I’ve been running an Outgunned Adventure! campaign set in 1920s China. The most recent threat was a huli jing — a fox spirit. The creature is popular in Chinese, but also Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese myth. These usually immortal creatures have nine tails in fox form and can shapeshift — usually into beautiful young women who seduce scholarly or important men to steal their knowledge and life essence. (You can guess how…) They can be driven off by catching them in fox form and cutting off their tails, or in human form by getting them drunk. Alternately, they can be driven off if you know the name by writing it on paper, burning the paper, and mixing the ashes in tea.
“Rum Row” is a 2-4 hour scenario for 3-5 players where the characters are roped into a bet — which crew can make the run from Bimini, stop to pick up alcohol at Rum Row and land it in Fort Lauderdale, then return to Bimini first? What could go wrong?
The scenario is written for Ubiquity, but we’ve added some suggestions on how to tweak for other systems like Spirit of the Century‘s FATE and Director’s Cut, the excellent engine for Outgunned Adventure by 2 Little Mice.
I still hold that the Broken Compass RPG and the Kickstarter that spawned it was one of the best bang-for-your-buck games I’ve ever bought. The Kickstarter (and now Backerkit) campaigns that 2 Little Mice ran were well orchestrated — with constant updates, quick turn-arounds that had the PDFs on time, and delivered their products on time or only slightly late for physical materials, in the case of Outgunned. Now, they are releasing Outgunned Adventure — the successor to Broken Compass. Their system now has a name: Director’s Cut, but it’s the same basic mechanics we’ve seen since BC, just with some tweaking here and there to improve the product. The PDF landed in my inbox a few weeks ago, and the physical product is in the offing. So how is it?
Excellent. There are a few differences in character creation: there is one less Attribute than in BC, and each attribute has four — rather than three — skills associated with it. You start with one pip in skills, two in attributes, and these get added to as you choose your role (Hunter, or Professor, for example) and your Trope (Like Action Archeologist). That’s the die pool you roll for a task, plus or minus a die per advantage or disadvantage gear or scene traits, etc. provide. You look for matches onthe die face, so you can use their fancy dice or normal d6s, just like in Broken Compass.
Only the players roll — you either take an action or a reaction to things happening. Tasks, challenges, fights — all the same mechanic. It’s dead simple and easy to learn and play. It’s Broken Compass, but with improvements.
What improvements? Gear, for one. It pulls the gear “feats” from Outgunned, and which I have suggested should be applied to Vehicles here. Strangely, the one set of rules they left out were the Chase rules, replaced by the Run rules in Chapter 5. The real additions to BC/Outgunned are made here: chapters five and six.
Chapter 5 gives us Temples & Traps, and makes suggestions for how ancient temples should be deployed in your adventures. Does it have to be a temple? No — it could just as easily be a library, ancient building, whatever. Traps gives suggestions for what kind of taps are cinematically appropriate and gives plenty of examples. After this are the Run rules — the trap is sprung, the bad guys are on your tail — You set up the number of turns they must run to escape the danger, what kind of reactions are appropriate, and what happens win or lose. It’s very Indiana Jones-flavored, but what about a car chase or the like. You could absolutely use this; it’s simpler in some ways than the “Need for Speed” car chase rules in Outgunned, but I think I would probably use those, instead. Chapter 6 delves into the Supernatural. It is a location, a creature, a treasure…and rules for what traits and dangers these opponents would pose. It also gives examples, once again. There’s a chapter after that on how to run the genre and a complementary adventure at the end.
At 250 pages, it’s the same general length as the other core books for Broken Compassand Outgunned. It will most likely be the same size for the books (9.5×6”) wth a hard cover and bookmark ribbon. the art is much improved from the more spare stuff in Broken Compass, and there’s more color art from Daniela Giubellini, and the few pieces that aren’t are — as with Outgunned — simple black & white (well, sepia-tone) line art. The writing and the translation from Italian to English is good; the tone is still more conversational than American audiences might be used to, but less so that Broken Compass (something one of my gaming group had remarked on while reading Outgunned was that it was a bit more polished.)
The Black Campbell 