October 29-September 4 What Did You Play?

[Onix]

What games did you play this week? Give us a rundown of the story, system, player antics, anything you found enjoyable and share them in this thread.

Bonus points question: What did you do this session that expanded your gaming horizons?

[Rob Lang]

Last night's Dead... and Back game was a night of piling on the problems. We're approaching end of campaign, so I'm cranking up the ante.

Last week they unleashed a giant alien-tech-powered dieselpunk robot onto the streets of Reading, Berkshire (UK).
This week they planned to end the robot through the hatch in it's bottom. While preparing for that, they received a call from their home base over the radio to return. Upon arrival, they were told that aliens had landed to the south of the town and were making progress towards a downed military aeroplane.

The players previously knew that there was something on the downed military plane but not what, except that no-one should be allowed to get at it. The crew of the plane confessed, it had an alien technology bomb on it. A bomb the aliens should never get hold of.

The plan stepped up a notch. They gained entry to the big robot, found that it was following some sort of autopilot and began shelling the alien landing site. Another "much bigger" alien flier turned up, they shelled that too. While jury rigging the giant machine (very diesel punk, with bulbs and thermionic valves) to switch off the autopilot (there were hand written manuals - and many of them), one of the idiot NPCs accidentally let a "tank" zombie onboard.

They'd met a tank before - but in open country. The tight confines of the robot was a different sort of challenge. One NPC was turned into a reanimate pretty much instantly and came at them with an assault rifle, the other died a bit later and reanimated in the control room - shooting and wounding the engineer who was doing the jury-rigging.

The tank had torn the bottom door to the robot apart and zombies had been climbing in. We left the session with one PC facing a horde of 20 zombies, running out of ammo. 1 PCs running out of rail gun (most powerful PC weapon) ammo while shooting at the tank and another hand-to-hand with the tank running out of health (down to crawl), the aliens making progress over toward the bomb site and the local populace taking pot-shots at the robot.

Bonus points question: What did you do this session that expanded your gaming horizons?
I realised what a hard task master I am during combat. I really do not give players much time to think. I like that. I'm going to keep doing it. Forcing them to make decisions quickly (even at 2230 on a school night) often means suboptimal ones.

I also confirmed my belief that if you give players a resource to burn, they will. Even if it means their character goes nuts.

[Onix]

I started another PBF for Steampunkfitters over at RPG Geek. So far the group has some really good energy going into it.

This is different for me (although not unprecedented) since I don't know the players or their styles. So far so good though.

[J.K.Mosher]

[Onix]

[J.K.Mosher]