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Three quarters of the heroes in our Achtung! Cthulhu Assault on the Mountains of Madness campaign were available this week. Three players being our A!C quorum, we resumed the adventure where we had last left off: early in Chapter 2, "The Floating Kingdom". It had been about a month since our last session, which had featured a major infodump. If you run this campaign as written, there is a fair amount of exposition required in the first couple chapters.
So things began with some abbreviated re-exposition-with-roleplaying during our briefing session with all the big brass on the bergship Jerimiah. Eric's character, a Canadian soldier, decided he wasn't going to salute any of the big brass, because all he saw immediately were British and American officers. However, he soon realized that one of the officers here, Brigadier Frederick T. Roberts, was leader of the 1st Special Service Force, an American-Canadian combined force specializing in winter warfare. They were known as "The Black Devils" and "The Devil's Brigade".
The Wikipedia entry on this unit has some details that are immediately relevant to one of the other NPCs in the briefing room, just saying...
One of the neat things about gaming at the home of a military historian and gamer is that our host Alan left the table for a minute and came back with two counters from the wargame Anzio. These were the two game pieces representing the 1st Special Service Force!
At any rate, the mission briefing continued for the assault on Fort Ritscher, the Nazi Antarctic base. Our heroes critiqued the assault plans as unsubtle and unsuitable for an effective "muskrat hunt" (Eric's PC termed it) for aliens. Our heroes recommended that their party be deployed with the initial commando recon force. They suggested that the initial the air assault on the installation be limited to incendiaries, since these would do little harm to the Nazi installation, while creating a fiery distraction. Infiltration should be the initial focus of the assault.
The brass agreed to this, and then all hell broke loose with emergency klaxons sounding. Two of the PCs headed back to the starboard generator area to help the damage control crews deal with a massive fire. Alan's merchant marine character discovered evidence of sabotage. Meanwhile Eric's character followed the commander of the 1st Special Service Force for a bit, and then headed above decks to check things out.
Eric's character had a very good notice roll, and spotted suspicious activity. He gave chase, which allowed us to test out the Chase rules in Savage Worlds. They are a bit abstract, but work fairly well. I re-read the rules twice after the game session, and am confident I can use them smoothly in future sessions. We also felt that in spite of there being about a month since our last Savage Worlds session, the combat during the chase went very smoothly.
Savage Worlds has a bit of a learning curve, but once you learn the basics the game becomes pretty easy to run!
