GURPS IOU Help

[Last Pawn]

Originally Posted by pnewman

Oh, and there is a time limit - at the end of 24 hours IOU would normally just write them all off and just activate their clones - but that won't work this time because of the nature of the elsewhere. There is a morphic field linking the bus passengers to IOU that will cause the Health Insurance to fail, killing both sets. [Or so the bus passengers believe, if they fail to return maybe that's not so, but this may cheapen the eppisode.]

Nah, death isn't so much in genre for IOU. On the other hand, having them miss mid terms and thus face make-up exams, or paying for yet another years tuition seems in place. So would members of the team needing to get back in time for the big game.

[dravenloft]

Originally Posted by Last Pawn

Nah, death isn't so much in genre for IOU.

Well... tis and tisn't. I mean there's a reason uninsured is -100pts. Death is common, just it's only a minor and temporary nuisance.

[Last Pawn]

Originally Posted by dravenloft

Well... tis and tisn't. I mean there's a reason uninsured is -100pts. Death is common, just it's only a minor and temporary nuisance.

I sit corrected. However the "both die" part seemed a little more than the usual "if we can sew his head back on I've got a truck load of lemons to substitute for the lightning" variety of death normally encountered at IOU.

[Pmandrekar]

Originally Posted by dravenloft

I agree with the suggestions about crazy school based movies. The videography in IOU is good. My personal fave from it is Real Genius, the suggestion of PCU is also prime.

We used the IOU campaign (years ago) as a break from the 'standard' campaign. We each built a character who was a gradthing at IOU, and if nobody was up for running a campaign, someone would just jump in and run an IOU adventure, everyone got a chance, as there were no great secrets from session to session.... This was a lot of fun, and in that case, most of us had experience with the kind of setting, since we were mostly gradthings ourselves... at the time.

Because of the very weird nature of the locale, you could always take *any* storyline and weird it out with IOU-ness.

I tended to draw heavily from the inspiration (illustrated by P. Foglio as well) of the Another Fine Myth Series of books. Instead of being a shop in the middle of a multidimensional bazaar, we were living in a house together, with weird neighbors, and strange doorways that nobody had ever noticed before*

The other inspiration is taking almost any episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and twisting it for the funny. Character goes on blind date with reasonably interesting seeming guy. Guy becomes werewolf. Ex-boyfriend decides to remedy the situation with Silver bullets. Hilarity ensues.

Each character had a faculty advisor who might send them down some weird set of tasks that had to be accomplished as part of applying for a grant, or hunting down some weird monster that got free on the school grounds (before their archrival on faculty finds out, of course).

Look through the IOU book. There are a lot of wacky ideas about things that you can do on campus. The steam tunnels are invariably attached, deep underground, to the kind of Alien pyramids that look a *lot* like the Traveller maps you have from the 1980's (or, well, I do, anyhow... ).

Have the character's parents show up to visit, but have them be blissfully unaware of the true strangeness of the joint. Keep them from finding out.

(*Which were routinely located behind posters, or large collegiate flags. We never did learn to take all of them down, and we just kept finding more doorways to strange places)

Good luck. And for The Founder's Sake, make sure your Health Insurance is up to date.

-P.

[dravenloft]

Originally Posted by Last Pawn

I sit corrected. However the "both die" part seemed a little more than the usual "if we can sew his head back on I've got a truck load of lemons to substitute for the lightning" variety of death normally encountered at IOU.

That's fair enough. I'd misread what you were replying to at first -- or missed it altogether. I don't know.

In our IOU we came across someone who was a ghost because she'd not had her tuition paid up so wasn't insured. The not-mad-only-slightly-off-kilter scientist in the group is growing her a new body and having the College of Metaphysics put the spirit in, and I think our Business major paid the tuition charges so CoM wouldn't have any reason to complain about it.

The sewing the head back on thing reminded me of that.

[Archangel Beth]

Send Enigmatic Government Agents (of the government of your choice) onto Campus, looking for someone. They get to accost the PCs. Perhaps one of the PCs looks like the Someone. Perhaps the Someone is an NPC MacGuffin, like the son of a Child of the Grigori and Nybbas or something. Perhaps the Someone is one of the PCs who took Secret Disadvantage.

Perhaps the EGAs will try to talk the PCs into spying for them before the EGAs are thrown out by uncommunicative Campus Security? Perhaps they will offer bribes? Perhaps they will offer threats? Both?

That's where I started with something, anyway.

[viscounteric]

Two words: Scavenger Hunt.

There are plenty of obscure lists available (I'm using one 62 pages long). It's self-propelling, ties in every with every adventure idea (travel to hell? hey sweat of the damned is worth 37pi +2 points!).

Throw in a couple of recurring characters the players either love (or love to hate), and they may forget the lack of direction.

And as someone else stated, it's college!!! We never had any amusing stories from the events we planned, it's always the amusing random stuff we remember fondly (and require laser removal occasionally).

Three sessions of my campaign:

A) Group goes to orientation, travels to the off campus carnival, and get caught in a battle between Snake Gandhi and Funnelcake Man.

B) Group travels electronically into the "Polka Dot Matrix" and fight through a pile of old Atari games to stop THE Computer from playing polka music through all the dorms.

C) One Card to rule....

Absolutely no direction whatsoever. And my players prefer it that way.

[Justice]

TDIM 106 Crisis Management on Infinite Earths

A class whose jurisdiction has long been in dispute, it has been recently re-assigned to W.U.S.E. from C.T.H.U.L.H.U. on the argument that it's "It's about mucking about in other universes, not ours". Unfortunately for most C.T.H.U.L.H.U. students, their department hasn't updated their degree requirements, meaning that many students are still required to take this class. In a rare "Double-Whammy" decision, the Dean also decided that C.O.U.P.'s DDT 312: Crisis Manipulation on Infinite Earths was infringing on this territory and combined the classes, giving the class roster an unhealthy amount of C.O.U.P. upperclassthings.

The class itself is generally about traveling to different universes and not screwing things up enough to have it follow you back to IOU. Required reading varies from comic books to the D&D Planes Manual to the works of Stephen Hawking, and the tests are HARD (Damn W.U.S.E. professors...). The saving grace of most in the class is the labs, which range from fixing a transporter to fending off Dinosaurs from overrunning the drop site.

Nearing the end of the semester, it is obvious that the PCs are in trouble, especially since the final is written. They BEG the professor for some sort of extra-credit to offset their bad test grades and the upcoming final. In the end, he relents and tells them to meet him in the basement of the W.U.S.E. building.

Upon arriving in the laboratory of choice, they find that the teacher is not there, but rather written instructions for them to follow to operate the complex Transdimensional Gateway Machine. This is on purpose: the machine is set to bodge, bringing someone from ANOTHER dimension across here. It could be anyone, as long as they could potentially cause a ton of havoc: Captain Crazy and his Lunatic Legion from Boffo Comics, eVil versions of the PCs with the requisite beards, the Thing from the Black Lagoon, or even the 13th Soviet Guard Army. The test is for the PCs to get them back to their own universe without causing too much of a ruckus. To make it harder, there's a comic book convention in town, or maybe there's a big screen showing of Josef Stalin, Superstar on the lawn of the Pent. Anything to make it harder to figure out who they need to send back. Extra EXTRA credit for those who can make money off the ordeal (Like selling group pictures with the Lunatic Legion at the Convention).