Jurassic Pulp

[Wirelizard]

You all remember that chase scene in the original Jurassic Park movie, right? SUV vs T. Rex, in the rain?

Right, now roll that back about 70 years, and let's make it Model T vs T. Rex.

Model Ts are just a bit more fragile than SUVs. Just a bit. 1920s T. Rexes are just as toothéd and mean as later models, though.

Tomorrow's 45 Adventures game will be an exercise of 45A's driving rules - and of insanity, in the finest pulp traditions.

[Operator5]

Oooooh! A car chase! I love it!

I've actually just started playing around with some new car rules that hopefully will be simpler and faster so I can't wait to see how your chase turns out.

[Galman]

Oooo, sounds interesting.  I got 10 on the big lizard.

[mrborges]

That sounds great.
Model T, huh?
Good luck to the passengers!

[Whiskyrat]

I hope the Model T engine is already running - rolling a d6 to hand-crank the engine with a T-Rex in full gallop would probably make for a short game. 

Looking forward to the next post.

[Wirelizard]

I hope the Model T engine is already running - rolling a d6 to hand-crank the engine with a T-Rex in full gallop would probably make for a short game. 

That came up in the game, actually. We ruled that because the motorized part of the expedition had been generously sponsored by Mr. Ford himself, all vehicles came with those new-fangled electric starters. No Brawn check needed to start these Model Ts!

So, the scenario was run, and judged largely to be a success!

The Scenario & Setup Notes
(game report to follow!)

The Harvey-Round Motorized South American Expedition had expanded game trails, carved tracks, and hacked their way into the unexplored Gran Perdido Valley, and discovered great wonders - living dinosaurs, throwbacks to a greater age still alive in the mundane 1920s world!

They established a camp, threw up a thorn bomba and light stockade to discourage scavengers, and did a great deal of exploring and sample collection. Then one night they noticed the jungle was even more restless than usual, the night full of bellowing and snarling! Just before dawn, an rumbling was heard, and moments later, a huge herd of sauropods trampled through the camp, destroying the bomba, flattening the equipment and radio tents, and scattering everyone!

Our scenario opened in the immediate aftermath, with everyone picking through the shattered camp and rushing to the (fortunately undamaged) vehicles to escape back to the river and safety. The wireless was lost, the armoury tent smashed flat, so most had only what they carried.

We had four players and five vehicles. I designed the scenario to be a race/chase, not a firefight or hunt, so nobody had any weaponry on them heavier than a pistol at the start.

I took Terry "Sharpshooter" Harvey (Performer, Grade 3) and his lovely and capable assistant Lydia (Servant, Grade 2).

Malcolm took Mr. Round, man of mystery (Grade 2, can't remember the archetype), and two of his assistants, another Grade 2 of unknown name and specialty, and Ethan Orient, Grade 1 Anarchist.

Mike took Capt. James E. Quirke, RN Ret'd (Big Game Hunter, Grade 3), and his assistant Percy, Grade 2 Servant. (Best line during pre-game setup, from Mike, when he decided not to take a female figure for Percy, "Percy could be a girl's nickname... nah, Captain Quirke has been in the Royal Navy his whole life... he's not quite comfortable around ladies, you know...")

Corey (Burgundavia, here) took Jim "Turkey" Lacrosse, Grade 2 Enforcer, who'd been gang boss of the labourers and tradesmen accomanying the expedition. Assisting him were a Grade 1 Driver/Mechanic nicknamed "Leadfoot" and a Grade 1 Gatman called Tommy. (this is only four grades of 45A characters, which Corey complained about after he lost, until Malcolm pointed out that he'd won with only four grades, Ethan not having lived very long...)

There were eight Encounter Markers amongst the wreckage of the camp; two of them rifles, two specimen crates (+1 VP for one, +2 for the other), two dud markers, one that lead to an attack by a single Compy, and one (never triggered this game) that would have had the triggering character staggering around for a turn choking in the fumes from the smashed lead-acid batteries of the wireless transmitter.

We also had a deck of Event Cards, the top one being flipped at the start of each turn. I had partly 'stacked' the deck - divided it into thirds and made sure each third was a shuffled mix of dinosaur and "Nothing Happens (Yet)" cards, so as to pace the game a bit.

The "Nothing Happens (Yet)" cards also incremented the Tyrannosaurus Rex arrival. The test was "d10 + (number of Nothing Happens cards) must exceed 12" so we had two "safe" turns at the beginning, then an increasing chance of the T. Rex showing up. We started rolling this test after we had two NA cards face-up, and it turned out to be mid-game game before the T. Rex showed.

The table was large - about 4x9, massive by 45A standards.

I told everyone that it was "Not neccesarily a co-op game!" and the treachery started immediately - one player (noted sociopath Burgundavia  ) sent his mechanic to cut the brake lines of one of the trucks while his other characters climbed into another truck!

I'll do a proper game report shortly, and hopefully Burgundavia will be along with his photographs, and protestations of non-sociopathic gameplay!

[Burgundavia]

Damn right I am going to protest my innocence. I merely cut one brakeline and rammed one other vehicle.

Two random teaser shots:



You can see the whole flickr set here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7393803@N03/sets/72157622663853444/

It was a good game, but there were a bunch of things that could have gone very differently with one dice roll. If i were to play again, there are a few things I would change:

1. Have two exits from the camp. Having a single exit meant everybody bunched up, which allowed the two leaders to get good leads on. Braid the road so that there were multiple points of contact
2. Make travelling off-road more dangerous and slower. We played it with no movement penalty and a straight dodge check (+ driving skill) to stay in control. Half speed, half accel and -1 per 2 would make it much harder
3. Make the herbivores respond to vehicles. A good suggestion was to have them treat trucks as either rivals or mating targets. Either way, things end messily.
4. Have dinos come from the front, to slow down the leaders. We only had dinos come from one side, which really hurt some people.
5. Have dinos come from the back, to chase people out of camp.
6. Add more environmental risks, like bridges you can only drive slowly over, cliffs, etc. As it was, the road just wasn't dangerous enough.
7. Make controlling vehicles harder. As we played it, one player made nearly every single on of his rolls, with re-rolls. He was driving the truck with no brakelines. The loss of control table should be more finegrained, to allow results such as loss of speed without driving off the road.
8. Have different speeds of vehicles. All the trucks in our games were trucks. Be nice to have some smaller, faster vehicles and larger, slower ones. Gives different groups different strategies.

[mrborges]

Man, that really does sound like quite a fantastic game!
Great background/setup, and I like how the Nothing Happens...Yet cards get the T-Rex out sooner or later.

Thanks for sharing all this so far, looking forward to seeing and hearing more!

[Wirelizard]

Left out of the Scenario & Setup post by mistake:

The table was large - about 4x9, massive by 45A standards. The remains of the camp were at one end, just in from the table edge. The front of the camp was packed down (treated same as the road for driving) and a single dirt road led off into the jungle.

The route back to the river was mostly light jungle scrub that could (with difficulty) be driven through. Think of that cinematicly convenient jungle in the last Indiana Jones movie, except instead of Shia Lebouf fencing with Russians, we had random hunters and velociraptors, so ours was a much cooler jungle. In amongst the light scrub were thickets of much denser growth.

The road split about 1/3 of the way back to the river; one route went up and over a large hill, the other wound through the valley below it. The valley route was slightly longer and had much sharper turns, but was further from the onrushing dino herd. The two routes rejoined for the last section before the river, where a small steamer waited to carry everyone to safety.

[Wirelizard]

A (fairly) quick rundown of some of the high points of the game... because I've done more typing already today than I have in the last few weeks!

The game opened with most of us starting trucks and picking through the rubble of the camp. I found a rifle, but traded it to Mike's hunter for a crate of intact dino eggs (worth 2 bonus Victory Points!) - except that later, during a fistfight with Corey's bruiser in the back of my truck, my character stepped on the crate and broke the eggs... only worth 1 VP after that... (that was the rifle that later dispatched the T. Rex, so I guess it was worth the trade...)

One of Corey's characters snipped the brake line of one of the other trucks, as previously mentioned; an attempt was made to back another truck over someone else, and a compsognathus was discovered and promptly dispatched amongst the rubble.

The first dinos appeared right on turn two - a batch of mini-raptors that would later swarm all over Corey's truck and mostly die as they fell off it... it was one of the closed-cab Model Ts, so the dinos couldn't invite themselves easily!

The first vehicles hit the road as more small dinos started to invade the camp, and the first big dino showed up - a juvenile (but still huge!) sauropod that nearly walked into the back of the last truck to lurch out of camp.

A near-collision had forced my truck to a halt, so Corey attempted to ram but missed his Driver roll and snarled our fenders together. That mess took most of the rest of the game to sort out, with velociraptors attacking my (open!) truck, attempted hijackings, fisticuffs with an incredibly dangerous ex-boxer, and Corey's last conscious character hiding in his truck cab, unable to drive, hoping the raptors didn't notice him...

Meanwhile the two trucks to make the river went speeding off - really speeding in the case of Capt. Quirke & Percy, who (barely!) outran the T. Rex and nearly ran into the tail of an anklyosaurus that crossed the road in front of them. Malcolm's Mr. Round used all his Lucky-generated Hero Points to keep his brakeless truck barely under control, and both trucks nearly collided (with the T. Rex right behind one of them!) at the second intersection when the roads re-joined.

That was the cinematic climax of the game - two speeding trucks on converging jungle roads, with a T. Rex thundering along behind one of them, in the back of which the gravely-wounded Capt. James E. Quirke (he'd been badly bitten by the T. Rex when it came out of the jungle) taking careful aim with his rescued Custom Huntin' Rifle... and putting the bullet right into the beast's eyeball, with a natural 1 on a d10!

The Rex came tumbling down the hill in a cloud of dust, it's tiny brain blown out the back of it's skull, and the two winning trucks skidded into the landing area in front of the steamer. Mr. Round's truck ended the game bogged in the mud of the riverbank - he'd used piles of luck and the brush surrounding the road to bring his brakeless truck to a shuddering halt just before the river!

Meanwhile, deep in the jungle, Terry Harvey and his assistant Lydia gunned their truck and hoped they'd make it, leaving an unconcious 'Turkey' Lacrosse and the trecherous, brake-line-cutting, badly wounded Leadfoot to their fate and the wandering velociraptors.

{Roll End Credits, Theme Music}


Edit to add a bonus after the credits!
The first set (of 3) of the Event Cards I used some of in this game are on this old LAF thread. I'll try and update that thread this week with all the cards in PDF form.