Wyn­termere catches some ruf­fi­ans; Ant­o­nia blows them away.

Played

24^th Septem­ber 2009.

Dramatis Personae

• Lady Ant­o­nia deVore – a Heav­ily-armed Aris­to­crat.
• Doc­tor Hil­ary Crabb – an Army Sur­geon.
• Pro­fess­or Augus­tus Wyn­termere – a Back­room Boffin.
• Rev­er­end Regin­ald Black­more * – a Tur­bu­lent Priest.
• Rod­ney Marsh – a Par­tially-reformed Thief.
• Mr Erasmus Rooke – the Boss.
• Jack “Nodger” Noakes – a Gang Lead­er.
• A large num­ber of Ruf­fi­ans.
• Two Street Urchins.
• A Mys­ter­i­ous Woman.

Plot

The team emerged from the sub­ter­ranean home of the ill-fated Simon Barchester to be con­fron­ted by more than a dozen angry dockworkers.

The gang par­ted to let their lead­er through, a young man dressed in a battered top hat and tail­coat, who com­men­ted that they seemed to have uncovered a group of thieves. Lady Ant­o­nia attemp­ted to defuse the situ­ation (“Excuse me, my good man!”), but sev­er­al mis­siles came fly­ing out of the crowd and the doc­tor was hit by what appeared to be a belay­ing pin. Marsh bolted for Barchester­’s crypt as Ant­o­nia drew her ridicu­lously-over­sized pis­tols (LeMat 9‑shot revolvers, with shot­gun bar­rels fit­ted in the centres of the cyl­in­ders) and fired both shot­gun shells at the lead­er. The blasts took him in the chest and thrust him back­wards into the river.

Shout­ing what soun­ded like “Get ′em lads, they killed Nodger!”, the ruf­fi­ans charged and Lady Ant­o­nia killed two more of them, before the pro­fess­or unleashed an exper­i­ment­al weapon, ensnar­ing most of them in a rap­idly-harden­ing foam. The sur­viv­ors man­aged to extric­ate them­selves and flee, then the doc­tor spied a loc­al woman watch­ing from the back­ground before she, too, fled, bear­ing a wor­ried look.

The team were stick wait­ing for the foam to harden before they could escape, then they headed back for the Min­istry, noti­cing a couple of loc­al urchins watch­ing them as they went. They dis­covered that the vicar had failed to loc­ate any records of Barchester­’s birth or of any mem­bers of his family.

Invest­ig­a­tions into Barchester­’s journ­al proved more reward­ing: it seemed to con­tain a com­plete set of instruc­tions (much of them coded) on the pro­duc­tion of the “philo­sopher­’s stone”. Barchester was evid­ently an alchem­ist, and this sug­ges­ted that may be he was­n’t a vam­pire after all. They dis­cussed their options and decided they needed to return to the crypt to identi­fy any records of the dead man’s cli­ents. Mean­while, Mr Rooke sug­ges­ted they should try to track down the mys­ter­i­ous female onlooker.

Notes

* Play­er not present – and had informed us that he would not be able to make any games for a while.

A basic battle against a group of Extras pro­duced the first suc­cess­ful use of Weird Sci­ence (aka Steam­punk Tech­no­logy) and revealed a couple of flaws in my under­stand­ing of the Sav­age Worlds com­bat sys­tem. Not­ably, you only ever get one bonus dam­age die on an attack, regard­less of the num­ber of Raises (poor Nodger took some­thing like 40 points of dam­age due to my mis­un­der­stand­ing of this rule) and Extras only ever take one Wound (again, the luck­less Nodger took about nine).

Also, I dis­covered that I am use­less at pro­du­cing names on the fly (Nodger?!?)…