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Caper Game Update
Aug. 28th, 2010 08:29 pm We had the 6th session of An Invitation today, and therefore started breaking some of the rules. For all of the previous sessions the plots were self contained - one 4-6 hour game slot, one plot - and involved matters of international espionage. This time we're doing a two-parter, and it's personal: the mark is the personal nemesis of one of the PCs, the team's Ubiquitous Black Engineer (UBE), who is a child of Opak Re, the super-tech African city from Planetary. Her nemesis is a British lord obsessed with discovering her origins (he's also, our heroes learn, a member of the Temple of Ra, the CFalk evil magician group who mix time magic and super science and think they're all reincarnation of Egyptian Pharaohs. In other words, they're barking mad).
So at the end of the first episode, from the audience's perspective, everything has gone totally wrong: the UBE's attempt to get more information out of the mark has ended with her being kidnapped and locked into a specially built travel sarcophagus, after he reveals that he's done this once before, having traveled back in time after his previous defeat at their hands and knows that his current romantic conquest is actually working with the UBE to upset his plans, but he plans to spirit her away to Africa and subject her to a fate worse than death (time-manipulated personality alteration to make her his willing empress). Duh-duh-duuuuuuh!
What the audience doesn't know is that the party changed their plans at the last minute (which they really did during the e-mail planning session, with a sudden burst of brilliance from the Eye Candy PC led them to develop the "kidnap him, isolate him in a manor house and convince him that it's 1920 and he's returned to England from his empire to write his memoirs, then turn those plans to double cross both the British and the Prussians over to the right people" plot rather than the "infiltrate his expedition to the Congo and sabotage it" plot - so last minute that I decided that in the last iteration they _had_ gone with the Congo plot), that they had already realized that the Mark was setting up the expedition to lure the UBE into his clutches, had identified the sarcophagus as the means of transport and the UBE had lockpicks hidden under flaps of fake skin so she'd be able to escape once she was inevitably locked up (and go through his files now that she's inside his base).
Rather than the mission being FUBAR, it is instead exactly going to plan. Next month's session, from a TV episode perspective, will begin with the scenes of everything going wrong last episode, the opening credits and the mark waking up to look as if he's much older, drugged to make him weaker and parapalegic, and the second half of the con well underway. Now they have a month to figure out how they'll keep him from suspecting and get him to write out his own confession.
Plus, the session was worth it to get Diane to realize that the villain was indeed totally barking mad.
So at the end of the first episode, from the audience's perspective, everything has gone totally wrong: the UBE's attempt to get more information out of the mark has ended with her being kidnapped and locked into a specially built travel sarcophagus, after he reveals that he's done this once before, having traveled back in time after his previous defeat at their hands and knows that his current romantic conquest is actually working with the UBE to upset his plans, but he plans to spirit her away to Africa and subject her to a fate worse than death (time-manipulated personality alteration to make her his willing empress). Duh-duh-duuuuuuh!
What the audience doesn't know is that the party changed their plans at the last minute (which they really did during the e-mail planning session, with a sudden burst of brilliance from the Eye Candy PC led them to develop the "kidnap him, isolate him in a manor house and convince him that it's 1920 and he's returned to England from his empire to write his memoirs, then turn those plans to double cross both the British and the Prussians over to the right people" plot rather than the "infiltrate his expedition to the Congo and sabotage it" plot - so last minute that I decided that in the last iteration they _had_ gone with the Congo plot), that they had already realized that the Mark was setting up the expedition to lure the UBE into his clutches, had identified the sarcophagus as the means of transport and the UBE had lockpicks hidden under flaps of fake skin so she'd be able to escape once she was inevitably locked up (and go through his files now that she's inside his base).
Rather than the mission being FUBAR, it is instead exactly going to plan. Next month's session, from a TV episode perspective, will begin with the scenes of everything going wrong last episode, the opening credits and the mark waking up to look as if he's much older, drugged to make him weaker and parapalegic, and the second half of the con well underway. Now they have a month to figure out how they'll keep him from suspecting and get him to write out his own confession.
Plus, the session was worth it to get Diane to realize that the villain was indeed totally barking mad.
