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How I Spent My Summer Pandemic

10/22/2020

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The weekend before restaurants closed in Philadelphia, I had skipped the subway and was walking to work, thinking about how things were going to be pretty weird for the next few... well weeks I thought. It was a rare moment in my life when I genuinely knew that what I needed was more distraction. I reached out to my DnD friends, looking to set up a play-by-post game for a steady drip of roleplaying in the coming chaos. It’d be too dramatic to say that it was a life-saver, but I’m in the mood to be too dramatic. We decided on a For the Queen game, and I was excited to give Z. W. Garth’s mecha melodrama Chasing the Ace a try. In two months of self-prescribed escapism, my friends and I collaborated on a 40,000 word story that still fills me with pride and gratitude to my wingmates. Today I want to share a small excerpt from the story we made together:

♥2 What was the moment you swore to follow the Ace?

In the early days, they moved me between a lot of units. I mean we weren't even squadrons yet, in those days the organization was a joke. We didn't have ASCOM online yet, and you know how I feel about ASCOM, but it's better than nothing. So they'd put me on with some fresh-greased Captain, have me run missions with the crew to make sure that their maneuvers were locked-in. A lot of these early flight school types could run formations, but they couldn't improvise. And in the heat of a conflict, with an actual creature you know, they'd stall or they'd freeze or they'd hook themselves into some obvious pattern that they probably thought was a signature or something but to the enemy, you know, that's just a beacon. So they'd send me in with all the new Captains, you know, each one trying to make sure that everyone knew who was the boss. They'd all been cadets together the week before, but now it was their chance to push each other around, work out old grudges. And it was my job to make sure that they didn't get themselves killed in the squabble. They'd call me the Merc. I don't know how the rumor got around, or if they're all just that damn original, but anyway they'd grin at eachother and make bets on who was going to get phased by the Merc. And I didn't know it then but I hated doing it. But you had to. Now I'm humble, I'm no cadet, I get that these kids were twice, three-times the pilot I am, but I am a good operator, and in those days, sorry Bird, but before the alliance I was the best operator. And we all know it now, but those kids had no clue that when you’re in a tangle you can't just rely on jetwork. So my script was to hold back in the Lithobat and watch the reads on the other Echions, track the adaptive systems, and when one of those stunt-runts missed that their elecrowhip was about to overcharge and that they'd taken three teeth to the deltoid already, I had the override codes to activate whatever reflex weapon they'd overlooked and shunt out the pilot's directives. Phased by the Merc. A flurry of shame and survival. And next mission a brand new crew. Learning the same old lesson. Until you know who. 

Riza was on that mission and Danika too, but you won't be able to guess which one got phased. The run was typical, Nephilim hornets had seized a fuel pod outside Ber Lance and were already syphoning it away. Standard level 1 protocol says short range engagement, controlled spill off fuel pod to distract the hornets then dash out with the rest of the pod. The Ace, of course, had a different plan. 

First contact was smooth, I was prepared to bail these folks out early, but they didn't need me yet. The sync was good, they knew what they were doing with the Echion, but there was a different problem. The mission was running too long and the Ace wouldn't advance the script. The pilots would all fight their way to the inside, and instead of opening up the fuel pod, they'd run a coordinated sweep back to the outside. I couldn't make sense of it. One, because there was nothing I could do, I mean I had the script right there in front of me, but I'm the engineer, I've got no mission priority, no authorization. And two, because I'd never seen such a fresh crew run so tight to the Captain's lead. No showboats, no one trying to take the reins. Everyone just sticking to scene 1 over and over again, while the hornets work into a frenzy. Suddenly there was a break, the Ace pulled out of a turn too short and caught the fanged saw of one of the hornets right under the arm of their Echion. I watched the adaptive systems fire up as the Ace brought their hookdrill up under the single eye of the hornet. With their other limb they shot out flares to aid the pilots on either flank, and the hookdrill kept the first beast from escaping but the fangs kept biting in. It was abnormal for me to phase a Captain if I could avoid it, but the Ace had a rib shield ready to deploy and they were preoccupied with the interference blasts. I snapped in my directive, but instead of the sound of fangs on shield I heard the Ace's voice over my comms "It looks like someone scrambled your overrides, guess it’s time to stop pretending you’re not a pilot. Fire up that bullfrog and get this thing off me." By the time I found myself in the fray, the Ace's Echion had begun to lose fuel. Instead of pulling off the fuel pod, they'd used the Echion's reserve, which meant that the hornets would only be able to sniff back to the Ace and the poor outpost that held the pod would stay safe. That had been the plan all along. I still have no idea how the Ace jammed my override codes, but the second we got back to base I turned in my engineer creds and told Pyraemon that they'd have to find another Merc.

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Grab This Game - Mission: Accomplished!

10/8/2020

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Finding myself between shifting schedules, but still looking for games to play, and I thought some of you folks might be able to relate. With that in mind, today I want to pitch you my absolute favorite one-shot role-playing game, Mission: Accomplished!  Mission: Accomplished! by Jeff Stormer is an RPG of super-spies and office meetings inspired by shows like Archer, The Venture Brothers, and Better Off Ted. It’s a rules-light, player-driven game of collaborative storytelling with an outlandish backdrop of top-secret espionage and overbearing office policies. Sessions run about 2 hours (including coffee break), require little to no preparation, and are perfect for new players or new GMs. Honestly, if you’ve never run a fiction-forward game, or never felt comfortable running something like Blades in the Dark or Dungeon World, I sincerely recommend giving Mission: Accomplished a shot.  

What to Expect

In Mission: Accomplished, players take on the role of international super-spies returning back to HQ after completing their mission. The job wasn’t done well, but fortunately the job was well, done. Mission Control (played by the GM) wants to get to the bottom of what went wrong, but more importantly who they’re going to pin the blame on. The action of the game plays out in unreliable retellings of what each of the characters witnessed or can attest to, all while racking up Commendations and Citations from Mission Control. 
Character creation is swift and lighthearted, and the scenario is built collaboratively so each player knows what sort of stakes are at play for the story that’s about to unfold. The joy of the game comes from a back-and-forth of throwing folks under the bus and covering your own ass, with just enough frivolous hypocrisy to keep it all in good fun. 

​Why I Love this Game

Disclaimer: games are art, and the only difference between art and craft is whether someone can spend far too much time analyzing it, so that is exactly what I intend to do.

I often describe Mission: Accomplished as anti-cynical, and it’s the game’s best quality. Let me highlight some of Jeff Stormer’s text to demonstrate what I’m talking about. One of the things you define when you make your character is your Specialty:
Picture
I love the phrase “spectacularly competent.” It almost sounds like an oxymoron, but trust me, there’s something to it. There’s a certain “disaster OC” style in role-playing games that is in vogue right now, probably because it’s unquestionably fun as hell. There’s nothing better than getting together a rag-tag group of fictional friends who are totally in over their heads and can’t action economy their way out of a paper bag, and believe me there is plenty of room for that kind of play in Mission: Accomplished! This game gets it. It also gets that sometimes, that style of play is a way to wallow in our own fears and failures, to mock them, sure, but ultimately cling to them as the only story we allow ourselves to tell. Not today villains. This game demands that you embrace your success as well. In Mission: Accomplished! you’ve already won the game, the objectives were met. It’s not about the GM making it harder for you to succeed. This isn’t a game of struggle, this is a game of stunning victory, and inside of that it mocks how much our modern world is trying to stop us from shining. This game believes that you can be the best there is at what you do, and that you are always valuable to the team. Some of the best sessions involve taking a character with a very mundane contribution and discovering how they are ultimately the star that we needed to get the job done.

​Running the Game

This game, simple as it is, asks you to cultivate a path of curiosity that will help you when you go to run more complex, intricate games. The players give you everything that happens, so you have to develop the skill of following their leads, and that sort of GM listening is going to be a great tool to deploy in other systems. The rules are simple, but the story is complicated, and learning how to get the players to untangle that together is a great path to better collaboration in other games..

What I Recommend

The best time to play this game is as a break or a pallet cleanser for a long-running group. I’ve also ran it as a convention game, and find that there’s enough heart and joy subtly built in to make this a fine game to get a bit of inter-party conflict among a less-familiar table as well. 

The game plays well online, and if it’s not too real or too soon, I’m sure you have plenty of virtual meeting horror stories to reenact. As fun as it is to take jabs at the digital delirium we’re dealing with, I think this game most wants to be played in person with absolutely too many loose leaf sheets of office expectations and mission details. That sort of tactile chaos seems like a fun expression of so much of what this game does well.

One last thing before you get back to gaming, as part of the Itch Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, Mission: Accomplished might be the best game you didn’t know you already own!
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