For the second session in a row we had a very small turn out for various reasons (sickness and school commitments chief among them) and the jeep was being driven by Dataan the robot, with Bozko the shapeshifting plant riding shotgun and Richard "Don't Call Me Dick" the dragon-man standing behind the twin heavy machine guns on the back of the jeep. The sun was setting behind the clouds as the jeep was climbing up a small hummock in the drizzling rain (it is early fall in the Willing Mate valley in the campaign). The low hill shuddered, then rose up out of the water. Dataan brought the jeep to a halt and the party realized what was going on as two huge heads on thick necks emerged from either side of the "hill" and turned towards the jeep, massive jaws snapping. The jeep was parked on the armor plated back of the Swamp Turtle! Neither of the two heads (the second head takes the place of a tail) could quite reach the jeep where it perched on the center of the shell. The party instantly thought of the plastic explosives that they had just received as a result of their meeting with Flipsham Eggwar, the leader of the Ooh-Oh Monks. Bozko pulled a four pound chunk of C-4 out of his chest cavity where he had been storing it and declared that he was inserting a detonator in it and was going to stick it to the shell.
Bozko (after a brief out of character interlude where he asked if his character would know anything about what the most effective way to shape a plastic explosive charge was and I told him no, you are a mutant plant from the Mutant Future, what the hell would you know about plastic explosives?) slapped the putty-like explosive charge down on the shell of the turtle and pressed it into a cone shape. The turtle, angry at the annoying chunk of steel that sat just out of reach of its snapping jaws, rolled over in the swamp to dash the jeep into the cold waters.
At this point the party was pretty certain they were going to be swimming while dealing with a creature that looked like it could swallow them whole and not even notice it, not to mention that they would be within the blast radius of the explosion if they detonated the C-4. Yup, things looked pretty grim. I figured that with a little creative thinking and the use of all their technological artifacts they could probably escape without incurring a TPK, but I certainly didn't foresee them KILLING the damn turtle! The thing had nearly 400 HP for Jeebus's sake! I thought at the very least they would lose the jeep, as I was going to have the turtle attack the jeep next round. What happened was one of those great moments where the dice gods smiled on the players.
Dataan tried to ride the jeep up and over the corner of the shell as the turtle rolled, in an attempt to keep the jeep from being spilled into the swamp. I have been using a dexterity check mechanic for particularly tricky driving maneuvers, so I told Dataan's player that he could roll a dexterity check. I told him that he would have a significant penalty to the roll, but I wasn't telling him what that penalty was. I had already made up my mind that he would have to roll a natural 1 to successfully drive the jeep up the shell as it was rolling and crest it at the perfect moment to be able to descend to the other side and end up on the stomach of the turtle.
The die rolled, and rolled, and... came up with that perfect 1! Many people decry the fact that older editions of D&D do not have a unified mechanic for resolving situations like this. Why should some things like attack rolls call for a high roll, while other things call for a low roll? I personally like this. How many times have you cursed that unlucky "1" when it pops up its ugly little head on an attack roll? Isn't it about time that the down-trodden "1" gets to bask in the same glory that its big brother the natural "20" gets?
Dataan floored the jeep and rode off the turtle before it could roll again. Once the jeep was clear, Bozko pressed the remote detonator and the C-4 exploded, raining chunks of turtle shell and flesh over the swamp. Looking back from the jeep, the party realized that they had failed to kill the monster and it was crashing after them, gaining steadily with its huge strides. Richard unloaded on it with the heavy machine guns, scoring some hits on one of its heads, but hardly slowing it down at all. Bozko turned his body into a hang-glider and jumped off the jeep, never one to stick around when fleeing might save his bark. The turtle had closed the distance and was about to catch the jeep, but I ruled that Richard could have one more round of attacks with the heavy machine guns. These guns can each discharge a whopping six shots per round, so Richard was rolling twelve attack rolls.
This time, he rolled up a storm and scored a ton of hits (I don't remember exactly how many, but he rolled ridiculously well), including a critical that he rolled excellent damage with. He just managed to do enough damage to drop it, and it fell dying, massive jaws clenched just short of the rear of the jeep. This was very lucky, because even one round of attacks from the turtle would have crushed the jeep. The party cut off all the parts of the turtle that stuck out of the shell, then tied it to the jeep and slowly towed it across the swamp to the home of the badders where they gave the shell to the those master armor crafters to make turtle-plate mail. The badders are eating turtle soup even as we speak!
Note: The two-headed snapping turtle was inspired by a very similar but much smaller creature created by
DMH and posted in this amazing thread over at rpg.net. If you have not already check this out, he has created hundreds if not thousands of mutant monstrosities for use with the Mutant Future game. Thanks, DMH!
Epic!
ReplyDeleteExcellent account of the action in your game! I had a great time reading your players' exploits on this one. You really give them challenges to balance out their tech-toys. Thanks also for alerting us to DMH's critter thread. I can sure use new MF monsters anytime!
ReplyDeleteGreat post!
ReplyDeleteSounds like an awesome session!
Derek really does have a knack for building beasties!
Nice read.
ReplyDeleteBut your "problem" complacent / cocky characters is now magnified. I've been in same situation "attempt to put the fear back into them backfire". Since they soundly defeated the huge horror. I suggest next you try the small, insidious, seemingly insignificant threat. That will lay them low if not properly recongnized / dealt with.
Good suggestion, Norman. I am not too concerned with the way this particular encounter turned out, because it took some very fortuitous rolls for the party to escape without losing the jeep at the very least, and I am pretty sure they know that they got lucky. But using the seemingly innocuous threat to bring them back to size is a good idea. I do have a few tricks up my sleeve, of course, as any good DM does. There is a group hiding out in the swamp that the party has not run into yet, and if things keep going the way they have I am pretty sure they will run afoul of them very soon. They fit the bill as a seemingly insignificant threat that could prove to be a real game changer.
ReplyDeleteGreat stuff, getting read to run my first MF game tomorrow!
ReplyDeleteJust made a table of 100 random items of junk! Very Jeff. :)
http://buccaneersguild.com/one-hundred-random-post-apocalyptic-junk-items/
Cool random table, Buccaneer! That is awesome. Best of luck running your session, I hope you have as much fun as my group has been having!
ReplyDelete"I suggest next you try the small, insidious, seemingly insignificant threat."
ReplyDeleteOr you could just go whole hog and throw a death machine at them...
I have been resisting the urge to pull out the death machine. I have the first and second editions of Gamma World, so I am familiar with that bad boy. I wonder if anyone has ever actually defeated one of those things in play? It seems unlikely, with the kind of damage that they can put out per round.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair I was putting a detonator in a ball of C-4 and was going to loop back around as the hanglider and drop it in the turtles wound but I didn't get the time.
ReplyDeleteFormer Dragon mag editor Roger E. Moore wrote about his experiences with Death Machines as a GM:
ReplyDeleteI was in a GAMMA WORLD game that Jim Ward ran a few years ago. It scared me to death. Jim has a habit of rolling huge numbers of dice of damage at the snap of a laser, and his campaign was full of amusing things such as Cthulhu-size lake monsters and death-ray satellites that diced up ground targets with impunity. But his most famous creation was the subtly named Death Machine, a nice little military relic of the Social Wars of the game’s background. What’s a Death Machine, some of you may ask. Here’s a story: A few years ago, when I was in the Army, I told everyone in my gaming group to each pick his or her favorite deity from the AD&D® game, and prepare to role-play that deity in a special scenario I had developed. The next hour was spent in feverish excitement as a large assortment of gods and supermonsters met on a deserted plain and awaited their opponents. Suddenly a huge space-time warp opened up in front of the incredible assembly . . .and out of the alien warp came three brand-new, fully armed, fully powered Death Machines on random programming.
Two gods died in the first 10 seconds of combat, each taking over 700 hp of damage. A third god died before the minute-long fight was over, and two other gods (including Demogorgon) fled the battlefield in utter panic. All the rest of the deities were pounded with atomic missiles, lasers, bombs, rockets, shells, bullets, force fields, and death rays. Thor bent the nose of one Death Machine with Mjolnir but took a nuke in return. If I had not used random attacks, all of the gods would have died in 30 seconds, no sweat. It was wonderful.
None of the PCs in any GAMMA WORLD games we had thereafter ever stayed within sighting distance of a Death Machine. However, I understand that Jim has run GAMMA WORLD campaigns in the past in which whole fleets of Death Machines would fly off into the wilderness and be completely destroyed by mutant strains of crab grass. Properly run, a good GAMMA WORLD game should cause Fear with a capital F in any pitiful, barbaric mutant who dares poke his head out of his cave. Thank you, Jim.
Thanks for the Roger Moore quote. That is about what I would have expected from the Death Machine - annihilating gods seems about right. While I have no problem killing PCs, Death Machines wouldn't really make sense with the particular campaign backstory that I have. The human resistance movement never had such efficient killing machines or they would have just mowed down the aliens, and the alien tech was very different from the death machine sort.
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