Repostein Legwork

We did it, people. We came up with a Braunstein idea that fit in a tweet and then we ran it and it was excellent. Buckle in, there's a lot of legwork that went into this one.

 

Get in loser, we're going storygaming

THE PRE-GAME TESTING

    I, prior to entering into the wild world of the BrOSR, was storygaming. Primarily I was getting a lot of mileage out of the Blades in the Dark system, which (when compared with its market competitors) is a heavily gamified and mechanically rigid structure. There are a lot of fixed variables that lead to a reliable and stable system that naturally produces interesting results from typical player input. Suffice to say, I just think it's a really great game. In particular, it is very concerned with factions, having groups of varying degrees of power all with overlapping interests, objectives, and long-term projects. This attention to detail with conflicting powers is, to the eyes of someone schooled in the teachings of Jeffro, an obvious shoe-in for braunstein play. To test this, I have taken a cyberpunk hack of Blades and presented it to the Living Urf Gaming Club. I asked each interested party to pick a faction from the list (or create their own) and then began a play-by-post faction game using a skeleton of the rules.

    The mechanics are exceedingly simple: Each faction has a "Resource" rating from 1-5. They have this many six-sided dice to commit to actions they wish to undertake each turn. So I might commit 2 of my dice to staking out a rival gang to gain intel and my single remaining die to spreading misinformation about a job my boys pulled the week prior. The individual actions are then processed by rolling the dice pool and checking the single highest result. If it is a 6, the action succeeds. If it is a 4-5, it succeeds in a limited way or with some additional complication, and if it is a 1-3 the action fails. Very simple. You can modify the number of dice you have in 2 ways. First, you can convince another player to "loan" you resource dice, committing some of their dice to your action in their own orders for the turn. This is done under fog of war and they may not come through for you (And I, the referee, might not tell you that they did not come through, as I am rolling all of the dice discretely). Second, you can push yourself, borrowing against tomorrow and gaining 1 extra die this turn in exchange for 1 less next turn. 

    These fairly simple mechanics is all you need to run a faction game. It is flexible and up to interpretation, and the "Partial Success" being more common than standard success leads to faction leaders always trying to stay on top of little problems that crop up and demand their attention. The robbery went well but someone made one of your guys and now people know it was you. The wire-tap works well but it has signal bleed with another channel and someone (You don't know who) is gaining all the same intel you are. The expansion was a success but a trusted lieutenant in your operation died in the preceding firefight. Rumours leak, resources are lost, safehouses are compromised, that sort of thing. 

    

    This system was working pretty good (And I look forward to returning to that very game on St. Patrick's day after a newborn-induced hiatus!), but this was play-by-post. Is the system suitable for LIVE PLAY??? Can you do it IRL without order processing grinding everything to a halt? This was the aim of the Repostein.

THE SCENARIO

    The scenario from my original tweet was inspired first and foremost by Jed the Dead by Alan Dean Foster, a sci-fi novel about a man trying to drive from Texas to California with a dead alien in his car. But I did also draw heavily from the cult classic film Repo Man, wherein a guy is driving around California with a dead alien in his car. The alien carcass in the scenario produces all sorts of psychic and paranormal effects, so I ask: Who would want this alien recovered? The premise was presented like this:

Jake Nash is driving across America with a dead alien in the back of their car causing all kinds of psychic anomalies. FIND HIM

Vatican investigator (LG)

Feds (LE)

UFO truthers (N)

Scientologist financier (LN)

Jake's Brother (NG)

Jake's Cousins (CN)

J*urnalists (NE)

Cartel (CE)

    This gives me a lot to work with, so I pitched it to the Dschungelberg crew and we cleared a Saturday afternoon for it. I got a guy playing the Vatican Investigator, the UFO Truthers, the Scientologist Financier, and the Cartel. I would have liked to get more out, but some problems are evergreen. I sent each player a little blurb prior to the session to give them their first round of intel. 

VATICAN INVESTIGATOR

Fr. Anton MacCready is an investigator for the Roman Catholic Church, you have been sent to America to investigate a UFO crash that happened last week. The Vatican Observatory in Safford Arizona mapped the trajectory of the crash to the Choke Canyon Reservoir south of San Antonio, Texas. Your job is to recover any alien from the crash, whether or not it survived, and return it to the observatory in Arizona. Keeping it out of the hands of eccentrics, feds and criminals is of high priority, as you are certain they will exploit or use the tech and attendant knowledge for evil. A mass hysteria event broke out yesterday at the Chaparall Wildlife Management Area west of the crash site, with several witnesses claiming to see "Bright Lights" and strange visions in conjunction with the explosion of a car at a rest area.

You have received a detachment of 12 Swiss Guards who are charged with your safety, and you have been given a letter signed by the Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese for Military Services requesting cooperation from both local parishes and affording you (supervised) diplomatic access to military bases across the country. 

You have a special ability where if someone else takes an action that would be grossly immoral you will get an extra die the following turn to spend responding to that wrong. 

UFO TRUTHERS

The Waco Watchers is a dues-based society of eccentrics and UFO truthers who seek to expose the LIES of the GOVERNMENT and all that jazz. With members all over Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, the organization is mostly online but does meet for quarterly gatherings in Waco, Amarillo, Albuquerque and Tuscon. Last week there was several sightings of a damaged saucer going down near the Choke Canyon Reservoir south of San Antonio. Yesterday one of your members died investigating a man who seemed to have recovered something from the crash. While tailing him to a rest area in the Chaparall Wildlife Management Area the member's car suddenly overheated and exploded, and several witnesses in the area claim to have seen a potent green light emanating from a 1958 monkey shit brown Buick Super moments before the explosion.  

As a faction you get a special ability, you always give orders last because there is a 2-6 chance that your network has picked up on the activities of another faction before their orders go through. 

SCIENTOLOGIST FINANCEER

Friedrich Arnold Glennfield is a massively wealthy high-ranking member of Scientology. He has a private interest in Extra-Sensory Perception, Remote Viewing, and other "Psychic" phenomena. Last week he was informed of a mass-hysteria event at the Chaparall Wildlife Management Area in Texas, where several people claimed to have seen bright green light surrounding a car explosion. Witnesses claim to have heard voices of people long-since dead and one man had a vivid vision of a city on the surface of Venus. He has been waiting for this moment his whole life, a new event that correlates with past instances of alien life being encountered on earth. Someone has a dead alien, and he is going to find it. Both to make gains in proving the extra-terrestrial doctrines of Scientology true, but also to gain access to the potent psychic energy he believes to be present in the alien carcass. 

Your faction has a special ability: The closer the target gets to California, the more potent your actions will be. This is to say, the further into "Scientologist Country" the target gets, the more dice you will have to throw around. In Texas, you have only 2 dice, but in New Mexico you have 3, In Arizona you have 5, and in California you have 7. 

THE CARTEL

The Mendoza Cartel is headed by Hector Morales, and has steadily growing influence all over the American Southwest (But especially in Arizona). Hector smells the winds of change, and has been displeased with the heavy crackdown along the border since the election. He knows that his business venture in the US could be threatened, and is looking for a weapon to use against the federales. He thinks he has found it: yesterday a 1958 monkey shit brown Buick Super was seen pulsing with Green Light at a rest stop in the Chaparral Wildlife Management Area in west Texas. Shortly after the light began a nearby Subaru went up in a ball of fire so hot a piece of shrapnel welded itself to a nearby stop sign. Whatever is in that car is probably the weapon he's been seeking. 

You have a faction ability where if anyone agrees to combine dice with you to make an action even once, you can blackmail their families to make them do it again (But only once more)

STAY TUNED a few days when I finish writing out how everything turned out!