gen con amber ans stuff

[jibbajibba]

Well my amber game was more than sucessful. Any game where one of the pcs ends up tied to a chair being beaten and interrogated by the other 5 must be good right?
Anyway I will post up a whole debrief when I get to the airport.
- am currently sitting in Palomino enjoying an excellent early supper before getting my flight home. A combination of an excellent con not much sleep and a surplus of alcohol, including this excellent pino noir, mixed with Inception which I just watched has filled me with a dream like calm.  - find myself questioning the entirity of my existance and wishing there was something beyond the mundane reality wishing there was indeed a curtain we could peer behind.
Perhaps that is what drives 30000 people to converge on a mid American city and pretend they are elves, goblins or imortals who can bestride realities with aplomb. But here is the steak so I am off. Game review later

[AshenHaze]

I skimmed the first sentence and mistakenly read beaten as eaten...

[jibbajibba]

So the Amber game I ran.

First a precis of the plot. The party are accompanying Gerard on a diplomatic mission to Florentz, a recnet Golden Circle member. Duke Armondo, the Merchant Governor, is murdered and Gerard is accused of the crime because of a device powered by blue crystals that can read and display people's memories. The decive clearly shows the scene in the memory of a servant girl who was found in the Duke's room.
Florentz is full of intrigue, there are rivals for the Governorship (4 of them) rivals for control of Armondo's Merchant House, there is a cultural tension between 2 groups which has resulted in the downtrodden Tiran mounting an IRA style rebellion.

As players showed up I gave them a sheet of A4 with background of the shadow on one side and a map on the other. The game started with a quick overview of the rule variants I was using A skill sytem and partial powers. I didn't do any detail because I knew I had explained it all on the character sheets.
The PCs then got a sheet with all 8 available PCs on it with a trump image and an overview of each character without giving away stats or powers but with strong hints. The 6 PCs then had 10 points to bid for which PC they wanted and for a position.
The PC auction went much as I expected but a caouple of cany folk realised that none of the PCs would be duffers so the bids topped out at 6. Then we bid for positions. There were three of these. Captian of the Serpen's bane, Ambassador to Florents and a messenger fromm the king (in fact this one was actuallly one of Amber's spy network). The bids here were more varied and one PC actually went over her 10 points taking badstuff to get the position of Diplomat.
There was a problem with the aution in that I said the PCs woudl get good stuff witht eh points left over. In retrospect I should have used this as ablative goodstuff by giving them poker chips and making them spend the points to make a good reaction or get lucky. If I ran this again I would give them all poker chips and run the auctoion like that from the start. Because I didn't do this most Pcs had 3 -5 points of good stuff for the whole of the game.
However the auction did work as I hoped and it kept the essence of the commpetative amber set up but meant that I didn't have a 2 hour set up time and in fact the PCs were ready to go after 25 minutes and I gave them 5 minutes to familiarise themselves with their characters.
The characters that weren't chosen became NPCs. Gerard sent one of them back to Amber to report to Gerard and more on the other one later.
On hearing the accusations the PCs had the reactions you might imagine which were why the fanny do we care about this lets just fuck off back to Amber or wipe this whole place. They saw the advantage of a diplomatic solution however and so decided to investigate.
Everyone took to their characters and have to say as always with Amber the role play was great. the way it panned out the spy position went to the guy with advanced pattern powers, which wasn't a great match as he was written up as a devout Pattern acolyte and wasn't really written as a covert type. However access to Pattern Lense meant he quickly completed 2 of his three objectives find the broken pattern and check out what is happenign to it. He quickly got into some action with some crystal power autometa. I had to lay down the lore a bit with Pattern defense as for me that is a power defense and won't defeat a physical attack but this guys group played it differently.
The rest of the party opted to pursue what was the correct route and spotted that the machine that could read memories could probably implant them and they immediated went for the savant/wizard that made it. One of them Fala who was more of an instigator than an investigator went after the Tiran rebel angle and started to well agitate ...
So there were a load of threads they ignored the rival houses the local militia etc etc  and we proceeded on three fronts the Broken Pattern the wizard and the rebels.
I managed to keep the ace moving along. The servant girl was interviewed but resisted the direct approach until the charmy ones worked on her and fala got enough infor to start a little war. Then Resnyck, the 'lover' won her over good and proper.
Now the plot had called for an elder Amberite to be behind it but the pace was moving faster then I thought so I borrowed the spare PC character that hadn't been used and reincorporated her back into teh plot as the cats paw from the Elder which was Luke/Reynard.
 So the investigators regrouped and paid the wizard a visit whilst Fala armed the rebels with some gunpower and bust the servant girl out of jail. The wizards mind reading toy got smashed to bits and he tried some magic and called on his automated dogs (powerd by the blue crystal) the Pcs dispatched then luckily ranks 1-3 in warfare were all there. Then the spy guy reappeared. By now they had worked out that these autometa had killed armondo (although they never found the actuall creature itself) and that there was someone behind this. then they let him get too close to his racked spells and he triggered his lynchpin free exit spell. They persued him tote h brokn pattern and dispatched the remaining autometa that the spy guy had encountered previously.
At this point I chucked in a trump contact from Luke to Fala to try and get him onside and to break up the rather chummy use of trumps
The guys on the broken pattern were closing in on the wizard when he was trumped out by that spare character with a trump from Luke Just at this point Fala had put his plan together to get the same spare character into his scheme. I ran with it and with just the sort of precise timing you can never plan for Chole (the spare character) attacked Fala and was trying a Pyschic attack just as the rest of the party poured in through a trump sketch of her rooms that Resnyck had drawn based on Trump spying the trump sketch of the wizard he had just drawn.
So the circle was complete. The party knocked everyone out just to be sure and then interviewed them all with extreme violence, Fala was not happy as all his devious escape plans were thwarted by some excellent forethought from the Captain.
They came up with a story that put all teh blame on the rebels and the wizard, whose mind they had totally screwed over breaking down a mental barrier imposed by somethign they thought Chloe but actually it was via the blue crystal mind reading device. They presented their story to Gerard who thought it sounded plausible. In typical amber logic they sent the marines off the Serpent's Bane to clean up the newly armed rebels and eliminate every possible loose thread, although Resnyck saved the servant girl.
Gerard was exonorated and so was never put in the machine to test his version of events and allow Luke to insert all those memories he intended .... the honor of Florentz was satisfied the treaty maintained.

Importantly the Players loved it and everyone wanted to keep their super cool character sheets and download the rest of the scenario and all my optiponal rules.
Seems like my first Con hosted game worked out alright:)

[Evermasterx]

very interesting, jibbajibba.
good ideas for some future campaign...
but you should have been drinking some brunello di montalcino being in Firenze, or Florentz, la mi scusi

[charis]

That sounds like a very fun scenario/game! Nice work JibbbaJabba.

[AshenHaze]

Your one shot sounded so fun I decided to run a one shot for my friends with your bidding on NPC and Titles idea.  I was curious if you could post a sample of the character descriptions you gave?  And what information you gave them.

Also, you say the spy completed two of his three objectives immediately?  Did each character come with a list of objectives?  Was additional character information granted after the character was selected?  I've never run a one shot game so any advice is appreciated.

[jibbajibba]

Your one shot sounded so fun I decided to run a one shot for my friends with your bidding on NPC and Titles idea.  I was curious if you could post a sample of the character descriptions you gave?  And what information you gave them.

Also, you say the spy completed two of his three objectives immediately?  Did each character come with a list of objectives?  Was additional character information granted after the character was selected?  I've never run a one shot game so any advice is appreciated.

The positions came with objectives. In retrospect I should have given everyone an objective but I dismissed it as i thought that the restricted time slot woudl mean that objectives ether took over or got ignored.

I intent to pack the whole game up in a zip file and post it to my server tonight I just need to include an extra doc explaining some plot options which is currently just in my head.

[AshenHaze]

Thanks Jibbajibba, looking forward to looking through it.

[jibbajibba]

You can find the details for my game on my site i set up a link from the index page here http://www.jibbajibba.com/

[RPGPundit]

That sounds great, and its nice to hear that Amber was present at Gencon.

RPGPundit