I think this was one of the standout games of my con. It was run by Fred Hicks of Evil Hat fame.
Twilight Knights
We all played aged british knights. It turns out the title wasn’t entirely ceremonial. I played Sir Salman Rushdie, we also had Arthur C. Clarke, Agatha Christie, Fred Hoyle, Richard Branson and errr….. the race car driver, who’s name escapes me at the moment.
We ended up playing more MIB then ancient covenants but it was great fun.
I’d never played InSpectres before, systemically it’s pretty easy. There are 4 skills: academics, athletics, technology and contacts. These are rated 1 to 4 and represent how many dice you roll in that kind of conflict. Only the highest die matters, there is a chart to dictate outcome going from Terrible (the GM gets to hose you with a terrible outcome) up through Not Great (The GM decides your fate but you get to dictate a single good element) up to Amazing (Describe the result and gain 2 franchise dice. I’ll explain franchise dice later.)
There is also stress. Whenever you encounter somethng that has the potential to make you WAUGHH you must make a stress roll. The more stressful the situation the more dice you must roll. Stress rolls are sort of the inverse of skill rolls. Only the lowest die counts and the results start with Too Cool For School through Annoyed which causes a 1 die penalty on the next roll down to Complete and total nuclear meltdown which causes you to loose a total of 2 dice off your skills.
The final element of the system is the time element, franchise dice. Each mission has a certain number of franchise dice. When the players succeed especially well the players get one or two of them. When the GM runs out of dice the mission is resolved. At the end of the mission players can spend the franchise dice to heal dice lost to stress or store them in the franchise where they can be used later.
There are few other wrinkles: Talents and Documentaries. My talent was Security Detail. The documentary allows one player to ask another player a question as if they are asking a question in the documentary later. Anything suggested by the either the questioner or the answer is true. Each player can call for one documentary per mission.
The Case of the Time Dilating Brain Slug
So we got a call that there was trouble in the underground. Once we found the phenomena, it turned out to be a weird time dilation effect. At the center of it was my old enemy the Ayotola Khomeini. It turned out to be a disguise and when Agatha Christie pulled the fake face off it was the queen. Appearntly she was being mind controlled by a brain slug.
Sir Richard Branson pulled it free and tossed it aside. It grew into a proper gelatenous mass. Salman Rushdie engaged the slug in a philosophical debate convincing the slug of the slug of the importance of human rights and free will. It said oops, sorry and beamed away.
This was about a 9 frachise dice mission and we took more stress thanwe got in franchise dice so we started the second mission down a bit.
There can be only one
We started getting calls, “Then there were nine. Hahahaha”. “Then there were eight. Hahahahaha.” At this point Sir Sean Connery is killed.
We convened at the Highlander castle for reasons that I’m sure were completely logical. Once there we found a secret door that came into a gallery full of empty suits of armor standing guard… of course they were animated. Sir Richard Branson out awsomed the ghost of Sean Connery and donned his armor.
On the other side of the door is Christopher Lambert driven mad by lack of work and knocking off his co-stars from Highlander, becasue there can be only one.
This was a five dice mission and I think we took less stress than that.
Martian Chocolate
This was a big 13 dice mission.
If I recall correctly, Richard Branson got a phone call to the effect of “It’s missing.” Appearently the phone call came fromr with Branson’s Volcano base… on Mars. We took Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShiptwo to get to Mars. Somewhere along the line we discover it in this context is Sir Richard Branson’s Ego.
Once we got there the Olympus Mons base was empty, no service staff or anything. Down the elevator filled with stressful cobwebs. Downstairs there is the scariest sight in the univere…. a little girl… on Mars… with a box of chocolates… or maybe souls.
Taking my instruction from MIB I instruct my security detail to kill the little girl. It turns out she was a hologram and we manage to secure the computer interface. About here we lost power and there was a lot of tumbling around. Hoyle uses our lasers which bounce off everything but black body objects to illuminate the room. For some reason the control panel was black body object.
Through the door is a room full of cloning tubes, that had little grey aliens in them…. made of chocolate. Accessing the computer core we learn that the chocolate aliens have the souls of people who have crossed Branson.
Branson’s double/ego calls up to gloat. We feed the chocolate into the Olympus Mons magma chamber thus causing it to eject the chamber to Earth.
We land on the top floor of Virgin Atlantic HQ where Branson fights his double/ego. Eventually with the help of the team Branson’s ego is defeated, thus making the Kingdom safe once again.
We called the game at this point because it was going to be hard to top.
Gaming
