Hillview, LA. Just inland from New Orleans. Population 4000, elevation 2. Hurricane Katrina mostly spared Hillview, but when natural disaster was avoided, man-made disaster was just around the corner.



Heidi Jo Summers is a cheerleader with a heart of gold, or something about that dense. She has a problem: she has a baby, and she doesn't know who the father is. She hopes it's the one-man crime wave Spider, who has shown that he actually cares about her and her infant daughter, but it could be Sheriff Bo or Deputy Jimmie too. She wants to find out, and figure out a way to build some sort of stable financial situation. Unfortunately for her, that means she'll have to keep all three of those knuckleheads alive long enough to figure things out.

Deputy Jimmie Thornton IV has a problem too. After a messy divorce, he doesn't have any money. He's living in a U-Store-It and complaining to his boss, Sheriff Bo, about how he needs that raise that's been "coming" for so many years. That isn't his problem, though.

He's also as bright as a burnt match. That isn't his problem either.

Sheriff Bo Tannen has an idea - why not use their official cars to dispel suspcion while they drive on down to hurricane-ravaged New Orleans and do a little looting? No violence, no victims, no way it could go wrong. Deputy Jimmie's problem, mentioned above, is that he's going in on his boss' plan.

Spider Parrish has a history with Jimmie and Bo, and they think they've got him under their thumbs - he'll use his underground contacts to fence the loot for them. But Spider has a plan of his own. He wants to be rid of Jimmie and Bo. He also wants to make sure that Heidi Jo gets what she wants; this may complicate things a bit.

Things go wrong early and often. Jimmie and Bo wind up killing an old lady at one of the very first houses they loot. In a not-too-bright move, they steal, and fence, her (registered) gun. Spider talks Bo into taking an unequal share of the proceeds of their scheme, then later tells Jimmie about Bo's double-dealing. Heidi Jo single-handedly props up the drug store paternity test industry, collecting DNA from everyone and bravely, if not very effectivey, trying to keep them from turning on each other at every opportunity. But despite her vigilance, Jimmie decides to take his raise from Bo at gunpoint, and Bo winds up gutshot in the hospital.

In act 2, Bo and Jimmie reach a sort of detente as Bo recovers, since Jimmie has what he wants - cash. Sheriff Bo leaves the hospital with a colostomy bag under his wheelchair. He calls in Spider to punish him for revealing the uneven split with Jimmie, but Spider easily overwhelms him and, in the process of extracting the keys to the locker where the loot is stored plus all his cash, breaks seven of his fingers in a most gruesome fashion. Eventually, Heidi Jo and Jimmie wind up on the scene, and in a panicked car chase, Bo gets run over by Heidi Jo's pickup truck (driven by Spider), and Jimmie shoots both Spider and the baby. Heidi Jo loses Jimmie and drives her mangled truck out of town to her father's cabin; Spider and the baby go to the hospital. Spider's wounds are superficial but the baby is barely hanging on. Heidi Jo wants revenge now, too, even though Jimmie (as it turns out) was the father. Spider isn't running away - he'll do just fine for her purposes, biological father be damned.

Jimmie is now everyone's enemy, and that makes Bo, Heidi Jo, and Spider at least their common enemy's enemies. In an awful, tragic, touching scene, Bo visits Spider in prison and they come to an arrangement, figuring that they've screwed each other something close to equally at this point. Spider puts his fist to the glass for a bump, and Bo raises his mangled claw and manages to get two knuckles to the other side of the glass.

In the Aftermath, they all work together to lay the whole thing at Jimmie's feet, starting with the old lady's murder down in New Orleans. He doesn't even make it to trial - an assassin's bullet lays him low during his perp walk (black 3). Spider and Heidi Jo move to Texas to start over with her baby, who somehow (white 10 Aftermath for both characters) came through her wounds and made a full recovery. Bo will be drawing disability for the rest of his life, augmented by his ill-gotten gains, and will never face justice, because of how thoroughly he outmaneuvered everyone (black 14). He went through hell for his get-rich scheme, but hey - it worked, after a fashion!

This is great, Colin! Your R-map looks fine, no worries.

(Dirty little secret for you- Jason has a small army of Roach-bound grad students that do all his work for him, so it's really not that impressive.)

I notice that you only have one Need selected as an element, even though other needs came up in the narrative. Do you think this affected play? Was the story heavily weighted toward the "get rich" Need, or did it balance out with other character's goals? Do you think having two Needs established at the start would have changed the story?

Your ending totals (two white 10s, black 14) are pretty extreme- did the players work hard to accumulate the dice to do that, or was it just luck? Were other players actively working to undermine those results by moving dice around?

How long did the game take to play?

Also- dude, you guys shot a baby. That's one messed up fiasco.

Thanks!

Steve - We did find that our game centered strongly on the single Need in play, and conversely that one of the Objects, the photos, didn't get any focus. Doing it again, we agreed we'd probably have gone for a second Need, but trad gamer habits die hard ("Better get an extra Longsword +1, you know, just in case"). It didn't hurt the story at all, though, since that need was big enough for everyone to ride. We were all tied together strongly enough that Bo and Jimmie's pursuit of getting rich affected everyone.

We actually played with the dice as directed. The guy who died, Deputy Jimmie, had three of each color and got what we all felt he deserved, not least Chris, who played him. But the two 10s were flukes - I ("Spider") only had two dice, went into the aftermath totally expecting to die in jail, and rolled 5, 5 for something like the win. Sarah ("Heidi Jo") rolled 6, 5, 3 white, 4 black, on her nearly-balanced pool. The funny outcome was John, playing the bad Sheriff, who rolled 14 on four black dice. I did make a serious attempt to get him to take a white die when he resolved scene 12, basically inviting him to gat my guy, but he gritted his teeth and took a fourth black die instead. Everyone agreed that that level of dedication to our collective schadenfreude deserved a big reward, and I for one hope Bo enjoys his lifetime of government-paid spongebaths (and getting away with murder) enough to offset that whole wheelchair/colostomy thing.

Our total time was 2:55 of play plus a 15-minute break. I imagine that if we were to do it again, we'd probably take more like 2:30. We lost some time getting over our early jitters, finishing the pizza, and figuring out who would like what beer. None of us had played a GM-less game before, and we struggled with technique for the first few scenes.

Besides being hell of messed up, the baby-shooting scene was interesting from a metagame perspective. The scene was established by Sarah ("Heidi Jo") and it was a getaway chase, with Deputy Jimmie chasing her, Spider, and the baby. We gave her a black die, which she immediately gave to Chris ("Jimmie"), and she paused to enumerate what she needed to happen for success: she wanted to get away, she wanted Spider to get away, she wanted the baby to get away, and she wanted Jimmie to stop chasing them (but still be alive). We agreed that any one of those things not happening would be enough for the black die. She decided that the most dramatic possibilities were either not getting away, or having the baby be hurt in the spray of fire that happened at the end of the previous scene. I think she chose the latter because it minimized her authoring the other characters' outcomes, and because it tied her strongly into the Tilt element of "Mayhem/Cold-blooded score settling" (and maybe also "Failure/A tiny mistake leads to ruin" for having left the baby in Spider's care a few scenes previous). I suggested leaving the baby's ultimate fate to the Aftermath, which was only two scenes away, and that left the door open to the happyish ending we had.

I also put together a scene-by-scene writeup, which would take about a thousand posts here and be annoying to anyone who posts afterwards, I think, since you'd have to scroll past it all every time. Any rate, I stuck it on my blog.