So I ran a session of Adam Sexton’s Mortally Bankrupt at a mini-con a couple weeks ago and it went great! What follows is quite long (and best read with the voice of Cecil Palmer in mind), but what you ought to take from this is a desire to play this game yourself!
TLDR: Flip or Flay, the hottest new house-flippers in the Springdale Cul De Sac of northern Atlantis, used falsified civic records and a blackmailed a cat food company to secure a deed to a house filled with squatting alchemists. With a montage of bribing squatters, refurbishing a dilapidated mansion, and building a chthonic temple out of cutlery, the crew was ready for an open house gala! The bids rolled in and everyone would’ve been happy, if only they hadn’t pissed off their own NWA and gone to war with the next HOA over.
—Character Creation—
Mortally Bankrupt does a lot more customization in the opening setting and scenario than Blades. I’d done some neighborhood creation beforehand and character creation took about as long as I’ve come to expect for Blades-type games, around 45 minutes. We still did some of the extra parts, like picking what continent to set our game on and getting the look and feel for the group’s particular neighborhood.
Flip or Flay were the newest house-flippers in the Springdale Cul De Sac of northern Atlantis! Mordecai Alphorsus was the money manager and networker (a Shark), Larry Williams was the broadcaster of everyone’s dreams (no really; the Transmission was literally broadcasting into people’s dreams), and Sir Triangle Bucketface was their disturbingly effective creative director (whose horrifying dreams became reality). Their long-suffering but dedicated cohort of contractors made their vision a reality, but are also the ones flayed when the flipping goes wrong.
—The First Flip P1—
Xavier, Flip or Flay’s Neighborhood Watch Alliance contact and HOA zealot, suggested that a vacant house in the cul de sac might be a good option for them. It was infested with Alchemists and other undesirables (for example, Sir Triangle had been sleeping there), but it had four full floors and was connected to a pair of mighty stone satellite dishes. Of course Flip or Flay had no money. So how do you purchase a house with no money? Larry, his face made for radio (once he’d installed the input/output jacks especially), had the plan: on every commercial break he thanked Elevated Trains Cat Food for donating this urban blight to a set of fine, upstanding citizens to rehab! With the sales boom from this free advertising, they’d be delighted to help out the crew, right? Maybe so, but Larry’s producer Chuck started getting dour and grim as Management pushed back.
It was up to Mordecai and Sir Triangle to smooth the way. Figuring that some malevolent accounting or legal department at Elevated Trains would probably just turn over a deed if they had one, they employed their friend Edward the property lawyer to draw up some documents and loaded into Mordecai’s fine auto. Peering around his audacious, life-sized eagle hood ornament, they headed to the city records office. Much of the staff had been drawn outside of the multi-story building, carved into the side of a massive stone ruin, by Mayor Jenkins. The mayor was surrounded with reporters explaining, patiently and at escalating volume, that he had been tutoring that high schools student in civics!
Sir Triangle had fallen asleep in the car, but the press conference had infected his dreams. As he dozed, he dreamed the mayor’s hand on his shoulders, then slipping down onto his body, and shuddered. That psychic shudder echoed out from him, and reporters and clerks and security personnel were all encompassed with this feeling and quickly distracted from their actual job by phantom hands. Only Melville, the dedicated front desk clerk, was left unperturbed as a disguised Mordecai wheeled the sleeping form of Sir Triangle toward the private staff area of the city records office.
“Excuse me. EXCUSE me. Excuse me!” Melville cried as he hurried after them, leading with his clipboard of signatures and bedazzled nametag. “You need to sign in!”
Indignant, Mordecai laid into him. “Look at my vest. Look at this hard-hat. Who do you think I am? I’m supposed to be here. I’m not signing in to do my job!” He batted the clipboard away and swept into the staff area without a second thought for the groans and meek complaints on the other side.
*In the interdimensional space where the demons watch and interrogate humanity with glee, a question came to Mordecai. “Tell us, why was Melville unworthy? Tell us, why are you any better?” There was much talk of bedazzling*
A maze of cabinets, cubicles, and half-tended coffee machines greeted them. Snorting in his sleep at the offensive smell of mildewed, stale coffee, Sir Triangle dreamt of the route through records office to their desired filing cabinet. The atlantean runes that served as the filing system were quite impenetrable to Mordecai, but with the guidance of the dream he filed their deed with a purloined notary stamp.
Slipping out of the office, the pride-bruised Melville had managed to fetch Sarah, the devoted security guard, away from the Mayor’s very distracting and physically uncomfortable press conference.
“But dear listeners,” the sleeping and tuned in across Springdale could hear Larry intone, his sweet voice having narrated this caper directly into their dreams and thoughts, “what you must understand is that these men have planned. They have planned every inch, every detail, every moment of this. They have struggled and suffered as you do not yet understand. And what you do not know, listeners, is this: that at this very moment, hanging from Mordecai and Sir Triangle’s chests, are a pair of perfectly legitimate security badges.”
“What’s the problem, Melville? Everything’s fine with their badges.” Sarah’s brow furrowed in confusion as she looked at her friend and let the two contractors pass. Back to the car and off into the sunset of Springdale! And, true to Larry’s absurdly round-about plan, Elevated Trains Cat Food did deliver their perfectly legitimized deed to Flip or Flay. Of course the house was still infested with Alchemists and in awful repair.
–Downtime–
In their downtime, Mordecai was able to arrange a loan at devastating interest to set up some capital for the renovation. Afterwards, he needed to relax, so went to the Comcast Memorial Mall and Public Meeting Place, an eight-story behemoth of a shopping center. The bottom floors are free to enter, but making it past level 2 requires some substantial bribery. Paying enough cash to live for a month for Level 3 access, Mordecai overindulged and purchased a broad assortment of fine suits and an executive onesie for private occasions. Dipping into the company’s funds, he began a project to set up free access to higher levels to continue escalating his spending habits. Someday the vaunted 8th floor personal shopping experience (luxuriously set up in the very bowl of the ruined satellite dish) will be his!
Finally, dedicated to ridding their property of rif-raf, Mordecai scouted out a fine home in the nearby Ivycreek cul de sac that had superior ancient Atlantean stone-dish hook-ups and substantial access to alchemical resources (by which he meant residents who could be turned into alchemical reagents). Gathering the Alchemists for an extended powerpoint presentation and negotiation session, they agreed to leave with only a small bribe. As a parting gift, they presented Mordecai with an instruction manual to turn dead stone into living gold. Surely the HOA there wouldn’t have any problem with that, right?
Larry meanwhile was becoming uncomfortable in his 10-foot cube office/home. It was the only life he’d ever known, at least the only life he could remember, but lately he’d begun wondering about the many empty offices in the twisting halls of his radio station. Maybe even the mystical land that could be seen through the magic portals in those offices that had sometimes been called “windows” or something like that. “Larry, you have to be reasonable,” crowed Timoth Ostequapher, the personal assistant to the twisting darkness that ran the station. “Those are executive offices.”
“Empty offices!” Larry replied, but defeated went to dump his frustration and sorrows on his producer Chuck and faithful intern Dana. With their help (and sufferance), he was able to eventually able to convince Timoth to allow him use of an adjoining room and it’s facilities. “Listeners, dreamers, have you ever seen something so wonderful! Water that falls out of the ceiling and into a basin in the ground!” For days his broadcasts were nothing but descriptions of the showers he’d taken and the full sized bed he could now lay in.
Sir Triangle meanwhile had a vision for the house. Sixteen bathrooms! Four rooms covered in forks! One of spoons! And most importantly, a basement room filled with scrap sculptures of tentacles. Maggie, their radical recycler friend would help, as would their cohort of contractors. She loaded down her motor-trike with cutlery and supplies and to work they got. With little trouble, the pair had constructed a mind-bending palace of beautiful shifting cutlery statues.
Maggie was enamoured with the place. Frankly, she refused to leave for a little while. Finally, unable to move her, they allowed her to stay in that basement and become lost in its dark embrace. She reappeared the next day, grey streaks in her hair, with a tentacle in place of her arm but little desire to remain inside. All of this, however, was not what Xavier had in mind when he asked them to fix up that house. He was thinking less blasphemy. He was considering calling a priest.
–The First Flip P2–
Making the sale would be the last challenge for the evening. Leveraging every friend they had left unburned, Flip or Flay put on the party of the month! A local-celebrity-studded event, it had fine non-traditional sushi, a food truck parade, and tours of this very desirable property. The party began perfectly.
And then the Ivycreek NWA raiders appeared. Pulling into Springdale, their cars were loaded with angry homeowners carrying plumbing fixtures and revolvers, ready to take revenge for the assault on their property values. No one sends Alchemists into Ivycreek!
“But listeners,” Larry said as their cars peeled around the corner into their neighborhood, “these are simple people. Not people accustomed to violence, just people brought to the edge of their sanity by wayward Alchemists. Which is perhaps why they forgot their ammunition.” Still armed with their makeshift clubs, three cars full of angry suburbanite Atlanteans turned into the central ring of the cul de sac, nearly smashing into the food truck line, but little did they know that Mordecai had laid an electrified tire-damage field, constructed from forbidden technology. The sounds of electrified screams and worse floated through the air but began to disturb partygoers.
Their cars clearly useless, the Ivycreek NWA piled out, only to feel a psychic weight on their stomachs from the blasphemous thinker inside. Sir Triangle Buckethead was once again asleep and dreaming his horrifying nightmares, this time of placentas floating above the heads of the assaulters. Clearly tired of his surreal problem solving, something shuddered in the space between realities, and while the immediate threat of an attack stopped, the Ivycreek NWA fell to the ground in howling pain as they began, man and woman, to give birth to themselves.
Their horrified screams further disturbing the party, it was only the timely intervention of Larry with a traffic update that allowed the police to arrive (commissioner and his favorite lieutenants at the head of their procession, already on their way to this stylish party) and reestablish order outside. Fearing that further ambulances and emergency vehicles might interfere, Mordecai ushered the cream of his guestlist into the only guaranteed soundproof room in their house: the basement of eldritch cutlery.
Yet trusting to these dark forces worked! These wealthy guests were floored, and by the time anyone was able to muster the will to move again (much less leave), there were already bids coming in for the house. The crew sold to a police lieutenant that they knew wouldn’t be able to maintain such a place in the style of the cul de sac, but who was willing to deeply indebt himself for the prestige. True to their name, the house was flipped!
However, this was the final straw for Xavier, who will certainly be bringing in exorcists at this rate. Once a friend, their loud and abusive actions have driven him to rivalry. And don’t think we’ve seen the last of Ivycreek; on no, their NWA militia may be in the hospital now, but they will return with doubled numbers once their freakish self-birth clonings resolve themselves. No longer content to raid, there is certain to be brewing a full HOA War.