29 November 2013

The genesis of Cataphracts and Kaiju, and the three sessions that have been run of it. Much over due.


This is essentially how my Cataphracts & Kaiju game started. That it is on hiatus I blame on the fact that this last quarter of college has been stressful on me, my wife because of my stress, and our two friends because one is a fellow student.

The first: The party will be knights in a post apocalyptic world without horses. Instead of horses, knights use mecha powered by ancient nuclear whatsits. I will be using a combination of Basic Roleplaying and Pendragon.

The first session synopsis. This was very little adjustment to the mecha rules and ported KAP to BRP, and using the intro adventure in KAP 5.1. The bear was two-headed because that was the miniature I was using for it.

So I ran the first session of this on Thursday. The party consists of my wife playing a more reasonable mechaknight, my friend from college playing a 14 year old magical girl who is also a mechaknight for unknown reasons that will probably never be pinned down, and her boyfriend who is playing a "Chaste as fuck" mechaknight. On their first official adventure they tracked and slaughtered a gigantic twohead mutant bear that might have been infected with ancient nanotech. Their spoils included its hide, made into an armored cloak for chaste knight's mech, its two skulls as a helmet and pauldron for the magical girl's mech, and a bit of a claw for a drinking horn for my wife's knight. The magical girl basically nuked it with magic because my on the fly adjustments made it practically impervious to normal attacks, something I will be taking into account next time.

They then saved a peasant and his herd of cattle from a trio of robber knight in mecha that had seen better day. My wife's mech went down when magical girl fumbled her attack and critically shoved her lance through the torso of my wife's mech's torso. All three of the player knights did score rather impressive blows. Almost every time they successfully hit the robber knights a limb got disabled. As it is, I may have to adjust the lethality of mech scale weapons as an unblocked hit is currently DEMOLISHING mechs. After some quick field repairs they traveled to the village they had just saved from the megabear had their mechs repaired more fully and we stopped there.
The second session was using the Curse of the Spectre King adventure. Still using my original rules conversions.


 And if my game was on rails it will never ever be on rails again.
Cliffnotes version of tonight's session.
Wife character: Challenged a dude to a duel so that the party could continue in their quest. She fails, so the entire party is honor bound to stay at the castle to possibly die a pointless death. Goes mad at the end of the session due to a fumbled Passion (Honor) roll just as the BBEG shows up and runs off.
Friend's character: seduces the dude to distract him so my wife's character can slip out to continue in the quest. Is now pregnant, and in love with the knight she seduced.
Friend's BFs character: is forced to ride my wife's character's mech as she had ridden off with his mech. He renamed the mech "Retribution." He might be mad at my wife's PK.

I decided to chalk this up as they successfully defeated the Specter King, despite them all having lost honor.

But there has been additional side-quest that happened due to my wife's PK going Mad.

She wakes up in a strange place, a strange sterile place. Which turns out to be a special sickbay on a carrier. A space carrier filled with space fighters that transform into mechs. She discovers that she and her crew volunteered for an experimental training problem using VR and then something went wrong, her crew, the other two PKs are still trapped, just like she was until she spontaneously awoke screaming. Not only that but the captain of the ship is extremely shocked at the description of what is going on in the VR system, guess it wasn't supposed to be some bizarre Arthurian fantasy, but merely a simple accelerated training program. Turns out she and the rest of her flight are rather excellent pilots, and she is now the flight commander as their original one died being plugged into the system. Additionally the techs that installed the equipment are missing. Which is essentially where the campaign is stalled because of life.