Cool Things About Last Night's Pulp Game

[kjamma4]

I am currently in a semi-monthly pulp campaign run by a GM that has two separate player groups in the same world. Yesterday, we had a big game where the players from both groups played at the same time.

 

We were in Ethiopia trying to get Haile Selassie safely out of the country. While trying to do so, we were strafed by an Italian aircraft. My Gadgeteer fired his Engine Stopping Ray and another player shot at the plane with a Thompson. I used some HERO Action Points and hit, stopping the engine cold. The other player also hit, doing further damage to the plane. Crash/Burn follows. Great teamwork!

 

[We also had a sub-mission to gather intelligence on troop strength. When we captured two Italian soldiers, one of the characters who didn't speak Italian told a character who could, "Ask them how big their unit is?" That immediately made the "Funny Things Said During The Game" list.]

[Barton]

Re: Cool Things About Last Night's Pulp Game

 

I am currently in a semi-monthly pulp campaign run by a GM that has two separate player groups in the same world. Yesterday, we had a big game where the players from both groups played at the same time.

 

We were in Ethiopia trying to get Haile Selassie safely out of the country. While trying to do so, we were strafed by an Italian aircraft. My Gadgeteer fired his Engine Stopping Ray and another player shot at the plane with a Thompson. I used some HERO Action Points and hit, stopping the engine cold. The other player also hit, doing further damage to the plane. Crash/Burn follows. Great teamwork!

 

[We also had a sub-mission to gather intelligence on troop strength. When we captured two Italian soldiers, one of the characters who didn't speak Italian told a character who could, "Ask them how big their unit is?" That immediately made the "Funny Things Said During The Game" list.]

 

I am the GM of this game. This action also has more reaching effects for the players. The victory over the Italian invaders will increase the ability of the player characters to influence the Ethiopian goverment reaction to the invasion. A note to GM's some combats have effects beyond just killing the bad guys.

[Savinien]

Re: Cool Things About Last Night's Pulp Game

 

Glad to hear some stuff on how this game is going, Guys!

 

When am I going to 'guest appear'?

[kjamma4]

Re: Cool Things About Last Night's Pulp Game

 

Another good session last night. We were able to get Haile Selassie to agree to leave the country with us via airplane. Of course the Italians had other notions.

 

Our pilot had spent most of the adventure trying to patch up the airplane and had done a good job. I had to rewire my Engine Stopping Ray to start up one of the engines. We got strafed and The Wraith, already badly wounded from a bombing attack, took the brunt of the strafing. He was one BODY away from death and only there because he expended all his Hero Action Points.

 

We loaded him on the plane and took to the sky but were beset upon by an Italian airplane. The pilot was doing a good job hitting us and we hit back. However, the Italian was unfazed and continued to attack. He hit the crew compartment and the pilot had to spend a HAP to avoid being hit. Unfortunately, our newest player (playing The Question, a mystery man) took the hit. Roll for location - vitals. Ouch.

 

Next phase, I was unable to get a bead on the Italian plane but two of the group hit with the Lewis guns. The Italian fired again and hit. Crew compartment. Pilot spends another HAP. New guy is hit. Roll for location - head. At this point, he has to spend his only HAP and changes the location to hand. Still bad but not deadly.

 

This time, the Italian plane is in my sights. I need to roll 6- to hit. Decided against using a HAP and rolled - a six exactly. Rolled the dice for effect and was able to stop the engine. Italian plane goes into a flat spin. Pilot tries to get out but we never saw his chute.

 

A great session. Despite the pounding, The Question did real well and he was instrumental in convincing Haile Selassie that he should leave the capital in order to fight another day. Great fun had by all (and only three more planes until I'm an ace!)

[Zane_Marlowe]

Re: Cool Things About Last Night's Pulp Game

 

I'm actually playing "Jack Slate" a "crypto-archaeologist" (someone who specializes in finding sites that aren't supposed to exist) in the other group for this game. I have to first tip my hat to Barton's GMing skills. Those of you who have a chance, get to his games at a con, he's excellent.

 

That said, we actually don't know that much about what the other group's been doing. You see, we all work for "His Lordship," a shadowy British sponsor whom we've never met, and who flies us all over the globe in the massive R500 airship. When the two groups went to Ethiopia, we had a brief joint adventure before going our separate ways. The other group was charged with the northern offensive and evacuating Haile Selassie. Our group was charged with 1) finding some means of disrupting the counterfeiting operation sponsored by the Italian government to disrupt the Ethiopian economy, and 2) recovering artifacts from an ancient coptic site in the southern part of the country to keep them from falling into fascist hands.

 

The first goal we succeeded in with the help of our ex-mobster engineering wiz James Baker. He rigged a device to test the comparative electrical resistance of two coins, and as long as you knew one was genuine, then if they came up with different values, then you knew the other was a fake. We actually managed to test the coins in the Ethiopian treasury for counterfeits and discovered about two thousand coins were false (a smallish proportion), and the counterfeiting plot has been wrapped up.

 

The second goal we're working on now. Except we're a little ambitious. You see, the Italians are driving the Ethiopians into the ground with superior weapons, training and airpower. The Ethiopians, while numerically superior, believe that their noble cavalry charges into enemy machine guns with 1890's-era firearms (with which they once repelled an earlier Italian invasion) will be blessed by God with victory. Well, we (the players) have decided we want to try to impact the course of the war, which means we need to restore the Ethiopian morale (they've suffered some serious defeats), even the odds in the air, and take advantage of the overextended supply lines the Italians have stretched in their march north through the Ogden desert.

 

So our plan was simple. We'll get a plane and land it at night near one of the advancing southern columns and pass ourselves off as Italian soldiers with some captured uniforms and forged papers. Then, we'll make our way to the back of the Italian supply lines where they keep their aircraft and blow up their aviation fuel, grounding their aircraft. While they're putting that fire out, we can make a quick escape by stealing one of their aircraft (presumably one with fuel, but I'm still working out how that's going to happen ) and proceed to the archaeological site in the south part of the country. We recover the artifacts, the Italian ground columns are isolated without resupply, and their aviation in the south is effectively grounded for some time. We fly out of the country, cue music and sunset.

 

Well, we had to get a plane. Fortunately, we'd hired an Egyptian with a busted up old six-seater called a Condor to fly us into the country and standby in case we needed to get out again fast. We offered to buy his crate, and Jack gave him a promissory note that he could use to draw the price of the plane against a line of credit at any branch of the Bank of London. Unfortunately for us he turned out to be a hard cash kind of guy. Of course, it just so happened that we had access to, oh, about 2000 coins worth of Ethiopian hard cash that would pay the balance if we threw in a truck and Jack's Indian Scout 101.

 

Wait, did I say hard cash?

 

I will genuinely will miss that Indian Scout 101, but not as much as he'll miss those 2000 coins when he gets to the border and finds that we've called ahead to inform border officials that there's a shipment of counterfeit coins coming out of Ethiopia. Our Egyptian friend drove off pleased as he could be that he'd swindled me, but since he's still got the promissory note, I figure that when (or perhaps if) he gets out of prison for counterfeiting, he'll be able to get himself setup again.

 

So now we had a plane, and our pilot and aviation expert began taking us up on recon expeditions to attempt to locate the incoming Italian columns to the south (we were flying out of Addis Abbaba). Before long, we descried on two separate occasions large clouds being kicked up by motorized columns winding their way through the Ogden desert. We made our plans and then flew off into the sunset, locating one of the Italian trucks in the clear night. Our pilot (whose skills are ridiculously good by the way; they had to be since he managed to make it all the way through the Great War) managed to set us down, but before long we were apprehended by a perimeter guard.

 

Now Jack is the only one who speaks and writes fluent Italian (he's our Linguist), and being the group's confidence man, I managed a passing lie about our being engineers sent in from the northern front (the other group's arena) to service the motorized column. The CO was obliging enough, and even that night we looked at the tankettes (small tracked vehicles with machine guns instead of anti-vehicle/HE main guns). We discovered that the trip north had put a lot of stress on the column's vehicles, and between that night and the following morning's inspection, we liberally sowed the seeds of sabotage into Italian radiators, drive columns, and transmissions.

 

Our plan was to conceal these faults as maintenance failures that would halt the column and require us to go to the depot in the rear of the Italian advance to successfully procure necessary parts for repair. We advanced all the next day, planning carefully, and becoming acquainted with the company supply clerk and the various parts we'd need to request in order to precipitate our much-needed skills departing the company. However, Barton threw us a crisis we had not anticipated.

 

Let me back up a moment and tell you a little about the unit to which we were now attached. We had successfully infiltrated an Italian motorized regiment comprising some 24 trucks, 4 tankettes, and around 130 men. Not a large force you would think, but their modern weapons and equipment had routed much larger Ethiopian forces, and early in the morning following the first full day of our travel north with the Italian column, 3500 Ethiopian soldiers arrayed for battle took up position to attack some two miles distant, clearly visible from the Italian position. The Italians created a pentagonal formation with the 24 trucks, and located the Tankettes on the northern side facing the central line of Ethiopian cavalry and flanking foot. It was like one of those old westerns where the settlers circle their Connestoga wagons and hunker down to fight to the last. The Ethiopians were probably only about 150 miles from their capital, the jewel of their nation, for which they would fight their hardest in this, what would be by all appearances, the most decisive of battles.

 

And we had no doubt in our minds that they'd be cut to pieces.

 

Now I don't know about you, but Jack's not the kind of man who's ready to see good men fighting for their homeland go down under a wall of fascist lead. The three of us (our Pilot and Great War veteran, Nigel Barrister, Jack, and James Baker, our engineer and specialist with the Chicago typewriter) decided that the time for subterfuge had passed. As the Italians arranged themselves for battle, Jack surreptitiously got his hands on a grenade while Baker siphoned some fuel from the gas tank of our truck and rigged a short fuse to detonate the truck and hopefully its remaining fuel. But the repair parts truck was not our main target.

 

There was an ammunition truck two vehicles south along the lower line adjoining the bottom of the pentagon formation. If we could get to that, then the ensuing explosion could draw Italian resources away from the Ethiopian advance and give them a fighting chance, especially as the destroyed trucks would expose a serious breach in the Italian flank.

 

Over the clear morning air, we heard the Ethiopians singing hymns and we knew the moment was upon us. We lit the fuse and began to RUN! Italian perimeter guards watching from behind the doomed trucks shot us quizzical looks as Jack screamed in Italian, "There's a BOMB in the back of that truck, GET DOWN!!!" Jack's presence was sufficient to get just that reaction, and we bolted toward the ammo truck along the outside of the perimeter. We were probably only twenty feet distant when the truck went up, and the concussion from that blast blew Jack and Nigel forward off their feet another six feet or so. The truck was a roiling mass of flames and oily smoke. We couldn't see the Italian frontline, but nearby perimeter guards had wised up and were coming for us.

 

We hauled ourselves to our feet and covered the remaining distance to the ammo truck along the outside perimeter. Jack readied the grenade that could mean the difference between slaughter and victory for the Ethiopians. If he could just buy a moment of indecision in the Italians, he could deliver the grenade like a split-finger fastball into the open rear of the canvass paneled ammo truck and then find his own way out in the confusion following that blast, assuming he could get away in time to survive it.

 

Now this post is getting longish, and I'm almost done, but I should here take a moment to again reiterate what a good and DETAILED GM Barton is. He doesn't forget stuff like, oh, say, requiring us to declare that we're speaking in a second language. And he is a compassionate GM, as evidenced by the fact that he let me make an intelligence roll to see if I remembered to warn the Italian soldiers away from the doomed ammo truck...IN ITALIAN! Dear friends, not only did I fail to so declare, I also failed the intelligence roll, and in a moment's lapse, informed the Italians in English that they needed to get away from the whole line of trucks.

 

Suffice it to say this had somewhat the opposite of the intended effect.

 

In moments, more soldiers were rushing to close with us. Nigel stood at the rear corner of the ammo truck, and Jack managed to put the grenade in his hand as he rushed forward to try to bowl a way through the Italians separating them from escape. Nigel ripped the pin from the grenade, rifled it into back of the truck and made for the cover of the next truck which, taken together with the ammo truck, formed the southeast corner of the pentagon formation. Three seconds separated the us and our unwitting Ethiopian beneficiaries from life and death.

 

Three seconds later nothing happened. Jack and Nigel rounded the front corner of the next truck to find safety, bowling through an Italian perimeter guard, minds racing to find another plan since we hadn't counted on the grenade being a dud.

 

Fortunately for us, it wasn't. The grenade's five second fuse did its job admirably, and the ammo truck went up like a roman candle, taking all of our pursuers with it. Unfortunately it also took the neighboring truck that was our shelter with it too.

 

Nigel hadn't fully made it to cover when the ammo truck went up, so he took hard shots from both explosions. Zero body, stun levels in the deep negatives, and knockback over more than a dozen feet took him out of further action. Jack was standing next to the second truck and was also blown over a dozen feet, taking heavy stun. Jack was luckier however, and he still had positive body. Jack regained consciousness in time to see a gaping hole in the Italian flank, and Baker (who had started running ahead of we hapless grenadiers) commandeering an intact truck to make good our escape. Jack pulled himself together in time to get Nigel stabilized and into the truck as Baker drove up.

 

Behind us, the Ethiopians had witnessed the sign that God would give their enemies into their hands this day, and the fire of their fighting spirits was indomitable. The Italians would suffer their first major defeat today, and lose one of the two forward columns of their southern offensive through the choking sands of the Ogden desert. Nigel, James, and Jack must now make their way South and attempt the recovery of the Ethiopian artifacts...and their wits.