While we are waiting to get our pool back into action for the summer, I needed something to do to keep my daughter busy, so I ran her a quick one-shot in Broken Compass, an RPG system by Two Little Mice out of Italy, that i had backed on Kickstarter. They did well with their first two campaigns — the first being the original game and “Golden Age” (1930s pulp) setting, and their second the Jolly Roger (pirates) and Voyages Extraordinaire (steampunk/Victorian sic-fi). The game system has been reviewed by me before, and our first run at it with the gaming group left us thinking it was an excellent lightweight set of rules that works better than Ubiquity or Fate for pulp settings. (Although it’s hard as the GM to get used to not rolling dice…)

The kiddo built a “gunslinger pilot”, so I tried to think of a quick game without digging into some of the Black Campbell stuff I’d already published. I wound up running a game set in early 1926, with her character — a Texan girl of 18 who had run away/had to run away for legal reasons. She had somehow wound up in Bimini, where she had been working as a speedboat and seaplane pilot for Gertrude Lythgoe, sometimes known as “Cleo” or “Cleopatra” for her exotic looks — the so-called “Bahama Queen” of the rum-runners. The adventure was designed to be a quick run, maybe two hours, for a solo character but could be easily buffed up.

Following a night of drinking and jazz music (put on some 1926 hits at this point for atmosphere) at the Port Alice Hotel in Alice Town, Bimini — Cleo, the Bahama Queen gets into an argument with an arrogant gangster in from “Fort Liquordale” (Lauderdale), who is trying to worm his way into the rum trade. Along the way, he insults her and the character — a “slip of a girl” and bets them his crew can get a ton (about twenty cases) of booze into Lauderdale before they can do the same in the plane. The boat can offload on the shoreline, but the seaplane (a new Fairchild 71 — yes, I know it’s a bit early for that particular bird to be out) has to have a more stable landing poinbt and it’s not inconspicuous, so they’ll be landing at a spot inland in the wood on a canal, about ten miles inland…just to make it fair. They load up at the same time in Alice Town in the morning, race the 45 miles (55 for the plane) to Florida and drop to the waiting crews, then return to Bimini. First back wins. To make this more fair if using this idea, you might have both use speedboats.

This led to a series of challenges, usually grouped in threes, at most, in Broken Compass: the first stand-alone challenge was a leadership to get the dock crew to load the plane properly. If failed, they’ll immediately need a successful critical pilot test not to crash; they will then need to set down on the water and balance the load properly with a pilot or observation test. If they need to rebalance, this will give the boat a 15 minute head start. Once in the air, they need to 1) do a basic navigation test to the drop zone using survival or observation, 2) a basic (or critical) if they had to land pilot test to fly there and arrive about the same time as the boat — roughly 50 minutes after they left Bimini, and an critical alertness to notice something new and dangerous — the Coast Guard makred Voight UO-1 seaplane (which had just been picked up and was radio-equipped) that will spot them and report back. Once over Florida, it’s a critical pilot test to put down in the canal where a truck and two man crew is waiting to offload the booze. To do it quickly, requires a critical stunt or leadership test and will take about 15 minutes (the boat crew can chuck the booze into the shoreline for their crew and it only takes 5 minutes.)

The next challenge/danger is the arrival of the T-Men warned by the Coast Guard — two cars of feds! It’s a basic alertness or observation to spot them and have time to respond by launching or shooting up their cars. (My daughter’s choice…she loves her Tommy gun!) A critical shoot to take out the lead automobile will leave the T-Men in the cars having to bail out on the small dirt road and run to the dock. This gives the plane crew time to get into the plane and take off, or to get into a shootout with the feds. To escape into the plane and launch, 1) a critical stunt test not to get shot up by the trigger-happy Treasury men, then 2) a critical pilot to get out of the area without the plane getting shot up. (And possibly an alert or observation to note if they were hit.)

By this time, the speedboat’s got a 15 minutes headstart, again, and they have to dodge the Coasties in the UO-1 and get out of US airspace. A critical pilot gets them out over the Atlantic and a critical observation or survival gets them back first.

If the characters do this adventure using a boat, there’s more opportunity for action with their offloading being interrupted not just by T-Men, but a Coast Guard “6-bit boats” or 75-foot cutter. Then, it can be a series of challenges like 1 critical stunt test to get the hooch over the side fast enough, then 2) a critical pilot to escape the cutter and get into the open sea, then another critical pilot test to beat them to the 12 mile limit, before having the race the other boat (if still in play). If they are caught by the Coast Guard, they can resist a 6-man crew as a 2 critical-level enemies.

We were again impressed with the speed and ease of play using Broken Compass, and I’ll have a nother play report for the daughter’s second adventure.

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