Free RPG Day Adventure

[Crakkerjakk]

After Action Report:

The Free PRG Day adventure was a rousing success!

For character creation what I ended up doing was using all of the 500 point templates from Supers, as well as a few 1000 point templates that were scaled down and a few 250 point templates that were scaled up or combined. I stripped out all references to points, and anywhere the template had them "pick one of" or "any to of" I just separated the options into three columns so that they were visually distinct from the rest of the template. The idea was that they could just use a highlighter to pick the options that they wanted in a few minutes.

I also took the Motivation templates from Supers and did the same thing with them.

Come the day of the event, I showed up a couple hours early and participated in a homebrew "Red Dawn" style game, with the PCs playing guerrilla insurgents against the occupying red army.

Once that had concluded, I invited the three guys I had played with if they'd like to try a GURPS Supers game. Character creation took about half an hour, because I had them transfer the templates over to a character sheet, on the assumption that if they put it on the character sheet themselves, then they would know where it was when I asked them to roll for something. Plus they kept the character sheets and I took the highlighted template sheets, so I had a copy of what they were capable of as well.

We ended up with two guys playing superstength bricks and one guy playing a teleportation nightstalker/infiltrator. One brick was tougher than the other, but the second brick had Super Throwing.

The adventure went sideways within the first few minutes. The junior heroes went to foil the bank robbery, but the teleporter managed to get a full-auto glock pistol off the getaway driver out front and teleported behind the leader in the first second of combat. The second second of combat the leader caught a full-auto burst to the back of his skull.

The players mopped up the rest of the mooks with copious slams into granite pillars by the 32 ST bricks. The teleporter caught an M4 burst and almost died (made his health roll exactly.) The cops showed up, thanked the heroes for helping out, and patched up the teleporter (since I didn't want to deal with having him out of the game, I figured the point of the lethality of firearms to the unarmored had been made.)

The super throwing brick (who had decided he was a catholic priest) had a contact who ran an occult bookshop that they went to to find out stuff about the amulet. They went and talked to him, with the Teleporter being very reluctant to give up the amulet. I had decided the amulet, in addition to letting the wearer shoot jets of flames from his hands, lowered the self-control numbers on all their mental disadvantages and in general made the wearer feel very, very, very high.

The "Father's" contact pointed them to the museum, where they found out about the grad student and the missing jewelry, as well as the fact that legends said that the jewelry had a variety of powers, including mind control.

The teleporter then got a call from the cop who had first showed up on the scene of the bank robbery that the station was under assault and the evidence locker was being robbed.

They ran the two blocks to the station, managed to get into the last van and gave chase to the other two vans.

The teleporter had the Drive! skill and rapidly gained on the rear van. The bricks, loaded in the back, ripped the roof off so that they could throw things at the van. After several rounds, the teleporter got them next to the rear van, the tough brick(known as "Tank") tore a hole in the side of the van, and Father dropped a frag grenade he had found in the rear of their van into the rear van.

The teleporter passed the rear van and managed to gain on the lead van. Father threw a weapons locker into the back of the van, pushing the rear doors inward and crushing the guys back there. As the teleporter closed the distance to about ten yards, Father threw Tank at the other van, unfortunately missing by a few points.

I let Tank make a DX roll to catch the other van's roof as he sailed over, which he missed. He hit the pavement in front of the van, but took no damage thanks to his impressive damage reduction and DR. I then let him make a DX roll to end up on his feet facing the van so that he could attempt to catch it as it hurdled towards him. He failed this one two. Then I let the driver of the van make a driving roll to avoid Tank, which he failed. So the van plowed into Tank as he was skidding to a stop upside down. He served as a fulcrum, as the van pinwheeled over him and came to a screeching halt upside down with the front facing the hero's oncoming van.

The teleporter decided to pull a bootlegger turn, whipping the van around and throwing Father out the back into the other van's driver compartment, himself teleporting out of the van onto the sidewalk before the van had come to a stop.

Father sailed through the air, and hit the driver in the chest, ending his involvement in the fight. Meanwhile, The Curator crawled out of the van and started monologing while waving the statuette, with a dimensional portal opening behind him. Tank tried to slam him, but the Curator dodged. He did not, however, dodge the unconscious body of the driver which Father threw at him, and was carried backwards into the portal.

They then tried to plug the portal with the totaled van, but that didn't do anything. Then, velociraptors emerged to attack the heroes. The raptors were much more agile than the other enemies that the heroes had faced so far, but couldn't really damage either of the bricks. Tank ended up grappling one and then pulling it's jaws apart, while the teleporter made effective use of his hand to hand skills, parrying several attacks and kicking one of the raptors in the throat.

Finally, with all of the raptors down, the heroes saw the statuette discarded on the ground and smashed it. As the portal began to shrink, however, the van partially in the portal was kicked back out, nailing Tank. The van was followed by a tyrannosaurus with The Curator riding on it's back.

The curator began monologuing again, but Father threw the van door he had defeated the last raptor with at him, nailing him and knocking him off the T-Rex and disrupting the mind control he had on it. The T-Rex confused but with what looked like a tasty meal in front of it, promptly ate The Curator.

The players, realizing that an uncontrolled T-Rex in Central Park was probably just about as bad as a mind-controlled T-Rex in Central Park, rushed valiantly to battle. Tank attempted to grapple it's leg, failing in taking it down by a few points. Father threw one of the vans at the T-Rex, injuring it slightly. The teleporter ran to the other van and liberated one of the bad guy's M4s. Tank again failed in taking down the T-Rex by a few points, so the T-Rex ate him. Unfortunately for the T-Rex, he couldn't really get through Tank's armor with any large amount of damage, so Tank was still very much alive and fighting, just inside the T-Rex's mouth.

Father picked up the other van and tossed it into the T-Rex's leg, crippling it. The dinosaur fell to the ground on it's side, at which point the teleporter popped over to the top of it's head, unloading half a mag into it's eye. Finally, Tank used Power Blow inside it's mouth to shove a first through it's cranial cavity and out the top of it's head. The heroes, triumphant, limped off into the sunset.

The guys playing decided that Supers + Dinosaurs + GURPS was pretty much the most awesome thing ever, which was pretty much my thought processes designing this adventure as well. The guy who was running the home-brew Red Dawn game, Father's player, said he was planning on checking out GURPS because it seemed to be a better fit than the rules he was trying to make. Apparently he's familiar with HERO, but he said he thought the combat was a lot more streamlined in GURPS (which I agree with from what I've read of HERO, but to be fair I was running combat VERY fast and loose in the demo.) The two other guys also liked the system quite a bit. One of them kept repeating how much "better" it was than the Red Dawn game (which made me wince, but the Father's player took it pretty well.)

They asked if I was looking for a group for more GURPS, to which I replied that I was moving to New Mexico in two weeks, but got their e-mails and promised them that I would contact them for another session if I had the time before I left.

I gave the Red Dawn GM all the adventure notes I had drawn up for the session to illustrate how you didn't need complete stat blocks for NPCs, as well as the templates as a guideline of how to prepackage things to make it easier on the players to get a game rolling. I also told him about these forums and told him to swing by if he wanted to ask for any advice or pointers for converting his campaign over to GURPS.

All in all, it was very satisfying and a lot of fun to show others a system that I enjoy very much, and have them emphatically agree with me.