Our Thursday night session at GenCon this year was a lot of fun. We had eight players, even though I prefer to max out at six, but everyone seemed to be able to participate and have a good time.

We didn't use the random genre table this time. One of the players said he wanted to be a gladiator of some kind, and another said he wanted to be able to use a sniper rifle. I suggested that perhaps the players were legionnaires in the Roman Empire, but the Empire had not fallen and they had access to mid-1800s technology. They were armed with shield, gladius, and muzzle-loading rifles. (I've been reading the Codex Alera books, that might have had something to do with the suggestion....) Everyone seemed happy with this (someone said "The Redcloaks are coming!"), so they made up characters and I made up the adventure.

My reading suggested that the Empire had spread to encompass the entire Eastern Hemisphere, but there were some troublesome colonies in North America that were still causing difficulties. (I'd played a couple of demos of Josh Roby's Sons of Liberty....) So they started out guarding the docks in the colonial town of Boston, when they discovered that some "savages" were dumping goods into the harbor.

They managed to capture one of the savages, and found out that it wasn't a colonist in disguise. He said "You will all die when the thunderbird rises!", and so they were sent off to find the native village and stop the thunderbird from being summoned. After some difficulty (and the carving of a truly exquisite wooden mermaid) they managed to arrange for their prisoner to escape, and he was eventually rescued by his tribesmen. Then it was a fairly simple matter to track them back to their village. They stormed the longhouse where the ceremony was taking place, despite the fact that one of the natives had a primitive machine gun, and managed to stop the ceremony just in time!