Space 1889:Red Sands Session 1, And Deadlands:Reloaded.

So on Sunday I finally convened the delayed start of Space 1889:Red Sands.

I am glad to report The Curse is alive and well. This game has collapsed twice due to players having conflicting schedules that eventually killed it. These people assure me that the problem isn't my GM style (my first suspicion), just events.

This day there were supposed to be two players, Matt and Chris, but at the last minute Chris had to beg off as he had contracted a bad cold.

Rather than not play - I had had a rotten month and badly needed the break from suckage - I decided to play with only one player and a GM, padding the numbers out with an army column of 25 troopers, a sergeant and an officer. Matt would be a civilian being escorted through the Libyan desert by the army.

Savage Worlds lends itself very well to this sort of kludge because it splits characters into two types:

• Wild Cards like the players and "boss" baddies who have a number of wounds they can suffer before being taken out (the consequences of that can vary according to the setting), several "bennies" that can be spent to re-roll failed trait checks or "soak" wounds (shrugging off attacks cinematically) and access to certain edges (feats/advantages) restricted to Wild Cards, and

• Extras who are downed by a single wound. Think of the enemy soldiers in a Rambo movie or bandits in a western - extras are characters for players to shoot if opposing or to give support if allied. Extras can be made very quickly. In fact, I used templates from the back of the Space 1889:Red Sands setting book.

 The number of allied NPCs meant I could terrify Matt with a huge number of attacking Bedouins as he raced for Fort Oublié.

I gave him a good run for his money and threw in a Lame GM Bone (LGMB) so that he survived with some soldiers to enter the fort and suffered attacks by what waited within.

And he had a ball. I had a ball. Things can only get better when Chris joins next session.

The preparation involved reading the scenario and setting rules to re-familiarize myself with them, and turning text-block clues into first person diary entries for touchy-feely clues a-la Call of Cthulhu.

I think this time we might get all the way through. I might even finish the Globe of Mars I was working on when the last game collapsed in a puff of weddings and postings abroad.

That was in the afternoon. In the evening I stepped into my friend Craig's game slot and ran Deadlands:Reloaded, the Weird West setting for Savage Worlds. I ran Deadlands a few years ago and had a great time doing so, using a module called Coffin Rock. When it was over I calculated we got 18 3 1/2 to 4 hour sessions from that module, and I could have run another 9 without breaking a sweat. Coffin Rock is just about the best value for RPG dollars I've ever bought.

This evening I ran "Shootout at the Circle R Corral", an inexpensive pdf I bought from the Drivethru RPG website. We got about halfway through before we had to beak for the evening. During that time much Mad Science was deployed on both sides of the GM screen (actually, the screen was off to one side because I prefer to run "in the round" with open die-rolls. The screen is just an aide-memoir for the various once-in-a-blue-moon rules I normally can remember but have trouble with after running D20 most of the time). Mine was largely ineffective, theirs was devastating, blowing my mighty steam wagon to shrapnel with one shot and taking down my clockwork mech with riflefire. The mech proved delightfully incapable of directing gattling gun fire onto any of the many targets and eventually blew up due to over-the-top damage the likes of which have not been seen since Kirk activated the self destruct on the NCC-1701A while Klingons were rifling it.

It was all great fun and we shall be meeting again in two weeks to do some more.

UPDATE: Future posts concerning the Space 1889:Red Sands campaign will be posted in a purpose-built blog rather than here.