Friday nights I run a tabletop roleplaying game over Discord and Roll20 for a few friends. Sometimes they’re one-shots, sometimes they’re more extended. A few weeks ago I started a new game, Wandering Pines.
Premise
Wandering Pines is a portal fantasy game. The small midwestern town of Whispering Pines wakes up to discover that they’ve been transported from the Great Plains to an unknown mountain. Streets, yards, and homes draped across a rough terrain of rust colored stone and sparse vegetation.
While they have no official authority, the player-characters are the most competent and capable townsfolk, and thus looked upon to do whatever needs to be done. Protagonists, if you will.
System
The game is run in my ol’ favorite, GURPS. Players are 100 points; capable, but not action-movie quality, relatively unprepared for what’s to come. Fortunately, they’re going to get weird powers.
The World
While the party is inherently ignorant of the world beyond their town, it’s a surprisingly derivative Dungeons and Dragons pastiche. So much so that characters familiar with the game will have a distinct advantage – it adheres to the setting lore in certain respects.
It’s also relatively small – you can travel from the Inner Sea to the coast in only a few days, and complete a circuit in a manner of weeks to a month. The reasons for this are yet to be revealed in the course of play.
I’ll be creating a log of the game as we play, but here’s a brief catch-up summary of what’s happened thus far:
Session 1
We open on the morning after transfer, with the agog populace marveling at mountains where there were no mountains before. Our players are taking on the roles of Ace and Walker – a small town baseball star and a feckless drifter only recently returned to handle his grandmother’s estate… and the son of the gruff town Sheriff.
A hasty town meeting ends with a mandate to hunker down while Ace and Walker make a hike down the mountain to look for roads or telephone lines that might indicate where they’ve been transported to.
Halfway down the mountain Ace and Walker find the ruins of another town – this one very much a 19th century old west relic, that seems to have been in a similar situation – transported and dumped on the mountain. Then they meet this guy:
He introduces himself as the Dungeonmaster. “You know, like from that cartoon?” Yes, it’s literally the character, and the PCs are both familiar with the show to some degree. He welcomes them to a land of “Mystery and Merriment!”
He further informs them that they can free their town and return to their own world by collecting one hundred magical tokens. He shows them a sample; it’s very clearly a common arcade token.
To aid them in this quest, he asks them to pick a class. Not a fighter/wizard/thief/cleric type deal, no, he pulls out a CD wallet and have them pick a DVD from his collection.
This, he tells them, will give them powers.
The wallet in question:
Increasingly confused the players have no choice but to acquiesce. Ace selects the horror movie “Shocker” and gets electrical powers. Walker goes with the supernatural romance movie “Ghost”, and discovers he can project out of his body into the ethereal plane.
Before departing, the DungeonMaster tells them that as they collect tokens they can turn them in to “Power Up” and gain more abilities.
Session 2
We resume with the players electing to continue their mission down the mountain, no longer expecting to find signs of modern civilization. They’re unsure, as well, whether to reveal to the town the exact nature of their predicament.
At the base of the mountain they find the ruins of a tower, which they explore – fighting several zombies and a ghoul which fucks them up. Ace is able to channel his electricity through the aluminum baseball bat he carries, and Walker uses his ethereal powers to poke his head through doors to see what’s on the other side.
While severely injured, they do manage to find two tokens, which they trade in to power up – Ace’s electrical field is stronger, and Walker can now fully turn his body insubstantial instead of projecting and leaving it behind.
Session 3
Fairly injured, the players return up the mountain to deliver their report and spend a few days healing. Things aren’t going well in Whispering Pines; they’re running out of food and don’t know how to get by in a mountain environment. Plus, the monsters that dwell in this world are picking them off while they try to hunt and find food sources. By the time Ace and Walker are fit enough to set out again, the population in town has been cut almost in half.
Ace and Walker are sent down the mountain again, this time to look for food sources or a safer place to relocate to – along with three NPCs – Mr. Tillman, a local schoolteacher, Chance, a stoner mechanic buddy of Walker’s, Peyton, a survivalist nutjob, and Deputy Doug. All are provided with what the town can spare – pistols, camping gear, and canned goods.
They return down the mountain and, in the foothills, stumble upon a gnomish community. The gnomes are surprisingly friendly and agree to see about trading food from their gardens and what they hunt to the strange new beings – they’ve never seen humans before. They allow the party to stay with them overnight.
Session 4: TPK
In the morning a group of orcs raid the gnomish village, kidnapping the local priest. This is, in fact, the intro to Dungeons and Dragons module B11: King’s Festival. The players agree to go rescue the priest, hoping for more goodwill from their new friends.
It does not go well. The players initially make quick work of the orcs – who haven’t ever seen firearms or Walker’s electric powers before, but a giant lizard makes quick work of both PCs with a few lucky rolls.
Such is GURPS.
The players express interest in continuing the game with new PCs, and I don’t mind, so they come up with new characters. To even the odds a bit, I let each player have two.
Walker’s place adopts Bill Tillman, grade school science teacher, and Chance the mechanic. Bill chooses The Wizard as his power set, and gets a few abilities that mimic spells – object reading, magic detection, and spirit sight. Chance gets Inventor/gadgeteer powers, though to start they’re finicky and difficult to use.
Ace’s player takes a different path and creates as characters the Kunou siblings from the anime Ranma 1/2. Now, Tatewaki – a kendo enthusiast – had been introduced as a half-joke rival to Ace’s baseball career, but I had no problem with “promoting” him to PC, and he decided to bring in his sister Kodachi as the secondary character.
Neither is as over-the-top as in the source anime – they are 100 point characters after all. Kodachi chooses Gymkata as her DVD and gets gymnastics powers, while Tatewaki gets the power to imbue his bokken with different sorts of enhancements.
Session 5: Rescue
This brings us to last week’s game. Bill, Chance, Tatewaki, and Kodachi are sent down to try and rescue the missing party. En route they run into some kobolds – which Tatewaki is able to handily dispatch with his bokken skills. The caves are more dangerous. He gets pierced by a spear and hit upside the head with the flat of an orcish blade, but remains the primary combat focus. Kodachi’s skilled as well, though poor rolls decrease her effectiveness.
They manage to defeat the Orcs and find, yes, more tokens. Only two this time, which are used by Tatewaki and Bill Tillman… there’s little direct impact, but they unlock more future power choices. Maybe I’ll make a post on how I’m working that out in the future.
So now we’re caught up. There’s a game tonight. I’ll post about how it went next week.
