The GLOW 1996: Psychic Eustace Delmont. Intermission #1 - Revisiting Starting Expectations
- The GLOW 1996: Psychic Eustace Delmont, Intermission 1 — Revisiting Starting Expectations
- Revisiting the Arc Early and Often
- Adding a Villain and Heat
- Tweaks to Eustace
- Tweaks to Hitomi
- What's Next?
- Credits
Previously, on The GLOW: 1996 Psychic Eustace Delmont
Eustace meets Hitomi and then goes on a murder. How did it play? What else do we need to make this arc?
About The GLOW: 1996 Psychic Eustace Delmont
Eustace Delmont is a psychic on the cusp of "graduating" into a full-blow Field Psychic. He requests his right to Walk, a brief period of freedom to encourage psychics to see the other side of The GLOW. He tries to finish his long-time partner Jani Blum's final unfinished mission: to find a mini-disc and crack open the Patel crime family. He meets Hitomi Meyer, a criminal hacker. The two are now on the run between a powerful crime family and an even more powerful adversary: The Order and its plans for Eustace.
Content Warning: Occasionally very foul language, lots of smoking, quite intense violence, drinking, gambling, non-graphic sex, drugs, criminal behavior, and black magic. The GLOW is a world of spiritual torture and weird horror.
This post is in the standard Doug Alone post style, Intermission Version. See Anatomy of a Post for more details.
Attribution for the tools and materials used—including the splash art—can be found in the Credits below along with some details.
The GLOW 1996: Psychic Eustace Delmont, Intermission 1 — Revisiting Starting Expectations
Revisiting the Arc Early and Often
Since The GLOW 1996: Psychic Eustace Delmont is both a launch of a tightened and more flavorful "The GLOW" but also my first dive into playing Outgunned, I figure it is a good idea to pretty much immediately take a full pause and ask the question: How is it going?
Now that I know more about how rolls work and how to get a feel for a rough stat line, I wanted to do a first check-in to make sure I made the characters I meant to play, that I am following at least the general concept of the rules — with the idea that solo variations will play out a bit differently — and that I am challenging myself and my characters to the right degree.
How I thought it was going to go...
Eustace and Hitomi were going to meet. He was a big, beefy, and smart agent of good caught up in a morally gray organization. Him doing what he thinks is right is going to put stresses on him. She is a smart, sassy, criminal who ultimately keeps using her crimes for the good fight. Cop and hacker are going to hit it off without really knowing each other. A fight is going to break out that forces them to work together and learn about each other as they are generally forced to flee before collateral damage gets too much. Possibly having to abandon the character who ended up becoming Bee. An early hook they would need to resolve.
How it went...
Eustace scored a massive success and murdered the bad guys without taking any snake-eyes and the oracles were really nice in allowing all three to escape undetected, for a time.
What does this mean?
Maybe nothing bad. Eustace and Hitomi were both meant to be quite competent. The fact that they are very competent or very lucky is fine. There is a lot of bad stuff they still have to dig through. I do feel like Eustace needs to be toned down just a tad. He has a bit too much for him. Hitomi, not really a killing machine but still capable, should be more his equal.
How do I feel about the gameplay?
I think it is a lot of fun. There is an odd little mini-game where if you roll, say, six dice and you get a couple of matches then you kind of have to take the gamble of rolling just two dice, or dissolving a match. I will reread to make sure I am doing that correctly but it feels like an interesting narrative choice. The equivalent of kicking open a door while aiming the gun and having to decide if you want to kick the door open better or aim the gun better or try to balance it.
How do I feel about the aesthetics?
Right now I think I am good where they are. While it is meant to be very cyberpunk there does need to be a balance with a 90s-lower-Alabama vibe, as well. Things are bigger, scarier, and harsher but they are also kind of Gulf Coast. At this moment, I think I have fun playing at that sort of small-town-meets-massive-city paradox. I'll just have to keep my eyes peeled for opportunities to dial that up.
Adding a Villain and Heat
Since this, like a lot of solo play, is very main characters focused over a more traditional GM-campaign-focus then a couple of elements that are pretty core to the Outgunned experience has been a bit downplayed.
The first is the Villain. For right now, I will proceed with the assumption that the main Villain is Roger Patel. Amy's older brother. The biological son of Roman and Ariel Patel. More ruthless than Amy. Less imaginative. In over his head as a default state of being. Much like in the Alabama Weird version, spent a lot of his life dedicated to his younger sister. Amy remains the child of an affair of Ariel Patel with an unknown other person. Like in the Weird, Roman doted on his daughter with extra-affection to compensate for this fact, making sure the world knows that she is his daughter.
Here, Amy has a similar sort of mindset. A person who wants to destroy the Patel family from the inside while also making sure her fortune and power remains intact. The big difference is that while in the Weird, Roger ended up joining his sister to accomplish this, the GLOW version will have Roger pivot to turn against his sister and try to make the power grab himself.
Mean, dabbling in hedge magic, getting in way over his head.
Amy Patel will be under house arrest and essentially a prisoner of Roger's.
What exactly his crimes are, the ones recorded on the mini-disc, will be found out later. They involve screaming, torture, and going above and beyond.
I will leave myself the rough room for it to turn out to not be Roger as the true villain if the solo play discovers something better, but let's just proceed thinking he is the boss. If he turns out to be a minion, he will be a quite high ranking minion.
The other missing aspect is Heat. In the "Neon Noir" Action Flick, Heat starts out as double the number of characters. Meaning 4. I think the murder in the back halls will bump it to 5. I will possibly stall it there until the first turning point — likely whenever they are ready to try and rescue Amy — though it seems like Heat is mostly a rough clock that makes more sense in a full multi-player game. We'll see. I definitely need to make combats more interesting through a variety of methods
Tweaks to Eustace
The first main tweak will be drop him to just the arms and the blades attachment. Getting rid of the special hands and the aetherjack. I had the latter because something like it shows up in his art. I can just pretend that's part of his sigil array.
Even though he would have more of a "blank check" I like the idea of him being only on a first or second step on his way towards being turned into a new type of Psychic Weapon instead of already there. He's a test model. At least will be from episode two and onwards.
In this light, he will lose the "Cyberpunk" Feat — he's learning, after all — and to bring him back to more his original idea, he'll get Silver Tongue. He was always the one running damage control for Jani behind the scenes so he will be good with talking. I think that's more fun than the slightly more game-y Mastermind. It will also making him more active in conversation rather than "just standing still like a mountain stands still."
His catchphrase will be changed, slightly, to "I'm here to help." Fits more his character than his Role/Trope and I think that's ok.
Tweaks to Hitomi
Hitomi is pretty much perfect as she is. She is always smoking — and as a joke always has a lighter and a pack of French cigarettes either on her or nearby — well aware of her own sexual needs, tries to protect her friends even at the loss of her livelihood, and tries to hide the fact that she commits crimes on the reg. Dumped most of her ill-gotten gains into a kiosk as cover for money laundering and a ready alibi and now has lost the kiosk, essentially. Her skills and stats feel better balanced that Eustace's did. Only tweak will be to make her catchphrase, "No one hurts my friends!," to better fit her mode of being a protector type but burying it under her more cynical demeanor. I think that will come up, more. Having goons target her just because someone else dropped a mini-disc off will be a bit of a tipping point.
What's Next?
If we go with the assumption that taking down Roger — and Roman — Patel is the main mission and keep the issues with the Order for a possible later arc, then saving Amy Patel would represent a pretty definite Turning Point. Not far down the road but at first I think the first "shot" will end with the next session despite in a more traditional setting the "shots" are just whatever happens in a session. Solo play makes the traditional session-to-post format a bit odd.
The first shot will involve them getting away from the mall, stashing the car, getting Hitomi's stuff, and generally getting some slight room to breathe. The second shot will involve them doing some "Hitomi jobs" to try and get the cash to get a ride, get some gear, and will introduce a few good secondary characters.
Then, we might have another shot aimed at them exploring and preparing. Then, the turning point to save Amy. After that, we'll probably have another intermission and another check in.
On to the second-half of the first "plot point" as it were!
CREDITS
The GLOW 1996: Psychic Eustace Delmont is played using Two Little Mouse's Outgunned and Outgunned: Action Flicks (especially, but not limited to "Neon Noir" and "Great Powers"). It uses Larcenous Designs' Gamemaster Apprentice Deck: Cyberpunk 2E as its main oracle.
Other sources used include:
- Zach Best's Universal NPC Emulator.
- Cesar Capacle's Random Realities
- Kevin Crawford's Cities Without Number
- Matt Davis' Book of Random Tables: Cyberpunk 1, 2 and 3.
- Geist Hack Games and Paul D. Gallagher's Augmented Realities.
ART CREDIT AND EXPLANATION
Image up above started out as by carloyuen from Pixabay. In my mind, the "cyberpunk" aesthetic seems to derive out of pieces of four cities: Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Detroit. I found a nice pic of a cloudy/foggy Hong Kong and used various tweaks to make the clouds/fogs a bit more GLOW-y while increasing the unrealism of the picture. It's not a bad take on the mental image I am working with, even if a lot of the action takes place in the more gritty, run-down areas of the Sprawl.
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