Category: Game preparation

• 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
• Introduction: The Rickety Raft
• Scene one: The Wood I! Hardware Emporium

Continuing with our Monstrous Mishaps quickstart Story, it’s time to send the players off to buy some paint for their raft, that being the one thing not available at the Wood I! Hardware Emporium. So instead, they have to make the pilgrimate to the Mastodon Mall…

Introduction: At the opposite end of town from the Wood I! Hardware Emporium stands Mastodon Mall, an enormous glass-and-steel eye sore surrounded by acres of parking lot. Colourful advertisements deck the sides to shout out the needfulness of the various junk being peddled inside. Mad throngs of consumers, high on the heady drug of Capitalism, congregate here every weekend to impulse-buy their way towards bankruptcy. Inside, the stores are spread across layered balconies over a central court. The air is filled with the merry ruckus of children whining for ice cream, teens squeeing over the latest fashion, and people shouting into their cell phones.

Technically, getting paint is the job that Lisa Ludlock, the Slew’s human friend, takes upon herself, but if they just send her out to do it she’ll get distracted and come home with a number of “just the cutest!” new purchases but without paint. Nor can they tell her to let them handle it, or she will get very offended that they don’t trust her and sulk and mope for the rest of the Story. Dealing with people being completely unreasonable is a pretty major part of Monstrous Mishaps, it must be said.

When the players enter the mall, there is a call over the PA system that the Time Stands Still stopwatch store on level 4B has declared a sale for eight point seventy-three percent off on all last quarter’s model. This causes a surprising number of people to rush for the store, resulting in a stampede that the players will have to dodge or push through as best they can to avoid harm. If anyone thinks to examine things, they’ll notice that the PA system has some Hocuspocus on it that makes discounts announced over it absolutely beguiling to anyone who already have negligible sales resistance – this does not include the players or even most GMCs, but it does include enough to cause these mad rushes from time to time.

Lisa immediately claims that the spirit of her Grandma Greta insists that she’s had a bad shock, and nothing will satisfy Grandma but for Lisa to enjoy some relaxing mimosas at the Palmy Oasis bar on level 6D. Again, she’ll be very offended if someone suggests that Granny mind her own business, nor is she receptive to the idea that she go enjoy a refreshing adult beverage while the players handle the paint-buying – it will just take a few minutes, she claims. Of course, if she gets her mimosas she’ll spot a shoe store next, and once she has new shoes she’ll want a pedicure at Pampered People Palace on level 2Q, and if the players don’t put their foot down at some point the mall will end up closing before they ever get their paint. Sweet-talking Lisa into being moderately useful without getting her in a snit about it can be done with a Schmoozing Challenge, with Modifiers for good roleplaying. Alternatively, someone might buy the paint and then claim to have found it in a corner of the garage later on so as to spare Lisa’s tender feelings.

Regardless of whether the players get carried along with Lisa’s shopping spree or make a beeline for the paint store, they quickly run into the Slayers Siegward Trout and Barry Hussel. Siegward is a previously well-to-do gentleman fallen on hard time and Called as a Lout (think a barbarian hero), so he has long, stringy grey hair and tries to look like an elderly Conan the Barbarian, but his basic fussiness and insistence on good manners keep getting in the way. Barry is a dry-skinned, humourless pointdexter who thinks that everyone is scamming hard-working people like him, and has thus become a Wimp (a trickster archetype) to work hard at scamming them right back.

Anyway, the Slayers bluster for a bit to let the players know that they’re in the race too, then they part, though Barry will shadow the players (rather ineptly – a Limited (3) Keenness Challenge to spot him in the crowd) while looking for an opportunity to do something sneaky and underhanded. We can have another customer stampede here to establish it as a running gag.

Once in the paint store, the players can pick out the paints for their raft (which I think should actually be Flying Spaghetti Monster themed – let’s name it The Noodly Appendage instead). They’ll also run afoul of Wilson the Mall Cop, who think they look shifty, especially if the players picked pregens with low Respectability scores (specifically Marissa or Winnie are both weird enough to invite harrassment, and Zelda has a shaky enough reputation from all her crashes that she might not be quite immune to it either). While he’s bugging the players, Barry will try to drop a paint brush or something in a player’s pocket, then claim he saw them steal it. Here he’ll spend a GP to maximise the impact, but he’s still trying to do something very tricky, so it’s another Limited (3) Keenness Challenge to catch him in the act. Still, it will actually work at anyone but Marissa (none of the pregens have a particularly good Keenness Score), unless the players smelled a rat earlier and kept an eye on him.

The players will have to either talk their way out of trouble, make a run for it, or let one of their number take a rap and get escorted to the police station and thus be unavailable to help with the raft-building the same afternoon. If they run, a third customer stampede can be either helpful or troublesome in their attempts to dodge Wilson.

With or without paint, they’ll eventually make it back to the parking lot, where they’ll have to find their car in a timely fashion, possibly risking being run over by over-zealous people coming or going. If they talked their way free of Wilson, or even got Barry in trouble in their stead, they’ll be confronted by Siegward. He’ll challenge one of them to a saber duel (with whatever implement they can get hold of in a hurry serving as a saber) for “dishonouring my boon companion by failing to get tricked by him as a decent Monster would.” The duel is just to “first blood,” of course – Siegward might be a Barbarian, but he’s not very good at being uncivilised. If Barry is still around while a player is dueling Siegward, he’ll try to spill the players’ paint while they’re preoccupied.

All right. That’ll do for now. It establishes the mall, which Marissa might need to break into (probably having to avoid Wilson again – he might be on a double shift or something) to indulge her need to sleep on the Ultra-Slackinator 6000, and also brings in two more of our villains. It’s looking like a lot of Keenness Challenges, which is maybe not ideal, especially since there is not much variety among the pregens as far as Keenness Scores go; I’ll see if I can’t reframe some of the situations as requiring something else. Still, it’s decent. I might be getting back into the spirit of coming up with MM situations.

• 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
• Introduction: The Rickety Raft

I am continuing my efforts to get this sample Story ready for the Monstrous Mishaps quickstart. I’ll try to be more regular with it going forward – one post every other week, and some actual forward momentum on each one. Wish me luck. This time, let’s deal with the players’ trip to the hardware store to buy materials for fixing up their raft.

The Wood I! Hardware Emporium is Gooberville’s premier (and only, thanks to some aggressive business practices) source of tools, building materials, survivalist gear, and all things rugged. It’s located in a big, square concrete building just off the freeway. A giant picture of a hairy, lumberjack-like man flexing his muscles decorates the otherwise plain exterior. Inside is an intimidating, saw-dust-smelling maze of giant, towering aisles full of bricks, planks, and sundry arcane construction equipment. There are no signs or labels, the emporium working on the principle that if you’re not manly enough to know every single item on sight, you are not manly enough to shop there.

As they walk around the building, the players find themselves followed by a trio of men. One of them is white, another is black, and a third is Asian, but their common look of suspenders, grey-speckled stubble, and looks of pompous grouchiness show them to be clearly brothers from other mothers. Their names are Ken, Ben, and Chen, and the emporium is their sanctuary from the evils of young people, womenfolk, liberals, and all that is loathsome and unmanly. The players clearly don’t belong, and the trio intends to make them realise it. Thus, they’ll stomp after the players, glare at them, mutter passive-aggressively among each other, and laugh derisively whenever something goes wrong for them. They won’t initiate a fight, but they’re hoping that the players will so they get an excuse to send them packing.

The only clerk in evidence is a listless-looking middle-aged man in rumpled clothes who is occupied with loudly lamenting his woes to the world at large, punctuated with trumpeting blowings of his nose on a soggy handkerchief. His nametag says ‘Joe,’ though his real name is Nicolaus (his boss can’t be bothered to get him a new one, so he’s having to make do with a used one). “Boo hoo hoo! Oh, woe is me! My life is a tragedy in umpteen acts! Oh, the pain! The pain!” Nicolaus is a man afflicted with a terminal lack of respect – he only keeps his job because his boss keeps forgetting that he works there in the first place, his kids keep telling people that they’re adopted, his wife has eloped with their marriage counceler, and he got kicked out of The Gooverville Bitter Losers’ Club for complaining too much.

The GM should feel free to invent as many more demoralising setbacks as she can come up with – assume that if there is some measure of being unsuccessful, Nicolaus has exceeded it. However, make sure that they are humiliating without being actively detrimental to his health, e.g., don’t afflict him with cancer. If the players start to actually feel sorry for him, he won’t be suitably annoying to them.

Getting Nicolaus to help you find anything is tricky. He only has a faint idea where anything is in the first place, and either way, his work ethic is in shambles (let’s face it, it’s not like he’d be likely to get recognised for it even if he did work hard, is it?). Even catering to his fragile ego isn’t as effective as one might think, since he assumes that anyone who flatters him is setting him up to fail. Intimidating him is fairly easy, though of course being scared makes him flustered and thus even less useful.

As the players are exploring the emporium, there is a rumble of engines and a maniacal laughter, and a forklift turns the corner on two wheels, racing down the aisle. The aisle is barely wide enough for it, and it keeps knocking things off the shelves and scraping against the sides, but the wild-haired, goggles-wearing young man behind the wheel doesn’t notice – in his mind, he’s running the Daytona. If Ken, Ben and Chen are following the players, they hide in an empty crate, run for his life, and desperately start climbing the shelves, respectively. If Nicolaus is along, he just stands there, looking like the proverbial deer in the spotlights; he’ll get hurt (and thus be completely useless; even if he just stubs a toe, his pain threshold is at approximately the center of the Earth) if a player doesn’t pull him to safety somehow. The mad driver is a clerk named Gonzales, and the players had better do something to avoid being run down by him. On the plus side, if they can somehow slow him down enough to notice them, he has a better idea where everything is than Nicolaus does.

Once the players have started assembling at least some of the items on their list, they run into town layers Bonefatius Harris and Jean-Claude DeSieve, who are apparently also out to win the race so as to get some free publicity for their firm. Bonefatius is a short, neat man with an egg-shaped, bald head and an egg-shaped, flabby body, impeccably dressed in a spotless pin-stripe suit. From time to time, when the players look at him from the corner of their eye, he appears transparent (he’s an Outsider, which is to say, the universe thinks that he’s a ghost even though he’s still alive). Jean-Claude is tall and was handsome at one point, but now his girdle fights a losing battle against many business lunches, and his golden mane of hair is an obvious wig. They’ll exchange some very cultivated trash talk with the players before going their way, led by their own clerk, Norman. Norman is slightly better than Nicolaus, but he’s not great – he mostly just agrees with the customer about everything and then recommends they pick up the first vaguely related ware within easy walking distance.

The very last thing on the players’ list is a tube of Super-Strong, Super-Lasting, Super-Resilient Super-Glue, of which there is only one remaining in the emporium – and a player manages to put his hands on it at the exact time that Jean-Claude grabs the other end. Frantic negotiation, threats, and a tug of war may follow. If the GM is feeling especially mean-spirited, the tube may have had a leak, coating its exterior with some of its contents – and now both the player and Jean-Claude is stuck on it! Remember that Ken, Ben and Chen are probably still standing around egging everyone on to have a manly fistfight over the spoils. Also, if Klaus is around, his Abhorrent Face Bane is definitely going to trigger here when tempers start running hot.

Things to keep track of after the emporium:

• Did the players have to search for stuff on their own? Then they’ll take a severe Disadvantage somewhere down the road, unless they managed a high result on a Nerdery Challenge.
• Did they get Nicolaus to help them? Then they’ll take a lesser Disadvantage from his lacklustre assistance, unless they somehow managed to motivate him properly.
• Did they get Gonzales to help them? Then they’ll take a minor Advantage later on, since he’s the best option around.
• Did they get the Super-Strong, Super-Lasting, Super-Resilient Super-Glue? If not, did the lawyers get it? They’ll get an Advantage later on if the former, a Disadvantage if the latter.

• 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.