RPG night: A Tragedy In Five Acts

Tonight we played A Tragedy in Five Acts. This was a first for everyone at the table -- I knew of the game because the designer is a friend, but I had never played it.

Our setting was a farm in Quebec in the late 1960s. The Canadian government has decided to try to beat the Soviets and Americans to the moon, and to that end has funded the building of a rocket.

Our characters were:
Rosie, the Daughter -- a competent engineer whose talents are overlooked because she is a young woman in a low position in the project hierarchy. (Fatal flaw: Fortune's Fool)
Dougal McGuire, the Lover -- an aspiring astronaut whose true love is the Moon. (Fatal flaw: Arrogant)
Farmer Pierre, the Foil -- on whose land the Canadian space program is building its rocket. (Fatal flaw: Jealous)
Werner von Grupp, the Parent -- a German janitor who pretended to be a rocket engineer so he would be pardoned at the end of World War II. (Fatal flaw: Ambitious)
Clarence Bishop III, the Authority -- an overly-trusting government bureaucrat overseeing the space program. (Fatal flaw: Overly Trusting)

With appearances by Frank the real engineer, Jacques the cow, and Francois the cow.

ACT I

Scene i: Farmer Pierre comes to the rocket-building site to inquire what is happening, as he is afraid his cows will fall into the giant hole that the rocket team is digging. Clarence arrives to check on the project, concerned about where the government's money has gone. He is given an order for steel tubes in a confusing mix of metric and imperial units that suggests they have no idea what they are doing.

Scene ii: Rosie and Dougal have lunch next to the tanks of corrosive acid that are being used in the rocket construction. Rosie insists that Dougal needs to read the astronaut training manual she has prepared for him, but he demurs.

Scene iii: Werner calls Pierre into his suspiciously opulent office. Because Pierre has some practical engineering experience from repairing his farm equipment, Werner wants him to join the rocket team. Appeals to patriotism fail, but Pierre is convinced by the opportunity to defraud the government of more money.

ACT II

Scene i: Clarence goes to check on the receipts for the project, and instead comes across some correspondence between Werner von Grupp and his hero Werner von Braun. Unable to read German, he takes them to Rosie for translation. In the letters von Grupp shares his rocket ideas and von Braun assumes he must be a rather dim third-grader. Rosie is alarmed, but lies to Clarence and says they are merely social correspondence.

Scence ii: Werner proposes building a 1/16-scale test rocket. Pierre insists a certain connection needs 10 wires (to bilk the government out of more money) while Rosie explains it only needs three. Pierre concludes from this that he misunderstood the numbers in English -- 10 is actually 3 and vice-versa.

Scene iii: Pierre and Werner launch the test rocket, which crashes into the paddock where most of the cows are -- leaving only Jacques and Francois alive. Dougal is upset at being left out of the launch.

ACT III

Scene i: Having realized things are not quite right, Clarence has called in a competent engineering team, led by Frank. Dougal is upset that they are making him do real training and eat real astronaut food, Pierre is upset that they won't let Jacques and Francois be his interns, and Werner is upset that Frank is upstaging him.

Scene ii: In his office, Werner cuts and pastes to swap the authors' names on his and Frank's rocket schematics. Then he goes to Clarence's office and shows him all the flaws in "Frank"'s schematics. They agree that Frank needs to be fired for his incompetence.

Scene iii: Pierre and Rosie are working on the rocket while the new team takes their union-mandated lunch break. He tells her he is jealous that Dougal is going to get to go to the moon. He shows her how, if they upgrade from "10" fuel tanks to "3", they will have enough thrust to add an extra pod to the rocket that will hold himself, Jacques, and Francois.

ACT IV

Scene i: Clarence confronts Frank, who calmly explains that the names have been switched on the schematics, then tears them up so nobody will mistakenly use them. After Clarence leaves, Werner lures Frank outside with a fake apology. While he's distracted, Dougal (on Werner's orders) sneaks up behind him and, after some hesitation, kills him with a wrench. Werner and Dougal dispose of the body in the acid tank.

Scene ii: Rosie finds the correct set of schematics, but seeing Werner's name on them she thinks they are the old plans and rips them up so that nobody will mistakenly use them. While she is doing this, Dougal -- who has been drinking heavily to dull the guilt from murdering Frank -- wanders in and begins to babble to her.

Scene iii: Werner panics upon finding both sets of schematics have been destroyed. He calls Pierre in to re-draw the plans from memory. Pierre does so, adding his cow pod to the design.

ACT V

Scene i: Dougal drunkenly confesses the murder to Rosie, and tells her "von-not-supposed-to-tell" put him up to it. She goes to confront Werner. He manages to talk her down.

Scene ii: Pierre convinces Dougal that they should launch the rocket early (so Dougal can escape to the moon, and so that nobody can stop Pierre from loading Jacques and Francois on board). Pierre plans to surprise Dougal when they get to the moon. He counts down (3, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 10, 2, 1, liftoff!), then pushes the launch button and the rocket takes off. But because it is unbalanced (from the udder-shaped cow pod attached to the side), it comes crashing back to Earth and explodes in the acid tanks, killing Pierre, Dougal, Jacques, and Francois.

Scene iii: A month later, Werner, Rosie, and Clarence appear before a parliamentary inquiry. Their incompetence is laid out for all to see. Werner loses all credibility as a scientist and has to go back to being a janitor. Clarence and Rosie are exiled to the USA to work on the US moon landing program.

Our winner, with a score of 210 (to second-place's 88), was Pete, playing Werner von Grupp. He named this monstrosity "Maple Moon Cows: The Untold Story of the Canadian Space Program."

RPG night -- Dread, Cold War edition

Tonight we played a round of Dread. The players were members of the President's entourage and other hangers-on chilling at Camp David. We had President Hellmutt, who had blatantly stolen the election and built a stained-glass fallout shelter at Camp David. There was his not-so-secret lover the hippie Sunshine Happiblossom, who was an activist for men's rights and a hater of all things Guatemalan. Unfortunately for her, we also had Guatemalan ambassador Sylvia Contreras-Ayala, who hoped to retire from politics to become CEO of the United Fruit Company. There was journalist Drake Johnson, who was a secret communist spy, as was Ruth Gilberg, a CIA agent under cover as a janitor. And finally we had General Prescott Wainwright, who believed strongly in getting Americans to produce as many children as possible for cannon fodder.

Our story began with the President and the General having a beer in the stained glass fallout shelter and discussing this comm-u-nism thing that the President didn't really understand. The President was getting well and truly sloshed when a marine ran in to tell him that there was a call for him from Admiral Birkbickler on the red phone in the command center. The President and General rushed to the phone, with the CIA agent and Ambassador both disguised as cleaning staff following. The Admiral informed them that he had just gotten word that Soviet submarines bearing nuclear warheads were within striking distance of New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Honolulu, and -- the phone line was cut before he could tell the President the last city being threatened. The President drunkenly marked the cities on a wall map, putting the marks in wildly inaccurate locations (such as Fargo, ND).

The other characters were waiting outside, where they saw a helicopter painted with a hammer and sickle land in the grass. Three Soviet soldiers and an older man in a suit emerged. The older man declared himself to be the Soviet Premier, here to demand the unconditional surrender of the United States. He explained that he had cut all communication lines out of Camp David, except for the enormous satellite phone that he carried with him. If the captains of the nuclear submarines didn't get a call from him with a secret code phrase in five hours, they had orders to nuke their respective target cities. The CIA agent pulled out a gun and shot the helicopter's fuel tank, causing it to explode -- but remained hidden so nobody else knew she was the one responsible.

After some back and forth, the President and General agreed to meet with the Premier at the stained glass fallout shelter. The Ambassador managed to grab the satellite phone from the Soviets to try to call for a Guatemalan helicopter to come rescue her. All of the Soviet soldiers turned their guns on her, at which point the General ordered the US marines to fire on the Soviets and ducked behind the beer fridge. The President also pulled out a gun. The three Soviet soldiers were killed. The CIA agent (being a commie traitor) took a shot at the president, wounding him in the head. The Hippie rushed to help him. The marines took the phone from the Ambassador and gave it to the General, who called Washington and ordered a preemptive nuclear strike on Russia.

At this point a backup Soviet helicopter, having seen the wreckage of the first one, landed, and four soldiers got out. The Premier rushed to the safety of his newly arrived comrades. The Journalist grabbed the phone and tried to call his communist contacts to let them know about the American nuclear strike, but the marines interrupted him. Luckily for the Reds, the CIA agent was able to dive into the meelee and complete the call. The marines seized her and locked her in a broom closet, while the Journalist fled to the Soviet helicopter. In the commotion, a stray bullet from one of the marines killed the General. The CIA agent used her knowledge of the fallout shelter's secret passageways to escape through a ventilation duct.

Meanwhile, the President rushed outside and took a shot at the Premier. It hit him, and the Soviet soldiers rushed his unmoving body onto the helicopter. The Journalist convinced the Soviets to wait a few minutes so that the CIA agent could join them, since she was a communist too.

The Ambassador now showed up with an army of cleaning staff, gardeners, and other common people who were around at Camp David. They took the satellite phone and made a series of calls to the cleaning staff at the three US missile bases and five Soviet nuclear submarines, telling them to disarm the warheads. (In terms of game mechanics, this required the Ambassador to make eight separate pulls from the tower.)

New York ... saved.

New Orleans ... saved.

San Francisco ... saved.

Moscow ... saved.

Stalingrad ... saved.

Mystery US city ... saved.

Honolulu ... saved.

Leningrad ... saved.

With the world now saved, the Hippie decided to take out the two leaders who had gotten us into this mess. She grabbed the President's gun and shot him (giving him a nice symmetrical wound to the one he got from the CIA agent). She charged the Soviet helicopter, hoping to finish off the Premier, but was killed by the Soviet soldiers.

In the end, the two traitors got away in the Soviet helicopter, the Ambassador became a major union organizer in Guatemala, and the President survived impeachment but lost his reelection campaign. And the mystery city really was Fargo, ND.

Here's a file with the player questionnaires if you'd like to play a Cold War Dread game.

Roleplaying night: Death Takes a Holiday

For our one-shot RPG night this month, we played Death Takes a Holiday by Nick Wedig. I had played DTaH with Mr. Wedig at GenCon this summer, so I was eager to try it out with some new players.

In this game, the players are all members of the Boxmuller family, who were on their way to claim their inheritance from their eccentric uncle Hopewell Boxmuller when the boat they are taking to Perdido Island sinks. The players die, but then are offered a deal by Death himself. Death wants to take a little vacation. He'll allow the players to return to life as long as they take over his job, visiting people just before they die to release their spirit into the afterlife.

Our group had four players. I was Hal Boxmuller, a soldier on bereavement leave from the Vietnam War. With me were academic librarian (and repressed lesbian) Marcie Boxmuller and our two hippie cousins, Starchild and Morningstar Boxmuller. Upon finding ourselves returned to life in the graveyard on Perdido Island, we received a note from Death that said only "lobotomy." We made our way to the psych ward of the local hospital, where we found that head psychiatrist Dr. G had been giving everybody lobotomies -- far more than were necessary. He seemed to be doing something nefarious with the brain parts he was removing, but we weren't sure what. While looking around the psych ward, we found our cousin Greg Boxmuller about to pass away. We laid our hands on him and as his spirit departed, its last words to us were "the money is tainted."

We retired to our hotel, and the next morning Hal and Marcie each got up early and slipped off to the office of the lawyer who was to execute Uncle Hopewell's will. He shooed us away, informing us that the reading wasn't until the afternoon. We reconvened with Starchild and Morningstar and decided to stake out the lawyer's office from the vantage point of a sandwich shop across the street, to see if anything fishy was going on. Starchild decided to sneak around in the bushes, where he was able to see the lawyer arguing animatedly with Dr. G.

That afternoon, the four of us found ourselves joined by two dozen other Boxmullers for the official reading of the will. The will began "Whoever can find my money can have it." This set off a stampede, in which our Aunt Janice was killed. Her departing spirit said only "oh my, oh my, oh my" -- not a helpful clue. When the rest of the family was gone, the lawyer continued with the will, which also said "ask me for help."

We decided that with our special connection with Death, we might be able to talk to Uncle Hopewell at the graveyard. We went there and asked his grave what to do. Morningstar heard a voice telling her to dig up Hopewell's body, so we did. Upon opening the coffin, we found a note that said just "haha, I fooled you!" Hal got so upset he peed on Hopewell's body before closing the coffin again. But as we re-buried him, we noticed some numbers hidden in the fancy vines carved into Hopewell's gravestone. Hal recognized them (from his military training) as map coordinates. After a trip to the local library to look up maps, we determined that they led us to the psych ward at the hospital.

The psych ward was still bizarrely full of lobotomy patients. When Dr. G showed up, Marcie stabbed him with a syringe full of sedatives, and stuffed him into a straitjacket. When he came to, he came clean with us. It turns out that Dr. G was actually Uncle Hopewell in disguise. He had made his own bargain with Death, agreeing to provide the four of us with some practice deaths while selling the lobotomized brains for medical research. It was the brain scheme that was the real source of his fortune, not (as we had thought) his factory manufacturing old time radios. Unfortunately, since Uncle Hopewell was in good with Death, there was little we could do about his scheme. We left to continue our work for Death.

I really like this game's core mechanic. To decide what happens next, the player who is "the authority" draws a card from a special tarot deck and gives it to another player. Based on the card, that player offers a possible direction for the story. For example, we asked what we found when we dug up Hopewell's grave, and who else came to the reading of the will. After the first option is described, the card goes to a second player, who gives an alternate possibility. The person who asked the question then decides which possibility to go with, and passes the authority on to whoever's idea didn't get picked.

Our game got slightly confused when we realized we had turned it into a mystery -- but with no GM to define the mystery or keep the various clues consistent. Nevertheless, we managed to wrap it up in the end and have an enjoyable time. Death Takes a Holiday is definitely a game worth playing.