Man, it's taken me forever to get around to writing this one up. This session was played Tuesday, 5/13/2008 (not 5/20/2008, because people just didn't feel up to gaming that night), and while it was probably our longest session to date, it should be simple enough to summarize as it was basically just one big fight scene.
Lost Worlds and Secret Histories
Summer, 1937 - London, England
Following directions they extracted from the blackshirts they roughed up last session, Abraham, Marko, Robin, and Herr Wolf come to a dockside warehouse where the alleged perpetrators of the Swillby burglary--another blackshirt gang run by a man called "Bad Bob"--are reputed to have their headquarters.
Abe hears German and English voices inside raised in agitated debate. Robin, uninterested in making plans of attack or investigating quietly, simply knocks on the front personnel door. Abe waits for the footsteps to approach the door, and then kicks it open, knocking unconscious the blackshirt behind it. Not to be outdone, Marko grabs the giant cargo doors, and tears them open as well.
Inside the cluttered, smoky warehouse, Bad Bob and his gang of blackshirts--a much tougher, more criminal, less political bunch than the ones the PCs beat so badly last session--are rushing to investigate the commotion, and all of them are armed with guns. To make matters worse, there are also three Nazi agents there, all wearing long, dark-gray coats and hats in an attempt to be inconspicuous. They are...
• Herr Blitz: lightning-wielding war sorcerer!
• Herr Zahn: knife-wielding bersker with unnatural speed and ferocity!
• Herr Stahl: hulking, steel-reinforced, man-machine abomination!
The fight that follows is long, full of awesome stunts, and increasingly complicated. Abraham fights with a tommygun in just one hand and a pistol in the other, shooting chains and pipes from the warehouse ceiling to come crashing down on his foes. Robin dashes in fearlessly, using her homespun charm to convince some blackshirts to surrender, and her mysterious connection with the thunderbird to harness Herr Blitz's own lightning against them. Marko wades into hordes of lessed men like a titan among dolls, fighting with both his fists and mace. Herr Wolf uses his arcane knowledge and sinister charisma to much greater effect than his gun.
A major turning point in the conflict comes when Wolf frees the bound lightning elementals that gave Blitz his powers, causing the sorcerer's book of magic to be burned away in the process. Wolf soon manages to convince Blitz to turn his coat, but no sooner does the Nazi sorcerer defect than Abraham shoots, blinds, and nearly kills him! Wolf made his pitch in German, of course, and Abe distrusts foreign talk almost as much as he hates Nazis.
Seeing the inevitable defeat of his side, Bad Bob flees the scene, taking a few of his blackshirts with him. But Herr Zahn, incensed at this betrayal, chases after him. Robin, in turn, chases both of them out into the rainy London night.
Meanwhile, back in the warehouse, Marko defeats Her Stahl, and puts the self-loathing proto-cyborg out of his misery by crushing his head. The remaining blackshirts surrender. But Robin is chasing after the maniac Zahn his equally-loathesome prey all alone!
We left off on that cliffhanger. Assuming we can get the right people together for tonight's session, we should be resolving it in just a few hours! And, hopefully, I won't take two whole weeks to do the writeup for it.
Stuff I learned: Real fights in Spirit of the Century--as opposed to the cakewalk I handed them last time--are even more fun . . . but it's possible to go overboard. SotC PCs are tough enough that they're really tough to threaten, but it's very possible to hand them a fight that'll just take retardedly long. Also, the Fate ladder is kind of a pain in the ass. I hate being told that somebody got a result of "Fantastic" and then trying to remember if that's actually a +6 or +7 in real money. (Absurdly, I still remember the descriptiors-to-numbers conversions for the freaking Marvel Super Heroes RPG. Now that is some wasted brain space.)
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