Glow in the Dark: The Third Rails
TL;DR: A PC rams silverware into a guy’s eye socket and shouts “Fork you!”
Operation Truck Yeah saw the Third Rails out of Prism City successfully team up with Big Red to take down a Blacksand guzzoline shipment. Although Old Zeke the Junker trauma’d out with Reckless in their desperate escape, the Rails returned and both they and Big Red the sentient drone truck parted on good terms (+2 faction status).
Part of their arrangement with Big Red was setting up a trade route, which I treated as a claim. Each tribe type in Glow in the Dark has two unique claims (the claims system is stripped down and made a bit more generalized to handle anything from taking turf to stealing cars), and the Dealers have one called Caravans, which does the whole “downtime tier minus friction equals supplies” thing. That matched pretty well!
Downtime is a flurry of vice indulgence for Johnny Tabernacle the Leftover. Lt. Dan Halen the Reaper tracks down the next name on his revenge list. Zeke, fresh and clean from his trauma, spends all his downtime actions, his bonus action from the Blackfinger ability, and spends a point of rep for another action in order to finish repairing Johnny’s bodytank power armor flaw “Limited Power”. We paused after this and talked about whether the costs involved in removing the flaw permanently like this seemed balanced. We all thought it was a pretty long process but fair – this was the second or third downtime Zeke was using on this, and he’s pretty optimized for crafting as it is.
After downtime, a Blacksand truck rolls by to make trade. When the Third Rails hit their previous convoy, they didn’t leave anything that pointed to them helping Big Red, so they retained their +1 status with the refinery-fortress. Valley, the Blacksand rep, wants to make a deal. He wants the Rails to plant a tracker on Big Red. Johnny T counters with an offer to settle up peacefully with the drone truck.
He does this, however, and in Lt. Dan’s rush to help, he ends up antagonizing Valley’s bodyguard, and then he escalates to violence. Johnny uses the scuffle as an analogy in his argument for peace and crits! Meanwhile, while the grownups are talking, Dan plunges a fork into the bodyguard’s eye and crits!
“Fork you!”
Because the results were just so good, Valley doesn’t take the kill the wrong way, but actually resolves to treat this tier 0 tribe as serious business. He takes their offer back to the King of Blacksand.
Social plan chosen, next time we’ll open with engagement! I never thought I’d be running a session about post-apocalyptic peace talks.
#glowinthedarkrpg