June 15, 2009

Trips to central Illinois brings nerd stories

So this weekend I was able to visit some hilarious friends who live south of me in IL for a great weekend full of games, and this weekend was SLA Industries.

I suggest looking at the wikipedia entry but I am not putting a link up here for fear of revealing anything to myself that I shouldn't know.  The game revolves around the PCs being operatives for SLA Industries (the name makes sense now right?) and them solving bizarre problems.  Bizarre because the city (Mort City) is company owned and operated, and is stacked up to the stratosphere with buildings.  The closer you are to the surface, the lower you are on the social totem pole.  And if you're below the surface, your probably a freak of nature, a menace to society or both.  It also constantly rains, and as the rain travels down... lets just say it becomes oil slicks when you get to the lower parts.

So in this setting I am a Wraith Raider trained with the Scout package in the hopes of being the best sniper that Mort will ever see.  Wraith Raiders are best described look wise as feline, with lavender fur and blue hair, but in some ways they're kind of like a stereotypical russian.  Love cold environments, pride drives them forward, and always looking to get the job done.  So I have a Wraith Raider who loves to snipe people.

The mission this weekend was to investigate the skin trade industry, which entails underage prostitution.  Yuck.  We got some leads to follow before getting some help from two SLA operatives with higher security clearance who specialized skin trade raids.  

First raid I basically gave the signal to rush in, unfortunately we didn't plan the rush in well.  I shot the tire of the van that was dropping off a bunch of drugged up minors.  It still skid away so one of the more experienced operatives followed that van while the rest of us kicked ass and took names later.  I shot another guy dead while my compatriots killed everyone else but one guy.  From the driver we found out about a clutch point (a place to capture minors) for another skin trade group, which was the one we were more interested in.

This was better planned.  We had to set up a lookout ASAP.  After a while I set up a snipe point, and was setting up my aim the entire time.  Other than me and an operative from the other team, everyone else was in a van waiting to kick ass.  On my shot everyone else was supposed to go in and save the kids who were about to get picked up.  

As soon as the van opened its door I shot the driver and the rest of my team (and the other two operatives) went in with two concussion rounds in the van, knocking out the other two guys left alive.  Apprehended some criminals, saved some kids, job well done.  And that was enough investigating to get a pretty good pay out.  Also we sold our video footage of the incident to our media contact, getting us some fame and also extra cash.  WOOT!

SLA is a great system for people who like games that require some investigation.  Also great for a sci-fi capitalist setting.  And logical ways of coming back from the dead!  This weekend my character shined simply because I rolled relatively well.  

Our GM has a SLA blog here if you are interested in some back missions and some of his hilarious restaurant ideas for the setting.  If you want an RPG that's more Farscape than LOTR, I think it's definitely worth a look.

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