Last night I killed Empire of Doors, my latest roleplaying campaign, which has been running since April. Since those first two sessions I so carefully logged, the group bounced about some other planets, meddled in intrigue and made some good allies and some nasty enemies (and/or rivals). They lost a homeworld, a spaceship, a horse, a body and a moon, and gained an army and the begining of an empire.
Two of my players took extended trips abroad during the game (one after the other), and we ran an extended cycle of “background” sessions, which were suppossed to tie together the PCs’ backstories – they (the three that were playing) got to experience a flashback game where they each met the same sinister trio (Doctor Neave, scientist and war criminal, and the two feral children of an escaped dictator, all eager to revive his dark legacy). Each of these encounters involved a mysterious “pink box”, which became the central mcguffin once the missing player returned and we moved back to “the present”.
Oh, yeah, there was also an implausible plotline with a moon about to crash down on a planet. This moon just kept gnawing at my mind more and more. It actually figured prominently in the penultimate session, which I likened to “The boring parts of 2001: A Space Odyssey, accompanied by fart jokes rather than classical music”.
So last session, bitching over the phone in a mid-session break about how I’m not having fun, I realized that, well, I don’t have to carry on with this. The Gingi[1] wouldn’t.
So I come out of the bathroom, share this insight with the party, who pull grave faces, and we think what to run now. And Bo wants to do superheroes, i.e., normal people in our reality getting cool superpowers, like we’ve done for, oh, the past 10-11 years? Every game I ran to him since the days
So Bo says “my character is an Indian cab driver in New York. He’s a student, on a scholarship. You two guys step into my cab. Who are you?”.
And Oren (who has drifted into silliness by now) says “Why can’t we all be in the circus?” and creates a native american indian who quit the Buffallo Bill show and ran off with Bill’s mustache to find some girl he met on the Internet.
Bo says Oren is being too silly, and that his character is more realistic, he actually met this Indian guy, who told him all these stories about Vishnu. Now, who you guys wanna be?
I look at Israel, and voice-over his thought balloons, saying that he’s too bummed to bother coming up for a character for the 10 minutes tops that this joke game will last.
And Israel says, I’m Vishnu. The Indian god. I step into your cab.
“Blue and glowing and with four arms,” I add.
And it gets funny from there. They go to a bar. The cabbie calls his dad in India (who doesn’t believe him), and asks Vishnu, why his life sucks so much, and why he, as the creator…
“umm, Vishnu isn’t the creator, he’s the preserver,” I nit.
“Oh, so he’s like the SysAdmin of the world?” Bo translates, “someone else writes the code, and he just makes sure it runs properly?”
“Brahma writes the code,” I agree, “Vishnu sysadmins, and Shiva does QA.”
Well, Bo thinks that as sysadmin of the world, Vishnu should trouble-ticket his character’s life. So Vishnu agrees. And adopting a less conspicious avatar (a dwarf), he joins the cab driver in his cab.
Umm, the native american guy is there too. But quiet.
I have them roll random encounters. We get an 8, which I say is a buxom but loud woman, complaining about her super (Bo’s character is in love; Vishnu thinks she deserves a spanking, and makes it so. The cabbie gets a slap, although the passenger is perplexed when she sees both his hands are full helping her with her bags). Then we get a 6, which I say is a pregnant woman about to give birth, and they wrestle Manhattan rush-hour traffic to get her to the hospital on time.
All in all, more than 10 minutes of amusement, mostly provided by my players. I think it turned out a neat sitcom, Bo says this is a romantic comedy.
Next week, maybe Israel does us Batman.
1 Gingi = Yonatan Miller; described by the 2nd Unit director as the “Unit 0 director”; guy who used to play with us, and was probably one good reason why I was willing to run the same game for Bo for 10 years. Probably deserves an entry of his own one day.