Dice Cup Nottingham Tales... Game 2

I ran my follow up scenario for my Tales from the Loop game at Nottingham’s Dice Cup Café on Tuesday night, Atomic Butterflies and Feral Buddleia. My intention was to run it for the same group of players from my previous game ran at the Dice Cup just over a month ago but two of the players couldn’t make it. Fortunately we had two new female players wanting to play as they were intrigued. They both were new to roleplaying, a little unsure how to go about it but I reassured them that they would have a good introduction to the hobby playing Tales...


The RPG Room at the Dice Cup Café set for my game.

I took them through the 'Principles of the Loop', which is a great start for new players anyway, and described how the session would go. They generated two great characters.
Victor a gender-swapping Weirdo who is a troubled artist with his drawing pad and a love of strange things (loves Souxsie and the Banshees ‘Happy House’ too).
Maxine, or Max to her friends, is a shy Bookworm who is driven to find the answers to the big questions with her dog Colin. Nana’s ‘99 Red Balloons’ is her favourite song.
They joined the established character of Jono, the Young Farmer with his multi tool and his desire to see the world.

Having the character generation at the start also helped for the new players as they were very creative and inventive with their choices and there are plenty of plot hooks for me to use at a later date too. Then there was the working out of the relationships between the Player Characters, the two new ones with the other player’s character too.

We also learnt that all the Kids had run afoul of the family of bullies, the Winfields. Poor Max has had a football repeatedly kick at her by them, she now hides in the school library where the Winfields never set foot in. Victor is constantly bullied by the Winfields, especially by the girls, and they call him some horrible names.

We used the same Hideout but the new Kids added their own touches to it. Maxine added a bookcase with a comfy chair and reading lamp. Victor added posters of 80’s goth bands, Halloween decorations and left the spider webs up!

We started with brief scenes from their home life and Jono went first. He had managed to do all his chores earlier in the week so he was ducking out for the day to avoid the Government Inspectors who were auditing the farm. He had made sandwiches and had a bottle of pop to take out with him.
Max has to help get her younger brother, Nat, up whilst her mum is working two jobs to make ends meet. She makes herself some snacks and a flask of sweet tea and selects several books to bring along too.
Victor is ignored at home by his parents making him almost invisible. He doesn’t take anything out with him as he will no doubt pick something up along the way.

The Kids meet up at the Hideout before heading out for the day.
They meet Leslie, the Corona Pop delivery man with his duel fuel delivery van full of bottles of pop, on their travels. He offers them a bottle of American Cream Soda and asks them to keep an eye out for his pet Toucan called Guinness who is missing. Of course Victor steals some sweets of the van whilst Leslie was distracted my Max and Jono.

It was their first bit of Trouble they had encountered so far so I took them through the dice mechanics of the game. Victor was great at Sneaking, he had a Body of 4 and a Sneak of 3 giving 7 dice for the dice pool. He got +2 dice for the distractions that Max and Jono were doing against Leslie. The player rolled 2 sixes getting two successes. The player had a choice whether to carry one of the successes over to another but of Trouble along the line or gain a better success. She thought that Victor would take extra sweets and drink to share with his friends so that is what happened.
I also showed the players the different ways of getting out of Trouble if they failed to roll any sixes in their dice pools.
They could Push the roll, re-rolling their dice pool but gaining a Condition. Gaining a Condition means they will get one less dice in their dice pool next time they roll.
They could spend a Luck Point to re-roll their dice pool. They have a limited number of Luck Points.
They could use their Pride an get an automatic success. They can only do this once a session.

Then they go to the Meadow, a piece of wasteland left to go fallow after some developers started to build some planned homes there. All that’s there is an abandoned works shed, dug trenches for the utilities, and weeds growing in the spoil piles.

There the Mystery starts with appearance of the Winfields acting suspiciously and the complete absence of insects or birds. With a pushy mother trying to collect butterflies, Lola her daughter leading the Kids to sneak into the Facility, animal bones scattered in the grass, weird tracks in the grass, and elusive green and blue butterflies along the way the mystery deepens to an investigation of the abandoned farm in the Facility grounds.

They managed to shutdown the Atomic Butterflies and avoid the deadly Feral Buddleia in an alternate 1984 in Derby.
Or did they?
They left it to a robot to finish the mission but what could happen in the second part in the next session?

The players had great fun and are keen to play again. I have included their messages straight after the game as well as a picture of the RPG gaming table at the Dice Cup.
The next game will continue on Tuesday 16th October at the Dice Cup in Nottingham.



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