The 4th scenario was played a week after the 3rd, with 3 completely different players. I called it "The Diamyo's Widow" because the daimyo himself met his end in the previous scenario. The background was that his territory had fallen into a bit of chaos and there were bandits rampaging around the countryside. The daimyo's widow was isolated in the upper floor of the pagoda while bandits were looting the surrounding villages and were threatening the pagoda itself. Her brother, the monks, and the ronin responded to help clear out the bandits, but they did a lot more fighting among themselves. Among the interesting events were the following:
Here the gang of bandit bowmen opens fire from the graveyard hill against the ronin. The visibility was only 12 inched for this scenario, due to a mandatory card play at the start.
A woodcutter picks up a teppo and fires it at the brother's league. But this only leads to the teppo man's demise as the brother himself promptly rushes him and cuts him down.
The brother's league has good luck with their might roles to climb the steep hillside, ascending almost as an entire unit.
The ronin, played by our youngest player (14 y.o.) found a gang of spear armed bandits inside one of the huts, and had a bit of fighting to do in order to dispatch them.
The group of peasant spearmen that were part of the surrounded a key character from the monks' league in one of the huts, but he played a Fortune Card that allowed him to escape right through the surrounding peasants and ronin! Unfortunately I didn't take a photo of that cool event.
But what happened next was that a wild boar attacked the monks out of a grove of bamboo. They quickly dispatched the boar.
The ronin made it up the steep hillside about the time the monks made it up the road to the pagoda. This was a challenge that the monks could not resist.
Having greater numbers on hand, the monks charged and prevailed in the ensuing melee, though the fighting was hard.
But the last of the ronin, their bowman, had gotten into the first floor of the pagoda, only to encounter a giant mamushi (pit viper), which took him down!
Then the monks had to turn to face the brother's league, which had ascended the steep hillside almost as a complete unit. The monks lined up in a perfect formation, only to be hit by a Fortune Card played by the brother which allowed placement of a burst (likely a primitive grenade in this instance)!
In Pulp Alley this means that there was a perilous area created temporarily. Each figure in that area had to pass a challenge revealed by a Fortune Card. This took out the monk's peasant spearman on the left, and temporarily put down their ally on the right. The brother and his men were then able to rush the two standing monks with an advantage in numbers and win the resulting melee, though it took a couple of turns.
With the brother's league being the only one left standing, we didn't play out his league defeating the pit viper on the first level and the noxious fumes on the second level. He and his friends walked away with the glory and with his sister saved from the bandits. This concludes my series of scenarios using Jeff's samurai figures.
I ran these scenarios on a much larger table than is usual for Pulp Alley, and with more players and total characters than normal, and with no turn limit. Normally Pulp Alley is played out on smaller surfaces, such as a 3 foot by 3 foot, with a limit of only 6 turns, and with one or two or three players, or a limit of the total number of characters if more players are involved. So these games took between 4 and 6 hours, rather than the usual 1 to 2 hours of smaller Pulp Alley scenarios. Had a good time running these.