30 June, 2021

Play Report 2: Broken Compass

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I wanted to use a few more of the bells and whistles (not that there are many) in Broken Compass in the next adventure I ran for my daughter. In this second scenario, her character, Ellie Calhoun, the 18 year old Texan pilot who left her home under a cloudy past, is helping her boss “Cleopatra” Lythgoe, the Bahama Queen with her last rum run from Nassau to Alice Town in Bimini on her schooner. It’s all legal and above board in the Bahamas, but rumors have been flying about the Americans putting pressure on the Bahamian government to hand her over.

In the first scene, she learns from another pilot that Avi Loenstein — the Brooklyn gangster that has recently relocated to Ft. Lauderdale, has been talking a lot of guff about moving in on Cleo. She related the story to the boss over a few hands a baccarat, at which point she stated that the “jinx” had caught up with her. She was wealthy enough and it was time to pack it in before the mob or the feds finally got her.

Later, at her hotel, Ellie was approached by Moses — one of Avi’s goons — who tried to convince her to sell Cleo out by giving the course and time of the run. He left her his hotel room on a matchbox so she could give him her answer. Instead, she let Cleo know and was sent with one of the other henchmen of the Bahama Queen, “Jimmie”, a local man, to set him straight. This led directly to a fight scene, which allowed us to run our first fight with a privileged henchmen. He was rated a critical danger and required three successes to drop him. The fight was quick, and while she didn’t knock him out, other basic successes led to Ellie and Jimmie being able to secure him. They rolled him up in the bedcovers, snuck him out to the waiting Cadillac and took him to the boat for questioning.

While he was tied up in the fiorelocker of the boat, Moses was able to cut his binds with a knife they had missed and he was able to throw himself overboard and disappear into the night. Cleo decided to get the schooner moving and head out.

The next major scene involved navigating to Alice Town, driving the boat, and spotting a seaplane approaching. Avi’s people had found them! There was a trio of dangers to overcome at this point — avoiding the strafing run by the passenger in the plane, who opened up on the boat with a BAR .30. i rated this a critical danger and Ellie scored two basic successes. She used one to push Cleo below, took off a point of the three luck points from the attack, and took a “bleeding” feeling. The second test was to outrun the speedboat that had been led in by the plane, another critical due to the difference in speeds. The last was to avoid the speedboat coming alongside and grappling. Both rolls were failed and the bad guys — two goons I rated a critical threat, and Moses — boarded the schooner.

Ellie handled the initial threat with a burst from her Chicago Typewriter and scored a extreme success; they got mowed down and her Tommy was dry! Moses attacked her with a hatchet, but she rolled a critical success, blasting off her 1911 .38 Super but he had managed to catch her hand and the shot missed (but took one of his luck points and I gave him a disadvantage for his ruptured eardrum.) They wrestled at the rail of the boat and he got another critical success with an added basic. She fired the gun again but missed, however, she plented her knee in his groin and disarmed him. On the next test, she got a critical and basic success again. She decided to throw him over the side of the boat where he was quickly left behind in the open ocean. She and the crew cut the speedboat loose and left if and the dead bodies, as well.

They got to Alice Town, where they offloaded the goods. While cleaning up in her hotel room, Ellie was interrupted by Avi Loenstein and a couple of mooks. She was able to scare them off with her .38 Super, rolling four of a kind. She then complained to the hotel owner and local big-wig, Sir James Guthrie, of the assault and he had them thrown out. Later, she was pulled aside by Guthrie — Cleo has set her up with a few of his friends so that she is out of the line of the feds and mob, with a 2nd class ticket to Gibraltar, and the Fairchild 71 she’s been flying for Cleo as a goodbye present.

We wrapped up with her heading to Gibraltar to link up with a buddy of Gthrie’s from the Great War, a member of the Foreign Volunteer Force, a group of mercenaries known as the “Sky Rats”. (For more on the Sky Rats, see Black Campbell’s Sky Pirates of the Mediterranean. )

 

28 June, 2021

Play Report: Broken Compass & and Adventure for the same…

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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.