Into the Odd - first game and thoughts

Under the bridge ...

Last night, I ran a short game  of Into the Odd - just a simple scenario involving the rescue of a kidnapped child from a star cult. The players ranged in age from 7 to 77.

After a wrong turn involving a bomb, a bear trap and some very distressed bystanders, the PCs managed to do just enough to effect the rescue.

We all enjoyed the game. The character-creation system manages to be swift and, er, characterful, which is no mean achievement. Everyone was ready to go in five minutes. And the setting's Dickensian flavour prompted a great set of names: Slugga the Pyrotechnist, the Professor (a nod to Conrad's The Secret Agent), 'Little' Dorrit (actually six feet tall) and Bacon. That tells a tale of its own, I think: it's rare for an RPG party to have such congruent names, especially if that party has been rolled up on the spot.

The combat system's terrific. As you always almost take damage if you get into a fight, there's a RuneQuest-ish sense of danger about getting stuck in. That means that caution, cunning and cajolery come into play far more than in standard D&D-type games. Fights are best avoided - or conducted from positions of overwhelming superiority (peppering a hapless lone cultist with musket balls, for example).

There are a few areas in the rules where you need to apply common sense. I ruled that reloading a firearm took a whole turn, so pistols and muskets were essentially single-use items in each combat encounter. The list of starting packages implies this, as many characters will be equipped with both a gun and a melee weapon. I also assumed that a character armed with a brace of pistols could choose to fire both for d8 damage or use each in successive rounds for d6. I imagine virtually all GMs would do the same.

I found NPC stats very easy to handle on the fly. At one point, we had an encounter with six cultists, so I simply gave them hit points of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. With STR, DEX and WIS assumed at 10 each, there was very little book-keeping.

We didn't use any arcana, but bombs were thrown and rockets fired. One player now has designs on creating a sort of Heath Robinson one-use flight pack from rockets. I've told him that it'll need a DEX check to avoid being caught in the blast, but he's determined to give it a go ...

Later this week, we'll have a go at The Iron Coral, the introductory adventure in the rulebook.