- Pregen: Klaus Kleinmann, the Creep
- Pregen: Winnie Wurmstein, the Hoarder
- Pregen: Joachim Yapper, the Jerkass
- Pregen: Zelda Zoom, the Kluts
- Pregen: Bradley Bulle, the Loudmouth
- Pregen: Marissa Measley, the Moocher
- Story idea: The Race of the Rubber Duckies
This week, I actually forced myself to do some work on the Monstrous Mishaps quickstart. Not gonna lie, it’s slow going. Part of the problem is that I’m just not in a Monstrous Mishaps mood. MM requires you to be irreverent, snarky, laid back. At the moment, I am feeling painfully serious, sincere and uptight.
But this needs to be done, because the delay is getting ridiculous – I was all set to publish the thing in 2025, and then one thing after another happened and now it’s looking like 2027 at the earliest. And to be honest, a lot of the jokes and references in this thing were dated even when I wrote them down! So let’s take a look at what I have managed to do this week.
First off, I have written the introduction:
Spring is in the air, and in the small town of Gooberville that means that the annual Race of the Rubber Duckies is coming up. Every year in your quaint little burgh, a bunch of people with no engineering or seamanship skills build and pilot homemade rafts down Bouncy Brook, trying to keep their rickety craft together and collect as many as possible of the yellow rubber ducks that’s released at the starting point, while pretending not to sabotage their opponents’ crafts at every opportunity. The winner – determined from finishing time, presentation, rubber ducks acquired, and how thoroughly soaked they got – gains eternal glory, or at least bragging rights for a few weeks.
This year, your Slew has happened to get its hands on a used raft in need of only moderate repairs and you’re determined to prevail. You just need to fix up the raft, ride it to victory, and not get sabotaged by all the people who despise you – how hard can it be?
As you stand in the back yard of the suburban house you share, you think that perhaps the answer is… a little bit harder than expected? The raft, purchased at an oddly low price by your curiosity-dealing friend Lisa Ludlock, is Christened “The Noodly Nightmare” and consists of a tangle of brittle rubber tubes haphazardly flung together around a wooden frame holding four plastic barrels. There is room for six people to ride the thing, but the method of strapping in is so complex that it half amounts to assembling the raft around you. Right now, many of the tubes have come loose or are flopping listlessly around the frame, and the barrels have sprung leaks in several places. The whole thing needs several more coats of bright paint, a new wooden board or two, steel wire by the yard, industrial-strength rubber patching, and possibly hopes and prayers.
You have the rest of the afternoon off from your various places of employment, and the race starts fight thing tomorrow. Time to get to work!
So… this isn’t great. The humour is too forced. The design of the raft is too basic. If I’ve learned one thing from Paranoia, it’s that the more specific a situation is, the more ways there are for it to be demoralisingly wrong! But it’ll have to do for now. At least it’s a starting point.
So, the next thing that happens is that the players will need to get to work. So let’s divide up the tasks. What needs to be done here?
Well, first off, we need a visit to the hardware store to get some wood, glue, nails and steel wire. So we’ll need to write up a description of a labyrinthine hardware store where everything is impossible to find, the staff are too morose and underpaid to be of any help, and a bunch of super-blue-collar guys hang around to scoff at anyone who isn’t as manly as them (and none of the pregenerated characters are especially manly).
Secondly, we need paint. We can say that Lisa the Flake insists on going to get it, but if the players don’t send anyone along with her – which she will be insulted if they do, unless they handle it really diplomatically – she’ll come back after the stores are already closed, without any paint, having been distracted by a sale in a clothing store. In which case, getting hold of paint somewhere else is up to the players’ creativity.
Thirdly, hyper-competetive Olive will want to head over the offices of DeSieve, Connive, Bamm-Boozle & Harris and sabotage the raft they’re building there. She’ll need to be physically restrained to keep from doing so (and of course that’ll make her feel insulted), and if she goes alone she’ll mess up, get caught, and result in the lawyers complaining to the race judges and getting the players demerits.
Some of the pregens’ Banes are going to be in play. Marissa is going to need some kind of sordid desire to act on, related to her grumbling back. We’ll say that she knows that the only thing that will make the stupid thing quiet down for now is if she can spend a few hours sleeping on the Ultra-Slackinator 6000, the high-tech super-mattress on display in Sleep On A Cloud, the town’s premier bedware store. She of course can’t ask anyone’s permission for that because the Guilty Pleasure Bane explicitly forbids it, so she’ll need to sneak off and try to break into the store on her own after hours. We can say that Barry Hussel and Siegward Trout will make an attempt to sabotage the players’ raft during the evening, so that the other players can deal with that while Marissa is off doing her own thing. If she denies her Bane, or tries but fails to satisfy it, she’ll lose 3 HP to a minimum of 1 before the race starts. That would normally happen in between Stories, but this is likely to be a one-shot, so we’ll bend the rules a little.
Winnie, meanwhile, has discovered that Abigail von Heckning is in possession of the Lower Left Wisdom Tooth of Guzzlin’ Gary, a legendary Vampire from out in Wisconsin. Apparently she got it on eBay solely for the bragging rights, but Winnie absolutely must have this rare and precious relic. Abigail, of course, will be reluctant to sell it, though she might agree in return for Winnie’s help in sabotaging the player’s raft race. Until she gets her hand on the Tooth, Winnie will be distracted and have a Moderate Disadvantage to all Keenness Challenges due to her It Must Be Mine! Bane.
Finally, DeSieve, Connive, Bamm-Boozle & Harris will send Shirley to sweet-talk Klaus into defecting to their team. She’ll lay it on thick, appealing to his company loyalty and the unbreakable bond of bureaucrats, but will also guiltily mention that Mr. DeSieve made threatening noises about lowering Klaus’ low salary if he refuses to be a team player. She won’t hold it against him if he doesn’t do what she says, but she will hold it against him if his team cheats – such as by letting Olive try to sabotage the lawyers’ raft.
All right. That’s a start. It involves all the major GMCs except for Nutty Elmir, who we can bring in later. Next time, we’ll start fleshing out some of these situations a little more.