Blaze of Glory: First Adventure |
As soon as the chance of death falls below 75%, I lead my men out. -- Liz Trumitch |
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Blaze of Glory (PG, Slot 5, game 98-5D) |
We are about to have the honor of charging you. |
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A private shadow of planes, trains, pirate ships, and adventure is Bleys's favorite playground. Now the play has gotten a little rough, and he's been captured. It's up to his elite guard to swashbuckle across half a continent to rescue him. 6 players, pre-generated shadow characters. |
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The first thing I did was throw away the pre-generated characters. It was too much work getting them ready. And the characters the players generated were a million times better than mine, anyway. At the last minute before the game, I had worked out a tricky idea about throwing classic swashbucklers in the path of our heroes, but it just didn't work out in the game. So what did happen?
Two ships send landing parties about twenty miles apart, off the coast of England. Bleys recognizes somebody on one, and sends our PC guards to deal with the other. The battle that ensues has cannons on land versus those on the ship, archers firing on the incoming boats, and, most notably, Jayne leading a suicide mission to flip one of the boats before it could land. She survived, along with one of her men, quickly dubbed "The Sharks". (Or at least, "The Shark".) They win the battle handily, though it took much more game time than I suspected. Interrogating the captain of this ship (it turns out that Otto Fromm is the master of interrogation as well) they work out that they're facing the Duke of Rochester, and find out where he is operating from.
They return to discover that primitive air support (a great archer flown by a great pilot) had pushed the odds against Bleys. They take off after him, dealing with a storm and a pirate ship on the way. The ship-to-ship duel, complete with a aerial attack where Philippe and Jayne try to duplicate the "archer from biplane" trick.
Upon reaching New Amsterdam, Otto dons a disguise and heads out to reconnoiter. They learn that the Duke of Rochester has taken a train to, well, Rochester. After a run-in with the local police ("warned" by the Duke) they hijack another train, modify it to go as quickly as possible (tech wizardry at work), catch up with the Duke's train, and have a massive train-to-train battle. In the end, a dishonorable attack from all sides takes down the Duke, who turns out to be Corwin. Bleys scolds them for not giving Corwin a fair chance, but doesn't hesitate to take advantage of the situation.