car as well.  Looking back, Edith saw it activate a tiny parachute and drift to a safe stop.

Eve was now looking at a mess of severed tubes and cords.  The mole had done a good job of sabotage.  Leaning halfway out of her window, she was able to use her ever-present duct tape and a couple of fanmail dice from the other players to repair them.  Edith was once again in control.

It was getting late and a couple of the players had to catch buses, so we couldn't play out the rest of the race (including Maggie bending the rules to breaking point by trying to burn away their tires with her raygun), but with this last success there was nothing to stop WTF from winning.  They came in midway through the pack, achieving victory and entrance into the Nine Vertex Devils Club for all, George excepted.

Road Trip AP - part 9

Session 7:

Once again the racers found themselves escorted out of a hotel.  That was followed by a strongly-worded request to never come back.  (This is becoming a theme.)  There was no time to dwell on that, though -- there was a race to drive.  The club presented the usual random selection of cars.  Luck gave WTF a decent one, that just needed the brake pads changed and the drums tightened.  Eve got to work on that while the others did their parts.

They didn't get very far before an incident happened that cost them one of their team-mates.

George had been pushing himself to produce good routes every day, recklessly opening his mind to the obscene whisper of Inspiration.  One final push was too much for him and his attachments, inhibitions and persona vanished in the blinding light of Illumination.  He picked up a wrench and attacked Dmitri.  Dmitri was taken by surprise and couldn't avoid the blow, but it landed awkwardly and only did minimal damage.  Eve and Edith were shocked, but immediately understood the situation.  George had grown cold and distant over the last few days, in retrospect it was clear that he was losing himself to Inspiration.  They jumped into the fight and the three of them restrained George without too much trouble.

Eve called Judith, the teleporting race official.  Judith was reluctant to get involved -- WTF were George's Collaborative, it was their role to keep an eye on each other and take whatever steps it needed to keep someone from devolving into a monster of Science.  Eve talked her round and she agreed to contact the Peerage to see what resources they could provide for handling George.  WTF left the bound and unconscious man in her care with a sense of relief.

They carried on outfitting the car, but after the shock of George's derangement the work was slow and halting.  Dmitri installed Kevin the gearbox and his voodoo air freshener, but Edith couldn't quite get an even coating of her go-faster paint over the flaking paint the car already had and Eve's work on the brakes took longer than she planned.  Time ran out and the team had to field a car that wasn't entirely race-ready.  They discussed it, and decided to rely on the last of Ziggy's superfuel.  It was effective, it hadn't exploded yet, and it was quickly degrading to uselessness while they ignored it.

The start line was well inside Des Moines' centre, so Fred warned them again about overt Wonder use.  That was an advantage, because it meant the start of the race was all about driver skill, and Edith was one of the best.  After the usual jockeying for position, (with the expected aggressive manoeuvres from Rocket) she managed to get into the lead.  Once they were out of the city, she looked in the rear view and saw Arthur in the Rocket car trying to chew up her advantage.  Her response was to feed the Ziggyfuel into the engine and start tearing up the distance.  This was a curved and twisting road, and the threat was in losing traction and spinning out.  Having Kevin the gearbox mitigated a lot of the danger, so Edith opened the throttle up as far as she dared.  Arthur vanished in her dust trail.

After a period of challenging but uneventful driving, something else appeared in the mirror -- a helicopter.  As it gained on them it became clear that it was a tiny one, too small to hold a human being, and it was travelling much faster than a helicopter should be able to.  It came closer and they noticed that it was a very familiar shade of red.  The mystery of Edith's missing paint was at least partly resolved.  (Edith's player decided not to find out what the pilot wanted and chose to 'dismiss' the stolen Wonder, stripping its immunity to the limitations of ordinary physical laws.)  The helicopter's go-faster coating began to dull and flake as the altitude affected the paint.

The pilot seemed to realise there was no catching them, because it fired several missiles.  The first passed harmlessly through them as Edith activated Kevin, and the following ones didn't have the range to reach them.  The helicopter dropped away into the distance and eventually faded from sight.  That was the last drama to occur before they rolled into Cleveland.

(The other teams ought to have had an advantage in this race, thanks to WTF's misfortune.  Instead, with Edith's player's consistent high rolling and the GM's consistent low rolling for the other teams, WTF came in first again.  Now the only way any other team has a chance is if WTF fails to finish the next race.  At this point, it's their race to lose.)

This night the racers were staying at a campsite on the lakeshore.  It was run by an elderly Genius and her 19 identical daughters.  They looked alike, they dressed alike, and they had the same emotionless, unblinking expression.  They were actually quite creepy.  The teams with less money to spend were staying in tents pitched in the grounds.  That included Alabammy, the Faster Pussycats and Arthur and Junior of Team Rocket.  Howard and Samantha were nowhere to be seen.  Eve and Edith elected to splurge and stay in a cabin, as did Team Human.

The team met George's friend Leroy at the gathering of Geniuses.  He was a tall black man with a calm manner who received some worrying texts from his old  buddy and drove over to see if he was okay.  He received the news about George's breakdown with sadness, but not surprise.  George was quiet, but intense about everything he did.  The sort of personality that inevitably tumbles headlong into Illumination and becomes a monster of Science.  It was only ever a question of when, not if.

Team Alabammy had hunting rifles with them and soon the woods surrounding the campsite had several less deer.  They got a fire going on the shore and started cooking venison for everyone who came by.  The ever-present beer cooler was open on the grass and passers-by were invited to help themselves.  Alabammy were in the worst position overall thanks to the misadventure with the JATO rocket, but if it bothered them they weren't showing it.  They seemed determined to have a good time.

Dmitri decided this was a perfect opportunity to stir up some trouble.  His plan was to use Kevin the gearbox to slip into Arthur's tent and plant Maggie's heirloom plasma pistol.  His player rolled badly though, and Dmitri found himself stopped by a hand on his shoulder.  It was one of the Stepford Daughters, out of phase to reality the way he was and wondering what he was doing entering another guest's tent.  He mumbled the first thing that came into his head as an excuse.  She looked sceptical, but turned him back towards the fire instead of doing anything worse.  Since planting the pistol failed, he handed it directly to Maggie and told her that he'd just been snooping through the Team Rocket tents (the Stepford Daughter could confirm if she wanted to check) and found this.  He'd heard stories about Maggie's grandmother and her pistol and knew from the description that it didn't belong to Arthur.  (His player scored a weak success on convincing Maggie, so while she found it a believeable story, she wasn't prepared to stir up more trouble with Rocket at that stage.)

Dmitri decided to spend the night drinking around the fire with the group that had gathered there.  Leroy was something of a lady's man and took an instant liking to the Faster Pussycats, so he stayed there too.  Eve and Edith decided to get another early night.  Yeah, right.  For any other team to win to win the race, WTF has to either fail to finish or not even turn up tomorrow.  At about three in the morning, Eve woke up as a strange smell filled the room.  The cabin smelled like a bar after a busy night.  A very busy night.  She looked around and found that the smell was most powerful near the sink in the very basic kitchenette.  There was a gust of alcohol vapour coming out of the taps and at the source it was strong.  Someone was trying to nobble them.

She stepped outside, using her cellphone as a light and saw three men squatting on the water tower that supplied her row of cabins.  One of them whispered urgently "She's seen us!" and the three of them bolted before she could recognise them.  There was a crude vaporiser device attached to the pipe leading down into the WTF cabin.  She pulled it loose and took it inside the cabin with her.

Even later, Eve and Edith were both woken by the cabin rattling, then literally ripping off its foundation and dragging across the grass and sand into the lake.  With water pouring in through the windows and door, they grabbed what they could and abandoned the building, only to see George in a speedboat dragging the cabin on a chain and laughing maniacally.  They were freaked out, because they hadn't expected to see their old teammate again.  He was supposed to be safely locked up in a Mad Science hospital somewhere that he couldn't hurt anyone -- particularly them.  After calming down they realised that the -- kidnapping?  Murder attempt? -- hadn't affected them that badly.  Eve had already used up all of her sneaker juice and hadn't made more.  Edith had mixed another batch of go-faster paint, but it was stored in the club workshop.  They'd lost their clothes and personal effects, but they were still in the race.  They headed for the fire to dry out and try to sleep in the safety of numbers.  At the same time they saw half a dozen Stepford Daughters walk into the lake and not come out again.  In the morning, their soaked belongings were waiting for him at the campsite office.  The grandmotherly woman who owned the camp commented that Geniuses make disruptive guests, but at least while they were here no-one murdered any teenagers for having sex.  That tends to cut into the repeat business.

Road Trip AP - part 8

Session 6:

Morning arrived, and the next race with it.  Once again, team WTF received a used car to fit out to their specifications.  This one was in much better shape than the last one, but the engine was well out of tune.  Eve's character spent her prep rolls working on the timing belt to improve the engine efficiency.  Dmitri had a great idea over his breakfast vodka and used prep time to build an Interdimensional Phasing Gearbox, to allow the driver to shift the car out of regular space and harmlessly pass through objects.  It can also be worn on a harness.  Dmitri calls it 'Kevin'.  The others did their usual work to improve WTF's chances of doing well in the race.

The start line was once again well inside city limits, so when the flag was dropped all the competitors sped away at or under the speed limit -- except for team Alabammy who activated their Wonder the second the race was official.  Even they were taking it easy though, the road was anything but straight.  Concerned that Rocket would try to block her again, Edith immediately manoeuvred to get past them.  Arthur tried to swing in front, but Edith was on fire and Eve's engine modifications gave her the power to skip round him.  It wasn't long before George's route planning started putting space between WTF and the other racers.

But speaking of George's efforts, he's starting to freak the other characters out a bit.  He's been putting a lot of himself in the race, willingly opening himself up to the caustic clarity of mad science in order to improve the results he can present to the team.  It's changing him, and not in a good way.  He's much less concerned with social niceties than when he started the race, beginning to treat people with the icy indifference of a lab technician peering into a petri dish.  He has an eerie presence and he just doesn't blink often enough.

George was oddly detached given the excitement of the race, but at least it presented him with an interesting optimisation problem.  Following his directions, Edith left the city with a comfortable lead on the other teams and hit the interstate.  She was finally free to open it up and let her go-faster paint do what it was designed for.  It came as a surprise to look in the rear view mirror and see Team Rocket's car behind her and closing the distance between them.  She took a calculated risk and activated her fire extinguisher/rocket engine Wonder, adding another speed boost.  Rocket made a speed jump as well and continued to close the gap.  That was when they ran into the fog bank.

It was thick and hid the sky.  Edith and George were reminded of the story Maggie from the Faster Pussycats told them, about sudden mysterious cloud cover hiding Team Rocket's illegal side-swipe in the previous race.  Looking in the mirror again, she saw Arthur shredding his tyres in the effort to overtake them.  The Team Rocket car clearly couldn't handle this kind of punishment for long.  If he was just trying to pass, it was very poor tactical thinking.  Expecting trouble, Edith activated Kevin the gearbox and let the car phase out of normal space.  The ride turned smooth as they began to skip through irregularities of the road surface instead of bouncing over them.  George opened his phone camera and began recording.  It was just in time.  Arthur gunned his engine again to pull alongside, pieces of rubber flaking off his tyres and revealing metal underneath.  He swung his steering wheel for a full-body side-swipe and passed harmlessly through the WTF car.  Edith had the weird sensation of feeling Arthur's shocked face pass right through her own.  He hit the road edge and fishtailed wildly, but managed to keep control.

George used his car remote Wonder to activate the Rocket car's brakes.  They reported successful activation, but there was no change the other car's speed.  Team Rocket's Wonder was rumoured to hollow out and wear a normal car like a disguise.  This seemed to give some weight to that theory.  He swerved at them again, trying a side-swipe from the other side.  Once again he passed through them without causing any harm.  This time the recovery was harder and he lost speed as he wrestled with the steering wheel.  The Team Rocket car dropped back, and Edith started to pull away as Arthur seemed to give up the cheating attempt and let his car-punishing speed slacken off.  Shortly, the fog began to dissipate and it was gone completely five minutes later.  The Faster Pussycats' story about Team Rocket's cheating was proven true.

Soon after that Edith looked in the mirror again and saw Team Alabammy's car approaching in a cloud of smoke and sparks.  Normally their car puffed out thick, black smog from its smoke stacks, but this was something different.  As they got closer it became apparent that the smoke stacks had broken off under the stress of their speed.  The car drew alongside and Tommy-Ray gave an inaudible whoop and threw them the heavy metal horns.  They saw the sparks were because Alabammy's back tyres had completely melted in the heat of the exhaust from the JATO rocket welded to the car's roof.  It began to pull ahead, surrounding WTF in smoke.  George made a comment about the likelihood of the car exploding, and the probable effect on WTF if it happened on the road ahead of them, sounding more interested than concerned.  Edith decided not to let that happen and pressed the button to inject Ziggy's superfuel into the engine.  Their speed, already nerve-wracking, jumped again.  They gradually came out of the smoke cloud as they overtook the Alabammy car.  Tommy-Ray gave them another salute, this time using just one finger.

It turned out to be a sensible precaution, because seconds later they had another new experience: a JATO rocket passing through the car (thanks to Kevin the gearbox), trailing the wreckage of its metal straps with it.  Behind them, the Alabammy car was slowly skidding to a halt.

The rest of the race was uneventful and WTF pulled into Des Moines with a comfortable lead over Team Rocket, the next to arrive.  George tracked down Fred to talk to him about the Rocket sabotage event, but Howard had beaten him to it.  He claimed that Arthur hadn't intended to side-swipe the WTF car, he just lost control at high speed because of his tyres shredding.  Fred was sceptical of his story, but it was plausible enough to get Rocket a warning instead of disqualification.  Rocket will be participating in the next race. 

After finishing with the car, Dmitri headed directly for the hotel bar.  The hotel was part of a shopping complex that had a spa on the top floor.  Edith and Eve headed directly there to unwind, and found themselves sharing a steam room with Missy from the Faster Pussycats.  They collectively decided that the spa counts as neutral territory and fell into conversation.  Missy passed on a nugget of gossip she'd heard about Team Rocket: they were ruthless because winning the race was part of their plan to get rich.  They wanted to use the Nine Vertex Devils Club resources to build a spaceship capable of reaching Mars.  They'd take a cargo of water with them and trade it for Martian sapphires to sell on Earth.  Martian sapphires dissolve in Earth's atmosphere after a few days, but Rocket saw that as the buyer's problem.

When they returned to their room, they found it in disarray.  Belongings were scattered, drawers were pulled out, cupboard doors were open.  Edith's container of go-faster paint was gone. Her extinguisher was still there, thankfully.  And Dmitri had Kevin with him.  There was no sign of who'd turned the room over.  Team Rocket seemed like the obvious suspects after the conversation they'd just had, but the other teams had shown themselves to be equally determined to win.

The usual club dinner was a subdued affair.  George and Dmitri weren't present, so it was only Eve and Edith of Team WTF.  The race officials and Team Human were also present.  Only the Humans seemed immune to the mood, they were doing shots of tabasco sauce.  Conversation was hushed and stilted. 

While that was going on and the race teams could be expected to be out of their rooms, Dmitri took the opportunity to do some snooping and see if he could find Edith's paint.  Using Kevin the gearbox, he stepped through the wall from his hotel room to the next.  It could only be someone from Team Rocket staying there, there were Chinese-language racing magazines on the bed.  There was no-one present, so he quickly looked through all the drawers, under the mattress, etc.  Just to see what there was to find.  It turned out to be nothing.  The same applied to the other Team Rocket rooms.  Arthur and Junior were sharing one, Howard and Samantha each had one of their own.  Team Alabammy's room was much the same, except that the floor was already strewn with beer cans and porn.  Team Human had three identical suitcases with three identical sets of clothes, and three identical steamer trunks which housed a vast range of snackfoods.  It was only when he reached the Faster Pussycats' room (ominously the WTF rooms were between those and Team Rocket) that he found something interesting: Maggie's plasma pistol.  He pocketed it and returned to the WTF guys' room.  Sadly, without having found the paint.

At the same time, George was in the shared workshop the club maintained for the teams.  All the cars had been removed so it was just him and a gorilla with a metallic skullcap, who was watching Netflix.  He found he enjoyed the solitude, as human company had begun to seem more and more pointless.  He'd bought himself some electronic supplies, which he used to modify a pair of night-vision binoculars to add a recording feature.  Sleep was a waste of precious time.  He planned to instead use that time to wait for the cow to return and investigate it thoroughly.

Team WTF went to bed early (except for George) to get a good night's sleep and prepare for the next race.  But it wasn't a peaceful night.  First, their rest was interrupted by shouting from outside Samantha's room.  Maggie was banging on the door, demanding the return of her grandmother's raygun (currently safe in Dmitri's possession).  Instead of confronting her, Samantha called hotel security, who escorted Maggie back to her room with a warning not to cause any further disturbance.  Half an hour later, inside the WTF room water started pouring out of the ceiling and running down the wall.  There was shouting from Arthur and Junior's room, where the flooding was even worse.  It seemed that WTF was collateral damage in a prank that was aimed at Team Rocket.  Eve moved to a utility cupboard in the hallway outside to try and resume her interrupted sleep.  Edith stayed where she was, but put on a sleep mask and pair of ear plugs and hoped it wouldn't get any worse.

Not long after that, the temperature plummeted.  In a matter of minutes, it was so cold the hallway carpet crackled under foot.  The cold seemed centred on the Faster Pussycats' room. There were muffled electrical sounds and then a bang from the ceiling space and it began to warm again.  Then after a short period of quiet, the whole floor was woken up by thumping bassy music from inside the Rocket quarters.  That only ended when the Rocket team members threw the last of a series of smashed cellphones out into the hallway.  There were also:

• A stink bomb
• A plague of rats
• A team of strippers and a dwarf in a princess costume
• Stifling heat
• Unexplained waves of vertigo
• Junior Lee was dragged into a van by three masked men with Alabama accents, then stripped naked, tied up and left in a cornfield

All of which meant no-one was getting a restful night.

George wasn't bothered by any of that.  He had let himself into an empty room with an external window to wait for the cow.  Just after two in the morning, his patience was rewarded.  The usual blue light appeared and the struggling cow, who clearly wanted nothing to do with this, descended.  Once again the light hovered from window to window, as though looking inside.  George recorded everything he saw through his binoculars.  After a while it seemed like the light hadn't found what it wanted, because it rose up through the night sky again.  Watching carefully, George saw it vanish inside a spinning saucer-like craft.  With his new-found insight into the secret logic underpinning the universe, he immediately recognised it as being the same construction as Team Human's car Wonder, the Spider Insider.  He filed the information away for later.

The following morning, the hotel staff insisted on helping the racers shift all their gear out of the building.  They also told them that while none of last night's odd events could be conclusively pinned on anyone in particular, they would be grateful if all of the racers would find alternative accommodation the next time they were in Des Moines.

Road Trip AP - part 7

Session 5:

Team WTF's car arrived in Denver Colorado, third in the current race, but still ahead on points.  Fred was there to receive them and directed them to the workshop the club had provided for the teams to remove their Wonders from the day's car.  While removing theirs, WTF noticed Leonie (the Faster Pussycats' navigator) throwing tools in rage and Maggie holding her back from physically attacking Team Rocket's driver.  Arthur seemed completely at ease, waiting for Leonie to throw the first punch.  Fred arrived at the double to break them up, then Leonie stomped off.

WTF had passed the Faster Pussycats' car in a ditch with a long scrape along one side, as though they'd been forced off the road.  That would be against the rules, of course.

The club was using a local hotel as a headquarters, the Astor.  Most of the teams were staying there.  The top two floors were blocked off for renovation and the remaining rooms were cheap.  There was a nice library nook, where Edith settled in for a snooze after all those hours on the road.  George went to nap upstairs in the WTF men's suite.  Dmitri headed for the bar and started downing vodka with determination.  Team Alabammy joined him there, whooping and shouting about their victory in the race.  Ziggy and Chad called in to say they were off running an errand, because Ziggy 'knew a guy' in Denver.

After a while Edith was drawn to the sounds of celebration in the bar, and George came down for a quiet drink too.  Jimmy tried to start a fight with George, but gave up quickly when he indicated he wasn't interested.  When he tasted his drink, he realised the threats were just a distraction from the fact someone had spiked his beer with Dmitri's vodka.  He sent it back for a replacement, which caused Team Alabammy to laugh and trade back-slaps as though the prank had gone down exactly the way they hoped.

Leonie came in and ordered something pink and umbrella'd, but Maggie followed her in and took it off her.  Leonie swore, kicked over an ice bucket and left again.  Seeing WTF were present, Maggie took the opportunity to talk with Edith.  She revealed that Rocket had side-swiped them into the ditch, a move that was completely against the club's rules.  The observer in space didn't see anything because there was cloud cover -- which is weird, because there wasn't a single other cloud the whole day.  Rocket had to be creating opportunities to cheat.

She offered Edith a truce between WTF and the Faster Pussycats as long as they both went after Rocket.  Rocket had to pay.  Edith agreed, and passed the message on to the rest of the team.

All the teams met up for dinner in the hotel restaurant.  Team Alabammy were still making noise, but Rocket seemed to be in unusually good spirits too.  The Faster Pussycats were scowling into their salads and Leonie was openly playing with a butterfly knife.  Team Human were passing around a bottle of Tabasco sauce  and encouraging each other to try it.  David David upended the bottle and took a swig.  The other two leaned in to hear his opinion.  He nodded approvingly, and the whole team ordered mugs of Tabasco.

Eve noticed Team Rocket's Samantha quietly leaving the table and walking out into the hotel foyer.  Mindful of the agreement with the Pussycats, Eve followed.  Walking as quietly as she could manage, she spotted Samantha in the foyer phone booth, talking into a box that she held up to the receiver.  Eve couldn't hear her whispering, but the box was repeating something about a family crisis in an older woman's voice.

Not long after that, Edith got a call from Chad to say that Ziggy had been called home for a family medical emergency and Chad was going too, for support.  When Edith and Eve compared notes, they realised that Samantha had stolen their trick and was using a voice changer to psych out the competition.  Edith passed the news on to Maggie, who thanked her for the heads-up.  Eve sneaked into Reception to look at the registration book, which showed her which rooms Team Rocket were using.  As a mild form of revenge, she took a roll of sticky tape from the gift shop's stationary shelf and completely taped up their doors' card readers.

WTF discussed the situation and decided that being the team that got the best night's sleep was their highest priority.  Using tools she'd smuggled out of the club's workshop, Eve and George threw together a short-lived mad-science-monitor device to seal their windows against being opened from outside and warn them about any intrusion attempts.  Eve didn't actually have the Science to take on an extra Wonder, but George was able to help out there as well.  They all went to bed early.

During the night, Eve noticed her monitor device apparently tracking something across the ceiling.  She turned the light on and investigated the room thoroughly, but found nothing.  After some discussion, she and Edith realise that whatever it was detecting was above the ceiling, on one of the closed-off floors.  They watched the monitor, ready for any surprises, but it settled down after a while.  That was when a tremendous screeching noise came from down the hall, approximately where Team Rocket's rooms were.  Eve stepped into the hallway and discovered Team Rocket in their pyjamas, shouting at a couple of hotel staff while noise and clouds of vapour billowed from their doorway.  It continued until security arrived and entered the room.  Eve saw them carrying out a set of taped-together fire extinguishers and smoke detectors.  Team Rocket was still complaining, so she closed the door and went back to bed.  Shortly, the monitor detected something above the ceiling again, moving back in the opposite direction.

Much later that night, George received a couple of visitors.  It was Jimmy and Billy-Lee.  They'd heard that George was good with computers and they needed help.  They wanted to celebrate the day's win by getting Chad to cook up another batch of special brownies, so Tommy-Ray went out to get some more of the magic ingredient.  Colorado is a state where you can legally buy weed, but Tommy-Ray didn't try.  He got picked up by the police for trying to buy from an undercover officer.  George could hack him out of jail, right?  This could force them to drop out of the race, Tommy-Ray was their designated driver.

George didn't see any reason to help them, but on the other hand it would mean they owed him a favour, and he'd thought of a way he could do it without leaving the hotel room.  He cracked the police arrests database and left a note from a governmental IP address stating that Tommy-Ray was an FBI informant and should be released without charges laid first thing in the morning.  He shrugged off Team Alabammy's thanks and went back to bed.

Eve's monitor woke her up again, alert to something outside.  There was a familiar blue glow, and a distressed cow hovered past the window.  It stopped, legs wind-milling on the other side of the glass, as though the blue light was searching for something.  Not finding it, it moved on.  Peering into each window it came to, the cow yanked awkwardly sideways each time it jumped to the next.  After a while, the cow hurtled up into the sky with a receding "mooooo --" and the usual mysterious lights darted away into the night. 

In the morning, the racers met again in the hotel restaurant for breakfast.  Tommy-Ray was there looking tired and depressed, but he had a breakfast beer to help him get over it.  Maggie and Edith fell into conversation again.  Maggie wasn't admitting anything about the night's events, but she let Edith know that the truce was concluded.  They were rivals again.

Road Trip AP - Part 6

Session 4:

In the morning all the teams packed up their stuff and checked out of the motel.  The WTFers noticed that the manager had hired security guards to make sure they left the property and didn't come back.  Fred Yang was there and holding a trespass order he'd been handed as club official on site.  It covered all the racers.  They were also gratified to spot Howard with a black eye and Samantha with a neck brace.  The Faster Pussycats and Team Alabammy looked battered and scratched too.

Fred read out the rules again: no messing with other teams' cars, no endangering members of the public, pranks should be in fun and not cruel or dangerous.  They were all friends as well as rivals and if they couldn't find it in themselves to respect the other competitors, they weren't in the right headspace for this race.  But he knew they were better than that.  Oh and while he's on the subject, they were all banned for life from the motel.  Obviously things had gotten out of hand but now he expected everyone to have burned off their excess energy and be ready to concentrate on the race.  Things were going to get more competitive here on out.

Once again, the club had delivered cars for the racers.  They were assigned at random, and this time it was WTF's bad luck to get one that wasn't in great shape.  It smoked and the engine's rhythm was inconsistent.  It cut out completely at a stop light on the way to their workshop and had to be push-started.  

Eve looked it over and declared that she didn't trust it to reach the Colorado border, never mind the city of Denver.  She spent the whole four-hour prep time elbows-deep in the engine, working to get it in condition for racing.  Chad attempted to help by designing and building a gym-style training bench for cars.  Unfortunately player Mila's dice rolls didn't support the effort.  So while Chad's theory is sound, it didn't translate into a usable Wonder.  George doesn't have any mechanic knowledge to call on, but he made an able assistant.  With his help and through a startling insight into the nature of metal crystallisation in alloy blends (Eve's player rolled his Science die into the effort) Eve successfully reconditioned the engine.  It didn't pay to look too closely at the way the hoses seemed to twist into nihilistic runes trumpeting the indifference of an uncaring universe, but it hummed with power.

Dmitri hung his voodoo air freshener, then parked himself on a stack of tyres for a few drinks to celebrate.  Edith and Ziggy worked to install their Wonders, leaving the car with a a coat of red go-faster paint and two new buttons on the console.  One to inject a reckless amount of Ziggy's fuel additive directly into the engine, one to spray a layer of his lubricant on the road under the rear wheels for fast cornering.  There wasn't time to install the roll cage, but it might have been a good idea.

At the starting line, Fred reminded them that this time they'd be travelling through populated areas before reaching the interstate.  He asked them not to activate their Wonders until the could be sure there were no civilians around to traumatise with a glimpse of Mad Science.  The racers got ready, Judith dropped the handkerchief and they were off.

In spite of Fred's request, team Alabammy activated the Big Big Rig immediately and shot towards the horizon in a cloud of thick black smoke.  The other teams were more circumspect and WTF found themselves travelling in close formation with the Faster Pussycats and Team Rocket.  Team Human slowly fell behind as the other three jockeyed for position.  The race had only just started, but none of them were willing to let the others past.   The Faster Pussycats eventually managed to get around the other two and speed away, because Team Rocket seemed intent on staying directly ahead of WTF.  Every time Edith changed lanes, Arthur would change to cut her off.  He was swinging recklessly to force her to back off.

That kept up until Edith decided enough was enough and got George to check for alternate routes.  He found a highway exit that turned into a gravel road and paralleled the interstate for a good long way.  She faked Arthur out with a feint and took it, leaving him to travel the highway alone rather than turn around and go against traffic to follow them.  The gravel road tested Edith's driving skill, but she managed to keep it pointed straight on the shifting gravel.  Unfortunately, at the speed she was travelling, there's only a split second to react to the realisation there's something on the road ahead.  In this case it was a cow.  Edith wasn't able to avoid the cow completely, and clipped it with a front wheel.  The windscreen turned red and the car immediately started bouncing on a crooked wheel.  

The wheel slowed them, but they were still making pretty good speed and Edith made the decision to continue without stopping.  That didn't last long, because it continued to weaken and soon the bouncing made it clear they wouldn't have a car to race unless they did something.  Neither Edith nor George had much repair knowledge, but with Eve's help via phone and a hammer from the toolbox, they were able to beat the axle straight enough to last out the race.  

They carried on, and were soon able to rejoin the interstate.  Soon after that, they spotted the Faster Pussycats in a drainage ditch.  Maggie and Leonie were both looking angry and straining to push the car back to the tarmac in high heels.  There was a scrape mark along the side of the car, making it look like they were forced into the ditch.  Possibly at speed, which would have been a reckless manoeuvre.  Edith and George talked about stopping to help, but decided against it.  There was a race to win.

Team WTF sped on, and with George's access to municipal traffic systems, they were about see congestion coming and route around it, picking up some time.  There was also an opportunity to mess with Rocket, by changing the timing on a set of railway crossing barriers.  They used a security camera mounted on the barrier to watch Arthur getting more and more frustrated, and finally move out of line to illegally divert around the barrier and across the tracks.  Fred had warned them about involving the police in inter-team rivalry, but they discussed it among themselves and decided that adding Rocket's correct car make, model, colour and licence plate details to someone else' police report was obeying the letter of the rule.  Shortly afterwards the same security camera picked up a police car speeding past the line of patiently waiting cars, siren blaring.  The sight cheered them up tremendously.

The incline gradually increased, because I don't know anything about US geography and stated that there are mountains on the border between Utah and Colorado.  At one point WTF looked outside and saw Team Human climbing the rocky slope directly on their car's spidery legs, trying to cut some distance off the trip by going as the crow flies.

It didn't help them get ahead of WTF, though.  They drove into Denver and crossed the finish line third, behind Alabammy and Rocket.  The massive lead they took on the first leg means they're still ahead on points, but the gap between them and the other teams has shrunk.  Rocket is now in second place, and it's a close second.  The next race could see them drop their lead.

Road Trip AP - part 5

Session 3:

Dmitri's original player has dropped out to run a Spycraft campaign, because he does love his espionage games.  I gave Theo the option of dropping Dmitri and creating his own character from scratch, but he's having fun playing the hard-drinking Russian.  We gave Dmitri an extra character attribute to show how drunk he is at the moment -- each scene Theo rolls a D6, and raises or lowers it depending on whether it's higher or lower than the current score.  The bare-bones nature of the system makes it easy to customise characters that way.  What drunkenness actually means for Dmitri is something we still need to determine.

Dmitri was the original navigator, with Eve stepping in when it looked like he wouldn't be available.  The team have agreed to keep her in the role, because having a navigator who can't reliably follow a line on a map with his eyes would just be an opportunity for the GM to mess with them.  (And I would have.  Count on it.)

With the race on again in the morning, Eve and Edith decided to go to bed at a reasonable time and get a good night's rest.  George did the same because he doesn't like to stay up late.  (His player describes him as 'pretty boring'.)  The others stayed up because a little thing like the threat of disqualification wasn't enough to discourage them from playing practical jokes -- and now they owed Team Rocket for the inconvenience of having to climb out a bathroom window to avoid the police!

Chad had the beginnings of a plan involving a squirrel, and some bait to obtain one.  He needed a sturdy squirrel container to go along with it, though.  A rucksack wasn't going to do the job.  Where was he going to get something like that, this late at night?  ...It turned out that Ziggy might know a guy.  (Wong made a successful luck die roll.)  There was a Genius in Monticello who worked with animals and Ziggy kinda sorta worked with him for a while... but they didn't part on the best terms.  In fact, it was probably better not to mention Ziggy's name.  (Wong voluntarily rolled a second luck die to see what their relationship was like.  He rolled a 1.)  He gave Chad the address.  The lateness of the hour wouldn't be a problem.  This guy had to get up periodically through the night to -- you know what, that didn't even matter.  Chad and Dmitri decided to go on foot.

Eve and Edith had only been in bed for half an hour when someone knocked at their door.  Edith got up to look through the loop and found a Chinese takeaway delivery boy standing outside with an insulated transport container.  She thought about ignoring him, but he kept knocking.  "Hey, you gotta pay for this!  It comes out of my wages if you don't!"  Eve tossed her some money.  "Just sort it out, Edith.  Please."  Edith paid the delivery boy for the sweet-and-sour pork neither one of them had ordered and went back to bed.  Forty-five minutes later it happened again.  "Pablo's Pizza, gotcha Jalapeño Horror right here, thas fourteen-fifty thankyuh."  And half an hour after that.  "Bigger Belly Burgers, I got a cheeseburger stack and megafries for 'E'?"

The two of them gave up on sleeping in their room at that point.  They discussed whether Team Rocket was responsible for this outrage as well, but it seemed more like a Faster Pussycats prank.  Eve called Pablo's and ordered an all-anchovy pizza to be delivered to the Pussycats' room.  She hung a note on the door reading WE GAVE YOU THE WRONG ROOM NUMBER - PLEASE GO TO 14 (which was Arthur and Junior's room).  They bundled up whatever sheets and blankets they could carry and found a thick, leafy tree just outside the motel's property to wedge themselves into for an attempt at sleep.  As they left the courtyard, they saw that there was a delivery driver knocking on Team Alabammy's door as well (no answer) and Team Human, all wearing Batman pyjamas, had a line of drivers outside their door, where they were ranking them by height.

Chad and Dmitri arrived at the address Ziggy gave them.  It was a house in the suburbs with a discreet brass plate on the door --

H. Lucas

Exotic animal supplies

That seemed like a promising beginning.  Chad knocked on the door.  Soon they heard footsteps inside and someone was peering at them through the mail slot, demanding to know their business.  Curious to know what the man would say, Chad introduced them as friends of Ziggy's.  "Ziggy?!  Is that son-of-a-bitch with you?  I lost three years of research because of him!"

Chad assured him they were alone, and wanted to buy supplies.  Dr Lucas reluctantly let them in and led them down a hallway with several steel-plated doors (locked) to a kitchen.  He sold them a steel mesh squirrel cage and some squirrel tranquilliser (but not before opening the container and taking a deep snort of the powder it contained).  Chad got a crash-course in administering squirrel sedative.  "Shove the pointy bit of the hypo in the meaty part of the squirrel's ass and push the plunger.  It's so simple I've trained rats to do it.  Don't give Ziggy the job."

They paid and left to begin the trek back to the motel, only to have a van screech to a halt next to them.  The side door opened and Team Alabammy leapt out.  Faced with the choice of grappling the commie they drank with or the dude who baked them hash brownies, they picked the commie.  The twins grabbed Dmitri and tried to drag him into the van.  He knocked one of them on his ass with his bottle, a move they were completely unprepared for.  Chad waded into the fight and with his steroid-enhanced muscles, he landed a heavy punch on Jimmy, who toppled back into the van.  Seeing how quickly the fight had gone against his team, the twin still on his feet decided not to face two-on-one odds and backed away.  The two WTFers heard Jimmy's plaintive voice ask "Did you get the brownies at least?" as the van accelerated away.  Dmitri's bottle was the fight's only casualty.

Back at the motel, they collected Ziggy and went hunting squirrels in the woods behind the buildings.  Between Chad's bait and Ziggy's lubricant making an inescapable trap, they were able to bag and drug a big squirrel.  There was leftover sedative and more room in the cage (Mila rolled a 3 for number of doses), so they stalked and captured two more.  Another big one, and an average sized squirrel.  Stage one of the plan was complete.

The next stage was to find out where Howard and Samantha Long were.  Team Rocket's co-leaders weren't staying at the hotel with their driver and navigator and they were the targets for retribution.  Ziggy had the idea of downloading a phone app to make his voice sound like a child's, and call around the better hotels in Monticello, asking to be put through to Mummy and Daddy Long's room.  The rolls went well and he got connected, finding out which hotel was theirs.  When Samantha answered, he turned the app off.  "Hello, this is One Lucky Horse's Ass Takeaways.  What's your address for delivery please?  I have an order of sweet and sour pork for you."  Samantha wasn't amused.  "You must be joking, we don't eat that American crap!"  She hung up.  WTF concluded that maybe Rocket wasn't behind the fast food deliveries to the motel, but they still had to pay for their deeds.

The final stage of the plan was to feed the squirrels some of Chad's steroids, coat them with Ziggy's lubricant and inject them with some Red Bull stolen from Edith to counteract the sedative.  Chad, Dmitri and Ziggy each took a squirrel and synchronised their watches.  Chad headed in to the centre of town, where his climbing wall skills made scaling the side of the hotel easy.  The squirrel was just starting to revive and under the effects of the steroid it was intensely angry.  He just managed to get it in through the window before it snapped at his fingers.  There was a rage-filled screech from the animal, then crashing and banging.  The light came on and there were two voices swearing in Chinese as Chad descended the wall and legged it at top speed.

Ziggy broke a Team Alabammy window and hurled his squirrel inside before tucking and rolling to slip away.  There was furious barking for a moment, then a crash and it changed to a whimper.  He ducked as he heard gunshots and someone shouted "Look out, that sqwerl's gone rabid!"  There were more shots and furniture breaking, then Alabammy came spilling out into the courtyard where they formed up into a defensive line facing the doorway.

Dmitri took the regular-sized squirrel and tossed it into the Faster Pussycats' room.  There was a moment of quiet, which was broken by angry chittering.  Then the lights came up, there were screams and the sound of the room being overturned.  Risking a glance in through a window, he saw three of the Pussycats trying to fight the squirrel with stiletto heel shoes.  Maggie was aiming a raygun, but having trouble drawing a bead on the fast-moving rodent.  Dmitri knocked on the door.  "Ladies, is some problem?  Can help?"  There was a buzzing sound and a circular piece of door the size of a coin disintegrated.  He ducked fast.

Ziggy stepped inside one of the Team WTF rooms and made sure the blinds were fully closed, then started flicking the lights on and off and shouting.  "Ahh!  It's a squirrel!  Catch it, someone!"  With any luck, Team Human would get the blame for this.

Soon after, the police arrived again.  Everyone except Team Human was in the forecourt by this point, standing in their sleepwear and listening to the enraged squirrels wrecking things in their motel rooms.  The two police officers were just deciding that this was an animal control issue and not their problem when Chad's steroids began to wear off and the two squirrels shrank back to ordinary tree rats and forgot that they'd been fighting angry.  There was a blur of brown fur and things got quiet in the motel again.  The cops shrugged and left and the racers were left to clean up.  It doesn't seem likely that anyone's going to get their security deposit back.

As a sequel to the evening's events, Eve and Edith were both woken in the early hours by a distressed 'Mooooo', quickly getting closer.  They both had their hair ruffled by the breeze as an airborne cow hurtled past, close enough to knock a cloud of leaves off their tree.  They watched in amazement as it swept in low across the forecourt and smashed straight through their room's front wall.  There were a few moments of relative quiet, only disturbed by the tinkling of glass shards dropping out of the shattered window and the cow staggered out onto the concrete.  There was a blue light from above it and it mooed in protest again as it was whisked up into a clear night sky.  A pulsing light directly over the motel whizzed away at impossible speed and disappeared in the darkness.