Had our first (pre)game session for the weeklyish (?) Spirit of the Century 1920s pulp adventure RPG on Sunday. Got together around 3, jumped into chargen pretty quick, and by the end of the evening (around 8, including doing some BBQ and socializing), we (Doyce, Margie, me, Randy, John, Meera, and Kate-by-phone) had pretty well-rounded characters put together.
Me? I’m Aleister Lord Ravensgate, the British aristo known better (though not as me) to the international police as The Daring Magpie, lover of shiny things, pretty ladies, and taking the arrogant and entitled down a notch or two (or at least pocketing their baubles and giving the proceeds to the poor). Should be fun — sleight of hand skills, pleasant bonhomie, and sword cane all contributing to the glee.
SotC has a lengthy — but enjoyable — chargen process (if you choose to go that route — there’s also a quick shortcut version) that involves charting your character’s early history, his/her participation in the Great War, their own personal pulp novel, and their guest-star appearance in two other characters’ pulp novels — with each phase/book giving you added aspects to your character. Nice stuff, and it works well, I think, to think through your character in as much detail as a pulp hero needs.
The plan Doyce has it to have the game floating around each weekend. The setting is designed to support pick-up games, and fact is we could do it with anyone GMing and any number of players in attendance. We’ll see how that works — but having something regular on the game calendar that (a) you want to go to, but (b) you won’t be screwing everyone up if you don’t make it will be quite nice, I think.
I failed to mention that Katherine got into the swing of things — she wanted to run a character, and then sat through a good chunk of the chargen discussion, came up with backstory, etc. It was … well, seven-year-old stuff … but kinda neat that she wanted to do it.
Her character, by the way, is named Hot Shot, loved to set things on fire as a kid, as well as dress up as a ghost and scare people. During the Great War he went “Over There,” came to the attention and secret sponsorship of Alfred Nobel (who was both appalled by his willingness to blow things up and intrigued by his genius in doing so), and was inadvertently killed while experimenting with a super-bomb based on stuff stolen from the Germans.
Now he’s Hot Shot the Ghost, who wanders America fighting crime and blowing up gangsters.
We didn’t include her formally in the cross-novel stuff, but I think Margie and I will sit down with her and do so to round out her Aspects. If we come up with a usable character … why the heck not? Pulp Adventure isn’t any more sophisticated than a lot of the cartoons she enjoys …
The Official Page is up.