| Circus Noir |
Subject: Circus Noir by follybard on 2008/11/29 15:24:07 Last night I ran an impromptu StoryCards session for three experienced RPers who had not played StoryCards before. When I read out the choices from the Mood table, one player immediately said "dire!" as another said "comedic!". We settled on "Dramatic with inevitable Comedy" -- meaning that actions could potentially have serious consequences, but that wouldn't stop us from wringing as much funny as we could even from the grim moments. No one felt particularly drawn toward any genre, so we used the Random Genre table. We drew "Film Noir", "School", and "Show-Biz", at which point we settled almost immediately on "Noir! And we're all circus performers!" My players all were very enthusiastic about the noir idea and seemed well-versed in the genre -- moreso than I consider myself, certainly. So I asked them to define the elements they felt were most important to the noir setting. They suggested: danger sardonic humor bad bad guys not-so-good good guys double-crossing stupid policemen Conveniently for me, they defined their own characters with these tropes in mind, so I got my not-so-good good guys and double-crossing with only minimal GM effort. We decided on an "Epic" power level (although in play, it became apparent that the PCs were epic not so much because they were paragons of wonderfulness, but because they were surrounded by dim-bulbs and weasels). Li gave me "Boneless Bess" Taylor, AKA Antonia Toricelli, the contortionist using her circus life to hide from her Mafia don father and hit-man husband, Johnny "Too Bad" Toricelli. Oh, and she also had an ESP ability that I treated rather like a "Spidey sense" to give her sense of motive, strong emotions, and danger. Dorothea gave me Chichi Alexander, the haughty headlining act trapeze artist, who was haunted by a past crime she did not commit, and who aspired to own the circus herself someday. David gave me Martin "Sniffles" Guinness, the sad clown with a drinking problem, a fear of fire, a propensity for reading crime novels and an unrequited love for Chichi. (I note with amusement that this gave me a real-life yoga instructor playing a contortionist, and a real-life linguist playing a mime.) The reading for the adventure was: Past: King (Honor) - Inverted Present: World (Creation) - Inverted Future: Prisoner (Captivity) - Upright Gift: Pup (Faithfulness) - Inverted Curse: Dragon (Pride) - Upright Destiny: Hero (Power) After that, the adventure pretty much wrote itself. The reading suggested to me that although the Mission of the adventure was, according to the players, "Let's Put On A Show!" the underlying conflict that they were soon to discover was that circus ownership might be about to change hands -- to the mob boss whose niece wanted a career in showbiz -- due to some previous unscrupulous actions on the part of current owner and ringleader "Big Mac" McKenzie, who had gotten himself in debt to these guys. The circus had fallen on hard times since the death of previous trapeze-artist headliner Angel Divine; her gruesome onstage death (falling from the trapeze in the middle of her without-a-net act, and then being eaten by a tiger ("...poor thing, it was pooping sequins for weeks...")) had made people a bit more reluctant to bring their kids out to the show; and although foul play had never been proven, everyone suspected Chichi, who seemed to have the most to gain by the death of her predecessor. My GM style, particularly when I have three such proactive players, tends to be pretty free-form. I'd sketched out a three-act structure, but since my players were quite happy to run the show with minimal guidance, what actually happened only very loosely followed my outline. As a result, I utterly failed to remember the "everyone gets a card at the beginning of each act" rule. However, I compensated by allowing the cards drawn for feats to contribute a little "extra" in shaping what happened if the attribute on the card was relevant to the desired outcome (or if it suggested something interesting that might happen). For example, when the lights went out in the Big Top and Sniffles fired his gun into the air -- while the trapeze act was going on! -- the fact that one of the successes he pulled was the "God" card certainly helped ensure that his prayers were answered. This tweak seemed to work out just fine, and since I was giving the players so much control over the action anyway, having another mechanism for them to shape the story probably wasn't necessary in this case. The players, on the fly, handed me some fantastic NPCs to work with: Trixie the costume girl, Harry the Lizard Eater ("don't go out for sushi with him"), and the surly midget who shared a trailer with Sniffles and seemed to exist solely to torment him. They also seemed more than willing to torment and double-cross each other, saving me all kinds of work. (It is probably worth noting that all three players knew each other very well, and the double-crossing was very clearly in-character and well-received by all parties.) The basic arc of the story started when Muffy the Dog-Faced Girl, an excitable but generally well-meaning sort, came to first Bess and then Chichi to tell them that some guys in suits were visiting Mac, who didn't look so good. Bess went to hide behind Mac's office trailer and "listen" (both with her ears and with her Spidey senses), while Chichi, seeing Bess spying, decided to hide behind a different trailer and spy on Bess. Meanwhile, Muffy considered telling Sniffles, too, but the sight of his dejected self made her change her mind and walk the other way. He, being a relatively clever sort, followed her anyway, back in the direction of Mac's trailer, and decided to knock on the door and figure out what was going on. I thought this scene went reasonably well as exposition scenes go, because each character got some interesting information: Bess learned from her regular hearing that the man she heard talking to Mac had a very familiar accent, and was therefore almost certainly connected to her family in some way; and from her special hearing, that Mac was panicked and that his visitors thought he was a sucker. Sniffles learned that Mac was unwilling to talk about what was going on, but that it probably had something to do with the circus's finances, since Mac kept referring to his visitors as "investors". Chichi, who had the best view of the trailer, saw that the visitors were dark-haired men in expensive-looking suits -- and that Muffy, trying not-very-successfully to look inconspicuous, followed them when they left. The circus had just come to a new town and was still getting set up for tomorrow's show, so the players had a bit of time to plot, plan, and investigate. Bess, deciding that she needed to look less like her old self in case anyone from her past should choose to visit the circus, headed straight for Trixie the Costume Mistress for a platinum dye-job and a new peacock-feathered costume with an elaborate face-obscuring mask. Sniffles headed for the sideshow tents, asking Harry the Lizard Eater and the Fat Man to keep an eye out for anyone who looked... out-of-place, dressed too nicely for the circus. Chichi, sensibly, checked her trapeze equipment for tampering and attempted to pump Mac for information, each of them implying accusations at the other without actually coming out and saying anything. The next day dawned too-bright but with a chance of severe thunderstorms, and our not-so-intrepid circus performers were up at the crack of noon to get ready for the show. Soon enough, Sniffles got word that a very large extended family of well-dressed children and adults had arrived at the circus. Bess, catching wind of the same information, packed a bag and prepared to flee -- immediately after her big number, of course. Everything came to a head at the Big Top show. The mafia family were seated front-and-center in the stands; and after Bess's contortionism number, as she left the tent to head back to her trailer and depart the circus, her hit-man husband, feigning too much cotton candy, excused himself from the bleachers to find and confront her. Sniffles's player actually stood up and mimed his whole act, giving me as GM the opportunity to provide audience reactions -- and, when he mimed drinking too much, falling over, and calling for a medic, the opportunity to send out the surly midget, dressed in a nurse's outfit, to sit on his chest and slap him silly. ("Must... think... sad... thoughts!" said the very amused sad clown. "...I'm not wearing any underwear," said the midget.) A thunderstorm was beginning to roll in as Chichi Alexander and the Flying Macedonians (I had originally suggested "Alexandrettes", but my players one-upped me) took to their platforms high above the bleachers. Sniffles had changed back into civvies -- with a gun in his pants, just in case -- and had snuck into the audience to keep an eye on the Family. ("...Wait, so you're sitting in the audience, you smell of booze, you're watching the woman you love perform her act, and you've got your hand down your pants...?" "Oh, no, it's all right, I'm also wearing a really big trenchcoat." "And you think that makes it BETTER?") As the trapeze act moved into its difficult phase, there was a huge clap of thunder and a sound like a small explosion as lightning struck the generator, plunging the Big Top into darkness. Chaos ensued. Meanwhile, Bess had gone to her trailer, changed clothes and grabbed her suitcase, broke into Chichi's trailer, left her peacock costume hanging conspicuously in the window so that the mafia guys would break into Chichi's trailer rather than hers, and was on her way out the door when her husband caught up with her. ("He recognized her? Even with the new hair and the costume and...." "Sweetheart, you never forget a contortionist like that.") They had a tart exchange: "I was told that I could either bring you back, or kill you." "Not both?" "I suppose that could be arranged...." At that moment, a gunshot rang out from the Big Top: Sniffles, concerned that the mafia guys might use the darkness and the confusion to do something awful, drew his gun and shot it into the air to try to distract the mafia guys in some way. Bess's player said: "Hey, someone just SHOT A GUN in the Big Top -- did that distract Johnny at all?" I didn't have a ready answer, so I drew a card.... "Anticipation". Clearly, Johnny had EXPECTED there to be gunfire -- which also told me what should happen next in the Big Top.... Bess managed to grab the practice bar in Chichi's trailer and execute a very graceful swing-and-kick right at Johnny's trick knee, knocking him to the floor, and then let go of the bar and planted both feet in his chest, winding him. This gave her the edge she needed to get away: he raised his gun to shoot at her, but it went wide, and soon enough Bess was breaking into Muffy's trailer and stealing her bicycle so she could ride into town, straight to the donut shop, where there were certain to be cops. Back in the Big Top, an audience member had gotten a hand on Sniffles and was demanding he give up the gun -- and Sniffles was trying to fast-talk the guy into believing it hadn't been him. This effort was aided when a second shot rang out from somewhere in the direction of the mafia family. Someone got the backup generator up and running just at that moment, and Sniffles caught a glimpse of Vito DeVito, the Mafia don, slipping something gun-like back into his pocket. But there was no time to worry about that -- Anton, one of the Flying Macedonians, had been hit in the gut and was losing his grip on Chichi! Sniffles raced backstage for help and a trampoline. He caught a glimpse of two mafia guys dragging Mac off somewhere, but his thoughts were only on saving Chichi. They got the trampoline maneuvered into place in the nick of time, and Chichi gracefully dropped to it, immediately pushing past Sniffles so she could climb the ladder back to the platform, swing over to retrieve Anton, and carry him back safely to the ground, where she applied pressure to the wound and sent Sniffles to retrieve the drunken quack of a circus medic. The medic declared to Chichi, "Eh, you look like you're doing fine without me. ...But maybe I should go call an ambulance?" while Sniffles broke into Mac's trailer to use the phone to call the local cops and report Mac's kidnapping. Not long afterward, Bess arrived at the donut shop and talked to the remaining cop (the other had left his still-steaming cup of coffee and half-eaten donut on the counter when he left to investigate a kidnapping report), giving him a teary-eyed story about how her husband had tried to kill her and could he please protect her? The immediate crises all turned over to the "proper authorities", we declared the adventure at its end -- but I daresay that in the long-run, saving Mac and keeping Bess away from her no-good husband would require the additional intervention of our PCs. Sniffles did get a grudging kiss from Chichi for saving her life, though.... All-in-all, a good time. In retrospect I should have upped the stakes for Sniffles by having the lightning-strike set the Big Top on fire (or even better, set the trampoline on fire!), and with extra prep-time I could have gotten some of the plot elements to hang together a little better, but measured by the metric of "fun", it was definitely a success. |
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