Top Gear Adventure - Postmortem

I ended up running this right at the end of the con and only had four players, so the player characters turned out to be Clarkson, Wallace (with Grommit as sidekick), Richard Hammond, and Donna Noble (best temp in Chiswick, currently Clarkson's PA). I went with Black Stig as the team's Stig, an NPC.

Challenged to stop Milton Keynes from being destroyed by an asteroid, Sir Patrick Moore (an NPC) pointed the Top Gear team at Wallace, owner of an MOT-expired spaceship and Britain's only lunar astronaut. Sir Patrick pointed out that Wallace's rocket couldn't carry enough fuel for the mission, due to the speed of the asteroid and other factors, but they rejected his perfectly reasonable suggestion that it should tow a fuel tank caravan and instead built a booster stage in the shape of a huge inverted teacup. During construction the Top Gear team was asked to spend a day in Milton Keynes warning the public of the impending danger - this did not go well, ending with them being pelted with rotten tomatoes etc.

The orbit changing device (a tactical nuke) arrived a couple of hours before launch and for some strange reason Donna was the only person trusted with the keys and password for activating it. Clarkson and Wallace both sulked about that.

Due to some lucky dice rolls the journey was uneventful and after a day or so they made a soft landing on a small pinkish-red asteroid, where they were somewhat surprised to find there was noticeable gravity and a breathable atmosphere (tested by pushing a candle out through a teeny airlock). Donna started to freak out about being on an alien world (Yes, she was the post-metacrisis version) and all the anomalous phenomena and suffered a timey-wimey nervous breakdown, which due to an even more lucky series of dice rolls ended by triggering a partial Time Lord regeneration that cured her and left her as the Doctor-Donna, and glowing slightly.

They got out to explore, finding a cratered surface with several holes, none unfortunately big enough for the nuke. After a short walk they found that there was a cover, like a dustbin lid, in one of the craters, and were busy exploring that when a small pink alien turned up and whistled a hello.

At this point Clarkson made the mistake of saying "Don't let it come any closer". The Stig, being a Slab e.g. a leather robot, promptly obeyed orders and splatted her with its fists. That would have normally killed her, but everyone was upset by this and I decided that some of Donna's regeneration energy revived her. This left Tiny Clanger alive and well though a bit upset, Donna alive and well and on more than 50 hit points which is up there with some gods in the Diana: Warrior Princess system, and able to communicate with the natives, and everyone else a bit confused. By now Donna was noticing all of the weird phenomena and beginning to suspect a very high-tech rat. When Major Clanger arrived they asked about any unusual phenomena and quickly learned that the whole world was bigger on the inside, and that there were sometimes mysterious spatial portals inside the caves. This raises a lot of red flags, and I had Donna "remember" The Master looking at video of the Clangers (see https://youtu.be/dOK1YdWalOw?si=KmmZcRLLES5l9BvD) which was somehow one of the Doctor's memories.

In the caves they met the Soup Dragon and had a nice meal, then eventually found one of the portals, and a couple of teeny portals which were too small for Clangers etc. but the right size for a small tool such as a screwdriver. Poking one of them changed the larger portal, which now led into a gleaming white corridor, and ultimately into a TARDIS control room. Donna ran some diagnostics and found that it couldn't time-jump but could move short distances in space, say a few hundred thousand miles, if they could fix a few things. Cue a short montage of Donna, Wallace and Gromit and Hammond working on the control panel repairs. Eventually they succeeded, and jumped the asteroid ahead in its orbit, so that it missed the Earth completely.

Once they were sure that the Clanger world (and Milton Keynes) were safe they took off for the journey home, again short on fuel because the asteroid was now heading away, not towards the Earth. I didn't make them roll dice for this one, I just said it would be OK if they took off at exactly the right moment, which they did.

And that would have been the end of it... except that I asked who had eaten what on the asteroid, and discovered that everyone except Hammond had eaten the Soup Dragon's soup and Blue String Pudding. Hammond had only drunk the soup, so was the victim of a scene not entirely uninspired by Alien... he fell over in agony, then a big lump appeared in his chest and burst out - a REALLY tiny clanger. I acted this out using a whistling Clanger toy. Fortunately it was budded from him (like the Adipose) so Hammond wasn't really hurt. Fade out to a happy ending, and the baby Clanger joining the team as Top Gear Alien. And on that bombshell, goodnight...


Wasn't able to run the Beatles adventure due to lack of players (too many games and too few players due to a freeform that sucked in at least 3/4 of the con attendees) but I'll probably run it at Dragonmeet in December.

Another RPG bundle - Ultraviolet Grasslands

This is a new bundle of an "old school revival" fantasy game called Ultraviolet Grasslands from Luka Rejec

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/UVGrasslands



I'll be honest, I really don't think this is my sort of system, but it looks like an interesting idea if you want a more psychedelic dreamlike setting.

Diana Warrior Princess - A Note on Mystic Power

One of the questions I'm sometimes asked when running Diana: Warrior Princess is what Mystic Power is about. When I wrote the rules I don't think I explained it as well as I would now like, so here's a brief expansion.

Mystic power is a trait that is tied to a specific aspect of your character - it may be an innate property such as the Mystic Power of Royalty, in the original game, or tied in with the use of specific traits like the Mystic Power of Music in Elvis: The Legendary Tours.

Innate properties are something that you get simply by being a particular type of person. The Mystic Power of Royalty is a good example - if you are Royal (by birth, or possibly by marriage) you can have Mystic Power, which can  be used for various special capabilities - most notably, you probably never get dirty, and you may be able to cure some diseases simply by laying on hands. It can also be used to boost traits that a monarch uses - anything related to charisma or leadership, and healing if you combine Healing with Mystic Power. You probably can't use this trait if you are pretending not to be royal - or using it while disguised might tend to reveal your true nature. A "beggar" might be revealed to be a prince by being spotlessly clean.

Trait-related Mystic Power is a performance enhancer - it can only be used when combined with a specific trait, such as Music. This typically means that the the character must be using the trait personally, but could also be interpreted as reacting to a third party's use of the trait. For example, someone who can draw on the Mystic Power of Music might be able to combine it with Athlete and Speed to boost a gymnastics performance if someone else was playing music during their display, or get a bonus on Martial Arts if they're fighting while music is playing - a good example for this one is the fight scene in The Fifth Element.

I hope that this makes things a little clearer.